A Peep at the Celestial Empire
WINES, Enoch Cobb.
A Peep at China, in Mr. Dunn’s Chinese Collection; with miscellaneous Notices relating to the Institutions and Customs of the Chinese, and our commercial Intercourse with them … Philadelphia, for Nathan Dunn, 1839.
8vo, pp. viii, [9]-103, [1 (blank)]; some light dampstaining at beginning, a little spotting, some toning to margins; a very good copy in twentieth-century red cloth, spine lettered in gilt, original blue wrappers bound in; spine sunned; ‘Wm Hamilton’ in ink to front wrapper, armorial bookplate of Robert Marquis Strong Jr, ink stamp of ‘The Franklin Institute’ to contents page, ‘3379’ in ink at head of front wrapper and title.
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A Peep at China, in Mr. Dunn’s Chinese Collection; with miscellaneous Notices relating to the Institutions and Customs of the Chinese, and our commercial Intercourse with them …
Scarce first edition of a guide to the remarkable collection of Chinese artefacts accumulated by the American businessman Nathan Dunn (1782–1844).
Dunn went to Canton in 1818 and established a successful business trading goods between America, Britain, and China. He returned to Philadelphia in 1832, bringing with him a large collection of Chinese artistic and cultural objects. Six years later he opened the ‘Chinese Museum’, the first systematic collection of Chinese material exhibited publicly in the United States. The exhibition twice toured London, in 1842 and again in 1851 (to coincide with the Great Exhibition), but was then sold off to various collectors, including P. T. Barnum.
This guide to Dunn’s collection was compiled by Dr E. C. Wines (1806–1879), teacher, pastor, and prison reformer. Here he writes in his introduction: ‘It is no longer necessary to measure half the circuit of the globe, and subject one’s self to the hazards and privations of a six months’ voyage on distant and dangerous seas, to enjoy a peep at the Celestial Empire. This is a gratification which may now be enjoyed by the citizens of Philadelphia, for the trouble of walking to the corner of Ninth and Sansom streets, and by the citizens of other parts of the United States, at no greater peril of life and limb than is connected with locomotion by means of our own steamboats and railroads’ (p. 13).
Library Hub records only two copies in the UK (BL, Bodley).
Cordier, Sinica, col. 75; Sabin 104773.