CHINA.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Beijing, 1959. First edition, deluxe issue, published to mark the tenth anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. Though unmarked as such, this copy was owned by Solomon Adler, one of the select group of Westerners permanently resident in China during the Mao era.The celebratory photobooks published in 1959 - equivalents were produced for Shanghai and other major cities - were predominantly distributed as gifts to party officials and foreign VIPs, the latter group also receiving brochures containing translations of the captions. Among the many plates is an impressive folding panorama of Tiananmen Square and its vicinity, showing the Great Hall of the People and the history museums, which were all built in record time by a state keen to display communism's accomplishments. Immediately following the title page is a high-quality reproduction of Dong Xiwen's famous painting Kaiguo dadian ("The Founding Ceremony"). The work was repainted several times over the course of the 1950s, as several party leaders present at the founding ceremony fell out of favour with Mao.An economist by training, Adler (1909-1994) worked in the US in the 1940s but later fell under suspicion during the "red scare." After a period spent at Cambridge University, he moved to China in 1962, living in Beijing until his death three decades later and working on the official Chinese translation into English of Mao's Selected Works.Parr & WassinkLundgren note three other issues: "a special de

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