Huang Zunxian 黃遵憲 (1848-1905) is generally admired as the most prominent poet of late imperial China, and his Renjinglu shicao 人境廬詩草 attracts unceasing critical attention ever since its publication in 1911. As Huang played an influential role in the reform movement in the late Qing period, the importance of Renjinglu shicao is, therefore, not confined to the field of literary study. It has become the centre of attention in the study of Huang Zunxian. However, to most readers Huang’s poems are far from easy to understand. As a solution to this problem, annotations to Huang’s poems appeared in large number in the past century, among which Renjinglu shicao jianzhu 人境廬詩草箋注 by Qian Zhonglian 錢仲聯 (1908- ) was unsurpassed in terms of comprehensiveness and rigorous scholarship. Unfortunately, these annotations looked somewhat obsolete to readers today and thus failed to function adequately as a tool to the understanding of Huang’s mind and achievements. This research project aims at providing scholars and common readers with practical, informative and reliable annotations on Renjinglu shicao by utilizing and bringing together the following:

．results of the research on Huang in the past century as much as possible as source materials for the annotations;
．today’s information technology to its full extent in searching for source materials for the annotations;
．my own experience in the past 25 years in studying and teaching Huang’s poems, literature of the late Qing period, and classical Chinese poetry.
．It is expected that this project and the results it produces would provide a useful paradigm for future annotations of classical Chinese poems.

Over 100 Chinese dictionaries for transmitted texts and excavated texts were published in the last few decades. Although these dictionaries, mostly synchronic, often contain the same words or words of similar meanings, they differ from one another in their nature and methodology. A prominent problem concerning them is that none of the individual dictionaries seems to have been able to boast a full collection of all the representative usages of a particular word. This has led us to wonder whether the dictionaries as we have today still have room for improvement. To compile a synchronic dictionary, one needs to have a good understanding of the complete lexical landscape of the particular period. A study on both the transmitted texts and excavated texts become indispensable in obtaining such an understanding. A time-consuming and arduous task as it is, we have to take advantage of modern technology, establishing a database for the entire body of ancient Chinese texts and conducting meta-analyses. This up-do-date method for compiling a dictionary of ancient Chinese plays an essential part in the study of ancient Chinese lexicography. Large-scaled and systematic research on Pre-Han and Han ancient texts is such a task that it cannot rely just on the research carried out by individual scholars, but requires the strong and long-term support of an organization. The Research Centre for Chinese Ancient Texts, under the aegis of the Institute of Chinese Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, has established six traditional and excavated ancient Chinese texts databases which are widely recognized by the academic community. Geographical areas involved covers the most important cultural regions such as the Chu 楚, the Qi 齊, and the Lu 魯, while the time period extends from the Shang to the Six Dynasties. The proposed project will make use of all these databases and design a computer program that can help cull words from the texts to build up a complete Pre-Han and Han glossary. This glossary will then be used to study the uniqueness in the usage of particular words and their evolution. Based on this study, a multiple-purpose online dictionary can be made available to scholars all around the world, so that they can conduct word search with any particular historical period, region/state, author, medium, genre, etc.

Mok Man Cheong(莫文暢, ?—1917) had worked as a court interpreter, a comprador and a school teacher before moving into the shipping industry and later on becoming a ‘zhili’(值理) at the Tung Wah group of hospitals in Hong Kong. His first important publication, The Tah Tse Dictionary（達辭字典）, was very well received indeed and it remains in use as a reference book even up to the present day. In an effort to help his contemporaries to learn English as a second language, Cheong introduced the sound-matching approach to tackle English pronunciation in his other book, English Made Easy（唐字調音英語） and it comes as no surprise that this English-Cantonese sound-matching manual was highly praised by A.W. Brewin, the then Registrar-General of Hong Kong. According to the British Library Catalogue, English Made Easy was reprinted many times and thus its influential status back in the early part of the twentieth century can hardly be doubted. Sound- matching documentation as such is central to the studies of Chinese linguistics but unfortunately the importance of English Made Easy has for long been overlooked. Previous studies of this book were largely undertaken from the perspective of English teaching, even though English Made Easy contains a significant amount of valuable and reliable data, which prove indispensable to any attempt to understand the changes of Hong Kong Cantonese over the years. It is the first book authored by a Chinese scholar to have noted the phenomena of ‘high leveling (上高平)’ and ‘high entering (上高入)’ in Cantonese intonation and it contains the earliest documentation of ‘san-pin-fa (三拼法),’ which contrasts sharply with the more commonly used ‘shuang-pin-fa (雙拼法).’ Of no less importance is Cheong’s detailed account of the cultural changes in Hong Kong. This research project will delve into the wealth of phonetic and vocabulary data contained in English Made Easy with a view to work out a comprehensive and accurate historiography of the multifarious changes that inform Hong Kong Cantonese, placed in the context of Chinese linguistics, and the myriad of socio-cultural factors that nurtured them.

Contrary to other readings of the novel, Sanguo yanyi, as built around only one theme, one idea, or one narrative structure, this project proposes to explore the presence of a multiplicity of themes, meanings, ideologies and structures, and seeks to investigate the dialogues among them.