Introduction
Regarding the Library’s collection of Chinese rare books—defined as any and all books published in the Chinese language prior to the founding of the Republic of China in 1911—the great majority came from two particular donations: those of Dr. Peter Marie Suski and Professor Chow Tse-tsung.
Dr. Suski, for whom a brief biographical sketch may be found online here, built the collection that he later called the “Oriental Culture Nucleus” around his own interests. These included, most prominently, classical studies of the origins and development of the East Asian written language. Great attention was paid in the Qing period to such works as Shuo wen jie zi and Er-ya, and as a result, the Library had a good representative collection on Chinese and Japanese etymology by the early 1960s, when the Suski Collection was donated.
Chow Tse-tsung was born in Qiyang county, Hunan in 1916. With an interest in literature, he joined the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) in the 1930s and served as an editor for the Chongqing government, including drafting documents for President Chiang Kai-shek. In 1948, he emigrated to the United States to pick up his educational career, receiving his PhD in History from the University of Michigan in 1955. He is renowned for his landmark history The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China, as well as his life-long interest in Hongloumen and for his poetry.
It was Professor Chow’s poetry that provided a connection with USC, as a fellow member of the White Horse Society (Bai ma she), in the early 1950s, later became the East Asian Library’s Chinese Studies Librarian, Lillian Yang. The two had collaborated on several poetry volumes, so when Professor Chow began to look for an institutional home for his extensive book collection, USC’s East Asian Library was fortunate enough to receive it. Aside from the subject areas noted above, Professor Chow’s research interests were wide and varied, including additional works on etymology, to supplement those the Library had received from Dr. Suski.
There have a number of other rare Chinese titles donated to the East Asian Library, or to the University President, who then passed them along to the Library, but the Peter Suski and Chow Tse-tsung collections most define its strengths and character. As a component of research assets at the University, the Chinese rare book collection has remained largely unknown. In 2019, with support from the Dean of USC Libraries, Dr. Soren Edgren, the renowned Chinese Rare Book Specialist from Princeton University, was invited to campus to critically evaluate the collection, title-by-title. As a result, there is a much more accurate sense of its contents and search value. The new additional attention this catalog will give to USC’s rare Chinese collection is long overdue and certainly welcome.