Page:A Chinese Biographical Dictionary.djvu/13

 statesman knows what happened to (No. 64) and to Duke  (No. 2397), and we who would follow his train of thought must know it too.

Notices of the more prominent living men have also been given, thus bringing the book down to the present day from a starting-point of forty centuries ago.

The surname and personal name, by which each man is formally known, have been transliterated according to the sounds of the Court dialect as now spoken at Peking and popularly called "Mandarin." These have been arranged so far as possible alphabetically, and are followed by the "T." (= 字 tzŭ) which stands for "style" or literary name adopted in youth for general use, and by the "H." (= 號 hao) which is a fancy name or sobriquet either given by a friend or taken by the individual himself. Of the latter there are several varieties, classed together for convenience' sake under one letter.

Most of the Emperors are inserted in a similar manner, with cross references under the "canonisation" and sometimes under the "year-title." Thus the first Emperor of the Ming dynasty is given under, with cross references under and. The Mongol Emperors appear under the names by which they are familiarly known to Europeans (e. g. ); the Emperors of the present dynasty under their year-titles (e. g. ).

The Chinese characters for such place-names (exclusive of Treaty Ports), dynasties, etc., as recur several times will be found in a table at the end of this Preface. At the end of the book there is a full alphabetical index of the literary and fancy names, coupled in some cases with the surnames, and of the canonisations. All such are frequently used in literature, and are often very troublesome to the foreign student. To these have been added a