Popova I. Depictions of Tributaries of the August Qing 皇清職貢圖 and Hyacinth Bichurin’s First Album // East Asian Studies: Festschrift in Honor of the Retirement of Professor Takata Tokio. Kyoto: Rinsen Book Co., 2014. P. 401-415.
The paper focus on the study of the album of pictures About the Peoples
Living
on the Banks of the Amur from the River Ussuri to Its Mouth, along the Whole
Coast of the Eastern Sea from the Bounds of Korea to the Russian Border and on All
the Islands Lying along That Coast, one of three ethnographical albums by Russian Sinologist
Nikita Yakovlevich Bichurin(1777-1853)- Father Hyacinth, kept in the National
Library of Russia. The album is called also Father Hyacinth’s First Album as it is
the earliest of his albums of art assembled in China between 1809 and 1822. The
source for Hyacinth’s picture album(Dorn 806)was the third part(juan 卷)of an
18th-century woodblock publication Depictions of Tributaries of the August Qing
(Huang Qing zhi gong tu 皇清職貢圖), that contained analogous depictions of ethnic
types, but in black-and-white outline pictures. For his album Hyacinth Bichurin chose
fairly rare depictions that are of interests from an ethnographic point of view. His album
includes 56 drawings of men and women belonging to the Tungus-Manchurian
group of North-East China and pictures of representatives of various territorial groups
and peoples from Fujian province and the island of Taiwan. It makes evident that later,
when writing his major summarizing works about China, Hyacinth made use of the
Chinese opus Huang Qing zhi gong tu that came to be an important source for the
study of the Chinese ethnical types in Russia and Europe.