Chinese and English Dictionary
Title page of Medhurst's Chinese and English Dictionary (1842: i)
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| Author | Walter Henry Medhurst |
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| Country | Batavia, Dutch East Indies |
| Language | Chinese, English |
| Publisher | Parapattan |
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Publication date
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1842 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 1,486 |
| OCLC | 5309778 |
The Chinese and English Dictionary: Containing All the Words in the Chinese Imperial Dictionary, Arranged According to the Radicals (1842), compiled by the English Congregationalist missionary Walter Henry Medhurst (1796-1857), is the second major Chinese-English dictionary after Robert Morrison's pioneering (1815-1823) A Dictionary of the Chinese Language. Medhurst's intention was to publish an abridged and cheaper dictionary that still contained all the 47,035 head characters from the (1716) Kangxi Dictionary, which Morrison's huge dictionary included. Medhurst reversed and revised into his Chinese-English dictionary in compiling the (1847-1848) English and Chinese Dictionary in Two Volumes.
In 1816, when Walter Henry Medhurst was 20 years old, the London Missionary Society (LMS) initially employed him as a printer, and then chose him to become a missionary printer in China. After studying at Hackney College under George Collison, Midhurst sailed to Malacca state in Malaysia, where he established the LMS printing center for religious publications in 1817. He learned Malay, and studied Chinese, Chinese characters, and the Hokkien group of Min Nan Chinese varieties, which is widely spoken in Southeast Asia. Medhurst was ordained in 1819, and served as a missionary in Penang in 1820, and then in Batavia (present-day Jakarta), capital of the Dutch East Indies in 1822. After the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, foreign missionaries were allowed to enter China and Medhurst moved to Shanghai, where he and William Muirhead founded the London Missionary Society Press.
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