Fort San Domingo’s Place in the Making of the First Chinese English Dictionary
Address
on the Opening of the Fort San Domingo Museum – 8 November 2005
Dear People
You are the inheritors of the wisdom of Lao Tzu, Confucius, Mencius and Sun
Yat-sen: the Kuofu. Men and Women of Taiwan, I bring you greetings from
Introduction
I am grateful to you all for inviting me to assist in remembering my
great-grandfather, Herbert Allen Giles. He stayed in
I am humbled by the invitation to assist in the opening of this fine Museum, in
which history will be protected from those who have a tendency to turn history
into fiction.
First allow me to introduce myself by telling you what I am not. I am not
a scholar. So those of you who are scholars may find fault with what I
have to say. If I make any mistakes, please forgive me. I am a
manager of universities. That has been my life-long work from my first
job at the
My Great Grandfather’s life was dedicated to publishing the truth about
He was a truly great man, a stubborn man, a man directed from within himself,
not by others. I have inherited some aspects of his character, but not
his genius.
Herbert
Allen Giles
(Slide 1)
Herbert Allen Giles was an honest man, and therefore had many enemies.
The Greek philosopher, Diogenes of Athens, said that an honest man says what he
thinks; he does what he says he is going to do; and he never has a large circle
of admirers.
Giles fits this description. Most of his enemies were people whose work
he had criticised. Such people included E H Parker, a sinologist at
Giles was also disliked by the Christian Missionaries whose work he
despised. This antagonism was contrary to British Government policy,
which saw the work of the missionaries as entirely legitimate and
beneficial. Giles disagreed, and made his disagreement very open and
public.
He found an echo of his own thoughts in A Thousand Character Essay, written as
a primer for Chinese girls in the reign of Tao Kuang, which Giles translated in
1873-4. Here is one of the proverbs.
“Of all things most important, shun
The subtle priest, the wily nun…”
(Slide 2)
Giles was also unpopular with the British traders because he opposed the
overcrowding of emigrant Chinese on British ships. In 1881 he was
presented with a Red Umbrella by the Hsiamen Chinese Chamber of Commerce in
recognition of this service to the Chinese people.
But Giles did have a small circle of admirers. These people included the
Chinese officials with whom he worked and a number of German academics such as
Nicolas Trubner. One person who gave Giles much encouragement was the
Marquis Tseng who was the Minister Plenipotentiary at the Court of St James.
He wrote to Giles in March 1880 after reading the Liao Chai Chih I saying
“I congratulate you on having in this made the best translation of a
Chinese work into English which has ever come under my notice.
Whilst remaining faithful to the original, you have succeeded in a remarkable
degree in preserving the spirit of the author.”… “You have
placed Chinese Scholars under a deep debt of gratitude to you for the elegant
manner in which you have set the work of their countrymen before the English
reader…”
In 1883 Giles published a major work called Gems of Chinese Literature in which
he wrote this preface “For the past sixteen years I have been a diligent
student of the language and literature of the Chinese people. I have now
attempted to render into the English tongue specimens of their standard authors
of past ages, in the hope that my countrymen may thereby learn something of the
literary achievements of a great empire, whose inhabitants held learning in
high esteem when our own painted forefathers were running naked and houseless
in the woods and living on berries and raw meat.”
I am not sure about how Giles could have proved this statement to be true,
because the early Britons left no written record. The first written
record came from Julius Caesar when he invaded
Giles arrived in Tamsui on 10 November 1885. A year later he had been
elected President of the Royal Asiatic Society. During his time here he
published works on Lao Tzu and corrected a translation of the Tao Te Ching by
Chalmers (1868) which had previously been considered authoritative. In
addition he translated the works of Chuang Tzu, a 4th Century mystic, moralist
and social reformer.
Although Giles had been preparing the work for his dictionary for fifteen
years, including much of his time here at Fort San Domingo, he would leave
Tamsui on 13 March 1888 on transfer to Ningpo where most of the progress on the
final draft of the dictionary was made. There was very little Consular
work at Ningpo, which allowed Giles to put all his energies into this great
work.
(Slide 3)
In 1891 he was transferred to
Giles finished his work in
In December 1897 Giles was elected Professor of Chinese at
On 17 December 1921 Giles’s second wife Elise Williamina Giles
(née Edersheim) died. Giles wrote of her “In all those 38
years not a syllable came from my pen which was not examined by her and
approved before publication.” Elise was herself an author, her best
known work being China Coast Tales, which she wrote during her time in Tamsui
(1885-1888) and which she published under the pseudonym Lise Boehm.
(Slide 4)
Final recognition of Giles’s contribution came on 4 July 1922 when the
Royal Asiatic Society awarded Giles their Triennial Gold Medal. His old
friend L. C. Hopkins, in his speech during the ceremony, was reported by an
observer to say this.
“If he were asked to formulate in a sentence the special mark and merit
of Professor Giles’s lifelong labours, he would say that beyond all other
living scholars he had humanised Chinese studies. He had by his writings
made more readers know more things about China, things that were material,
things that were vital – he had diffused a better and a truer
understanding of the Chinese intellect, its capabilities and achievements, than
any other scholar.”
Giles was also twice awarded the Prix Stanislas Julien by the
(Slide 5)
During the immense stretch of time that Giles was in China he was stationed
variously at Peking, Tientsin, Kaoshiung, Hankow, Swatow, Canton, Amoy,
Pagoda Island (part of Foochow), Shanghai, Tamsui, and Ningpo. There is
not much of the coast of this great land that he did not know at first hand.
Apart from his best known works, Giles wrote and translated books and articles
on Chinese cookery, instructions to coroners, opium smoking, foot biding, the
position of women, slang, travel, spiritualism, astronomy, anthropology, cremations,
fans, freemasonry the history of China, poetry, dreams, jade, palmistry,
football and polo. All of them were subjects relating to
Lancelot
Giles
(Slide 6)
One of Giles’s sons was Lancelot Giles, who was my grandfather. He
was born in 1878 while Giles was in
(Slide 7)
He kept a Diary of the siege which he wrote in order to inform Giles of the
events. The Diary came down to me as the eldest grandson. I have
donated the original hand-written Diary to the Australia War Memorial in
(Slide 8)
The Diary was published by the
(Slide 9)
Lancelot’s later years were clouded by a rift with his father. As
Professor Giles grew old he became more and more irascible and difficult to
deal with. Lancelot had always written regularly to his father giving him
news about
The relationship eventually broke down completely. He did not even write
to Lancelot when my mother Rosamond wrote to Giles telling him that his son was
dying of cancer. Lancelot died in
Rosamond
Pickford (née Giles)
(Slide 10)
Lancelot and Marjory Giles had two daughters – Rosamond and
Marjory. I am the son of Rosamond. My mother and father were
married in All Saints Church Tientsin on 28 October 1930. My father was
with the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank in
The Second World War came as close as Stalingrad, on the
The only other thing I can remember about
(Slide 11)
After
(Slide 12)
In 1949 my father told the Bank that it was not possible to do business with
the communists. The Bank said it was possible and ordered him to
continue. So my father offered his resignation. He joined us in
Works of Art
I will now take you quickly through some of the works of art that my family has
collected over three generations. (Slides 13 through to 17)
Our family was a part of Chinese history for three generations. I believe
we have made a difference in that time. But we made almost no difference
to
Through the work of my great grandfather and other gifted scholars, the West
slowly came to understand the immense antiquity of the Chinese civilisation,
its exquisite literature and art and its profound philosophers. We also
recognise that it is in
I venture to say that if Herbert Allen Giles were alive today, and if he could
choose to live in
Gift
(Slide 18)
Finally, I would like to make three small gifts to the Museum. The first
is a small ivory study of two Mandarin Ducks (Guangxu 1875, height 5.5
cm). This is my favourite of all the works of art that my parents brought
back from
(Slide 19)
The second is a carved fruitwood box of a finger-like lotus root form (Guangxu
1875, length 10 cm.) It has travelled around the world several times and
has sustained some breaks. However, it is still a thing of beauty.
(Slide 20)
Inside this box I have placed an opal, which is the national jewel of
Conclusion
In closing I want to make this observation. It often seems to me that
References
and Acknowledgements
I have drawn most of the historical details about Herbert Allen Giles from
“The Memoirs of H. A. Giles” edited by Charles Aylmer and published
by the
I am indebted to Ping-wei Huang of Vacaville, California, a renowned Giles
scholar, for his helpful suggestions and improvements; and also to Celia Stubbs
of
I also thank Professor Mark Elvin, Professor of Chinese History and Geremie
Barmé of the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the
