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Herbert Giles

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Herbert Allen Giles (8 December, 1845 – 13 February, 1935) was a British diplomat and sinologist, educated at Charterhouse.

He modified a Mandarin Chinese Romanization system established by Thomas Wade earlier, resulting in the Wade-Giles Chinese transliteration system.

Biography

Giles was a diplomat to China (1867–1892). He was British Vice Consul at Pagoda Island (1880–83) and Shanghai (1883–85) and Consul at Tamsui (1885–91) and at Ningpo (1891–93) who later became the second professor of Chinese at Cambridge, succeeding Wade, after living in Aberdeen, Scotland. In 1902 he became first lecturer at Columbia University on the Lung Foundation.New International Encyclopoedia

Father of the sinologist Lionel Giles, he spent a brief time at Fort Santo Domingo (1885–88) in Tamsui, Taiwan, now a museum.

Postal map spelling is also based on the Wade-Giles system described in his A Chinese-English Dictionary.

Works

  • Chinese without a Teacher (1872; sixth edition, 1908; ninth edition, 1931)
  • Using Examples to Learn the Spoken Language (Yuxue Jiuyu) (1873)
  • Using Examples to Learn the Written Language (Zixue Jiuyu) (1874)
  • Chinese Sketches London: Trubner & Co., 1876.
  • Handbook of the Swatow Dialect (1877)
  • Glossary of Reference (1878; third edition, 1900)
  • Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (1880, London) — English translation of 164 stories (out of 431) from Pu Songling's collection of ghost and fantastic folk tales, Liaozhai Zhiyi.
  • Historic China (1882)
  • The Remains of Lao Tzu (1886)
  • The 1415-page A Chinese-English Dictionary (Hua-Ying Zidian) (1892, Shanghai; 1912, London) — containing Mandarin and nine southern dialects, such as Hakka, Cantonese, and Min
  • Chinese Biographical Dictionary (1897), which received the Prix St. Julien of the French Academy
  • Chinese Poetry in English Verse (1898)
  • History of Chinese Literature (1901)
  • China and the Chinese (1902)
  • Introduction to The History of Chinese Art (1905)
  • Chinese Fairy Tales (1911)
  • The Civilization of China (1911)
  • China and the Manchus (1912)
  • "China" in History of the Nations (1913)
  • Confucianism and Its Rivals (1915)
  • How to Begin Chinese: the Hundred Best Characters (1919)
  • The Second Hundred Best Characters 1922)
  • Revision of Bullock's Progressive Exercises (1922)
  • Chuang Tzǔ: Mystic, Moralist, and Social Reformer (1926, Shanghai)
  • The posthumously published, though never in English, encyclopedia, The Chinese and Their Food (Zhonghua Fanshi) (1947, Shanghai)
  • Adversaria Sinica — a series of Giles' scholarly papers, reviews, etc published by the Shanghai publisher Kelley and Walsh from 1904 to 1915.
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