Eastern Travels
The 21st century has been referred to as “the Chinese century”, a reflection of Beijing’s increasing political, economic, and cultural influence.
China’s rising prominence is making waves in the antiquarian book world, as more people become interested in collecting works which can speak to China’s fascinating and complex history. Where once the rare book trade focused on a select group of famous antiquarian titles, dealers are now offering collectors access to an extraordinary range of materials.
The market has taken off in the past two decades both in China and worldwide with some astonishing results. In 2020, two surviving manuscript volumes of the famous 15th-century Yongle Encyclopaedia achieved 1,000 times their estimate at auction in France. Later the same year, the diaries of the renowned intellectual Hu Shih, written while he was studying abroad in America in the 1920s, fetched $20.9 million at auction in Beijing, the most expensive hammer price for a set of journals ever recorded.
A Golden Age of Travel
The possibilities for collectors divide into two overlapping fields: books published about China and books published in Chinese.
While traditional entry points into collecting Chinese rare books range from interest in long-established core works such as the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (1687), the book which first introduced Europeans to Confucianism, and early encounter narratives and embassy accounts, dealers sourcing and creating a market for previously uncatalogued niche books have opened up fascinating opportunities for collectors of more unusual and nuanced subject-matter.
Of the many genres now being explored by collectors, China’s popularity today as a tourist destination is translating into increased interest in tourist guides from the Golden Age of travel.
The opening up of the treaty ports, combined with improved long-distance transportation, eventually put cities such as Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Hong Kong within reach of the wealthy from the West. These cities were mysterious and enticing, even to the most experienced global wanderer.
Serving the Independent and Intellectual Adventurer
To cater to these adventurers, between 1870 and 1930 there appeared a plethora of guidebooks and other remarkable tourist literature. For foreign travellers, these were both indispensable sources of information, to be kept on one’s person at all times, and treasured souvenirs of their journeys. For today’s collectors interested in the history of travel and East Asia, they are highly prized for their detailed maps and plans, as well as photographs and distinctive period adverts.
The origins of these tourist guidebooks can be found in the narratives written by early travellers to China which enthralled curious European audiences and exoticized China in the Western imagination. The most famous example is Gonzales de Mendoza’s La Historia de las Cosas más Notables, Ritos y Costumbres del Gran Reyno de China, published in 1585 and translated into English in 1588, which galvanized others to travel eastwards for centuries to come. It also containing the first Chinese characters ever printed in a European book.
Later works such as George Staunton’s account of the first official British embassy to China, first published at the close of the 18th century, were frequently embellished with views, plans, and maps to create compelling reading experiences for Western audiences.
Early guidebooks from the second half of the 19th century – now some of the rarest on the market – were straightforward affairs, catering to an audience imagined to be sophisticated and intellectually astute.
For example, the second edition of Frank Warrington Eastlake’s A Guide to Hongkong with a Short Account of Canton & Macao, published around 1890, offers discussion of flora and fauna, geology, dialects, and slang. Discussing the wildlife of the colony, Eastlake thought it appropriate to offer information on migration patterns and an exhaustive list of observable butterfly species. Absent are the maps and illustrations which became a feature of travel guides – for Eastlake, the discerning visitor did not need such niceties because travel was a form of intellectual nourishment: “thus travel becomes a means of knowledge and an incontestably superior method of instruction and improvement” (p. i). Elite anxieties about ending up in a bad part of town abound, with visitors advised that “there are not many Chinese restaurants of any great respectability in Victoria, the ‘Hung Fa Low’ being the only one patronised by visitors of the better class” (p. 23).
Unlike the cheap pamphlets found in the typical lobby today, Golden Age hotels provided visitors with guidebooks to help them make the most of their time in bustling destinations such as Beijing and Shanghai. One of the earliest known guidebooks to Shanghai is that provided by guests at the city’s famous Hotel Metropole which demonstrates the emergence of the familiar Golden Age guidebook form: period adverts for shops and services of interest to visitors, a large folding map of the location, and a warm, courteous tone. The guide presents the Metropole as a safe haven for Europeans who might venture out into the unknown in the day but yearn for an escape “from the bustle and din of the City, and more particularly from the weirdly unpleasant noises and antique odours” (p. 17). It advertises the services of a resident barber, a bar stocked with champagne, beer, and cocktails, 75 bedrooms, and livery stables.
Collectors prize travel guides for the light they shed on the concerns of visitors, and this guide suggests that, for early 20th-century visitors to Shanghai, obtaining clean water was a major preoccupation. Besides advertisements for such businesses as the Shanghai Horse Bazaar, Robinson Pianos, and the Italian goods importer F. Venturi, it devotes significant space to promoting assorted brands of bottled water – “Tansan natural tonic table water – you all want it!” – to help visitors survive the notoriously hot Shanghai summer.
Above all other forms of transport, railways opened up the world to Golden Age travelers, and attractive pamphlets and small booklets were on hand at stations and major hotels. This particular copy of Imperial Railways of North China: Peking-Mukden Line, a guide to the first Chinese railway enterprise, was used by a foreign tourist adventuring across China at the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911. Its array of information on fares, baggage allowances, on board facilities, timetables, and connections allows us to piece together the complex infrastructure which facilitated elite travel. By now, illustrations and a map are almost an obligatory presence, with the large number of in-text visuals showcasing tourist hotspots such as the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, and the summer resort at Shanhaiguan, all accessible along the railway route. Guides made great souvenirs for those back home and examples with inscriptions are especially desirable. This copy is pleasingly inscribed on the inside front cover, “10 June 1912. Here I am at Leichuang railway station – a very little place. Nothing doing but I have a roof over my head. Please forward to E. Love WSB”.
The now-fare first edition of Emil Sigmund Fischer’s Guide to Peking and its Environs (1909) is an outstanding example of the visual appeal of Golden Age tourist guides. In addition to its 31 plates, it contains no less than three detailed maps and plans of Beijing and its surroundings. Fischer took the idea of the fold-out map to a new level. The city is represented to a granular level, with dozens of places of interest – not just the most popular sights – identified in both English and Chinese. The fold-out plan of the city’s famous Legation Quarter is equally impressive, and also demonstrates the complex network of businesses that sprung up in major Chinese cities in the late 19th century to provide foreign visitors with every conceivable comfort. Like other examples in the genre, Guide to Peking and its Environs is full of the kind of pointed observation that still make for charming reading today: “it is hoped that when visiting tombs and places of interest in and about Peking, or in China generally, visitors will refrain from writing or in any way defacing the buildings and other places of interest” (p. 8).
Written by Dr Matthew Wills, Asia Specialist
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