"Chinese Culture Visualized" wall chart.

FENN, Henry Courtenay.

Published by Peiping: Truth Hall Press, 1931

Third edition, first printing, of this ephemeral 3,000-year survey of philosophy, art, scholarly enquiry, and history from the Shang dynasty to the Republican period. This edition and the first are entirely untraced institutionally, while only two copies of the second are recorded on WorldCat (Cornell and Hamilton College). The compiler, Henry Fenn (1894-1978), was born in Beijing to a missionary family and spent his early adulthood travelling in China. From the late 1940s to the 1960s, he taught at the Yale Institute of Far Eastern Languages, serving as its director for a decade from 1952. While at Yale, he popularized the Yale system of Mandarin romanization, the predominant system in the West until the adoption of Pinyin in the early 1980s. WorlcCat also records a 1929 adaptation (of the same name) involving a collaboration between Fenn and his fellow sinologists Benjamin March and Arthur Hummel. This version is found at Trinity College in the United States. Colour lithographed chart (624 x 388 mm), mounted on mid-century 740 x 426 decorative cream silk hanging scroll, wooden brackets, lower bracket capped with decorative brocade, thread hanging. Chart bright, couple of spots, mount sturdy, joint of upper bracket just starting at end: a near-fine example, attractively displayed. Seller Inventory # 168007

Bibliographic Details

Title: "Chinese Culture Visualized" wall chart.
Publisher: Peiping: Truth Hall Press, 1931