Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 58.djvu/429

Wade second tenure of office as chargé d'affaires that the massacre of foreigners at Tientsin occurred. Though the attack was primarily directed against Frenchmen, a British subject was among the slain, and Wade took a leading part in the protests which led to the punishment of certain of the rioters. In 1872 the marriage of the Emperor T'ungchih led Wade and his colleagues to urge on the emperor's ministers the propriety of their master receiving the foreign representatives in audience, and on 29 June 1873 Wade and the other ministers were for the first time admitted into the imperial presence. In the following year a dispute arose between China and Japan, which threatened to end in war. Indeed, the Japanese envoy was on the point of leaving Peking when Wade on his own responsibility undertook that the Chinese government should accede to the terms put forward by Japan. To this eminent service special reference was made in the queen's speech of 1875.

On 20 Feb. 1875 Augustus Raymond Margary [q. v.], who had been sent across China to Burma to meet Colonel Horace Browne's expedition from Burma, was treacherously murdered on his return journey near Manwyne in Yunnan. Wade instantly demanded at Peking that a full inquiry should be made into the circumstances of the crime, and after long and trying negotiations, in the course of which he more than once threatened to break off diplomatic relations with the Chinese government, he succeeded in obtaining a certain amount of compensation and an assurance of future protection, and in connection with the affair arranged with Li Hung-Chang the Chifu convention, which after a long interval was ratified by the two governments concerned. In 1880 Gordon visited Li Hung-Chang to consult with him on the threatened war with Russia, and in connection with this visit it was stated by Sir Henry Gordon that Wade and some of his colleagues had suggested that Li Hung-Chang should raise the standard of rebellion and take possession of the throne. Certainly, so far as Wade is concerned, this is not the fact, and the rumour was publicly contradicted by him when the statement first appeared. In 1875 he was made a K.C.B., and in 1883 he retired on a pension.

On his return to England Wade took up his residence at Cambridge, and in 1888 was appointed the first professor of Chinese at the university. He was elected a professorial fellow of King's College. On his death he left his large and valuable Chinese library to the university. In 1889 he was made a G.C.M.G. He died at Cambridge on 31 July 1895. In 1868 he married Amelia, daughter of Sir John Frederick William Herschel [q. v.], who survived him. By her he had four sons. Wade's life was one of action rather than of learned leisure, and he had little time for writing. Nevertheless he was author of the following works, which remain standard books for the study of China and the Chinese: 1. ‘Notes on the Chinese Army.’ 2. ‘A Note on the Condition and Government of the Chinese Empire,’ 1849. 3. ‘The Hsin Ching Lu, or Book of Experiments,’ Hongkong, 1859, 2 vols. fol. 4. ‘The Peking Syllabary,’ Hongkong, 1859, fol. 5. ‘Wènchien Tzŭ-erh Chi, a Series of Papers selected as Specimens of Documentary Chinese,’ London, 1867, 8vo. 6. ‘Yü-yen Tzŭ-erh Chi: a progressive Course in Colloquial Chinese,’ London, 1867, 2 vols. 4to; a second edition of the colloquial part in 3 vols. was brought out at Shanghai in 1886, 4to. 7. ‘A Translation of the Lun Yü,’ privately printed in 1881.

[Times, 2 Aug. 1895; private information.] 

WADE, WALTER (d. 1825), Irish botanist, was a physician practising in Dublin in 1790. Aylmer Bourke Lambert [q. v.] in a letter to (Sir) James Edward Smith [q. v.] states that through Wade's exertions a grant of 300l. was obtained to establish the botanic garden at Dublin, and that he intended publishing a work entitled ‘Flora Dublinensis’ (Memoir and Correspondence of Sir James Edward Smith, ii. 126–7). Undated folio sheets of this proposed work exist, with plates, under the title ‘Floræ Dublinensis Specimen,’ but it was never carried out. In 1794 Wade published ‘Catalogus Systematicus Plantarum indigenarum in comitatu Dublinensi … pars prima,’ on the title-page of which he describes himself as M.D., licentiate of the King's and Queen's College of Physicians, and lecturer on botany. This work is in Latin (275 pages 8vo), arranged on the Linnæan system, with carefully verified localities and indexes of the Latin, English, and Irish names, the sedges and cryptogamic plants being reserved for a second part, which was never published. Lady Kane, in her anonymous ‘Irish Flora’ (Dublin, 1833, 12mo), says of this work (preface, p. vii) that it was ‘the first that appeared in Ireland under a systematic arrangement,’ and that its author ‘may be justly considered as the first who diffused a general taste for botany in this country.’ Wade visited various parts of Ireland in search of plants: in 1796