Small concertina notebook in Chinese, manuscript. Bought in an Oxfam bookshop for 3£. Could be a notebook kept by someone who was fitting out a ship for a voyage, or some similar occupation. The notebook has separate sets of ink and pencil Chinese characters, and so perhaps the book has been used for two separate projects. A few pages have what appear to be pencilled English translations of a few characters and occasional transcriptions in Arabic numerals.

Correspondence in Chinese and in English, and coloured sketch of the Porcelain Tower in Nanking. There is little information on the origin and context of the documents. One of the letters has the following annotation: 'Letter to Rt from Dong - a chinese baptised ... from Ninqho who visited Edinburgh along with Dr McGowan in Oct Nov and Dec 1859 signed (Dong Patzai) translated by Dr McGowan'.

Rubbings of the Xi'an Stele (also known as the "Nestorian Stele"), a memorial stone erected in 718 AD in northwest China, to commemorate the presence of the Nestorian Christian Church in the area at the time. The whole stele is nearly three metres tall, with text in both Chinese and Syriac. The heading translates as "Memorial of the Propagation in China of the Luminous Religion from Daqin [Rome]".

Rubbings of the heading and of the body of the text.