Heading: (China - 1881 classic American account)
Author: Martin, W.A.P.
Title: The Chinese: Their Education, Philosophy and Letters
Place Published: New York
Publisher:Harper
Date Published: 1881
Description:

319pp.+ 8pp. publishers catalogue. Original blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt. First Edition.

Classic study of Chinese cultural life in the late 19th century, by one of the first American “Old China Hands”, a Presbyterian missionary who went to China in 1850 at age 23, and remained for over fifty years, until his death in 1916. Martin was an indispensable advisor to the first American diplomatic envoys to Peking and, later, to Chinese officials in their legal disputes with the western powers. As president of a government university, he was given the imperial honor of “Mandarin of the third class” after translating a dozen English-language tomes into Chinese. This book was the best-known of his original writings, still eagerly read, decades after publication, by serious American readers of the Spanish-American War era who disdained the racist diatribes of the day. One of the five Appendices records Martin’s visit to a surviving community of Chinese Jews who believed their ancestors had first arrived in the country more than a thousand years before.

Slight wear to spine, foxing on fore-edges; else near fine.