Di-li shü lin væn-koh kwu-kying z-tì yiu-tin kông-tsing. Di nyi peng.

A$7,500 · Offered by Douglas Stewart Fine Books

Limited edition

Nyingpo [Ningbo] : [Mission Press], 1852. Octavo, recent quarter calf over marbled papered boards, spine lettered in gilt Apostles ; block-printed on rice paper in double leaves in romanized Ningbo colloquial dialect; title-leaf with woodcut after Raphael s Saint Paul delivering the Areopagus Sermon in Athens illustrating Acts 17:16-34 (margins reinforced verso), frontispiece folding map of the Biblical world (essentially the Hellenistic world) showing the Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Middle East to the head of the Persian Gulf and the western shore of the Caspian Sea (lightly foxed, one fold strengthened with tissue), pp 76-120, woodcut plate illustrating a passage from the First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 9:24-27) bound in at page 83; occasional light spotting, a very good copy. One of the first printings to use the phonetically-based, romanized system ( pinyin ) of the colloquial Ningbo dialect devised by American Presbyterian missionary and translator William Alexander Parsons Martin (1827-1916), also known as Ding Weiliang (丁韙良). It is the second volume, but the third part ( Kyün 3 ) of an extremely rare four-part geography intended for native Ningbo speakers familiar with the Roman alphabet. Its seven chapters served as both an introduction to the Hellenistic world of the New Testament for Chinese converts, and as a reader for Ningbo speakers, young and old, many of whom were illiterate prior to being taught to read and write their own lan

• Printing: first
• Binding: Hardcover

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