written Chinese to foreigners. Making the actual pronunciation conventions of spoken Chinese intelligible to non-Chinese-speaking students, especially those with no experience of a tonal language. Making the syntactic structure of Chinese intelligible to those only familiar with Latin grammar. Transcribing the citation pronunciation of specific Chinese characters according to the pronunciation conventions of a specific European language, to allow the insertion of that Chinese pronunciation into a Western text. Allowing instant communication in "colloquial Chinese" between Chinese and non-Chinese speakers via a phrase-book. Chinese Identifying the specific pronunciation of a character within a specific context (e.g. as xíng (to walk; behaviour, conduct) or háng (a store)). Recitation of Chinese text in one Chinese variety by literate speakers of another mutually unintelligible one, e.g. Mandarin and Cantonese. Learning Classical or Modern Chinese. Use with a standard QWERTY keyboard. Replacing Chinese characters to bring functional literacy to illiterate Chinese speakers. Book indexing, dictionary entry sorting, and cataloguing in general. Non-Chinese systems The Wade, Wade–Giles, and Postal systems still appear in the European literature, but generally only within a passage cited from an earlier work. Most European language texts use the Chinese Hanyu Pinyin system (usually without tone marks) since 1979 as it was adopted by the People's Republic of China. Missionary systems The first consistent system for transcribing Chinese words in Latin alphabet is thought to have been designed in 1583–1588 by Matteo Ricci and Michele Ruggieri for their Portuguese–Chinese dictionary—the first ever European–Chinese dictionary. Unfortunately, the manuscript was misplaced in the Jesuit Archives in Rome, and not re-discovered until 1934. The dictionary was finally published in 2001. During the winter of 1598, Ricci, with the help of his Jesuit colleague Lazzaro Cattaneo (1560–1640), compiled a Chinese–Portuguese dictionary as well, in which tones of the romanized Chinese syllables were indicated with diacritical marks. This work has also been lost but not rediscovered. Cattaneo's system, with its accounting for the tones, was not lost, however. It was used e.g. by Michał Boym and his two Chinese assistants in the first publication of the original and romanized text of the Nestorian Stele, which appeared in China Illustrata (1667)—an encyclopedic-scope work compiled by Athanasius Kircher. In 1626 the Jesuit missionary Nicolas Trigault devised a romanization system in his Xiru Ermu Zi (simplified Chinese: 西儒耳目资; traditional Chinese: 西儒耳目資; pinyin: Xīrú ěrmù zī; literally: Aid to the Eyes and Ears of Western Literati). In his 1670 Portuguese