The China History Podcast · Laszlo Montgomery

Wade and Giles

·39 min·2 clips

Thomas Wade’s 1867 Peking Syllabary became the first comprehensive textbook for learning Mandarin.

1. The China History Podcast episode “Wade and Giles” traces the history of Western sinology through Sir Thomas Wade, Herbert Giles, and the Wade-Giles romanization system. 2. Laszlo Montgomery hosts the show as a solo narrator, and his role matters because he connects diplomatic history, Chinese language study, and older reference books. 3. The episode asks why Wade-Giles mattered for students of Mandarin and for readers of 19th- and early 20th-century China books. 4. Thomas Wade was born in London in 1818, studied at Harrow School, and joined the British Army as an ensign in 1838. 5. Wade served in the Opium War at Zhenjiang, Zhoushan, and Guangzhou, where he began formal Chinese language study. 6. By the end of that war, Wade had gained working knowledge of Mandarin and Cantonese and became an interpreter and secretary to Sir Henry Pottinger. 7. Wade then spent about 30 years in the British Consular Service, including posts in Shanghai and Ningbo. 8. After the Second Opium War, Wade played a leading role in drafting the Treaty of Tianjin and later became Britain’s Minister to China in 1871. 9. The episode recounts Wade’s handling of the 1875 Marjorie Affair, the murder of Augustus Raymond Marjorie near the China-Burma border, and the 1876 Zhifu Convention. 10. Wade’s most cited scholarly work is the 1867 Peking Syllabary, described as the first comprehensive textbook for learning Mandarin. 11. The Peking Syllabary included dialogues, vocabulary lists, and grammatical explanations for 19th-century learners. 12. Wade also translated portions of the Book of Changes, the I Ching, and the Analects of Confucius into English. 13. In 1888, Wade donated a large collection of Chinese books and manuscripts to the University of Cambridge, where he had become the first professor of Chinese. 14. Herbert Giles was born in Oxford in 1845, joined the British Consular Service in China in 1867, and served in Taiwan, Shanghai, and the United States. 15. Giles published Chinese Sketches in 1876 and a Chinese-English dictionary in 1892, and the latter introduced the Wade-Giles system in its standardized form. 16. The episode notes that Giles later wrote works including Gems of Chinese Literature, Civilization of China, and the Chinese Biographical Dictionary, while also developing a reputation for being cantankerous with other scholars. 17. The tone is explanatory and wide-ranging, with the host moving from biography to dictionary history to the broader history of sinology. 18. The format is a single-host historical survey with frequent digressions into related scholars, universities, treaties, and translations. 19. Listeners interested in Chinese language history and old reference works. 20. Listeners wanting a tightly focused episode on only Wade or only Giles.

As heard by us

A dry but useful guide to Wade-Giles and the older China books and documents where it still matters.

The China History Podcast's "Wade and Giles" makes a tidy subject out of a romanization system that can look forbidding from the outside. It traces Thomas Wade's original work, Herbert Giles's 1892 revisions, the apostrophes marking aspirated consonants, and the numeric…

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If old China books still use Wade-Giles, this is your decoder ring.

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