Donald Mennie – China: North and South (1920s)

Posted: September 14th, 2025 | No Comments »

A copy of Donald Mennie’s China: North and South published in the 1920s by AS Watson – yes, the chemist chain! There’s a reason for that see below. Mennie is best known for his book of photographs  The Pageant of Peking published earlier but this is a beautiful collection too.

Here his bio from Historical Photographs of China’s website…..

Donald MENNIE (唐纳德·曼尼) was born in Golspie, Sutherland, Scotland on 9 March 1875 and arrived in China c.1899. His atmospheric, classically composed photographs, are in the Pictorialist style, well suited to publication in souvenir photobooks. Mennie became Managing Director of the pharmacy A.S. Watson and Co., in Shanghai. During the 1920s, he published his photographs in China by Land and Water; The Pageant of Peking; Glimpses of China; China, North and South; Picturesque China and The Grandeur of the Gorges. Mennie’s photographs illustrated My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard by Elizabeth Cooper (Frederick A. Stokes, 1914) and The Great River: The story of a voyage on the Yangtze Kiang by Gretchen Fitkin (North-China Daily News & Herald, 1922). Mennie was interned in the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Centre, Shanghai by the Japanese military in March 1943. He died in a Shanghai sanatorium while interned on 10 January 1944. See also Wikipedia

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