The Grandeur of the Gorges.: Fifty Photographic Studies, with Descriptive Notes, of China's Great Waterway, the Yangtze Kiang, including Twelve Hand-Coloured Prints.

Shanghai: A. S. Watson & Company (The Shanghai Pharmacy, Ltd) [and] Kelly & Walsh, Limited,, 1926. With the scarce personalized limitation page First edition, first printing, number 142 of 1000 copies, with the limitation page printed ad personam for Mrs. Lansing Hoyt, spouse of the chairman of the Yangtze Rapid Steamship Company. The company operated the Yichang to Chongqing river route travelled by the photographer when preparing this iconic work. We have traced just two similar personalized copies, neither with the same pleasing Yangtze association. Josephine C. Cudahy (b.1884), an heir to the Cudahy meatpacking fortune, married Lansing Weed Hoyt (1884-1954) in 1917. After the war, Lansing Hoyt became the American trade commissioner in Shanghai. In 1924, he was approached to be chairman of the Yangtze Rapid Steamship Company, formed from the merger of three smaller shipping firms: a former company of the same name, the Upper Yangtze Trading Company, and the Ichang Steamship Company. During the next twelve years, the Yangtze Rapid transported goods along the river between Yichang and Chongqing, operating a dozen ships at its peak. In 1935, the business was wound down and the Hoyts returned to Milwaukee, where the former shipping titan pursued a career in Republican Party politics. Donald Mennie (1875-1944) was a Scottish-born American photographer and entrepreneur who arrived in China in the late 1880s. There, he first worked for MacTavish, Lehmann & Co., later the MacTavish Photo Shop, one of the first producers of picture postcards of Shanghai. By 1914, he was working at A. S. Watson & Co., the Chinese equivalent of Boots, and eventually rose to become their managing director. Like Boots, Watsons offered photographic services, hence its partnership here with the leading Shanghai publisher Kelly & Walsh. Mennie employed the obsolete wet-plate process and printed his photographs in photogravure, often employing hand-colouring as in the present work. The overall impression is consciously antiquarian and an evocation of China's romantic past, epitomised in the country's beating heart: the majestic Yangtze. Quarto. Contemporary brown full morocco, bevelled boards, front cover lettered in gilt, top and bottom edge trimmed, fore edge untrimmed. With 50 tipped-in photogravure plates (12 hand-coloured), line-drawn vignettes after pen and ink sketches by Lieutenant Colonel Henry George Gandy throughout. Text printed in sepia and green. Leather professionally retouched, small loss at foot of spine, tips worn, internally bright with occasional faint spotting and well-preserved plates. A very good copy indeed.