Literature Review

As China is becoming stronger, more and more Chinese elements are used in western television shows or films to attract attention, such as Hua Mulan and Kung Fu Panda. However, China is not open enough and western people lack knowledge about China. Many screenwriters made mistakes when using Chinese elements. For example, there are some typical elements of misuse of Chinese elements in the BBC Television show Sherlock.

BBC Television show Sherlock season 1 episode 2 is a story with many Chinese element: When a Chinese criminal gang called Black Lotus smuggled Chinese heritage to England, one of their members spirit away a precious jade hairpin which is valued 9,000,000 pounds. During tracing of the treasures, Black Lotus killed three people. And they used the ancient Chinese numeral: Suzhou numeral to communicate secretly Finally, Sherlock solved the case based on variety clues. Overall, this story did not have big mistakes. However, there were still some errors in detail because of lacking understanding of the Chinese culture.

Error of Translation

Zong Hong explained that Suzhou numeral is a kind of rod numeral system that was used in ancient China. And it was popular in market especially Hong Kong. (2007) However, when Sherlock mentioned Suzhou numeral, He said: “Hangzhou”. In fact there is no such thing like Hangzhou numeral. They made a mistake because there is a misnomer in the system is of Unicode. According to Asmus Fretag’s report, we could know that in Unicode Standard, Suzhou numeral was record as Hangzhou numeral.(2014) Fretag’s another research showed that Unicode Standard is a system that provides different language characters with one standard character set. The purpose of setting this system is reducing the quantity of mapping system. If every kind of language has its own mapping rules, we need to download different character set and install different input methods to type different language. (2014) Screenwriters did not notice this mistake because they do not understand and pay much attention to Chinese culture. Their audiences are almost Westerners. They only need to know that is a kind of numeral of ancient China no matter where it came from.

Error of Garble

When Sherlock was searching the Chinese antiques that auctioned, we could see a painting on the computer screen which was explained as a Chinese painting. However, if we see it carefully, we will find it is not a Chinese painting but a Japanese painting. Caroline and Susan pointed out that Chinese painting is famous of brush drawing in their book: Chinese Brush Painting : A Hands-on Introduction to the Traditional Art. (2012) Painting showed on screen was a Japanese Ukiyoe. We can distinct them by style and color choosing which explained by Ryukyu Satio.(2010) According to Tang Dynasty Tales : A Guided Reader written by William H. Nienhauser, Chinese and Japanese paintings are similar in some way because China and Japan are both Asian countries. In Tang Dynasty, there were a large number of Japanese scholars came to China to learn advanced knowledge. The large number of traditional Japanese culture preserved Chinese elements including painting style. (2010) So westerners are difficult to distinct Chinese and Japanese.

Error of Value

The treasure Black Lotus lost is a jade hairpin that used by a empress lived before 1000 years ago and it worth nine million pounds. In that sense, this jade hairpin should be extremely delicate and beautiful. Joan M. Hartman was talked about thet in Chinese Jade of Five Centuries. (2012) Jade with high quality should be very bright. However the quality of hairpin appeared on the show seems very poor. That hairpin was din and shoddy. British TV show is well- known by the quality. They do not need to really find a nine million hairpin to be a stage property. But they are responsible to find a hairpin that could express the quality of a Chinese treasure. In fact, they care more about what Chinese elements could convey to audiences but not Chinese element itself because their audiences are almost western people.

Most audiences of western television show are not Chinese, screen writer maybe just want to use Chinese elements to attract attention so they do not pay much attention to accuracy of those Chinese elements. Shen Yizhen proposed in his research: Creating National Image: A New Mission of Film and TV Art: China itself could create national image by film and TV art. So it’s necessary to create some representative film and TV arts to show new Chinese national images. (2007)