George Morrison’s vanished Beijing library

The finest collection of China books in the world

The online journal China Heritage Quarterly has a new issue out. The theme is the studio: “zhai, shuzhai, shufang—the scholar-writer’s place of creative engagement with the written word, or artistic practice.

The issue includes an article by Claire Roberts: George E. Morrison’s Studio and Library. Excerpt:

No one really knows when the building that once housed Dr. George Ernest Morrison’s (1862-1920) library on Wangfujing in Beijing was torn down. It was sometime in August or September, 2007—part of the frenzy of last-minute demolitions that have been occurring in the heart of Beijing to rationalise commercial and residential zones and make way for various developments in the lead-up to the Olympic Games. The demolition site was shielded from public view by a row of shops on Wangfujing Street that continued to trade. As we walked over the wreckage of bricks and rubble last year, none of the locals were aware that the area was previously home to ‘Morrison of Peking’, the influential Peking correspondent for The Times newspaper of London who, in 1912, became the political adviser to Yuan Shikai (1859-1916), the first president of the Chinese Republic. Nor were they aware that Morrison was Australian, or that the street was formerly known to expatriates as ‘Morrison Street’ in his honour. That is now a footnote in the complex history of Wangfujing and of China that has been overtaken by the changes over eighty years.

The entrance to Morrison’s Wangfujing house

George Ernest Morrison grew up in Geelong, Victoria, and from an early age he displayed a fascination for things and a compulsion to collect, beginning with stamps and shells. The young Morrison also had a passion for wandering and writing. His first major walk, from the southern coast of Victoria to Adelaide was undertaken in 1880 and, two years later, he walked from the Gulf of Carpentaria in Northern Australia to Melbourne in the south. After investigative trips to the South Seas and New Guinea, Morrison made his first journey to Asia—Hong Kong, the Philippine islands, China and Japan—in 1893-94. He sailed from Shanghai up the Yangtze River to Chongqing and then walked overland through south-western China to Rangoon in Burma.

Morrison traveling in disguise, a little like Thomson and Thompson

In 1895, he established his reputation as an adventurer and a travel writer through his account of the journey, An Australian in China. In that same year, Morrison was approached by The Times to investigate French activities in Thailand. On the strength of his insightful writing about Thailand, China and other places, Morrison was appointed correspondent for The Times in Peking. During his term, China experienced dramatic social and political change and his coverage of events included eyewitness accounts of Russian activity in Manchuria (1897-98), the Boxer Rebellion and siege of the foreign legations (1900), as well as incisive reports on the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) and the 1911 Revolution. Morrison’s first house, located in the Legation Quarter (now occupied in part by the High Court of China and the ministries of state and public security), was destroyed during the Boxer Rebellion, but by good fortune his library, which had been stored close by, was transferred to the Palace of Prince Su 肅親王府 before the Legation was torched. In 1902, he moved to a house in the Chinese quarter in Wangfujing Street which was on the site of the former grand residence of Prince Pulun 溥倫貝子. There, Morrison built a southern wing to accommodate his extensive collection of books in Western languages concerning China and East Asia. In 1911, the house was described in an article in the North China Daily in the following terms:

Walk just outside the Legation quarter in Peking, and you come to a typical Chinese house, its outer lodge facing the street, a big courtyard within, a house on one side, a long low building on the other… The long building is his library, containing probably the finest collection of books on the Far East in existence today. It is managed on a plan which reveals the man. Everything is systematised and indexed.