Paul Bonnetain - L'Extrême Orient - 1892

BONNETAIN (Paul). The Far East. Paris, Librairies-Imprimeries réunies (old Quantin house), May & Motteroz, [1892]. 1 volume in small octavo, 521 pp., publisher's binding in red percale cloth with beveled edges, front board adorned with a gold and black plaque (pagoda, shamisen-playing figure in a medallion, monumental door, pins, bamboos and Mount Fuji, title on a suspended cartouche), smooth gold-decorated spine, gilded edges. New edition reprint of the 1887 Quantin edition in the collection “Le Monde pittoresque et monumental.” The date 1892 appears at the tail of the spine.

Paul Bonnetain (1858-1899), naturalist novelist who rose to fame with the Charlot s'amuse scandal (1883), went out in 1884 as the Figaro correspondent to the Tonkin expeditionary corps. He produced Au Tonkin (1885) and L'Opium (1886), then had a career in colonial administration, in Laos and then in the Sudan, and died in West Africa. The Far East is the synthesis of this experience: it blends travel narrative, geography, and colonial history.

The work opens with the crossing “From Marseille to Singapore” and then divides into three books. Book I, “Indo-Chine,” deals with Burma and the Malay Peninsula, Siam, Cambodia and Laos, Saigon and the interior, the population of Cochinchina (races and customs), the administration and defense of the colony, and Annam. It ends with Tonkin up to 1875, from 1875 to 1885, and the “picturesque Tonkin.” Book II, “The Chinese Empire,” takes the route from Petchili (Tien-Tsin, Beijing) to Canton, via Hong Kong and Macao, the island of Hainan and Fu-tcheou, to Kelung (Formosa). Book III, “Japan,” covers the country’s geography, its history and religions, Japanese art and literature.

The text is abundantly illustrated with illustrations based on nature or photographic documents, in the text and as plates, making it a remarkable work from an iconographic point of view.

Thick and heavy work for a fragile binding, binding slightly rubbed with small wear or light marks, the first hinge weak with a split endpaper (but no string rupture), paper uniformly yellowed due to industrial production, other minor defects."