Nonfiction · 1875
Chinese Sketches
Short pieces on Chinese life by a young British consular officer who had learned the language properly and was impatient with almost everything written about China in English. Giles covers marriage and funerals, the examination system, doctors and their medicine, gambling, opium, superstition, the treatment of women, slang and proverbs, torture and punishment, and the missionaries — repeatedly correcting the picture his readers would have arrived with, in both directions, and refusing either to romanticise or to condescend.
Herbert Allen Giles published Chinese Sketches in 1876, early in a career that produced the first adequate Chinese–English dictionary, a great deal of translation, and the romanisation system that carried his name alongside Thomas Wade's for the next hundred years.
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