First lithographic Gengzhi Tu in silk covers

Jiao, Bingzhen. Yuzhi Gengzhi Tu [Pictures of Tilling and Weaving].

€ 8.500,00

The first lithographic version of one of the most famous Chinese illustrated books, the Gengzhi Tu, here preserved in its complete two-volume form and in original coloured silk covers.

First commissioned by the Kangxi emperor and issued in its canonical Qing form in 1696 after designs by Jiao Bingzhen, the work translates the older Song model associated with Lou Shu into a courtly visual cycle of agrarian order, showing in 23 scenes the stages of rice cultivation and in a further 23 the processes of sericulture, silk spinning, weaving, and the making of garments.

This 1879 Shanghai edition reproduces the full sequence in reduced format by means of lithography, with the 1696 preface and with the poems rendered into English and French, repositioning a dynastic classic for a late nineteenth-century audience. The bilingual explanatory texts suggest publication not only as a work of Chinese cultural memory, but also as a vehicle of interpretation for the expatriate community in treaty-port Shanghai.

The imagery is of signal importance well beyond the history of the book. Jiao Bingzhen’s cycle stands among the defining monuments of Qing illustrated printing and among the clearest instances of Jesuit-inflected pictorial method entering imperial visual culture; its compositions proved enduringly influential in painting, porcelain, lacquer, jade, and other decorative media.

As a Dianshizhai production, the present set also belongs to the early history of Chinese lithographic publishing, where new reproductive technology was enlisted to reframe celebrated works of the woodblock tradition. The survival of both volumes, rarely encountered together, with their decorative silk wrappers still retaining strong colour, gives this copy particular appeal.