Peking The Beautiful

Shanghai: The Commercial Press, Limited, 1927. First edition. Hardcover. Very good+ condition. Elephant Folio. 154 (1)pp. Original Royal Blue brocade, with lettering, imagery and decorative frame woven into covers; housed in custom-made black cloth slipcase. Frontispiece. Historiated initials at acknowledgments, introduction and preface, historiated initials and endpiece drawings on text pages. Comprising Seventy Photographic Studies of the Celebrated Monuments of China's Northern Capital and Its Environs Complete with Descriptive and Historical Notes. Introduction (truncated) by Dr. Hu Shih. Printed in b/w collotype.

Working as missionaries for eight years the White brothers Herbert Clarence and John Henry took more than four thousand photographs of the city, establishing schools to train young Chinese men and women in employable skills. "Students were taught to print and hand-color their photographs in oil... after 1930 the brothers relocated themselves and their publishing concern to ST. Helena, California... The sepia photos in this volume, each highlighted by a decorative border and captioned simply in Chinese only, are described extensively on facing pages in English... The "northern capital" of the subtitle is Bejing, referencing the shift of 1927, when the Republicans moved the seat of government to Nanjing (southern capital"). It was returned to Bejing in 1937, ending the so-called "Nanjing Decade." This decade roughly corresponds to the period when the White brothers lived in Bejing and photographed a truly beautiful–and now irreparably altered–incarnation of the city that is known today almost solely through old photographs such as theirs." Parr & Lundgren, The Chinese Photobook, pages 44-47.

An exceptional copy of this intricate photographic homage to the Forbidden City. Slipcase near perfect. Spine lightly cocked and light scuffing with some very light foxing on endpapers and foredge. (Inventory #: 51953)