Mennie, Donald. The pageant of Peking. Comprising sixty-six vandyck photogravures of Peking and environs from photographs. With an introduction by Putnam Weale. Descriptive notes by S. Couling. (Third edition). Shanghai, A. S. Watson & Co., printed and bound by Kelly & Walsh, Ltd. (February) 1922. Folio (39 x 30 cm.). [2] Bl., 40, [2] S. und LXVI mont. Tafeln in Heliogravure. Graublauer Orig.-Leinenband mit goldgepr. Deckeltitel und Deckelvignette.
Parr/Lundgren 38 f. – Eine der schönsten chinesischen Fotopublikationen. Erschien zuerst 1920 in 1000 num. Exemplaren. – „The Pageant of Peking is one of the most elegant books of its time, covered in dark-blue patterned silk over stiff boards with cover text highly contrasted in imperial Yellow. So popular was the book that the second edition was published only two months after the first appeared. Like many photographers of the era, Donald Mennie began his career in chemistry, a science firmly associated with photography and its printed results. He was born in Scotland in 1875 or 1876 and worked as a chemist’s apprentice there in his youth. By the late 1890s he was living in China, where, youth. By the late 1890s he was living in China, where, chemist’s shops that also traded in photographic supplies: MacTavish & Lehman & Co. (later MacTavish & Co.) and A. S. Watson (publisher of this book). He is known to have been interned by the Japanese following their occupation of Shanghai, and he apparently died in the Longhua internment camp in 1944. Putnam Weale, credited for the extensive introduction to this work, is a nom de plume of Bertram Lenox Simpson, who also wrote as “B. L. Putnam Weale.“ Weale first gained access to China through his father’s longtime position in the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, and became a prolific, if notoriously untrustworthy, commentatoron China. He was a controversial figure, not only because of doubts about the accuracy of his accounts of the siege of the foreign legations during the Boxer Rebellion (1900-1901), but also because of his involvement in internal Chinese politics. (It was suspected that while providing reports to the Republican government, he simultaneously worked for the warlords who opposed the government). Each section of Weale’s text begins with a decorative red capital on a background of black-and-white vines. The photogravure process, used in the printing of the book, gives the photographic reproductions their rich tonality, exploited here to highlight the artistic range of Mennie’s original photographs. The sixty-six tipped-in sepia-toned photographs, on sixty leaves, are described briefly on facing pages; a complete list is printed at the beginning of the book. The images are crisp and clear and identify aspects Beijing of (Peking) that have since been bulldozed in sweeping modernizations of the city, particularly after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949“ (M. Parr). – Einband und Vorsätze unter Verwendung des Orig.-Seidenbezugs des Vordeckels (dieser etwas aufgehellt) fachgerecht erneuert, sehr gutes Exemplar.
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