HONGKONG AND SHANGHAI BANKING CORPORATION.

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Manuscript manual for learning Chinese. A connection to the late Qing dynasty and the Legation Era: a banker's vocabulary list for learning spoken and written Chinese, produced during the tenure of HSBC's legendary Peking agent Edward "Guy" Hillier, when political upheavals brought new diplomatic stresses and economic opportunities for China's largest foreign bank.The ledgers from which this example is formed were only produced between 1890 and 1910. HSBC entered the China market in Hong Kong in 1865 and, because Chinese reformers began to look for more foreign investment in government projects, it established a Peking office in the Legation Quarter in the 1880s. Quickly, Guy Hillier (1857-1924) was drafted to lead operations. Fluent in Chinese, Hillier was the bank's chief representative in the Chinese capital from 1891 to 1924, although he managed to avoid be out of the city during the Boxer Uprising. "Hillier tested the very limits of the 'treaty system', establishing close relations both with modernizing compradores and with imperial officials. It was Hillier's genius to understand the politics of the foreign diplomatic community, to learn what was possible in the London market, to determine what was acceptable politically in China, and to match all three - on terms to the benefit of the Hongkong Bank, its associate companies, and, indeed, the general British position in China" (ODNB).Hillier needed well-trained, multilingual staff to handle HSBC's growing involvement in

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