Category: China, California
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Old China Hands Archive Who is an "Old China Hand" and what is the "Old China Hand Experience?" According to A Concise Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, edited by Paul Beale, (Macmillan, 1989), this term has been in use since approximately 1910 and is applied to "One who has spent many years in China in the commercial or civil service, or as a missionary." The dictionary's definition leaves out some important categories of people, particulary the waves of refugees from the conflicts of Europe and elsewhere who found temporary shelter in China, as well as people who served in the military of many nations. It must also be expanded to point out that implicit in the term is the notion of contact between Chinese and non-Chinese cultures.
The East Asian Library's Collection The East Asian Library of the University of California, Berkeley has 2,700 Chinese rubbings, second in number among collections outside East Asia only to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. The nucleus of the collection, over half of the items, was acquired in 1950 from the estate of Mitsui Soken, a wealthy Japanese bibliophile, and includes albums of rubbings once owned by noted Chinese connoisseurs of the nineteenth century. Other important acquisitions were made through purchases from Chinese scholars and dealers and through the bequest of Professor Woodbridge Bingham's collection. The library's holdings are especially rich in albums of models of calligraphy and bronze inscriptions.
Chinese Paper Gods Collection Essays The images in this collection were assembled by Anne S. Goodrich (1895–2005) in 1931, when as a Christian missionary in Peking she became interested in local folk religious practices. She studied the paper gods in this collection for much of her life. After publishing her research conclusions in 1991, she donated these prints to the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, Columbia University. The images are divided initially by usage: Those which were purchased to be burned immediately and serve as emissaries to heaven; and those which were purchased to be displayed for a year while offering protection to the family in a variety of ways, before being burned. The images are further divided by display locations and by the deities they represent.
