San-Yu-Low: or the Three Dedicated Rooms. A tale, translated from the Chinese.

A$6,500 · Offered by Douglas Stewart Fine Books

Limited edition

Canton [but Macau], China : Printed by order of the Select Committee; at the Honourable East India Company’s Press, by P. P. Thoms, 1815. Octavo; modern calf over marbled papered boards, spine lettered in gilt, pp [2], 56; title page with a long split along the gutter, contemporary name inscribed on title page, light toning and foxing, a very good copy. One of the first works published at the East India Company press at Macau. Löwendahl comments on the significance of San-Yu-Low : This work marks an important step in the history of Western printing in China, being the first to employ movable type since the two or three works printed by the Jesuits at the end of the sixteenth century. (Löwendahl, Sino-Western relations , II, 779) San-Yu-Low is a story contained in an anthology by Lu Yu. Its translator, John Francis Davis, was employed as writer at the East India Company s factory in Canton between 1813 and 1815. The following year he accompanied Amherst in his Embassy to Peking. Later in his career Davis held the office of Governor of Hong Kong (1844-48). The East India Company press omitted the name Macau from their earliest imprints there, instead adding a false Canton (Guangzhou) imprint, as on this work. The reasons for this are explained succinctly by Braga: “The Chinese authorities at Canton were strict to the point of fanaticism in all that represented the introduction of new thought into China. They might not have opposed the introduction of Christianity, as a religion

• Binding: Hardcover

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.