Moment in Peking : a novel of contemporary Chinese life

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  Lady Wu : a novel

  Rare Books

  Biographical novel set in 7th century China, telling of Wu Tsertien whose meteoric rise from obscurity to become Empress of China is without parallel among the queens of Western history.

  655100

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  Defence of foreign legations, Peking, China, June 20th to Aug. 14th, 1900 [cartographic material]

  Rare Books

  One of the first official map of Beijing's Legation Quarter (Dong Jiaomin Xiang / 東江米巷) to illustrate the events of the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901) and the siege of the Foreign Legations. The map was prepared by the American military engineer Harley Bascom "Fergie" Ferguson, who was sent to Beijing in 1900 as part of the China Relief Expedition. Produced in cyanotype (blueprint) in very small quantities, this map forms the basis of all subsequent maps of the Legation Quarter's defense.

  647412

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  Plan of British Legation Peking shewing defences June to August 1900

  Rare Books

  Shows layout of the British Legation in the Siege of 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion. Depicts barricades and defensive lines as well as the enemy attack works. Covers the Legation quarter in Beijing concentrating on the area of the British Legation, with the boundaries of the Russian Legation to the South, the Japanese Legation to the West and the Han-Lin Great Library to the North. The Su Wang Fu residence is depicted as well.

  647411

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  Sir Murland de Grasse Evans letters to Sir Francis Henry Evans

  Manuscripts

  The set consists of seven letters sent from Murland de Grasse Evans to his father while he was traveling throughout the United States in 1899, and one letter to shipping company president Bernard Baker in Baltimore in 1900. In the letters Evans describes his travels through Oregon, Washington, Quebec, Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Colorado. He occasionally writes of the steamship business, noting that he was being looked after by "local bigwigs" and had received a large number of invitations to social functions. In an April 15 letter sent from Chicago he also discussed local dissatisfaction with the management of ships in London, growing steamboat markets in the southern United States, and of a pending Steamship Subsidy Bill before Congress. Most of his letters are devoted to describing the cities he visits and his observations about the American way of life. He praises transportation around the Great Lakes as the "secret of their thriving & growing industry," and after a stay in Detroit marvels that American cities "are so utterly unlike anything I have seen before - Large open avenues asphalted, lit by immense electric lights...it makes one feel as though our ordinary street lamps...were relics of the Middle Ages!" In the same letter he describes the "pulse of intrepid & ceaseless energy that beats in the hearts of this young American life," and that while many of the people he encountered made him "shudder at their frightful want of good breeding & good manners," they provided a "powerful stimulant" to those used to a more rigid class structure. "Here you are nobody no matter what your name is, and yet you are at the same time everybody," he concluded (Nov.4, 1899). He was not impressed by Chicago, which he believed was filled with corrupt government and police officials and "ruffians" with revolvers, and he summed up his experience there by writing that he had "never felt so unsafe anywhere" before (Nov.25, 1899). Other letters describe the scenery of Puget Sound, Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Colorado; Evans's first experience in an American sleeping car while traveling to Quebec (he lamented of the lake of privacy and the fact that "we are all treated...like schoolboys by the conductor!"); compare gold mines in Colorado to those he had seen in South Africa; and touch briefly on his observations of the Boer War of 1899-1902. In the letter to Baker, who was president of the Atlantic Transport Company, Evans writes from Oregon that after traveling through the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia he has found a "promising attitude of these newer markets...and of the good openings for a steamship enterprise in the Pacific Ocean." He writes of establishing Portland as a major port for ships going to the Alaskan gold rush, as well as for more expanded trade in China, Japan, and Russia (Jan.12, 1900).

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