This view is a side effect of the British Academy’s path dependency on scant previous Western research. Matteo Ricci’s Portuguese-Chinese dictionary was of the Mandarin dialect he learned at the Ming court; Francisco Varo, Joseph Prémare, and Robert Morrison’s Chinese dictionaries were also of Mandarin. Britain’s Sinologists of that era, then, were far more focused on Mandarin than on other dialects. And so Robin was asked to forget his preferred native tongue.
