GINGELL, William Raymond (trans.)

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The Ceremonial Usages of the Chinese, B.C. 1121, First edition of this English translation of excerpts from the Rites of Zhou, a fourth century B.C.E. description of the ceremonies and bureaucratic laws of the earliest Zhou kings. For two thousand years of Chinese imperial history, the Rites served as one of the bedrocks of Confucian learning.William Gingell (c.1817-1863) joined the East India Company as a surgeon and first travelled to China in 1842 at the close of the First Opium War. He remained in the country for the remainder of his life, serving primarily as consul in Hankow. In preparing this work, he worked off the Zhou li guan zhu, an abridgement of the Rites published in 1797 by Hu Bixiang, about whom little is now known.Provenance: front pastedown with the armorial bookplate of Robert Crewe-Milnes, first Marquess of Crewe (1858-1945). A key figure in the Liberal Party and Asquith's most important aide during his premiership, he also served as Secretary of State for the Colonies (1908-10) and Secretary of State for India (1911-1915). "He was thus responsible for the Delhi durbar of 1911, when George V became the first reigning monarch actually to visit India and Crewe the first India secretary to travel through the country. In recognition of his work in preparing this masterpiece of imperial pageantry, Crewe was made a marquess in 1911, with the additional title of earl of Madeley" (ODNB).Crewe inherited from his father, the first Baron Houghton (1809-1885), a libra

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