William Edward Soothill

William Edward Soothill (1861–1935) was an English Methodist missionary and scholar of Chinese. He spent about twenty-five years in Wenzhou, China, where he devised a system for writing the local dialect in Roman letters and translated the New Testament into it. He later became principal of the Imperial University in Shanxi and, from 1920, professor of Chinese at Oxford. His works include a translation of the Analects of Confucius, The Three Religions of China, a Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms prepared with Lewis Hodous, and an abridged English version of the Lotus Sutra.