Dictionary of the Foochow Dialect
March 20, 2006A local newspaper in Foochow city introduces a Foochowese-English dictionary (in Chinese), Dictionary of the Foochow Dialect, which was published in the year 1870. I’m not a little surprised because I had thought all those books in Foochowese published in the late 1800’s and the early 1900’s had already perished without trace. And this piece of news indeed convinces me there should be some, if not many, other invaluable Foochowese books in my city, still unknown to the public.
As you may have noticed, "Foochow dialect" is used in this book instead of "Foochowese" or "Foochow language". Maybe the authors were not so meticulous in the definition of "dialect", and of course they would not get offended by such kind of misnomer as I do. Anyway, the defects can never obscure the virtues.
This magnum opus is the first real Foochowese dictionary in the world. Three writing systems are used in it: Romanized Foochowese, Chinese characters, and English. It collects nearly 70,000 entries in Foochowese and is a really comprehensive record of the language at that time. The authors’ names are listed in the bookspine: R. S. Maclay, C. C. Baldwin, but the third name is not distinguishable in the photo (LEOZN?) so I cannot search him in Google. The first two of them were both missionaries from the United States. It is reported that they had spent about 12 years in learning Foochowese and another decade in writing this dictionary. Wow, how unbelievable their passion and persistence were! 
Besides Foochowese, many other Chinese languages at that time were also profoundly researched and introduced to other parts of the world by Westerners, greatly boosting the cultural exchange. However, this glorious period of history is often neglected by the Chinese themselves. So far they still reckon the defeat of Opium War as a humiliation of our nation, and depict those Westerners who came to China as outrageous intruders. But I do feel obliged to say that such understanding and evaluation of history are far from objective. Without exaggeration, it was the Westerners who saved China, which was all but civilized before the Opium War. Therefore, it is time we abandoned this prejudice.
