Geography and Customs: World Photograph Album, Sixth Edition, with Chinese Translation by Zhang Chuntao, 1917

Description & Historical Context

Geography and Customs: World Photograph Album — Sixth Edition, 1917

A photographic survey of the world's geography and customs, the sixth edition, edited by Antaro Shoda with a Chinese translation by Zhang Chuntao, published in May 1917. The volume gathers a wide array of photographs of lands and peoples across the globe, each presented with bilingual text so that the work could be read in both Japanese and Chinese — a deliberate instrument of international understanding and cross-cultural exchange in its day.

The presence of a parallel Chinese translation is what distinguishes this album. Produced in the late Taisho years, it reflects a moment of active intellectual traffic across East Asia, when a single illustrated geography could be addressed at once to Japanese and Chinese readers. As such it carries value not only as a pictorial record of the world's regions and peoples but as a document of the period's ethnography, geography, and the shared print culture that linked the two reading publics.

A specific and uncommon survival, of clear interest to historians of geography and ethnography, of early twentieth-century photography, and of Sino-Japanese cultural exchange — a genuine artefact for a serious collection of pre-war Chinese photography and East Asian historical materials.

Offered by KT Vintage, drawing on decades of trusted international sales to discerning collectors and institutions across Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Oceania.