A Grammar of Colloquial Chinese, as Exhibited in the Shanghai Dialect

In the 1850s, as Western powers pressed into China through theTreaty of Ports, a British missionary and linguist set out to document something far more subtle than trade agreements: the living, breathing language spoken on the streets of Shanghai. Joseph Edkins spent years listening, transcribing, and analyzing the colloquial speech of a city poised to become Asia's great modern metropolis. The result is this grammar: a pioneering attempt to capture on paper the sounds, tones, structures, and rhythms of Shanghai's vernacular, distinct from the classical written language and from Mandarin itself. What Edkins offers is not merely a technical reference. It is a snapshot of a language in transition, a port city where local speech absorbed influences from across the Yangtze Delta. He meticulously catalogs phonetics and tones, maps parts of speech that behave unlike their Mandarin counterparts, and traces syntactic patterns that reveal how Shanghai speakers actually thought and spoke. This is early Western sinology at its most ambitious: attempting to grasp Chinese not as an ancient text to be translated, but as a living tongue to be understood. For linguists, historians of Shanghai, and anyone curious about the birth of modern Chinese studies, this remains an indispensable artifact. It documents a dialect that would transform dramatically over the following century, preserving a moment in time before waves of migration, industrialization, and political upheaval reshaped both the city and its speech.