| Is the sign in the Japanese Tenri University museum? | |||||
| Re: But finding the bibliography item that published the picture is a problem -- beadiste | Post Reply | Edit | Forum | Where am I? | |
01/17/2018, 10:30:36
The most important contribution, however, comes from the fascinating collection of the Tenri Museum. It holds more than 100 Beijing shop signs that were collected at the end of 1939. They are probably the only remaining actual artefacts that exist throughout the world today. In April 1939, a certain Fukuhara Tokia, a Chinese language teacher in the Tenri School of Foreign Languages, went to Beijing to prepare for his superior’s planned trip there. Eventually, because of bad relationships with the Japanese army in the capital city, the superior was not able to go to China. Instead he asked Fukuhara to collect shop signs. We do not know why he made this decision. We only know that the superior was interested in Chinese culture, that his attention was caught by a magazine advertisement for Louise Crane’s book, and that he had bought the book Shop Signs in Peking, published in 1931. Fukuhara used it as a guide to buying shop signs through an antique shop on Hatamen (Chongwenmen), a famous commercial street at that time.27 The antique dealer provided a complete list of the shops, with their names and addresses, but this document was eventually lost. Today the museum still has 125 shop signs from the original collection amassed by Fukuhara in Beijing.28
Thanks to the collection of shop signs brought back by Fukuhara in 1939, the Museum of Tenri University (Tenri Sankōkan) has become a major place for the study of shop signs.
http://beijing.virtualcities.fr/Texts/Articles?ID=50
Modified by beadiste at Wed, Jan 17, 2018, 10:31:27
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