before the Last Emperor: Johnston’s travels in China
JOHNSTON, Reginald Fleming.
From Peking to Mandalay. A journey from north China to Burma through Tibetan Ssuch’uan and Yunnan ...
London, John Murray, 1908.
8vo, pp. xii, 460, [8 (advertisements)]; with half-title, 33 photographic plates, and 1 folding map; some light foxing throughout, small closed tear to map repaired to verso; good in original green cloth, spine and upper cover lettered in gilt, top edge gilt; light wear to extremities, hinges split but holding; ‘W.H. Smith & Son Library’ bookplate covered by another label to front pastedown.
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From Peking to Mandalay. A journey from north China to Burma through Tibetan Ssuch’uan and Yunnan ...
First edition recounting the 1906 travels through China and neighbouring parts of southeast Asia by the Scottish colonial administrator and sinologist Reginald Fleming Johnston.
‘My chief object’, writes Johnston, ‘was to gratify a long-felt desire to visit those portions of the Chinese Empire which are least known to Europeans, and to acquire some knowledge of the various tribes subject to China that inhabit the wild regions of Chinese Tibet and north-western Yunnan’. In addition to Johnston’s account of his occasionally perilous journey over inhospitable terrain, the work also contains lengthy and fascinating ruminations on Burmese and Chinese civilization and their relationship with the encroaching West, right at the dawn of the twentieth century. In later years Johnston served as tutor to the Chinese Emperor Puyi and as a British diplomat in China. A militant anti-Christian, his studies did much to further European understanding of Chinese Buddhism. He is portrayed, rather affectionately, by Peter O’Toole in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Academy-award-winning The Last Emperor (1987), which is partially based on his own memoirs of court-life in Peking.
Yakushi (1994) J120.
