[In the following review, the critic discusses how Imperial Peking: Seven Centuries of China is an excellent illustrated scrapbook of Peking, but cautions readers that Lin's descriptions are of out of date.]

This is a handsomely produced, excellently illustrated Chinese scrapbook [Imperial Peking: Seven Centuries of China] built round the kernel or theme of Peking and its court life. Some new and brilliant photographs of the city decorate the first pages of text and others are included that might have served to illustrate books on Peking published thirty years ago, but there are no general views, nothing to reveal the “breath-taking vistas” promised by the wrapper. The truth is that Peking's main streets are generally shabby and unimpressive; the most breath-taking view is the city seen from the air when the outer and inner walls, and the great axis marked by towers and gates from north to south, with the Forbidden City squarely in the centre, give it a unity that no other city of comparable size can still convey.

After this pictorial introduction to the city, the illustrations are arranged chronologically from the T'ang dynasty to the present day; paintings, sculpture, porcelain, cloisonné, lacquer, jade and calligraphy; many are in colour and none is hackneyed. As a survey of Chinese art that puts such emphasis as it can on the art associated with the court the illustrations have been skilfully chosen. Thus the sixteenth-century painter Chiu Ying, who specialized in palace scenes, is well represented and much of the porcelain shown is of those pieces that were specially made for imperial use. Running through the text pages are contemporary wood engravings, often more fascinating and revealing than the larger illustrations, though they would have been much more so if adequately captioned.

It might be carping to complain of paintings of the T'ang dynasty in a book on Peking merely because they predated by some hundreds of years the city that is being portrayed. But the effect of this book as a whole is very much that of a compilation lacking in any central direction. It is hard to imagine how later volumes in the same series on Athens and Venice could be equally diffuse and vague in outline. The title [Imperial Peking] says one thing; the sub-title “Seven centuries of China” implies another, whereas the text contributed by Dr. Lin Yutang follows its own particular course. His chapters on the spirit of old Peking, ancient glory, palaces and pleasances and beliefs and fancies are an agreeable mixture of history and description, but those on the city and the life of the people may give the reader a jolt. It is not Peking today that is being described but the Peking in which Dr. Lin lived between the wars that we are given, and all in the present tense. Much of this is out of date; indeed, apart from a few tetchy references to the communist regime it is a curious attempt at non-recognition of the present. Thirteen years of communist rule is rather too long and has brought far too many changes to justify this.

Mr. Peter Swann adds a more succinct and pointed essay that both recognizes the present and relates the art to Peking as much as possible. No doubt it is difficult to pin down Peking at this moment in time. A reader might nevertheless ask, among a good deal of scholarly detail on the history of the city, and anecdotes of warlords and concubines, what picture he gets of the place from which China was governed for most of the past five hundred years. Dr. Lin's China has become something of a faded stereotype.