David Crockett Graham (1884-1961), missionary, educator, curator, author, and field collector hailed from Michigan. However in 1927, he was at work in the southwestern Chinese province now know as Sichuan Province. China was the focus of much missionary activity in the 1920's, but this diary of Crockett Graham's focuses on his collecting efforts. He documents his trips near Suifu (currently Yibin) and to Kiating (currently Leshan) during which he collected birds, insects, mammals, and reptiles. Graham also makes a number of ethnological observations in this diary.
Please help us transcribe the field notes of this collector and learn more about the context of collecting in China during the early twentieth century.
David Crockett Graham (1884-1961), missionary, educator, curator, author, and field collector hailed from Michigan. However in 1927, he was at work in the southwestern Chinese province now know as Sichuan Province. China was the focus of much missionary activity in the 1920's, but this diary of Crockett Graham's focuses on his collecting efforts. He documents his trips near Suifu (currently Yibin) and to Kiating (currently Leshan) during which he collected birds, insects, mammals, and reptiles. Graham also makes a number of ethnological observations in this diary.
Please help us transcribe the field notes of this collector and learn more about the context of collecting in China during the early twentieth century.
David Crockett Graham received a B. A. from Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington, in 1908. Graham then attended Rochester Theological Seminary in New York, where, in 1911, he completed his studies and was ordained into the Baptist ministry. Shortly afterward, Graham entered the service of the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society, departing for China in the fall of 1911. They first stopped briefly in Shanghai in order to acquaint themselves with the Chinese language and culture. They were further delayed there by the outbreak of the 1911 revolution which toppled the Manchu dynasty. Finally, they arrived in the province of Szechuan (Sichuan), where they were stationed for the next twenty years. In the fall of 1926, Graham pursued a year of doctoral study covering anthropology, ethnology, and psychology of primitive peoples and religions. During the period from 1919 to 1939, Graham made fourteen summer expeditions in Szechuan, the Szechuan-Tibetan region, and the Szechuan-Yunnan region, and several short field collecting trips in the vicinities of Suifu, and Chengtu. The specimens he sent to the USNM were mostly mammals, birds, insects, snakes, and anthropological relics. In addition, he sent anthropological measurements of Chinese people, and Chinese aborigines common in Szechuan such as the Ch'uan Miao, Ch'iang, Lolo, and the Bolstoi people, as well as their costumes and handicrafts. Graham kept diaries detailing his activities, mostly during the 1924 to 1935 period.
