An Interpretation Of The Chinese Maritime Customs Historical Material: 1859-1948. From Bibliographical Angle

In 2001, with the cooperation of the Second Historical Archives of China and the General Administration of Customs Office, Jinghua Publishing House had published 170-volume " Chinese Maritime Customs historical material: 1859-1948 ", collecting from 1859 to 1948 Chinese old customs historical material, such as Annual Report and Return, Decennial Reports, Report on the foreign trade of Manchoukuo and so on. It has provided great convenient for studying national and single port trade situation as well as economical vicissitude. However, the position of General customs commissioner of the old customs was held by foreigner for a long time. Most of the historical material published by Chinese old customs was in English, and the style, format, habits were different from each other, and even some contents were encrypting processing. Taking into account the importance of maintaining the original appearance of those Custom's historical documents, this book did not make any change when it was published. This book has high fidelity by this way, but it also has become a threshold to some extent, and is not conducive to the people to go deep into researching and use of this important literature. The value of arranging and exploitation of the historical literature ancient book is far greater than the preservation and archiving. Taking this into account, the article attempts to go into further study the 170-volume "Chinese Maritime Customs historical material: 1859-1948" from bibliographical angle, in order to clean up the origins and changes, as well as the history of the old customs literature.This article is divided to five parts.Preface. It introduces the origin of the research. And it reviews the research of this field until now. The source of materials and the way to study are also mentioned here.Chapter 1. It elaborates the Annual Report, and then simply introduces the Report on The Working of The Post Office and the Chinese Version on Return of Trade and Reports of Trade. Chapter 2. It elaborates Decennial Reports as a whole at first, and then discusses each Decennial Report.Chapter 3. It introduces the history of the Report on The Foreign Trade of Manchoukuo simply, and makes a comparative study with the Chinese Custom Trade Reports at the same period.Conclusion. It is a summary of the whole dissertation and the author's findings.