George Carter Stent (1833–1884) was an English soldier in India and China, an agent of the
Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service, and a translator of Chinese texts into English.
Life
George Carter Stent was born into a family of modest means in Canterbury in 1833. He was the second son of James Stent, of 2 King's Bridge, Canterbury.
Shortly after his twentieth birthday he joined the British Army as a soldier of the
14th (King's Light) Dragoons and proceeded with the regiment to India, where in the 1850s he witnessed and later wrote about the
Great Mutiny.
[Idema 2017, p. 120.] By the mid-1860s, he was in China, serving in the guard of the British legation at
Peking
Beijing, previously romanized as Peking, is the capital city of China. With more than 22 million residents, it is the world's most populous national capital city as well as China's second largest city by urban area after Shanghai. It is l ...
.
He displayed an affinity for Chinese literature, and with the help of
Thomas Francis Wade
Sir Thomas Francis Wade, (25 August 181831July 1895) was a British diplomat and sinologist who produced an early Chinese textbook in English, in 1867, that was later amended, extended and converted into the Wade-Giles romanization system for ...
was recruited into the
Maritime Customs Service.
He died on 1 September 1884, at Takaw (
Kaohsiung
Kaohsiung, officially Kaohsiung City, is a special municipality located in southern Taiwan. It ranges from the coastal urban center to the rural Yushan Range with an area of . Kaohsiung City has a population of approximately 2.73 million p ...
), China.
Works
* ''Scraps from my Sabretasche: Being Personal Adventures While in the 14th (King's Light) Dragoons'' (London: W.H. Allen & Co.).
* ''Chinese and English Vocabulary in the Pekinese Dialect'' (Shanghai: Customs Press, 1871).
* ''Chinese and English Pocket Dictionary'' (Shanghai: Kelly & Co., 1874).
* ''The Jade Chaplet, in Twenty-Four Beads'' (London: London by Trübner & Co., 1874), a collection of songs, ballads, &c., from the Chinese.
* ''Entombed Alive, and Other Poems'' (William H. Allen & Co., 1878), from the Chinese.
See also
*
Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland
The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, commonly known as the Royal Asiatic Society, was established, according to its royal charter of 11 August 1824, to further "the investigation of subjects connected with and for the encourag ...
References
Bibliography
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External links
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{{Authority control
1833 births
1884 deaths
British translators
British people in colonial India
English expatriates in China