Notable contributors to periodicals contained in China from Empire to Republic: Missionary, Sinology, and Literary Periodicals include:
• Robert Morrison
(1782–1834): an Anglo-Scottish evangelist and the first Christian Protestant missionary in China. Morrison pioneered the translation of the Bible into Chinese and was also the co-founder of Indo-Chinese Gleaner.
• Walter Henry Medhurst
(1796–1857): an English Congregationalist missionary to China. He was one of the early translators of the Bible into Chinese-language editions. He was also known as the compiler of the English and Chinese Dictionary (1848).
• James Legge
(1815–1897): a noted Scottish sinologist, a Scottish Congregationalist, representative of the London Missionary Society in Malacca and Hong Kong (1840–1873), and first Professor of Chinese at Oxford University (1876–1897). He was best known for his monumental translation of the Chinese classics into English, including the Confucian Analects and The Works of Mencius.
• Herbert Allen Giles
(1845–1935): a British diplomat, sinologist, and professor of Chinese language. He modified a Mandarin Chinese Romanization system earlier established by Thomas Wade, resulting in the widely known Wade–Giles Chinese Romanization system. Among his many works were translations of the Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching), the Chuang Tzu, and the first widely published Chinese-English dictionary.
• Tsai Yuan-pei
(蔡元培1868–1940): a Chinese educator and revolutionary who served as president of Peking University from 1916 to 1926, during the critical period when that institution played a major role in the development of a new spirit of nationalism and socio-political reform in China. He was known for his critical evaluation of Chinese culture and synthesis of Chinese and Western thinking, including anarchism.
• Wu Lien-teh
(伍連德1879–1960): a Malayan-born Chinese doctor and the first medical student of Chinese descent to study at University of Cambridge. He was best known for his significant contribution to the containing of the large pneumonic plague pandemic of Manchuria and Mongolia that claimed 60,000 victims in the early twentieth century. Dr Wu was the first president of the China Medical Association (1916–1920) and directed the National Quarantine Service (1931–1937).
• Lin Yu-tang
(林語堂1895–1976): one of the most influential writers of his generation, known for a wide variety of works in Chinese and English. He was also remembered for his bestselling translations of classic Chinese texts into English.
• Wen Yuan-ning
(溫源寧1900–1984) : a well-known professor of English language and literature at Peking University in the 1920s, educated at the University of Cambridge with B.A. Hons. and LLB. He was editor of the T'ien Hsia Monthly and also the author of the book Imperfect Understanding (1935), a collection of vignettes of prominent Western-educated Chinese intellectuals of pre-war Republican China.