The Project Gutenberg EBook of China and the Chinese, by Herbert Allen Giles

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Title: China and the Chinese

Author: Herbert Allen Giles

Release Date: March 20, 2006 [EBook #18021]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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CHINA AND THE CHINESE

CHINA AND THE CHINESE

BY

HERBERT ALLEN GILES, LL.D.

PROFESSOR OF CHINESE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
LECTURER (1902) ON THE DEAN LUNG FOUNDATION
IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

NEW YORK
THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, Agents.
66 Fifth Avenue

1902

_All rights reserved._

Copyright, 1902,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped October, 1902.

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.

PREFACE

The following Lectures were delivered during March, 1902, at Columbia
University, in the city of New York, to inaugurate the foundation by
General Horace W. Carpentier of the Dean Lung Chair of Chinese.

By the express desire of the authorities of Columbia University these
Lectures are now printed, and they may serve to record an important and
interesting departure in Oriental studies.

It is not pretended that Chinese scholarship will be in any way advanced
by this publication. The Lectures, slight in themselves, were never
meant for advanced students, but rather to draw attention to, and
possibly arouse some interest in, a subject which will occupy a larger
space in the future than in the present or in the past.

HERBERT A. GILES.

Cambridge, England,
April 15, 1902.

CONTENTS

LECTURE I

THE CHINESE LANGUAGE

Its Importance--Its Difficulty--The Colloquial--Dialects--"Mandarin"--
Absence of Grammar-