[CHINA.]
Notes of a Journey from Canton to Wu-chow-fu. S.l., [c. 1862].
8vo, pp. 6, [2, blank]; light horizontal crease where once folded, but a very good, clean copy, printed in English and Chinese on light blue paper, stitched in the original pink wrappers with printed title to front cover; typescript sheet loosely inserted.
Extremely rare account of an early journey by a Westerner into the interior regions of China, navigating the Xi river upstream from Guangzhou to Wuzhou.
Following the Second Opium War (1854–60) Westerners were granted access to parts of China which have ‘for the first time been thrown open to foreign travel’. The author complains that previous descriptions of the interior of Guangdong province ‘are meagre in the extreme’, as they were ‘hasty sketches … by persons who travelled in disguise and at the risk of their lives’. Due to the new freedoms of travel, which followed the 1860 peace treaty, the author is able to provide a leisurely description of transport and scenery: ‘the time most favourable for arriving at the Gap is towards evening when the shadows of the mountain gateway fall athwart the stream’. Other notable features of the journey include the passing of a convoy of refugees fleeing ‘an incursion of robbers’ four thousand strong, and the effects of the recent wars in Wuzhou, where ‘opium … seems abundantly consumed’.
The present copy appears to be an exceedingly rare offprint from the China Mail, the chief Anglophone newspaper of Hong Kong, wherein it appeared in the issue of 20 November 1862.
OCLC records a single copy, at Princeton. We have been able to locate one further copy, in the J. O. P. Bland archive at the Fisher Library in Toronto. Not in Library Hub.