Parley’s Tales About China And The Chinese

I have not had a chance to go through this yet but Earnshaw Books are invariably reliable so I’ll post details in the hope I can catch up at some point with Tales about China and the Chinese but many of you may be interested to get your hands on it asap…

Before there was Rudyard Kipling, there was Peter Parley, delighting his “young friends” with his fantastic fables of faraway lands and whimsical sense of humor. Published right after the first Opium War, this book reveals the chasm between the Marco Polo-inspired view of a mythically serene China and the harsh realities of the colonial era. A delightful mix of fact and fancy, Tales about China and the Chinese encapsulates the ethos of an era when the West saw China as a remote, and unspoiled empire – ripe for the picking.

Peter Parley was a pen name coined by the highly popular and influential American author Samuel Griswold Goodrich and was often used by imitators. The author of this book, whose real identity remains unknown, was one such imposter. Andrew Chubb is the editor of Earnshaw Books’ Classic series.