Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch ORASHKB and author
Vol. 1 (1961)
ISSN 1991-7295
61
His other major life work, A Dictionary of the Chinese language, 1819-1822, is not included in the collection either, but there is a copy elsewhere in the University Library. The Dictionary was published with a generous subsidy from the East India Company who brought Mr. Thoms out from England with a press and materials especially for the job of printing it. He arrived in Macao in September 1814 and after many difficulties over manufacturing moveable types, the first volume was printed by January 1816.
Four works of Julius von Klaproth (1783-1835), the German sinologue contemporary with Morrison, are listed in the printed catalogue but now only one survives, Asia Polyglotta, Paris, 1823, containing comparative word lists in various Asiatic languages.
This brings to mind the bitter attacks von Klaproth made on Morrison's integrity as a Chinese scholar, printed in the Nouveau Journal Asiatique and quoted by Morrison in the Memoirs. The French sinologue, Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat, (1788-1832) joined in the attack against Morrison. Von Klaproth seems to have been even more belligerent than the majority of sinologues are towards each other, as his reviews of his colleagues' translations from the Chinese in the same journal show. Von Klaproth even sunk so low as to try to get Sir J. F. Davis, then in the East India Company's service and later Governor of Hong Kong, to join in the attacks against Morrison, by promising that if he did, he would write a laudatory article about him in a forthcoming journal. Davis' reply was,
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I cannot help regretting that you should indulge in such hostility to Dr. Morrison concerning whom I must declare that I agree with Sir George Staunton in considering him as 'confessedly the first Chinese scholar in Europe'. It is notorious in (England) that he has for years conducted on the part of the E.I. Co., a very extensive correspondence in Chinese in the written character; that he writes the language of China with the ease and rapidity of a native; and that the natives themselves have long since given him the title of (Lao Shih Ma). This testimony is decisive, and the position which it gives him is such, that he may regard all European squabbles regarding his Chinese knowledge as mere Batrachomyomachia.
The French sinologue mentioned above, Abel-Rémusat, the first man to be appointed to a chair of Chinese at a European University, was originally represented by three books in the catalogue, only one of which is now left, Elémens de la Grammaire Chinoise, 1822.
A book little noticed now is Translations from the Chinese and Armenian by Charles F. Neumann, 1831. It contains