Fine Books and Manuscripts

An archive of photographic, manuscript, and printed materials from Charles Davis Jameson, an American engineer who worked in China at the close of the nineteenth century.Cultural materials include the 102 page typescript "Notes in Shansi and Honan China" (dated 1897), in which Jameson offers amateur anthropological pronouncements, as well as the typescript entitled "The evolution of China and Japan: the difference in results and why?" (undated; incomplete fragment of 9 pages).Original engineering-related materials include typescripts of two reports by Jameson on Chinese coal mines (Lin Tcheng and Tse Chow), with illustrated maps and details about labour conditions for miners, and a copy of Jameson's 1919 report to the Chinese Government Railways on the Chouchiakou-Hsiangyang Line, comprising 43 mimoegraphed pages, with 2 fold-out maps, and illustrated with 71 photographs (unrecorded by OCLC). Personal materials include a series of diaries (1903, 1906, 1910, 1917), with hundreds of manuscript entries; a commonplace book of approximately 60 pages, mostly filled with poetry; and a 10 page autograph letter to Jameson's mother (1911).Photographic materials include a large photo album, partially captioned, with 386 photographic prints of rural China; a leporello album with 24 colorized photographs; five loose photographs pasted to boards, of a Chinese monk with weapons (reproducing images found in other albums). With 15 further albums (circa 1895-1913), housing over 800 photographs documenting landscape, engineering projects, Chinese people, British royalty, and the domestic life of ex-pat Westerners.Condition note: portions of the archive have sustained damp-staining and many of the photographs have sustained some degree of fading.