五車韻府 A Dictionary of the Chinese Language, by the Rev. R. Morrison, D. D.

Shanghae : London Mission Press; London : Trübner & Co., 1865. Second edition. Two volumes, octavo, contemporary half-russet roan over marbled papered boards, spines in compartments with raised bands, lettered in gilt, shelf labels to foot of spines, light edge wear, shelf marks to front pastedowns and title pages, pp. ix; [blank]; 224, 224-239, 239 – 762 (pagination duplicated for 224 and 239); [ii – title], 724, iv (list of radicals), 99 (index of the characters), [blank]; text in Chinese and English, volume two neatly rebacked preserving original spine and endpapers, a few spots of foxing, a very good, complete set.

‘WITHOUT DISPUTE, THE BEST CHINESE DICTIONARY COMPOSED IN A EUROPEAN LANGUAGE’.

The Anglo-Scottish Protestant missionary and East India Company translator Robert Morrison lived and worked in Macau and Canton between 1807 and his death in 1834. In 1815 his Grammar of the Chinese language was published in Serampore, India, but the Dictionary of the Chinese language – printed at Macao between 1815 and 1823 – was Morrison’s most important and lasting contribution to Western understanding of the Chinese language. The first major Chinese-English, English-Chinese dictionary, its transcriptions are based on the Nanjing dialect of Mandarin.

The Chinese and English Dictionary (Batavia : printed at Parapattan, 1842 – 43) compiled by the English Congregationalist missionary Walter Henry Medhurst (1796–1857), is the second major Chinese–English dictionary after Robert Morrison’s pioneering A Dictionary of the Chinese Language (Macao : 1815 – 1823). Published in two octavo volumes, it was designed to be a more accessible dictionary than Morrison’s weighty six volume set.

This second edition of Morrison reprints the Second Part of the dictionary (first printed in 1819 – 20), that is the section organised by pronunciation. “The second Part of Morrison’s Dictionary has been generally commended by experienced Sinologues as the most perfect and useful of the whole. The present is merely a reprint of it, with such slight modifications as are mentioned at the close of the original preface. …. Prof. Julien of Paris designates this second part of Morrison’s Dictionary, as ‘without dispute, the best Chinese Dictionary composed in a European language'” [preliminary ‘Advertisement’, p.i].

While the second edition of Morrison’s Dictionary is reasonably well held institutionally, in commerce it is rarer than the first edition.

A single example recorded at auction in the past century (Rare Book Hub).

Cordier, Sinica, 1594; Lowendahl 1334