Samuel Couling (1859-1922) was a British missionary to China, a large part of his time working in Shandong province 山东省. Together with American missionary colleague Frank Herring Chalfant (1862–1914) ha was also an early collector of ”oracle bones” 甲骨 jiagu. Their joint Couling-Chalfant collection of oracle bones was gathered 1903-1908, and is kept at the British Library in London. Chalfant is credited with the invention of the English name ”oracle bones”, supposedly first used in his book Early Chinese Writing from 1906.
In 1917 Couling published the one-volume Encyclopaedia Sinica with Kelly & Walsh, a Shanghai based publisher of English language books still remaining in Hong Kong as a book seller (under Swindon). The Encyclopaedia covered many important aspects of China-related topics from a Western perspective. One might imagine that an encyclopaedia covering China in a wide sense would have been at least ten volumes, but it is only one with concise descriptions. Our copy is the original 1917 edition, and while in reasonably good shape it has indeed seen some usage. The Encyclopaedia became a classic, and has been reprinted several times, even as late as 1984 by Oxford University Press.