This Grammar on Literary Chinese by Ma Jianzhong (1845-1900) was the
first of its kind ever to be written by a native Chinese on Chinese and
was published in 1898. It came at a time when Imperial China was in
decline not only by loss of her sovereignty to the then Western colonial
powers and when there was a strong feeling of insecurity about the
relevance of ancient native Chinese culture in a modern world and its
continued existence under the rising pressure to modernise in order to
cope with the West and the rest of the modern world. Chinese Language
Planning and Reform for the purpose of creating a national standard
language and to spread literacy in all parts of society was seen as an
essential part of such a modernisation process. Ma's work was only a
first step in a longer series of research work and language planning and
reform projects to follow in the decades after him. This book offers
Ma's original Chinese text with Chinese-English glossaries at the end
for Western students and researchers in Chinese Linguistics.