Page 414 - Bonhams Fine Chinese Art Nov 2013 London

406 406
Photography: ‘The Pageant of Peking’
407 Published in 1920 (third edition)
408 | Bonhams 66 sepia photographs taken by Donald Mennie
of scenes from Beijing landmarks including the
Forbidden City, the view from Coal Hill, the Temple
of Heaven, the Summer Palace and the Great Wall
as well as Beijing street scenes, the introduction
and text by Putnam Weale.
The album 30.9cm x 39cm (12in x 15 3/8in)
£1,500 - 2,000
HK$19,000 - 25,000
CNY15,000 - 20,000

《北京美觀:The Pageant of Peking》相冊，含66幅
珍貴老照片
1920年第三版

407
Photography: ‘Peking the Beautiful’
Published in 1927
The hardbound volume covered in embroidered
silk and consisting of seventy sepia and hand-
tinted images of famous landmarks in Beijing,
including views of the Yuanming Yuan, the Yihe
Yuan,the Temple of Heaven and the Forbidden
City, the album compiled by Herbert C.White and
introduced by the celebrated scholar Hu Shih,
presentation box.
The album 40cm x 33cm (15¾in x 13in) (2).
£1,000 - 1,500
HK$12,000 - 19,000
CNY9,800 - 15,000

《燕京勝績：Peking the Beautiful》相冊，含北京
老照片
1927年版
The writer of the introduction, Hu Shi (1891-1962),
was a leading public intellectual during the May
Fourth Movement (1919) and the subsequent New
Culture Movement. Hu advocated pragmatism,
liberalism and the vernacular to replace Classical
Chinese so as to increase literacy, and was
president of Beijing University before he was
nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1939.
Hu had a broad range of interests including
literature, history, textual criticism, and pedagogy,
but he is perhaps most famous as a ‘Redologist’ or
scholar of China’s most famous novel Dream of the
Red Mansions.
Between 1938 and 1942, Hu was also the
Republic of China’s Ambassador to the United
States. After he was recalled from the United
States, Hu became Chancellor of Academia Sinica
in Taipei until his death.