Lexicography in China under the rule of the Manchu Qing dynasty (1644–1911) was intimately tied up with empire. The Qing Empire was plurilingual; with the support of the Chinese elite, dominated by scholar-officials from the lower Yangtze region, the Manchu khans ruled as Confucian emperors, at the same time safeguarding a place for their own language in the polity. In this context, the bilingual elite undertook various lexicographical projects aspiring to greater integration of the empire’s main languages: Manchu and Chinese. Within this context, Mårten Söderblom Saarela addresses Banihûn’s and Pu-gong’s Qing-Han wenhai (Manchu–Chinese Literary Ocean), a reworking of an eighteenth-century poetic Chinese dictionary. He compares this bilingual project to an unfinished Chinese–French dictionary inspired by the same source. At a time of linguistic and social change in China, Banihûn and Pu-gong aspired to further integrate the empire’s two literary languages and thereby to provide a resource for lettered bannermen such as themselves and to maintain what they knew to be the fragile equilibrium of relations between these languages.