A Brill Calendar: July 31

Few roads to election as a Cambridge Professor have been longer than the one undertaken by Thomas Francis Wade (London August 25 1818 – Cambridge, Cambridgeshire July 31 1895).

When Wade was inaugurated there as the first Professor of Chinese he had reached the age of the very strong: 70. The diplomat and sinologist who developed a system of Romanizing the Chinese language started education as a Trinity boy; the son of an army officer followed in his father’s footsteps, joined the army and was sent to China in 1842, the year in which the Treaty of Nanking was signed, ending ‘the most unjust war ever waged by one nation against another’.

When Wade retired from military and diplomatic service and returned to his Alma Mater in 1883, he had witnessed a reckless and often scatter-brained period in Anglo-Chinese relations and two Opium Wars; with the wanton destruction of the Imperial Summer Palace in October 1860, a barbarism of some infamy.

As a sinologist, Wade was an autodidact: in appointments at Nanking, Hong Kong, Peking and elsewhere it is seldom that his position as foreigner in the Realm of the Middle brings him into contact with Westerners reasonably fluent in Chinese languages and literatures. In his early ‘forties Wade publishes his ‘Peking Syllabary’ (1859), the kernel of a project completed in 1912 by his successor in Cambridge sinology, Herbert Allan Giles (1845 – 1935), in the famed ‘Chinese – English Dictionary’.

The syllabary and other attainments under Her Majesty’s Service earned Wade a knighthood in 1875; his scholarly work in Romanizing Chinese became an important first stage in the acculturation of Chinese in an alien, alphabetical tradition. When the Chinese Empire ceased to exist in 1912 – the year of the Dictionary – Western learning on China could boast more than a smattering of adequate scholarly knowledge.