3 New China Books in the Public Domain 2022 – #3 – Thomas Steep’s Chinese Fantastics, 1925

Posted: March 16th, 2022 | No Comments »

As i mentioned yesterday this year books published in 1926 come into the public domain. See Gowen & Hall’s Outline History of China here and Elizabeth Crump-Enders Temple Bells & Silver Sails here. Another is Thomas Steep’s Chinese Fantastics, first published by Century in 1925, a somewhat entertaing engagingly written account of early 1920s China. the book claims to be a guide ‘how to understand and interpret the Orient’.

As a young man Cincinnati-born Steep was sent as a reporter on a roving tour of ther American South, then to Cuba and then to cover the 1905 Russo-Japanese War. The London Mail then sent him to cover the political upheavals in Mexico around Diaz and Pancho Villa. He then went to China as a reporter with the Associated Press before joining the staff of the New York Herald Tribune.

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