A work designed primarily for Western readers need not, and perhaps should not, aspire to the completeness of biographical compendiums in the Chinese language. If it gives encouragement to more Occidentals to study the language in order to draw on these larger, more detailed, native sources, it will justify the labor that has gone into it. Since, for the purposes of this work of reference, a rigorous selection had to be made, it is inevitable that the specialized reader will note omissions of what seem to him important names, or conclude that the treatment at certain points is inadequate to his needs. On consulting the Index, however, he will probably find some mention of most of the great names of the dynasty—if only indications of the years of birth and death, the contacts they had with other men of note, or the works on which they labored or collaborated. Some names are treated briefly, or even omitted, not necessarily because they were overlooked, but because there is too little recorded about them in Chinese sources which can be taken with certainty, or too much that is based on conjecture. This is likely to be true of those persons about whom Westerners are apt to inquire most frequently—namely, artists, craftsmen, and men of independent thought who, spurning the ways to officialdom, lived in retirement and whose works, if they left any, were lost or destroyed because they failed to conform to the patterns set by their time.
Obviously a work touching upon so many crucial problems, and on the spheres of so many specialists, cannot be free from imperfections in certain details. As more documentary material comes to light concerning the names treated, and as research in China, after being disrupted by years of warfare, is resumed, it will doubtless be necessary to correct specific dates, and also the interpretation of certain events. The contributors had to rely on the documents at hand; they had to choose oftentimes between conflicting authorities; and though they would like to have tarried for months, or even years, on the solution of particular problems; they obviously could not do so, if the work was to appear within a predictable time. To apply to it, therefore, standards of perfection when, as the documents now stand, there could be no perfection, would be to deny to these, or to any writers, the privilege of writing at all. Within these limits, however, no pains have been spared to check the accuracy of the information gathered.
In the selection and presentation of the material the aim has been to strike a just balance between the needs of the general reader and those of the specializing student of history. The multiplied cross-references and the often apparently superfluous clarifications are all designed to leave the general reader in no doubt as to the meaning. Though the Chinese characters will seem to him perhaps to heckle the text unnecessarily, they will be of service to the growing number of persons who read the language. In any case, the characters can be entirely ignored, if further reference to Chinese sources is not the aim.
The system for transliterating names of persons, places and titles of books is the one devised by Thomas F. Wade for his Peking Syllabary of 1859, and slightly revised by Herbert A. Giles for his Chinese-English Dictionary of 1912. It has obvious deficiencies which must in time be remedied, but until a better system is generally approved, it seemed wise to follow the one that has been used by English-speaking people for the past eighty years. The only exceptions are the names of provinces and the more important cities, for which the Post Office spelling is used.
The letters T. and H. which appear beside most of the Chinese names indicate
