After studying
lithography at the
Working Men's College of Melbourne, the Australian
Robert Henry Mathews started a printing business, but in 1906 he abandoned it to become a
Congregationalist missionary and join the
China Inland Mission (CIM). Mathews first sailed to China in 1908, and the CIM assigned him to stations in
Henan,
Anhui, where he became interested in studying the regional
varieties of Chinese, and
Sichuan. In 1928, Mathews was assigned to the China Inland Mission headquarters in
Shanghai, where he could fully utilize his printing and Chinese linguistic skills. They commissioned him to revise two out-of-print China Inland Mission publications by
Frederick W. Baller, the
Analytical Chinese–English Dictionary and
Mandarin Primer, both printed in 1900. Robert Mathews and his wife Violet worked intensively to complete the
Chinese–English Dictionary in 1931, after only three years (he calls it a "rush job"), and then, for westerners seeking a "working knowledge" of Chinese, the 1938
Kuoyü Primer in seven years during the start of the
Second Sino-Japanese War. In 1943, Japanese occupation troops interned Mathews, commandeered the CIM compound in Shanghai to use as their headquarters, and destroyed both the dictionary printing plates and Mathews' manuscripts and proofs for a revised edition. The 1931 first edition, which began as a revision of Baller's
Analytical Dictionary, ended up as "a 'new' dictionary". Robert Mathew's preface says that in the 30 years since Baller's outdated dictionary, the "influx of modern inventions and the advance of scientific knowledge" in China have introduced many
neologisms. Consequently Mathews compiled a replacement dictionary, keeping in mind Baller's original objective, "to supply the demand for a dictionary at once portable and inexpensive and at the same time sufficiently large to meet the wants of an ordinary student." Mathews' Chinese title is
Maishi Han-Ying da cidian 麥氏漢英大辭典 "Mai's Chinese–English dictionary". Instead of adopting the usual
Wade-Giles system for romanizing Chinese pronunciation, Baller created his own system, now referred to as Baller's system or the China Inland Mission system. Another shortcoming of Baller's dictionary was inconsistent treatment of Chinese varietal pronunciations, furnishing "the sounds of characters as given in West China" (
Southwestern Mandarin and
Chang-Du dialect) and ignoring the variety "spoken in the south-eastern. After Japanese troops in Shanghai destroyed the Mathews' dictionary original printing plates, the lack of copies became an urgent matter for English-speaking
Allies of World War II. The
Harvard–Yenching Institute said the need for Chinese dictionaries in America had "grown from chronic to acute", and selected Mathews' lexicon as one of two "practical dictionaries" to revise and reprint for "the immediate demands of American students". Both
photolithographic reproductions were retitled:
Henry Courtenay Fenn's (1926)
The Five Thousand Dictionary was ''Fenn's Pocket Dictionary'' (November 1942) and Mathews'
A Chinese–English Dictionary… was ''Mathews' Chinese–English Dictionary
(March 1943), which was a "pirated" edition since Mathews never received any payment. The revised edition made a total of 15,000 changes to the original, "errors have been corrected, pronunciations and definitions revised, and new entries inserted". In addition, the Chinese-American linguist Yuen Ren Chao wrote an Introduction on Pronunciation. The dictionary was reduced in size from 8x11 to 7x10 inches. In 1944, Harvard University Press also published Mathews' Chinese–English Dictionary Revised English Index''. By 1984, the Press had sold more than 45,000 copies of Mathew's dictionary. Up through the 1970s, English-speaking students of Chinese relied chiefly on Mathews'
Chinese–English Dictionary. Scholars published several
companion pieces for
Mathews. Tse-tsung Chow (周策縱) of the
University of Wisconsin compiled in 1972 ''A New Index to Mathews' Chinese–English Dictionary, Based on the "Chung" system for Arranging Chinese Characters
, referring to the obsolescent zhōng
衷 indexing system based on character strokes. Olov Bertil Anderson of Lund University published in 1972 A companion volume to R. H. Mathews' Chinese–English dictionary
, which went into a 335-page third revision in 1988. Harry M. Branch developed a Five Willows system and published in 1973 Mathews' and Fenn re-indexed
. Raymond Huang wrote in 1981 a descriptive Mandarin Pronunciation Explained with Diagrams: A Companion to R. H. Mathews' Chinese–English Dictionary''. Mathews' Chinese–English dictionary has been reprinted time and again—but without his authorization—and became so prominent that it is often simply called
Mathews. The English diplomat and sinologist
Endymion Wilkinson says Mathews' continues in use, especially by students of
Classical Chinese, but for other purposes it has been outdated by excellent dictionaries such as
John DeFrancis' (1996)
ABC Chinese–English Dictionary. In the history of Chinese lexicography, Mathews' dictionary was the last major compilation in the tradition of
Christian missionaries in China. It began with
Robert Morrison's (1815-1823)
A Dictionary of the Chinese Language, and continued with
Walter Henry Medhurst's (1842)
Chinese and English Dictionary and
Samuel Wells Williams' (1874)
A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language—excepting the
anti-clericalist Herbert Giles' (1892, 1912)
A Chinese–English Dictionary. Thus, Mathews' dictionary signifies the end of missionaries compiling Chinese bilingual dictionaries and the beginning of a new era for Chinese and English bilingual dictionaries, "based on stronger theoretical underpinnings and more sophisticated information technology as from the latter part of the twentieth century". ==Content==