Henry Champly’s Le Chemin de Changhai – Sales Numbers

I’m obviously always interested in just how many copies China books really sell – I have a theory (which I guess I could check if I had access to Bookscan and similar sales data) that China books generate a lot of buzz but, with the exception of a few, don’t always deliver in volume sales terms – i.e. people gas a lot about new China books, review them, go to events around them, but don’t always actually read them. I’m not sure this was true historically though and so a little factoid of interest I came across the other day. Last year I blogged about Henry Champly’s Le Chemin de Changhai (Road to Shanghai: White Slave Traffic in Asia, as the English edition was called). In the 1903s it sold very well indeed and does contain some interesting information and anecdotes if you can past the racism, Yellow Peril, anti-Semitism and hectoring. Interestingly, I recently read (courtesy of Michael Miller’s excellent Shanghai on the Metro: Spies, Intrigue and the French Between the Wars) that the French edition sold over 100,000 copies.