Stealing souls and saving history

Each time I have visited China there seems to be a new country—new roads, new factories, new cars, new restaurants. The new things, which amaze even the locals, are typically the first topic of conversation over dinner.

But where is its history?

Uncovering Lost China is one of the things we’ve been working on this year at Levenger Press.  The result is the largest book we’ve ever published, The Inmost Shrine: A Photographic Odyssey of China, 1873, by John Thomson.

Mim Harrison, our editor of Levenger Press, tells you why we felt his photographic history was so important now. Then I have a question for you…

—Steve

If you know Levenger Press, you know that often our books look back with fresh forewords. Our collection of E. B. White’s essays was one such look back, to White’s uncanny observations 50 years ago of the future. They were so appropriate for today that we asked the futurist Paul Saffo to write the new foreword. For The Inmost Shrine, we asked Michael Meyer,  a young and current chronicler of Chinese culture, to write the foreword to this old text. Michael is the author of The Last Days of Beijing, and has borne witness as the new China layered itself over the old.

This was the first time Levenger Press would look back through photographs rather than words, and we felt it was the right time to do so. This was the year, after all, that Kodachrome officially faded from the picture, eclipsed by the wonders of digital photography. We would be showcasing an even older, lost-to-history form of photography with Thomson’s black and white images.

Appropriately enough, we landed at the jewel-like museum that now preserves the legacy of the founder of Kodak, the George Eastman House.

A Scotsman looks into a soul

George Eastman was a collector of rare books, and the volumes containing John Thomson’s photographs of China are among them. Thomson was a Scottish explorer and an adventurer, and he dared to steal the souls of his subjects. That’s how many of the Chinese viewed his bizarre activity with his ungodly-looking equipment. And yet they let him take their picture anyway.

 Perhaps they knew that in stealing their souls, he was giving them their history.

Here is the schoolboy with his long queue and the musicians with their mysterious instruments, there is the mendicant priest and the Buddhist abbot. We see what a lady uses to make up her face, the way gunpowder tea is rolled (by feet) and how silk is reeled (in great secrecy).

Thomson did something else remarkable for his time: he created a work of photojournalism. A short essay accompanies each picture, and it’s as much through Thomson’s words as the images that this past comes to life. Otherwise, we would have no way of knowing that the men bent intently over baskets of coins in one photograph are not counting the coins but schroffing them—testing them to see if they’re counterfeit.

Reflection of a time and place

The Inmost Shrine is an enhanced facsimile of George Eastman’s original book. The Eastman House painstakingly re-created it through digital remastering. Thus new technology was applied to old, and yielded a most happy result. We were able to enlarge some of Thomson’s photographs for the first time in print, revealing hidden detail.

Thomson was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a part of the Empire era. His viewpoint reflects his time and place in the world. We may not always agree with his perspective, but this, too, is part of the history.

For me the secret beauty of The Inmost Shrine lies beyond its intimate photography and gold trim and red and gold binding. This is not history that’s been rewritten; it’s history as it was becoming so, uncensored and utterly forthright. It is a book that gives history back its soul.

—Mim

And now to you, dear reader. Are there books you treasure because of the way they present history? I’d love to know what they are. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you’ll connect to Comments).

—Steve

Comments

[Jeff Greene]

I have always been fascinated by exploration and really enjoyed reading the travel diaries of Lewis and Clark and John Wesley Powell. Their accounts of voyaging where no white man had gone before take one back to a time when there were vast unexplored places and no cellphones.

[Claire]

I have been in love with history since a favorite teacher introduced us to the subject in high school. Yes, I do have favorite books simply because they give me a glimpse into the lives of others. The glimpses don't have to be significant events. Their value lies in how they capture my imagination and how I am transported to that land, that time, among those people.

[Jeff Dimock]

Biographies of those who accomplished much are enthralling (when well written). One of my favorites is "The River of Doubt" by Candice Millard - covering Teddy Roosevelt's trip down an Amazonian tributary in 1913.

[Marica]

I've got many favourites, but one that I'm reading right now is called "Destined to Witness" by Hans J. Massaquoi.

It's a little boy's and now a grown-up man's perspective on how it was to grow up in Nazi Germany as a black boy/man.

The way he recounts his experiences is captivating to say the least.