Herbert Giles

Herbert Allen Giles (8 December 1845 - 13 February 1935) was a British linguist who modified a Mandarin Chinese Romanization system established by Thomas Wade earlier, resulting in the Wade-Giles Chinese transliteration system.

Giles was a diplomat to China (1867 – 1892) as British Consul at Ningpo who later became the second professor of Chinese at Cambridge, succeeding Sir Thomas Wade, after living in Aberdeen, Scotland.

He spent a brief time at Fort Santo Domingo (1885-1888) in Tamsui, Taiwan.

He was the father of the sinologist Lionel Giles.

His publications include:

Using Examples to Learn the Spoken Language (Yuxue Jiuyu) (1873)
Using Examples to Learn the Written Language (Zixue Jiuyu) (1874)
'Chinese Sketches' Book Description: 204pp.,1876. First Edition. Giles, a scholar and linguist, is best known for his Chinese- English Dictionary, yet Chinese Sketches is an earlier and scarcer work. Work contains his early collection of short essays based upon his frequent travels to Chinese cities. (source abebooks.com)
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.
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
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 - From 1904 to 1915, the Shanghai publisher Kelley and Walsh published a series of Giles' scholarly papers, reviews, etc.