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Rare and Early Books

October 22, 2026

In 1946, the Chinese Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek published a number of pamphlets aimed at providing foreign military personnel with information on China and things Chinese. These were issued by the War Area Service Corps (WASC), established by Chiang about 10 years earlier with the aim of providing allied servicemen with hostel accommodation, services and entertainment. The WASC itself was later in 1946 taken over by the Officers’ Moral Endeavour Association (OMEA), set up by Chiang and his wife Soong Lei-ming in the 1920s. The drive behind this association was to put forward an ideology of moral regeneration, with Confucian values of orderliness, clean living and service.

The pamphlets are an eclectic group, on subjects including Chinese theatre, Chinese philosophy, the Chinese press and literature, the British Macartney Embassy of 1792, porcelain, bamboo carving, dogs, income tax, festivals,  and the New Life Movement. You can read about a collection of 11 of them here.


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