Peking Story: The Last Days of Old China

First edition, first impression.  208pp,with occasional black and white illustrations.  Red cloth-covered boards with gilt lettering on the spine.  Cloth is rubbed at edges, rounded on corners and spine ends.  Faint and occasional spotting on text block edges.  There’s a slight strain between the frontispiece and title page (meaning the book opens to the title page).  In its original dust wrapper, not price clipped, slightly shelf worn and gently bumped on extreme edges.  Dust wrapper now protected in an archival-quality Mylar sleeve, fitted without the use of tape or adhesives.

Soon after the fall of Peking to the communists in 1949 David Kidd, an exchange student of Chinese culture living in Peking,, married Aimee, fourth daughter of the venerable Yu family.  In writing that is by turns humorous and poignant, Kidd points a deep and sensitive portrait of the end of an era, as Mao Tse Tung attempted to ‘purge from society for all time any influences from its past’.