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Professor Drake summed up the probable chief monument to Sowerby's life in Shanghai as the China Journal. He added that it was not a sinological journal but a storehouse of information on all manner of subjects, the range and variety of which reflect the editor's [Sowerby's] mind. To a large extent it is a record of a world that is past and one of its chief functions was to educate the foreign community in the China of those days in appreciation of varied aspects of Chinese civilisation and life.
With his increasing knowledge in Chinese Art Sowerby gradually made a small but choice collection of Chinese pottery and porcelain, being attracted chiefly by the animals of the T'ang and Six Dynasties periods. These, with his fine collection of books on Chinese Art and his natural history specimens he donated to the Heude Museum, Shanghai before he left China in 1946.
His last illness was the now all but forgotten debilitating sprue which left him an apparently broken man, yet whilst in the Japanese concentration camp he maintained his interests and discovered a new species of some small creature.
In his final year, in Washington DC he began composing an ambitious history of the old Saxon family from which he was sprung - The Sowerby Saga - which included in the third and later parts his own autobiography. [Note: this does not appear to have been published and nothing more is known about the work].
Before the centenary of his and his family's fortunate furlough in 1900 passes I wanted to pay a debt of pleasure to the author and publisher, Arthur Sowerby, on behalf of all those who gained some insight into a China now long departed.
Post Post Script
[Editor's Note: Keith must have sent me at least six revised versions of this article, each time declaring that "this is definitely the last one." Then things went quiet and I edited the "absolute final version." Then this arrived with the usual "final" exhortations. I include it to confirm to readers that here at HKBRAS we truly go the extra mile!]
135
Professor Drake summed up the probable chief monument to Sowerby's life in Shanghai as the China Journal. He added that it was not a sinological journal but a storehouse of information on all manner of subjects, the range and variety of which reflect the editor's [Sowerby's] mind. To a large extent it is a record of a world that is past and one of its chief functions was to educate the foreign community in the China of those days in appreciation of varied aspects of Chinese civilisation and life.
With his increasing knowledge in Chinese Art Sowerby gradually made a small but choice collection of Chinese pottery and porcelain, being attracted chiefly by the animals of the T'ang and Six Dynasties periods. These, with his fine collection of books on Chinese Art and his natural history specimens he donated to the Heude Museum, Shang- hai before he left China in 1946.
His last illness was the now all but forgotten debilitating sprue which left him an apparently broken man, yet whilst in the Japanese concentration camp
he maintained his interests and discovered a new species of some small creature.
In his final year, in Washington DC he began composing an ambi- tious history of the old Saxon family from which he was sprung - The Sowerby Saga - which included in the third and later parts his own autobiography. [Note: this does not appear to have been published and nothing more is known about the work].
Before the centenary of his and his family's fortunate furlough in 1900 passes I wanted to pay a debt of pleasure to the author and publisher, Arthur Sowerby, on behalf of all those who gained some insight into a China now long departed.
Post Post Script
[Editor's Note: Keith must have sent me at least six revised ver- sions of this article, each time declaring that "this is definitely the last one." Then things went quiet and I edited the "absolute final version." Then this arrived with the usual "final" exhortations. I include it to confirm to readers that here at HKBRAS we truly go the extra mile!]
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