Chinese guardian lions However, Chinese reference to the guardian lions are seldom prefixed with 佛 or 福, and more importantly never referred to as "dogs". Reference to guardian lions as dogs in Western cultures may be due to the Japanese reference to them as "Korean dogs" (狛犬・高麗犬) due to their transmission from China through Korea into Japan. It may also be due to the misidentification of the guardian lion figures as representing certain Chinese dog breeds such as the Chow Chow (鬆獅犬, Pinyin: sōngshī quǎn, lit. "puffy-lion dog") or Pekingese (獅子狗; Pinyin: Shīzi Gǒu, lit. "lion dog"). The lions are traditionally carved from
A Chinese-English Dictionary dictionary into the 1,813-page second edition (1912) with the addition of 67 more entries and numerous usage examples. Herbert Giles served as a British consular officer in late Qing dynasty China until from 1867 to 1892. After his return to England, he was appointed the second professor of Chinese at the University of Cambridge, in succession to Thomas Francis Wade. They are renowned for developing what was later called the Wade-Giles romanization system of Chinese, which Giles' "A Chinese-English Dictionary" firmly established as the standard in the Western world until the 1958 official international pinyin system (Wilkinson 2000: 93). In