Доклады Международного конгресса ИИСАА. Т. 1

III. Far East, South and South-East Asia / Дальний Восток, Южная и Юго-Восточная Азия Доклады Международного конгресса по источниковедению и историографии стран Азии и Африки. Т. 1. 2020 589 Some pictures from L. I. Schrenk’s fund have prints with names of workshops; specifics of composition and artistic techniques prove that these pictures had been manufactured at the workshops of the Wuqiang county 武強 of Hebei Province, the second largest woodblock print production centre in the north of China after Yangliuqing. The ethnographic collection was gathered by L. I. Schrenk during his expedition upstream the Amur River and on Sakhalin Island during 1855–1856, where the scholar studied geography, zoology, botany and ethnography of the region 1 . It is not known for certain, where and when L. I. Schrenk bought the woodblock prints. It is known that the researcher visited several large villages and Chinese trade stations along the banks of the Amur River as he moved down to the large settlement Aigun (Chinese aihun 愛輝 , currently a part of Heihe 黑河 ).The pictures may also have been acquired during visits to the settlements with Chinese population on the Ussuri River (Chinese: Wusuli jiang 烏蘇里江 ) 2 . In a chapter devoted to Chinese people in the Amur Territory, L. I. Schrenk emphasizes that Chinese people in that region mostly originate from Shanxi Province and they carry out trade and exchange at seasonal trade stations. Chinese vendors lived in Aigun and in the upstream area of the Amur River, they arrived to the stations to trade with local population at certain time periods. We suppose that Shanxi merchants could also bring Wuqiang pictures for sale. Materials on L. I. Schrenk’s expedition, including travels around Manchuria, are kept at the Saint Petersburg Subdivision of the RAS Archive (SPb FARAN) and have been insufficiently studied by now 3 . It should be noted that the woodblock prints we discuss here clearly served for narration purposes addressing uneducated buyers, although they could imply literacy, since they contain short descriptions of scenes and names of people written in Chinese characters. Below we discuss content, composition and motifs of some pictures. MAE No. 675–48/1 (fig.1), MAE No. 675–48/2 (fig.2) A pair of vertically oriented matching pictures with auspicious meaning and mirroring composition. Each of the two prints feature women in Han clothes with objects symbolising good wishes, patterns on their clothes also contain symbolic images, even though they do not convey the well-wishing meaning. It is interesting 1 Reshetov А. М. Leopold Ivanovich Schrenk (k 170-letiyu so dnia rozhdenia) // Kurier Petrovskoi Kunstkamery [Leopold Ivanovich Schrenk (on the occasion of 170th anniversary) // Peter’s Kunstkamera Courier ]. St Petersburg. 1997. Iss. 6–7. P. 72–87. 2 Schrenk L. I. Ob inorodtsah Amurskogo kraya [On the Indigenous Dwellers of the Amur Region]. St Petersburg, 1883. Vol. 1. P. 58. 3 F. 93, opis 1, storage unit No.6. 1855. Journey to Sakhalin Island and to a Part of Man- churia. 2 notebooks, sheet 116; storage unit No. 7. 1855. Traveling around Various Parts of Manchuria. 4 notebooks, 118 sheets.