Idiomatic Dialogues in the Peking Colloquial for the Use of Students is a Chinese textbook written by English Frederic Henry Balfour. The main content of this book was written in Beijing Mandarin. This book recorded the features of Beijing Mandarin comprehensively and honestly, including the themes of daily life, religion, custom, culture and so on. The textbook were divided into two parts, including not only oral language in certain situation but also narrative and discussion about certain topics. There was translation of both the words and the sentences in the text. Therefore, Idiomatic Dialogues in the Peking Colloquial for the Use of Students is of great value in the study of Beijing Mandarin in late Qing dynasty. By analyzing the vocabulary and grammar of the book, the general features of Beijing Mandarin in late Qing dynasty could be found. Further more, the evolution of Beijing dialect from the late Qing dynasty could be explored by comparing Beijing Mandarin in late Qing dynasty with modern Beijing dialect. There are four parts in this paper:

      The first chapter introduces the content, significance and the method of this research. The second chapter summarizes the current status and the insufficiency in the research of Idiomatic Dialogues in the Peking Colloquial for the Use of Students. The breakthrough of this paper is also introduced in this chapter. The third chapter classifies the words in Idiomatic Dialogues in the Peking Colloquial for the Use of Students and compares them with modern Beijing dialect vocabulary, in order to explore the evolution of Beijing dialect from the late Qing dynasty. The fourth chapter takes agent preposition and coordinating conjunctions in this book as examples, exploring the evolution of grammar of Beijing dialect from the late Qing dynasty.