威妥瑪（Thomas Francis Wade,1818-1895）是知名的漢學家及外交官。他在漢學意義上開創甚多，而其中最重要的是他創設的威式拼音。威式拼音出現以來，大大方便了西人學習漢語的方法，特別是讓西人更易掌握漢字的讀音以及從音記義的學習過程。在威式拼音前，歐洲人已有以拉丁音轉化漢字的基礎，亦可以說，威妥瑪是集合各家所成，以當時北京官話的發音方法修正在西方流行的拼音方案。不過，即使威妥瑪及其拼音在漢學史上有著這樣的重要性，但學界至今對他如何創制威式拼音的知識準備、鑽研學習方法所知不多。筆者在歐洲發現的威氏手稿就特別有史學上的意義了。從手稿可見，威妥瑪以謄抄馬禮遜《廣東省土話字彙》及裨治文《廣東方言彙編》作為學習漢語的方法，形音義並重之外，亦重知識整理管理方法，特別是如何以字母拼寫作為整理不同漢語知識的串連系統。而仔細爬梳文獻，我們不單能理解抄寫並不純為刻板複寫手段，威氏抄寫的過程，修正增訂並改寫前人文本的心思歷歷在目。而配合1840年代初中葉威妥瑪處身香港的歷史語境，更可讓我們重組在物質匱乏的香港及機械印刷複印大行其道前，此手稿的功能及意義。

Sir Thomas Francis Wade (1818-1895) was known to the world as a sinologist and successful diplomat. One of his most significant legacies is his engineering of the Wade-Giles romanization system, which greatly facilitated the learning and pronunciation of the Chinese script by Westerners. Wade was an innovator and a reformer. He refined the previous romanization methods used by early European missionaries to China, basing his system upon Mandarin, the dialect used in the imperial court and among the scholar-gentry. Hitherto, he did not leave much trace of how he produced his romanization system. The recent discovery of a manuscript by Wade can now provide us with some insights to such questions. This manuscript indicates clearly that Wade studiously and meticulously transcribed every single entry from several Chinese dictionaries written by Christian missionaries in Canton at the time, adding remarks and correcting misspellings. By closely comparing Wade’s manuscript and the dictionaries he transcribed, this paper tries to show that regenerating a dictionary is an important way of producing knowledge about the Chinese language. This manuscript is particularly valuable because it was created before a universal system for romanizing Chinese had been developed, and the translations relied on the compiler’s personal horizon and knowledge of local dialects and his preferred system of transliteration. The manuscript is fascinating textual proof of early cultural and intellectual interaction between Europeans and Chinese, the local people and the ruling class in China.