Excerpt from China: The Long-Lived Empire Each European spells according to the genius of his own language, and in several instances general Eng lish usage does not agree with the form or forms given by Consul Playfair in his Geographical Dic tionary. The majority of sinologues are agreed that the English spelling or transliteration of place-names used by the Imperial Maritime Customs on letter-heads and postal canceling-stamps should be accepted by foreigners in China. There is no society among Chi nese literati for the Romanization or uniform trans literation of Chinese characters and Chinese delegates to international Oriental congresses in Europe are usually silent, while German, English, and French sinologues argue fervently for or against te or 1072, or other fundamental syllables. The Twelfth Oriental Congress at Rome, in 1899, left this transliteration still an unfinished question, although, as one of the secretaries of Section IV, it was my privilege to make record of two long sessions of excited debate. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.