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.
