china travel

Hardcover. NY, Jonathan Cape /Harrison Smith, 1st, 1929, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 295 pages. Decorated cloth with black cloth spine, bright gilt lettering on spine. A French doctor's account of Chinese life & civilization, based on his twenty years of life, work & travel there; he was Director of the Imperial School of Medicine at Chengtufu. Typically patronizing and moralistic; the author credits China with having been great in the past, but now in the grip of a profound lassitude, only to be helped by Europeans. Translated from the French by Elsie Martin Jones. Previous owner's name, date on front fly leaf otherwise a clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. New York, Viking Studio, 1st US, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 483 pages. Hardcover. Illustrated with full color photographs. Light wear. Clean, unmarked pages.

Softcover. Washington DC, National Geographic Society, 1st, 1930, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Original magazines July - December 1930, in a green pebbled hardcover binding. Magazines are dated and paged, with photographs and maps, but do not have covers, advertisements, etc. Includes: Mexico's west coast; 3 articles on the conquest of Antarctica; Unmapped areas of China, Unexplored areas of the Philippines; Chateau country of France; Yugoslavia; Virgil's Aeneid and Roman Geography; Strange tribes in the Shan States of Burma; The Yukon trail of 1898; Viking life in the Faeroes; and much more. Clean, bright volume.

Softcover. Washington DC, National Geographic Society, 1st, 1923, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Original magazines January - July 1923, in a maroon pebbled hardcover binding. Magazines are dated and paged, with photographs and maps, but do not have covers, advertisements, etc. Several pages of color plates. Also includes a fold-out panorama of The Great Wall of China. 680 pages. Clean, bright volume.

Softcover. Washington DC, National Geographic Society, 1st, 1919, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, illustrated with b&w photos, maps, advertisements. Original yellow and black wrappers, spine with light wear, good to very good. Articles include: The Shattered Capitals of Central America, The Isle of Capri, Shantung-China's Holy Land, America's South Sea Sailors.

Hardcover. Michigan, Scholarly Publishing Office University of Michigan, Reprint, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 507 pages. Hardcover. Reprint of 1857 J.B. Lippincott & Co. publication produced from digital images created through the University of Michigan University's Library's preservation reformatting program. B/w illustrations throughout. Pages clean, spine straight, binding tight. ISBN label on back cover. Light foxing to edges. Blue cloth cover boards, gilt title on spine. "Visits to the Malay and Loo-Choo Islands, the Coasts of China, Formosa, Japan, Kamtschatka, Siberia, and the Mouth of the Amoor River."

Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 354 pages. From the turn of the fifth century to the beginning of the eighteenth, Christian writers were fascinated and troubled by the "Problem of Paganism," which this book identifies and examines for the first time. How could the wisdom and virtue of the great thinkers of antiquity be reconciled with the fact that they were pagans and, many thought, damned? Related questions were raised by encounters with contemporary pagans in northern Europe, Mongolia, and, later, America and China. Pagans and Philosophers explores how writers-philosophers and theologians, but also poets such as Dante, Chaucer, and Langland, and travelers such as Las Casas and Ricci-tackled the Problem of Paganism. Augustine and Boethius set its terms, while Peter Abelard and John of Salisbury were important early advocates of pagan wisdom and virtue. University theologians such as Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, and Bradwardine, and later thinkers such as Ficino, Valla, More, Bayle, and Leibniz, explored the difficulty in depth. Meanwhile, Albert the Great inspired Boethius of Dacia and others to create a relativist conception of scientific knowledge that allowed Christian teachers to remain faithful Aristotelians. At the same time, early anthropologists such as John of Piano Carpini, John Mandeville, and Montaigne developed other sorts of relativism in response to the issue. Clean copy.

Softcover. Tokyo, Bijutsu Shuppan-Sha, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 111 pages. Japanese photographer on the road from Xi'an to Kashi and back again. Color throughout.

Hardcover. London, Picador, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. This signed first edition of author and journalist Sid Smith's novel 'Something Like A House' was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Whitbread First Novel Award, following a British soldier who deserts to China during the Korean War and stays there some 35 years, bringing up a little girl who later becomes a victim of experimental biological warfare. Despite being set in China, Smith had never traveled there before writing the novel, the background gleaned from extensive research at the British Library amongst other places. An exciting novel set in a China almost unknown to the outside world, a chilling account of an army deserter living through a Cultural Revolution. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Harborside ME, Social Science Institute, 1st, 1958, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 247 pages. SIGNED BY THE NEARINGS on the front fly leaf. The authors have also written about homesteading and living off the land - both were vegetarians. Scott Nearing was an American radical economist, educator, writer, political activist, pacifist, and advocate of simple living. This volume describes their experiences on trips to the Soviet Union and People's China in 1957-58. Light tanning to endpapers, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Boston, Little, Brown & Company, 1st, 1922, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, decorated binding; designed by Decorated Designers (DD). No dj. Cover lettering and design intact, with some loss of gold, but lettering has disappeared from the spine. About 50 pages of black and white photos. A vivid and intimate record of Chinese life, revealing its glamour and fascination, its callousness and disregard of human values. Minor foxing to front endpapers. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, John Murray, 2nd Ed., 1889, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth stamped in gilt, a little rubbed and bumped at edges. 456 pages with color frontispiece map, 139 illustrations of which 27 are full-page and 14 maps of which some are folding. School ex-library copy with spine label, minimal stamping to front endpapers and title page. Previous owner's inscription on half-title page. Interior clean with no marking, all fold-out maps in great condition. NOTE: The Marchesa a schooner yacht sailed from England in 1881 to the seas of China and Japan the East Indies and New Guinea before returning to England in 1884. First published in 1886 as a two volume set.

Hardcover. NY, Aperture, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 160 pages. An evocative and candid collection of some of the first photographs made in that country. Along with descriptive captions, these images describe the daily life and surroundings of an era now passed. The people are as seen through Western eyes, and the places are as traversed by foreigners. These early photographers were explorers and adventurers. They lugged huge cameras with heavy glass plates over rugged, unfamiliar terrain. Interspersed throughout the book are passages from significant texts and travelers' diaries, observations and opinions that echo and illuminate the images. For many Chinese, these photographers were the first white faces ever seen, and they carried with them previously undreamed-of contraptions. For all this, there is an unguarded air to many of the portraits, and the street scenes have the candid look of today's street photographer.

Hardcover. NY, Viking, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 294 pages, b&w photos. Sam Kleiner's The Flying Tigers uncovers the hidden story of the group of young American men and women who crossed the Pacific before Pearl Harbor to risk their lives defending China. Led by legendary army pilot Claire Chennault, these men left behind an America still at peace in the summer of 1941 using false identities to travel across the Pacific to a run-down airbase in the jungles of Burma. In the wake of the disaster at Pearl Harbor this motley crew was the first group of Americans to take on the Japanese in combat, shooting down hundreds of Japanese aircraft in the skies over Burma, Thailand, and China. At a time when the Allies were being defeated across the globe, the Flying Tigers' exploits gave hope to Americans and Chinese alike. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale /Houston Museum of Fine Arts, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 168 pages. Chen Changfen (b. 1941) began to photograph the Great Wall twenty years before the Chinese government officially adopted it as the national symbol in 1984. This fascinating book presents a small fraction of his decades-long study of the monumental form and conveys the fertile range of themes and ideas that Chen has investigated, each informed by traditional Chinese art, history, and philosophy. Combining a unique blend of traditional and contemporary technical processes, Chen's richly evocative photographs at once celebrate the remarkable series of building campaigns that produced the Wall and memorialize the thousands of conscripted laborers whose lives were sacrificed to its construction.One of the most striking features of Chen's photographs is their unexpected variety of perspectives and moods, capturing the vicissitudes of weather, time, and human history that have acted upon it. By excluding the people, highways, factories, and modern buildings that encroach on and daily destroy sections of the Wall, however, Chen eliminates major aspects of the Wall's present reality from his pictures. In a thoughtful essay and interview with the artist, Anne Wilkes Tucker probes the meanings of such omissions and guides the reader through Chen's extraordinary images. The Great Wall of China is essential reading for photographers, historians, and travelers.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 333 pages. With his marvelous eye for detail and his contagious enthusiasm, Ted Conover explores six key byways worldwide. In Peru, he traces the journey of a load of rare mahogany over the Andes to its origin, an untracked part of the Amazon basin soon to be traversed by a new east-west route across South America. In East Africa, he visits truckers whose travels have been linked to the worldwide spread of AIDS. In the West Bank, he monitors highway checkpoints with Israeli soldiers and then passes through them with Palestinians, witnessing the injustices and danger borne by both sides. He shuffles down a frozen riverbed with teenagers escaping their Himalayan valley to see how a new road will affect the now-isolated Indian region of Ladakh. From the passenger seat of a new Hyundai piling up the miles, he describes the exuberant upsurge in car culture as highways proliferate across China. And from inside an ambulance, he offers an apocalyptic but precise vision of Lagos, Nigeria, where congestion and chaos on freeways signal the rise of the global megacity. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, John Day, 1st US, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly edgeworn, price-clipped dust jacket. Another in the author's popular series of early-mid-20th-century travel guides from an Asian perspective, this one representing his first trip across the Atlantic where he brings New York City to life with 120+ of his own pen-and-ink drawings & 17 full-color plates, created using traditional Chinese technique & media, painting on both absorbent paper & sometimes silk. His observations on the life and scenery of America are as oblique and charming as ever, while his experiences round Times Square, along Fifth Avenue, in Chinatown, Greenwich Village, the Bowery, and Harlem are depicted with the postwar charm that would soon be lost forever. In 281 pages with map endpapers, this is the First American Edition (no date in book, but research places it at 1950).

Hardcover. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 3rd pr., 1950, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, maroon cloth with gilt lettering on spine. 439 pages, b&w illustrations with fold-out map of Polo's travels in rear. First published in 1931, this is the 1950 third printing. None of the manuscripts which have come down to us represents the original form of Marco Polo's narrative, but it is clear that certain texts are closer to the lost original than others. Entrusted with the task of preparing a new Italian edition of Marco Polo, Benedetto discovered many unknown manuscripts. He carefully edited the most famous of the manuscripts (the Geographic text) and collated it with the other best known ones. * An invaluable index has been added to Aldo Ricci's of Benedetto's text, which includes all the identifications made in the Geographic text and also later editions by Marsden (1818), Pauthier (1865) and Yule (1871). * The difficulty of following Polo on his many journeys has also been simplified by the process of distinguishing between those places on his main route to China and his return journey by sea to Persia and those places which he visited during his stay in China and those he never visited at all. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, illustrated boards. Tells of the true adventures of Ibn Battuta, a fourteenth-century traveler who, like Marco Polo, set forth on a seventy-five thousand mile journey of discovery through many lands, including Tanzania, China, Russia, and Morocco. Rumford's simply written adaptation is often surprisingly eloquent. For example, Ibn Battuta comments on his voyage: "Traveling-it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller." "Traveling-it had captured my heart, and now my heart was calling me home." On each page, a portion of the text appears within its own bright white narrow road crossing elegantly bordered illustrations that shine with generous amounts of gold, red, and deep blue. This text also flows into and out of larger frames. The artist adorns many of these illustrations with Arabic and Chinese calligraphy, providing translations for the longer phrases at the end of the book. A few maps are included and they are executed with the same attention to presentation. A glossary of names, places, and important words provides essential information in an accessible format.