Efforts by Western missionaries

Although the 'Phags-pa script, created between 1260 and 1269 at the behest of the founding emperor of the Yuan dynasty, Yuan Shizu, was also used to transcribe Chinese and other languages, it was designed primarily for writing Mongolian. The first schemes specifically designed for the phonetization, or more specifically, romanization of Chinese were all developed by Western missionaries in China. Matteo Ricci, the Jesuit who went to China in 1583 from Italy, is generally believed to be the first person to design a systematic romanized writing for Chinese. His scheme was later modified by another Jesuit missionary in China, Nicolas Trigault. Basically, their schemes served two purposes, to transcribe Chinese proper names, and to help foreigners learn Chinese, in particular the Chinese characters. As recorded in the literature (DeFrancis 1950; J. Li 1935; Ni 1948a; 1948b; Y. G. Zhou 1979:19), quite a few dictionaries were compiled on the basis of these schemes for the convenience of missionaries.

Because of conflict between the Jesuits and the Imperial Court of the Qing Dynasty, the influence of Jesuits in China in the eighteenth century was reduced to a minimum. As a consequence, the romanization of Chinese that they had initiated lay dormant for nearly a century, and was not revived until the early 1800s. The British Protestant missionary Robert Morrison (1782–1834) published a dictionary during 1815–23, in which he introduced a romanization system that he had designed for Mandarin Chinese.