Scholar and diplomat, born in Utica, New York, USA. A printer's son, he directed an American mission press in Canton and Macao (183345) and was secretary and interpreter to the American legation in China (185676). The leading sinologist of his day, he published several Chinese dictionaries, and his Middle Kingdom (1848, revised 1883) was for decades the standard English-language work on China.
Samuel Wells Williams (衛三畏;22nd September 1812-1884) was linguist and diplomat of United States of America. From 1848 to 1851 Williams was the editor of the Chinese Repository, a leading
Western journal published in China. He wrote A Tonic Dictionary Of The Chinese Language In The Canton Dialect (英華分韻撮要) in 1856. He returned to the United States of America in 1877 and
became the first Professor of Chinese in the United States at Yale University.
Publications
The Chinese commercial guide (1856)
A Tonic Dictionary Of The Chinese Language In The Canton Dialect (1856)
The Middle Kingdom: a survey of the geography, government,
literature, social life, arts, and history of the Chinese empire and its inhabitants (1857)
Account of a Japanese romance (1849)
A syllabic dictionary of the Chinese language,
arranged according to the Wu-fang yuan yin, with the pronunciation of the characters as heard in Peking, Canton, Amoy and Shanghai (1874)
Syllabic Dictionary Of The Chinese Language
(1879)
Chinese Immigration (1879)
A History Of China Being The Historical Chapters From "The Middle Kingdom" (1897)
A journal of the Perry expedition to Japan Narrative Of
A Voyage Of The Ship Morrison Captain D. Ingersoll, To Lewchew And Japan, In The Months of July and August, 1837
Reference
Biography of Samuel Wells Williams in
The Far East, New Series, Volume 1, December 1876, pages 140-2
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