SERICA

From time to time people come to the Bodleian with something they have found in their attic. They say they want to know what it is, but what they really want to know is what it’s worth. I was usually able to identify what they brought in, but was not allowed to value it, even if I could.

The manuscript I’m about to describe was brought to me by a Mr Turner in the summer of 1979, just three years after I joined the Library. Although photocopiers had been invented at that time, I didn’t have one, and scanners weren’t even dreamed of, so I transcribed it by hand. At the same time I identified it and wrote a couple of paragraphs on it for the owner. When he returned to collect it I offered to buy it from him once he had got a valuation from commercial dealers, but he never came back and I never saw the document again.

But I kept my transcription together with a carbon copy of my identification, and came across it for the first time in nearly forty years when clearing out my room as instructed, prior to my dismissal (see my previous blog entry).

The manuscript is a piece of ephemera of the sort I have recently become rather interested in. And so have the Chinese, who have started publishing collections of it which they sometimes call guzhidui 故紙堆, or “piles of old papers”. Ephemera is notoriously difficult to catalogue and make accessible to readers, but is of immense value in putting flesh on the bare bones of historical fact. Mr Turner’s manuscript illustrates this perfectly.

It is a notice from the acting magistrates of Nanhai 南海 and Panyu 番禺, two towns near Canton. It is quite large, 55cm high. and 66cm. wide, and is one of several copies that would have been made to be posted on the city walls near the main gates. It is dated the 17th day of the 5th month of the 20th year of Guangxu, which in the western calendar is 20 June 1894. It bears two seals applied side by side over the characters 「二十」 in the date. One is the official seal of Nanhai, and the other, which is illegible, is probably that of Panyu. The day of the month 「十七」 is written in red and would have been filled in after the rest of the document had been completed, just prior to its issue; and also written in red are the check marks and signature of the clerk who prepared it.

Here is my transcription of the manuscript, presented horizontally but preserving the text alignment and layout of the original (to see the vertical arrangement in PDF click here):

欽加同知銜署南海縣事候補縣
　　　　　　正堂加十級紀錄十次楊
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　為
欽加運同銜署番禺縣事海陽縣
　　　　　　正堂加十級紀錄十次杜

　　　曉諭事照得本年時疫流行歷更數月之久
　天降灾梫入宜戒惧乃聞外閒謠言妄謂病由洋
　　　教士放毒所致在明白事理者原不為其所
　　　愚觀香港洋人亦復一骵沾疫天行時癘感
　　　受非獨華民如果毒出外洋豈非自傷其類
　　　明係不法匪徒造言煽感希圖濨事誠恐安
　　　分良民誤信警疑除訪拏造謠之人從嚴惩
　　　究外合行出示曉諭為此示諭城厢內外人
　　　䓁知𢘻現在時疫已漸止息爾䓁正可安居
　　　作業靜迓
　天和勿得誤聽謠言致濨紛擾是為至要其各凜
　　　遵毋違特示

　　　光緒二十年五月十七日示

The 1911 edition of Nan hai xian zhi 南海縣志 records that in 1894 the magistrate was Yang Yinting 楊蔭廷 (9:1b) and that in this year there was a serious epidemic, the mention consisting of two characters only:「大疫」(2:69b). And the 1931 edition of Pan yu xian xu zhi 番禺縣續志 records that in 1894 the magistrate was Du Youbai 杜友白 (13:14a); the epidemic is not noted in the main chronological section (42:7b), but receives passing mention elsewhere (2:40a, 41a). (The editions of these two gazetteers are the first to have been published after the epidemic, and the links I have supplied lead to our catalogue entries of the reproductions I have used; both are in the recently published and very fine series Guang zhou da dian 廣州大典.)

It is immediately apparent that Mr Turner’s piece of ephemera tells us very much more than the laconic mentions in the gazetteers.

The epidemic has been troubling the region for several months. There is a rumour that it has been caused by poison planted by foreign missionaries, but this cannot be true as it has also affected the foreign residents of Hong Kong. The rumour has been put about by trouble makers with the object of causing a disturbance. The magistrates have posted the bill to inform people that the trouble makers have been arrested and punished, and that the epidemic is now abating so that they may go about their business as usual. They should pay no attention to the fabrications of trouble makers, and should obey the magisterial commands in fear and trembling.

If this text gets picked up by web crawlers and becomes searchable, and if this is the only form in which it survives, which it probably is, I will feel that my blog entry will have served a useful purpose, if only a small one. And if we had the time and resources to treat the countless pieces of ephemera in our libraries similarly, surely that would be a job worth doing.

Earlier this year I was dismissed from my post on the grounds of age, a questionable and not entirely lawful practice which in Great Britain is carried out only at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and St Andrews, where it is known as “retirement”. The occasion was marked by nothing more than a single message from my superior telling me to clear my office of all personal effects by 30 September. Thus charmingly were my forty-one years of service to the Bodleian Library and its collections brought to a close.

But now to more edifying matters – lithography, for example.

In 1988 I attended the “International Conference on Resources for Chinese Studies” that took place at the National Central Library in Taipei between 30 November and 3 December. My contribution was entitled Two collections of nineteenth-century Protestant missionary publications in Chinese in the Bodleian Library, and this was subsequently published in Chinese culture 31:4 (December 1990), 21-38. In it, I concentrated on the value of these collections in exemplifying the introduction of western printing techniques into China, for which the Protestant missionaries were entirely responsible. What follows is an enlargement, with the addition of illustrations, of the passage I wrote on lithography (26-27).

I can’t remember how I discovered what I believe to be the earliest use of lithography for reproducing Chinese text, but when I first came to the Bodleian in 1976 the compilation of the Pre-1920 Catalogue was in full swing, and I was surrounded by colleagues who knew the Library’s collections inside out. Perhaps one of them brought it to my attention. According to its preface, it was compiled and published precisely to demonstrate the ability of lithography to reproduce oriental scripts. Lithography had been invented in 1796 by the German author and actor Alois Senefelder as a cheap method of publishing theatrical works, but this book appeared over twenty years later. So I wouldn’t be surprised if there was an earlier example of Chinese lithography, but I don’t know of one.

From the two title pages we see that it was compiled by George Hunt in 1818, and that in 1819 it was printed by C. Marcuard in Chelsea and published by R. Priestly in Holborn:

It seems to be very rare, and it is unsurprising that the Bodleian’s copy is found in the collection of Francis Douce (Douce L subt. 40); Douce had an intense interest in printing, and the Chinese section of his collection although small contains some real gems – our copy of the Red Decree, for example, which was the subject of my second blog entry in 2011.

Here is the short preface and the page on which the Chinese is reproduced:

Again as far as I know, the earliest complete Chinese work to be printed lithographically is the text of Mencius appended to the French sinologist Stanislaus Julien’s translation, which was published in Paris in 1824 (the Bodleian copy is shelfmarked 2 Θ 121,122). Its execution is particularly fine:

Moving now to the East, the technique is taken up by Walter Henry Medhurst, who you may recall (if you read my earlier blog entry on the woodblock) was a printer by training, and had been engaged by the London Missionary Society to set up a press first in Malacca, and then in Batavia in the 1820s.

His first attempt at lithography was to print his English and Japanese vocabulary, which was published in Batavia in 1830:

In his short introduction to this work, he is perhaps a little too modest:

“The printing needs a thousand excuses; but it must be remembered that the work has been executed at a Lithographic press, by a self-taught artist, and in a warm climate, where Lithography often fails … added to which, being in a colony, it was found impossible to obtain sufficient paper of a like sort, or of an uniform quality to suit the Lithography.”

However:

“Notwithstanding all this, it was thought better to print it under the compiler’s eye, rather than be sending it in MS. to Europe, to run the risk of unnumbered faults, from the illegibilty of a hand-writing, or the unskilfulness of a compositor.”

Four years later, in 1834, under the pseudonym Typographus Sinensis, he wrote a detailed account of the advantages and disadvantages of the various methods of printing Chinese in the Chinese repository (3, October 1834, 246-252). One of the advantages was that the technique “is well adapted for printing alternately in various languages, for mixing different characters, or publishing books in a new character for which no types have yet been formed” (p.250). His English and Japanese vocabulary is an example of this.

In the same year he compiled and published a “Gospel harmony”, of which there is what I believe to be a copy in the Angus Library of Regent’s Park College, although it lacks an imprint [1]. It is the first purely Chinese work to be printed lithographically, and I catalogue it as follows:

福音調和 八卷 / 尚德者纂
[Batavia], [1834]
精裝1冊(原線裝2冊) ; 24.0公分
Regent’s Park College Chinese 2.31

And in 1837 he published a complete New Testament using lithography, of which there is a copy in the Bible Society’s collection which is now in Cambridge University Library; I have not yet seen it.

The following year he used lithography for a small periodical which seems to be very rare. It is mentioned briefly in Records of the General Conference of the Protestant Missionaries of China held at Shanghai, May 7-20, 1890 (Shanghai, 1890), p.720. There are two issues in the Bodleian which I catalogue as follows:

各國消息 存戊戌年[1838]:9月, 10月
[Canton], 1838-?
毛裝2冊 ; 23公分
Ed. by W H Medhurst, J Legge, and C B Hillier
Has 「每月初一日出」 on front cover/title-page
Sinica 381

In 1840 he produced lithographically a “new version of the Analects” (of which the Bodleian only has the second juan), and a commentary on Genesis I-XI which seems to have appeared soon after:

論語新纂. 下論 / 尚德者纂
[Batavia], [1840]
線裝1冊(41頁) ; 19.3公分
Sinica 1493

創世歷代書 / 尚德者纂
[Batavia?], [c.1840]
線裝1冊(34頁) ; 23.1公分
Sinica 1699

Finally, in 1842, he again used lithography for mixed language printing, but in a rather different way, in his Notices on Chinese grammar. This was described in the Chinese repository (11, June 1842, 317) as “a book almost unique in its mode of printing”. Here Medhurst used typography for the English text, leaving spaces where the Chinese characters were to appear. An impression was then taken and transferred to the lithographic stone. The Chinese characters were then drawn directly on to the stone, and the whole then printed by ordinary lithography.

All this notwithstanding, throughout the nineteenth century the direction of travel in missionary printing was towards the development of western typography. Of the 1,323 different nineteenth-century Protestant missionary publications in the Bodleian’s collections, probably the biggest and most representative in existence, only 163 were printed lithographically – just over 12%.

The invention of offset photolithography in the mid-nineteenth century and its large-scale use by the big Shanghai publishers and even the Chinese government is a different phenomenon, much more influential, and much better documented.

1. When I wrote this blog entry just over a year ago, I did not have any images of this edition. So yesterday (1 March 2019) I re-examinied it (having originally catalogued it in the summer of 2009) and took the images I now reproduce with the kind permission of the Angus Library. Quite recently, along with a number of other books in the library, it was soaked by an overflowing shower on a floor above (the library is in the basement). It was freeze-dried and survives relatively unscathed, although a little water-damage is visible.