Flitsch, Mareile

East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine (EASTM - Universität Tübingen)

130                                                                                               EASTM 32 (2010) 
 
Hartmut Walravens (ed.), David Crockett Graham (1884-1961) as Zoological 
Collector and Anthropologist in China. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz (Opera 
Sinologica Documenta; 1), 2006, 251 pp., incl. index, 6 maps. 
Mareile Flitsch 
[Mareile Flitsch, Chair of Social Anthropology and director of the Ethnographic 
Museum at the University of Zurich. She studied sinology and anthropology in 
Münster, Paris, Shenyang (PR China) and Berlin and received her Ph.D. and 
her habilitation from Freie Universität Berlin in 1990 resp. in 2001. Specialising 
in Chinese anthropology as well as in anthropology of technology, she published 
extensively on issues of skilled practice in everyday China, for example the mon-
ograph “Der Kang. Eine Studie zur materiellen Alltagskultur bäuerlicher 
Gehöfte in der Manjurei” (2004).] 
—„Killed two birds. Light rain.― 
In recent years, the issue of ―missionary scientists‖ (Charles McKhann) in 
China and their contributions to scholarly knowledge, to museum collec-
tions as well as their role in political movements has attracted western 
scholarly attention. Furthermore, Chinese scholars have rediscovered the 
collections and publications of former missionaries in China and have 
started to republish and re-evaluate them. Indeed, in Chinese anthropo-
logy we observe the occasional transforming of western missionaries into 
forefathers of local ethnological heritage in China. 
The American missionary, scholar of religious studies, China scholar, 
doctor, zoological collector and amateur taxidermist, excavator archaeol-
ogist, hunter and early ethnographer of China, David Crockett Graham 
was a key figure in the China collection history of the Smithsonian Insti-
tution as well as in West China border anthropology of the first half of 
the twentieth century. In the volume under review here, Hartmut Walra-
vens has edited parts of Graham‘s diaries (1924, 1927/1928, 1928, 1929, 
1930) in a non-redacted version. In addition, the volume contains some of 
the letters Graham received from the US American ornithologist and 
palaeontologist Alexander Wetmore (1886-1978, from 1925 onwards as-
sistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution), and three travel reports 
by Graham on collection trips he carried out in Southwest China. With 
this publication Walravens brings to our attention a side of David Crock-
ett Graham often overlooked when appreciating him as an anthropolo-
gist. 
In this age of increasing digitisation of archives, one rarely lacks mate-
rials, but rather one is more in need of background information and con-
textual presentations of people and materials. Thus, when opening the 
book one would have hoped to find an introductory—perhaps guest 
Reviews                                                                                                               131 
 
authored—article contextualising Graham‘s diaries in the history of the 
China missionary enterprise of his time. But this is not what these mate-
rials, published as the first volume of the Opera sinologica documenta 
series of the Harrassowitz publishing house, are meant to be about. With 
regard to Graham, it provides us with only a little more background in-
formation than the digitized ―Finding Aids to Personal Papers and Spe-
cial Collections in the Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 7148, 
David Crockett Graham Papers, 1923-1936‖ accessible online.1 What de-
serves special mention and gratitude though is the detailed bibliography 
of Graham‘s publications (pp. 12-27, 178 entries) compiled by Walravens. 
This is spoiled somewhat by a slightly irritating slip-box style listing of 
publications on Graham on page 28 that entirely ignores research on him 
since the end of the twentieth century, as well as many other interesting 
issues such as, for example, the oral history materials on Graham in the 
Smithsonian Oral History Collection. Throughout the book Walravens‘ 
footnotes on a number of western as well as some Chinese scholars with 
whom Graham came into contact during his stay in China provide help-
ful supplementary information to the diary texts. At the end of the book 
an index as well as maps drawn by Graham himself can be found. The 
book thus provides us with all that is needed to arouse our curiosity 
about the anthropologist, missionary and scientist David Crockett Gra-
ham. 
 
Graham‘s vita is remarkable: He was born in the last decades of the Qing 
empire, then was active in China as a missionary of the protestant Amer-
ican Baptist Foreign Mission Society from the first year of the Chinese 
Republic in 1911 on. In the historically complex times of the 1920s to 
1930s, he undertook, as a kind of part-time collector, field trips for the 
Smithsonian Institution in the Sichuan-Tibetan and the Sichuan-Yunnan 
areas. Throughout his years as a collector between 1924 and 1932, Gra-
ham became increasingly professional in collecting specimens, collaborat-
ing with Han Chinese and ―aborigine‖ hunters, collectors and skinners 
whom he paid with money from the Smithsonian Institute and ended up 
training himself. Graham was thus able to provide the US National Mu-
seum with numerous specimens (mammals, insects, birds, reptiles) and 
even discovered some new species, which were named after him. The 
butterfly dryonastes grahami is but one example. It is slightly irritating that 
the Smithsonian archive in the above mentioned online service gives the 
number of specimens collected by Graham as about 4,000, while Walra-
vens mentions 400,000 (p. 8). Part of his activities consisted of taking an-
                                                          
1  See URL: http://siarchives.si.edu/findingaids/faru7148.htm#FARU7148i 
(07.06.2010). 
132                                                                                               EASTM 32 (2010) 
 
thropometric measurements of members of non Han ethnic groups he 
encountered. In his diaries one reads, for instance, ―Measured two full-
blooded Lolos and one half-breed.‖ One wonders what has become of 
these materials. Graham also acquired a substantial number of ethno-
graphic artefacts mainly from minority peoples like the Miao, Qiang and 
Lolo (Yi).2 Furthermore the diaries testify to Graham‘s gradually becom-
ing a photographer, serving as a technical history of the genesis of the 
remarkable collection of Graham‘s pictorial heritage. 
Further anthropological data collection is only mentioned occasionally, 
even though his output of scholarly articles on the issue was remarkable. 
Lastly, Graham, in the service of the US National Museum, collected an-
tiques sold on Chinese markets and archaeological artefacts he himself or 
Chinese collectors working for him excavated and collected from tombs 
and monuments. (Graham, by the way, was the first excavator of 
Sanxingdui 三 星 堆 jades in Sichuan). All this was shipped through 
postal services to the US. In 1932, he gradually abandoned his collecting 
and was transferred to Chengdu, where he taught archaeology and an-
thropology at the West China Union University. He became curator at the 
West China Union University Museum of Archaeology, Art, and Ethnol-
ogy, a chapter in his life that is not touched on by this book, but of course 
remains highly interesting. Graham left China to return to the US in 1948, 
where he was honoured in many ways and taught about China until he 
passed away in 1961. 
The great enterprise of documenting the nature and 
archaeology/anthropology of Southwest China and its western 
borders—including its populations with their physical and cultural 
particularities—is part of a globally entangled history into which 
―missionary scientists‖ as well as western and Japanese scholarly 
institutions, well-established western museums and emergent museums 
in China were all involved. Only recently have young academics, such as 
Andres Rodriguez and Jeff McClain, addressed this missionary 
enterprise with regard to its political impacts, and one can only look 
                                                          
2 Ethnographic artefacts collected by Graham were part of an exhibition at 
Whitman college Walla Walla, where Graham had pursued his studies at the end 
of nineteenth century, in 1997 under the title ―South of the Clouds: Ethnic Groups 
of the Sino-Tibetan Frontier (Objects and Photographs from the Collections of 
David Crockett Graham and Charles Fremont McKhann).‖ The exhibition was 
curated by Charles Fremont McKhann and co-curated with David Deal; Maxey 
Museum, Whitman College. See http://www.whitman.edu/anthropology/ 
mckhann.html (26.6.2010). 
Reviews                                                                                                               133 
 
forward to their and hopefully more scholars‘ publications. Graham 
rightfully stands in the centre of their research.3 
Written at the request of the Smithsonian Institution funding his col-
lection activities, Graham‘s diaries are not the confessions of a missionary, 
but the result of his attempts to respond to their demands for accurate 
day to day reports on his work. Such diaries created ―on demand‖ of 
course raise questions about what Graham—always worried about suffi-
cient funding to carry out his work—wrote or neglected to mention to 
keep the funders happy. When reading through the diaries one returns 
again and again to this issue, and also to the fact that the missionary-self 
only emerges when he mentions Christians helping him in his work or 
sermons he has given. The diaries describe the chronologies of his collec-
tion activities, and include detailed geographical information, as well as 
information on the acquisition and preparation of specimens, including 
the personnel involved or the numbers of the shipping boxes. Through-
out the period of the diaries, it is evident that Graham trained himself as 
a taxidermist and in the documentation of finds, accurately accounting 
for costs for Chinese collaborators, postage and nutrition fees, packaging 
or preservation materials. A frequent issue he notes is troubles with mail-
ing boxes containing specimens. In addition, the diaries contain reports 
on the physical conditions of the collectors, on the availability or lack of 
medical care (to the extent of being a kind of running self-appraisal of his 
own health), comments on security issues (especially banditry) and col-
laboration with and support by local magistrates. Descriptions of political 
settings, personal observations and comments round up the list of topics, 
occasionally making the diaries exciting to read. They clearly show that 
his endeavours were anything but ordinary travel expeditions; they were 
hard, dangerous and tiring, with Graham constantly travelling by foot. 
Thus, we may retrieve a relatively complete picture of the circumstances 
of Graham‘s life and collection activities from the diaries, and thus of the 
concrete genesis of a collection. 
                                                          
3 See Andres Rodriguez, ―Minguo shiqi de jianguo he renleixue: Sichuan xibu 
de chuanjiao renleixue shiye‖ (1922-1945)‖ (Nation-Building and Anthropology 
during the Republican Period: The Missionary Anthropological Enterprise in 
Western Sichuan (1922-1945)), in Temule (ed.), Duoyuan zuqun yu Zhongxi wenhua 
jiaoliu (Cultural Encounters between Multiethnic China and the West), Shanghai: 
Renmin chubanshe, 2010, pp.105-33; Andres Rodriguez, ―Building the Nation, 
Serving the Frontier: Mobilising and Reconstructing China‘s Borderlands during 
the War of Resistance (1937-1945),‖ Modern Asian Studies, Special Issue: China in 
World War II, 1937-1945: Experience, Memory, and Legacy (forthcoming spring 
2011); Jeff Kyong-McClain, ―Barbarian Caves or Han Tombs? Republican-Era 
Archaeology and the Reassertion of Han Presence in Ancient Sichuan,‖ Twentieth-
Century China, 35.2 (2010): 4-24. 
134                                                                                               EASTM 32 (2010) 
 
One of the persistent meta-narratives of Christian missions in the first 
half of twentieth century is that of benevolent men and women strug-
gling in a highly complex and conflict-saturated Republican China for the 
sake of converts and against a rising communist movement that is perse-
cuting them. Graham‘s diaries can be read as confirming this narrative. 
We read about the physical and mental hardship and worries of a China 
connoisseur, observer and religious man acting within a mission network 
to save souls, heritage and objects from a China that he sees as heading 
for its doom. 
Through careful reading of the diaries, however, different stories 
emerge as well. We can detect a hardworking, self-disciplined man, who 
was simultaneously a missionary, hunter, taxidermist, photographer, 
informant on political events and Han-minority conflict relations, and 
scout looking for plants and animals that seemed to him suitable for the 
US market (p. 99 e.a.). While cooperating with and even working for the 
Republican government, in a way Graham also profited from the political 
turmoil of the time. 
He was a contemporary of numerous other eager collector-scholars in 
Southwest China, amongst them the botanist, sinologist and Naxi re-
searcher Joseph Franz Rock (1884-1962), about whose oeuvre Walravens 
also published a book in 2002.4 Again, the question of why the interest in 
documenting China through collecting was so important seems to be a 
relevant research topic. Towards the end of his collection activities in the 
late 1920‘s, Graham competed with other collection institutions and col-
lectors (pp. 104, 189, 205, 211). Meanwhile he had—to his own astonish-
ment—been appointed a F. R. G. S. (Fellow of the Royal Geographical 
Society): ―This seems strange in a way. All my collections have gone to 
our own National Museum, but this recognition came from the British 
Geographical Society.‖ (p. 182). It becomes clear from the diaries that this 
was a time of change for a man who had become intimately acquainted 
with local anthropological, archaeological and many other affairs 
through travels into remote hunting grounds, through anthropometric 
measurements, and through observing religious ceremonies and inter-
ethnic conflicts. He had, apparently, also by then mastered Chinese and 
Tibetan, if not also a local dialect. The next chapter of his life, his career as 
a China anthropologist and archaeologist, only partly shows up in this 
publication through three travel accounts from 1923, 1924 and 1929. The 
history of West China Border anthropology of the 1930s, West China 
Union University and especially the West China Union University Muse-
                                                          
4 Hartmut Walravens, Joseph Franz Rock (1884-1962): Berichte, Briefe und Doku-
mente des Botanikers, Sinologen und Nakhi-Forschers; mit einem Schriftenverzeichnis, 
Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag (VOHD Supplement; 36), 2001. 
Reviews                                                                                                               135 
 
um of Archaeology, Art, and Ethnology is only indirectly the topic of the 
publication under review here. 
With regard to collection and museum history, Graham‘s diaries pro-
vide us with especially rich evidence on collaboration with local skinners 
and collectors, and conditions of technical and material constraints, such 
as the different levels of technical skills in skinning and preservation, the 
shortage of arsenic, the delayed arrival of post, misfortunes in hunting, 
and poor shooting as detrimental to preserving specimen hides. The his-
tory of collections, we read, depends not only on financing. This story is 
rarely taken into account and makes reading the diaries particularly in-
teresting. One should like to read them against a contemporary technical 
history of taxidermy in China and the West to better understand the de-
tails reported by him. Sometimes the details are shocking. One example is 
how Graham and his fellow collectors and coolies by mere chance sur-
vived a meal. Due to a lack of salt, the cook had seasoned it with what he 
had taken for salt: arsenic (p. 105). Here as in many other instances Gra-
ham shows a very particular humour: ―Well? I have long realized that a 
foreigner in China need not suffer from lack of a variety of interesting 
experiences.‖ 
Reading this edition of a part of Graham‘s diaries leaves the reader 
asking many questions, and hoping for the edition of a second volume of 
the diaries missing from this one. 
 
 


Hartmut Walravens (ed.), David Crockett Graham (1884-1961) as Zoological Collector and Anthropologist in China

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Hartmut Walravens (ed.), David Crockett Graham (1884-1961) as Zoological Collector and Anthropologist in China

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