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The article focuses on the way in which the visibility of collectors of Asian art impacted upon popular culture of the inter-war period, particularly the novel, initiating a sort of symbiotic enhancement of the collector and their activities. Referencing actual collectors against their fictional counterparts offers an intriguing insight into character, motivation and the market for Chinese works of art at the time. The actual and fictional come together in an attempt to point up the visibility of artefacts from China that during the period from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century became somewhat familiar in the public mind. This period which lasted into the late 1930s was both one of a growth in knowledge and of opportunity with the familiar blue-and-white porcelain of the nineteenth century giving way to the unfamiliar: objects in a huge range of forms and materials and dating from as far back as China's earliest civilisation. The two went hand in hand. Knowledge of what was collected by individuals and museums grew out of the increased availability of material that was flooding out of China and on to the international art market. Its visibility was the result of major exhibitions and the prominence of collectors whose flamboyance and eccentricity also gave rise to characters in fiction from whom their habits, personalities and situations were drawn. What they all have in common is what Arthur Conan Doyle lets Sherlock Holmes refer to as "collection mania in its most acute form". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A commemorative medal in the Hunterian, University of Glasgow, marks Danish journalist and adventurer, Frits Holm's (1881-1930) attempt to remove in 1908 a monument recording the first arrival of Nestorian Christianity in China (AD.635). Unsuccessful in his attempt at its removal, Holm commissioned a replica of the stele in local stone, carved directly from the original and shipped it to New York, where, for ten years, it was displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Even at the time it was questioned whether a copy had any artistic merit, but such was the Nestorian stele's fame as a Christian document that it ended up in the Vatican Museum and was itself a source from which cast copies were made and distributed around the world. The paper discusses Frits Holm's 'adventure', which provided him with the perfect opportunity for self-promotion, and addresses the position of the copy to collecting practices, especially by Westerners in China during the first decades of the twentieth century. Despite his efforts, Holm could never escape his failure to acquire the original object. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author examines two photograph albums found in the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, Massachusetts). The albums contain 125 albumen prints depicting people and places associated with Peking (Beijing), China in the late-nineteenth century. Through a close analysis of the individual images, in the context of a detailed understanding of the historical period, the author is able to attribute the topographic views of Peking to Dr John Dudgeon (a missionary doctor from Scotland) and the ownership of the albums to Hugh Fraser (a diplomat in the British Legation). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]