WORCESTER (George Raleigh Gray).
Junks and Sampans of the Yangtze.
“This is a most important book, a book that no student of nautical research can afford to be without, no yachtsman should fail to read and no China-bound sailor to study. Whether previously interested in Chinese junks and sampans or not, all, after glancing at this book, will be. Indeed I fear that at a glance it will prove a fatal lure, drawing them into its depths, there to become absorbed not merely in the mechanics of junk hulls, the diversity of their forms and the ingenuities of their rigs, but to become absorbed also in the teeming humanity that plies the waters of the Yangtze Estuary and adjacent waterways in the freezing cold of the continental waters and the sweltering heat of Shanghai’s summertime.” (D.W. Waters review in The Mariner’s Mirror, Volume 34, Number 1). The second volume, published a year after the first in the midst of financial and political turmoil in Shanghai, is much rarer than the first.
