Download or read book Encyclopaedia Sinica written by Samuel M.A. Couling and published by Global Oriental. This book was released on 2007-04-05 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the tumultuous events in China in the first two decades of the twentieth century, there was an urgent need for a reliable reference work surveying all aspects of contemporary China, given that existing reference works and scholarly monographs became rapidly obsolete. Couling’s work, published in 1917, covered so much ground with such accuracy and consistency that it has become established as an essential tool for scholars wishing to understand how the new China was seen and interpreted at the time.