and Rémusat wrote, the Yuan shi was unknown in Europe, and it seems, that even the old Catholic missionaries in Peking had not seen it. The old sinologues knew only an extract of the great "Mongol History"." - E. Bretschneider, Notices of the Mediæval Geography and History of Central and Western Asia, pp. 5-6. Marshall Broomhall commented that Though a great soldier and a great litterateur, K'ien-lung did not escape some serious errors. At one time he appointed a learned committee of Chinese, Manchus, Mongols, and Western Mohammedans to revise the foreign names of men and places which occur in the Yüan Records. So unscientific was this work that the K'ien-lung editions of the Liao, Kin, and Yüan histories are practically useless. The title Kalif rendered Ha-li-fu was changed by the Committee into Farkha and is explained as being "a village in Manchuria." Transcriptions of English in Chinese characters were used in a book to learn English dating to 1860 in the reign of the Xianfeng Emperor. During the late 19th century, when Western ideas and products flooded China, transcriptions mushroomed. They include not only transcriptions of proper nouns but also those of common nouns for new products. The influence was particularly marked in dialects near the major ports, like Shanghainese. Many of these phonemic loans proved to be fads, however, and popular usage and linguistic reformers subsequently favored calques or neologisms in their place. Sound and meaning A transcription into Chinese characters can sometimes be a phono-semantic matching, i.e. it reflects both the sound and the meaning of the transcribed word. For example, "Modern Standard Chinese shēngnà "sonar", uses the characters shēng "sound" and nà "receive, accept". shēng is a phonetically imperfect rendering of the English initial syllable. Chinese has a large number of homo/heterotonal homophonous morphemes, which would have been much better phonetically (but not nearly as good semantically) consider the syllable (cf. sòng 'deliver, carry, give (as a present)', sōng 'pine; loose, slack', sǒng 'tower; alarm, attract' etc.), (cf. sōu 'search', sǒu 'old man', sōu 'sour, spoiled' and many others) or (cf. shōu 'receive, accept', shòu 'receive, accept', shǒu 'hand', shǒu 'head', shòu 'beast', shòu 'thin' and so forth)." Belarus (lit. "White Russia") is transcribed in Chinese as Bái'éluósī, with bái ("white") and Éluósī ("Russia") preserving the meaning of the original name. Similarly, the common ending -va in Russian female surnames is usually transcribed as wā, meaning