Herbert Allen Giles (/dʒaɪlz/, 8 December 1845 – 13 February 1935) was a British diplomat and sinologist who was the professor of Chinese at the University of Cambridge[2][3] for 35 years.

[4] He married Catherine Maria (Kate) Fenn in 1870[5] and was the father of Bertram, Valentine, Lancelot, Edith, Mable, and Lionel Giles.

Yet as Charles Aylmer wrote, in his Memoirs of H. A. Giles, "Notwithstanding his reputation for abrasiveness, he would speak to anyone in the street from the Vice-Chancellor to a crossing-sweeper and was remembered by acquaintances as a man of great personal charm.

[13] He dedicated the third edition of Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (1916) to his seven grandchildren, but at the end of his life was on speaking terms with only one of his surviving children.

Elise was herself an author, her best known work being China Coast Tales, which she wrote during her time in Tamsui (1885-1888) and which she published under the pseudonym Lise Boehm.

"If he were asked to formulate in a sentence the special mark and merit of Professor Giles's lifelong labours, he would say that beyond all other living scholars he had humanized Chinese studies.

[15] Generally considered unreliable among modern academics,[16] Endymion Wilkinson described it as:full of inaccuracies and the selection leaves much to be desired.

It is merely a collection of Chinese phrases and sentences, translated by Dr. Giles without any attempt at selection, arrangement, order or method," and "decidedly of less value than even the old dictionary of Dr.

The English sinologist and historian Endymion Wilkinson (2013: 85) says Giles' dictionary is "still interesting as a repository of late Qing documentary Chinese, although there is little or no indication of the citations, mainly from the Kangxi zidian)."

Administered by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, it is given every two years to a French person who has written a work about China, Japan, or East Asia, in general.