Edgar Snow wrote on Mao and Red China

Edgar Snow with Mao Zedong in the 1930s and in the 1970s (inset).

It is the birthday of journalist Edgar Snow (1905), whose book, Red Star Over China (1937), is considered one of the most important works on China in the 1930s during the rise of the Communist Party. The book contained the most extensive interview with Mao Zedong that had been seen in the West at the time. Snow spent considerable time with the leaders of the Community Party, including Mao and Zhou Enlai. Snow’s book  Battle For Asia (1941) was based on his visit to Japanese-occupied areas of Asia before the United States entered World War II. Snow also wrote of Japanese atrocities against the Chinese in Scorched Earth (1941). He covered the war for the Saturday Evening Post. During the 1950s, he was investigated by the anti-Communist McCarthy committee. In 1970, he learned on a visit to China that President Nixon would be welcome there but Snow died before that historic trip took place in 1972.

D'Anville challenged mapmaking of his era

Detail of d'Anville's map of China.

It is the birthday of French mapmaker Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville (1697), who is credited with creating a revolution in the cartography and geography fields by challenging existing perceptions of his era about world geography and remapping vast areas, including China and the countries of pre-Christian civilization such as Egypt and Greece. Unlike his predecessors who creatively invented what they did not know, d'Anville simply left blank areas for which there was no documented information. He also wrote extensively about his source material, a practice unprecedented at the time. D'Anville produced 211 maps and some 78 dissertations and memoirs. He served as first geographer to the king of France.

Salisbury wrote of Russia, Vietnam, China

Harrison Salisbury

It is the birthday of journalist Harrison Salisbury (1908), who won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1955 for a series of stories he wrote after serving as the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times. Salisbury was one of the Times' top editors. He also reported from Vietnam and China. He was a prolific writer, the author of 29 books.

Salisbury began working for United Press after being suspended from the University of Minnesota in 1930. He never graduated. He served as UP's foreign editor during the last two years of World War II, and traveled with the Red Army as it pursued the retreating Germans. In 1945, he wrote a series for Collier's Weekly about Russia that became a book Russia on the Way (1946). He served as the Times' Moscow bureau chief for five years beginning in 1949. In Russia, he constantly sparred with Soviet officials over censorship, though he was criticized by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and by writer Gay Talese (The Kingdom and the Power) for being too sympathetic to the Soviets.

Salisbury served as the Times' chief of domestic correspondents during the 1960s and covered the Civil Rights struggle in the South. He directed the coverage of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He visited North Vietnam in 1966 and became convinced that the United States policy of pursuing the air war was a bad policy as it was killing thousands of civilians. He was the first American journalist to report on the war from North Vietnam and among the first to oppose the war.

Salisbury also traveled extensively in China. He witnessed the student uprising in Tiananmen Square in 1989 that led to a bloody massacre at the hands of the Chinese military.

Salisbury's books include American in Russia (1955), The Shook-Up Generation (1968), Behind the Lines: Hanoi (1967), Orbit of China (1967), War Between Russia and China (1969), The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad (1969), The Gates of Hell (1975), Black Night, White Snow: Russia's Revolutions 1905-1917 (1978), Without Fear or Favor: The New York Times and Its Times (1980), Journey For Our Times (autobiography) (1983), China: 100 Years of Revolution (1983), The Long March: The Untold Story (1985), Tiananmen Diary: Thirteen Days in June (1989), The New Emperors: China in the Era of Mao and Deng (1992), Heroes of My Time (1993).

Salisbury died from a sudden heart attack in Connecticut in 1993 at the age of 84.

Pearl S. Buck wrote of Chinese peasants

Pearl S. Buck

It is the birthday of writer Pearl S. Buck (1892), who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for her novel The Good Earth and the Nobel Prize for Literature for her epic writing about Chinese peasants and her biographies.

Buck's parents were Presbyterian missionaries and took her to China when she was only three months old. She grew up in China and, except for four years of college in Virginia, lived there until 1934.

She married John Lossing Buck in 1917. He was an agricultural economist. They lived in Nanking for 13 years and both taught at the University of Nanking. They left in 1934 with the rise of political unrest and the Communist Party. The Good Earth (1931) is set in a rural Chinese village before World War II. It is part of an ambitious trilogy that also includes Sons (1932) and A House Divided (1935). The books introduced Americans to Chinese peasant culture.

The Good Earth was adapted as a Broadway play in 1932 and as a film in 1937.  Buck wrote more than 40 books, including two biographies about her mother's life as a missionary, two autobiographies, and numerous short stories. 

She was outraged at the plight of mixed race children born to Asian women, often left abandoned by American servicemen. In 1949, she established an international adoption agency for mixed race children, who were otherwise considered unadoptable. In 1964, she established the Pearl S. Buck Foundation to support children in Asian countries who weren't eligible for adoption. Today Pearl S. Buck International continues to operate the agencies she started and preserve her legacy.

George Anson’s astounding world voyage

Commodore George Anson

It is the stuff of novels and epic films. A Voyage Round the World is a true account, but it is a sea story as action-packed as the popular Master and Commander historical fiction series by Patrick O’Brian, though Voyage happened more than half a century before the time in which O'Brian's novels are set.

In 1740, a British expedition set sail under the command of Commodore George Anson, a skilled naval commander and wealthy aristocrat. The mission: attack Spanish ports and vessels in the Pacific Ocean. England was at war with Spain and anything that disrupted Spain’s commerce, especially in the New World, was considered a top priority. While the voyage mostly failed in its primary mission, Anson returned a hero, mainly due to a serendipitous turn of events after much disaster.

The four-year expedition is chronicled in A Voyage Round the World, published in 1748. The massive volume was compiled by the flagship’s chaplain from the papers of the commodore. A copy of a first edition is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA. It includes 42 copper plates illustrating the various ports of call and some of what was seen along the way.

That the expedition even got under way at all was an astounding event, considering that it was ill-equipped, undermanned, and got a late start. Six warships and two store ships set sail from Great Britain with 1,854 men and boys aboard, many of whom were patients in military hospitals and too ill to serve in battle. The expedition was part of the conflict between Great Britain and Spain known as the War of Jenkins’ Ear.

HMS Centurion, the flagship, was the only one to return to Britain, after circumnavigating the globe. Warships Gloucester, Wager and the sloop Tryal were lost through damage, storms or misfortune. Severn and Pearl were separated from the rest, eventually turned back, and arrived in England amid speculation that they deserted, though there were never any charges The supply ships, Anna and Industry, suffered ignoble ends in an episode that could have been a novel unto itself.

In all, only about 500 survived, including 188 original crew members and officers who returned on the Centurion. The expedition was beset with disaster after disaster, including severe storms that damaged and separated the ships, leaky vessels, mutiny, marooned crews, and illness. Anson encountered hostile ports, including a run-in with Chinese officials in Canton and Macau, who demanded a port tax that Anson refused to pay on the ground that his was a warship, not a merchant vessel. Storms plagued the expedition because it had started late, putting in at the southern tip of South America at the worst possible time of the year.

The expedition did succeed in capturing merchant vessels bound for Spanish ports in South America, and relieving them of their cash, but the real prize came near the end of the expedition.

For centuries, the Spanish had made annual or semi-annual runs across the Pacific Ocean from Manila to Acapulco and back. Part of the plan had been to capture the Spanish galleon as it left Acapulco carrying silver for trade in the Philippines. Anson lay in wait off the coast but it soon became clear that the Spanish had spotted his ships and wouldn’t be sending any galleons.

Manila Galleon by Samuel Scott, painted before 1772.

Anson headed to China, where he endured much difficulty and months of delay. When, finally, he got his remaining ship fully repaired, he decided to try once more for the Spanish galleon, which was by now, he expected, nearing the Philippines in the western Pacific.

Anson got lucky. He encountered the Neustra Señora de Covadonga, laden with 1.3 million pieces of eight and 2,230 pounds of silver. Anson took the vessel, and after a brief visit back in Canton, where Chinese officials and British merchants both took a dim view of his arrival (believing he wanted to make Canton a base for his pirating activities), he made a swift return to Great Britain.

The arrival of the Centurion in England was cause for great celebration and Anson was accorded the status of a hero. His share of the proceeds of this four-year adventure left his family financially secure and Anson subsequently enjoyed a distinguished naval and political career.