East meets West
Mar 28th, 2008 by houghtonmodern
This is the first of four parts of a juvenile geography, titled Di li shü lin væn-koh kwu-kying z-tì yiu-tin kong-tsing, and published in China in 1852. Its author, William Alexander Parsons Martin (1827-1916), was an American Presbyterian minister who lived and worked in China and Japan for almost forty years. The book is block-printed in a Chinese colloquial dialect spoken in Ningbo, in the northeastern Zhejiang province. The Chinese has been transliterated into Roman characters, although the titled page is in both Chinese and Roman characters. This copy is inscribed by Martin to the Rev. E. W. Syle, a pioneer in education for the blind in China and Japan. The book also contains several folding woodcut maps, including this one (click on the map to see a larger image):
*AC85.Sy521.852d. Purchased with the Sydney J. Watts Fund. Images may not be reproduced without permission.