China As She Is: A Comprehensive Album (First Edition, Second Impression)

WU, L.T. (ed.) et al. China As She Is: A Comprehensive Album. Shanghai: The Liang You Printing & Publishing Co., Ltd., 1934.

Large Quarto (33 x 23 cm). Original quarter cloth over faux-metallic textured boards, gilt titling to spine and upper board, upper edge gilt. Pictorial endpapers. 474 pp., illustrated throughout with 20 tipped-in colour plates with tissue guards, 23 colour chapter heading plates, numerous black-and-white photographic plates, and 10 folding statistical charts. Text in English and Chinese. First edition, second impression.

Published in Shanghai in 1934, China As She Is is one of the most remarkable documentary publications of the twentieth century, and one of utmost melancholy. The Liang You Printing & Publishing Company — among the most ambitious and progressive publishing houses in Republican China — dispatched a team of photographers under the direction of Yuan-Heng Chang to traverse the length and breadth of the country, capturing its landscape, architecture, cities, people, and ancient monuments in a systematic survey of extraordinary scope.

The result was this magnificent album: twenty provinces covered in sequence, each introduced by a colour plate and a comprehensive text in both English and Chinese, followed by photographs of temples, gardens, pagodas, rivers, mountain ranges, and urban streetscapes that together constitute an irreplaceable record of a civilisation at the height of its Republican confidence. The ten folding statistical charts at the rear document the country's population, agriculture, industry, transport, and military resources with the same comprehensive ambition.

It was published two and a half years before the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in July 1937 — showing a view of China before the systematic destruction of so many of the monuments and landscapes recorded here. That timing gives the book a documentary importance that no subsequent edition or reprint could possess: it is, quite literally, a record of a world that no longer exists in the form it depicts.

Very good. Some rubbing to spine ends, corners, and along the lower edges. Contents show mild toning at edges consistent with the paper stock and age of the volume. All twenty tissue guards present, with some age toning. All ten folding maps and charts present, unrepaired, with similar toning throughout.

Catalogue Number: HH000407