Herbert Giles

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Herbert Allen Giles (8 December 1845 - 13 February 1935) was a British diplomat and sinologist.

He 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 Wade, after living in Aberdeen, Scotland.

Father of the sinologist Lionel Giles, he spent a brief time at Fort Santo Domingo (1885-1888) in Tamsui, Taiwan.

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

[edit] Works

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.
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 - a series of Giles' scholarly papers, reviews, etc published by the Shanghai publisher Kelley and Walsh from 1904 to 1915.