now in the Civil Service of Wongkong,
Know patois.
3. only the Cantonese dialect, or.
Your Lordship is doubtless already aware that there is but one national and written language throughout the Empire of China, which is known to Europeans as the "Mandarin", official language, but that it is spoken with such great variations of pronunciation and dialect in the different provinces that, for example, the dialect of Peking is unintelligible at Canton, and vice versa. By way of illustration, (though the circumstances are not quite similar in all respects), I may mention the parallel case in Italy. In Italy, (as we all know), as in China, there is one National literary and official language, which is, practically, the dialect of Tuscany as pronounced at Rome. But the mass of the people in the several Provinces speak dialects differing very much from each other and from the National language. For instance, the Piedmontese dialect.
"In the Italian phrase,— La Lingua Toscana in bocca Romana.
"Mandarin is a term applied by Europeans to the Official class in China, but unknown to the Chinese themselves.