Peking Railway Station, 1965 [Censored], hardback with pictorial dustjacket, 300 x 230mm, black and white and colour photographs throughout, depicting the many features of the Beijing (Peking) Railway Station, which was completed in 1959. Plates 2-5 have been censored in an effort to erase Party leaders who had fallen out of favour with the government after publication; these plate names have been blacked out of the Contents list (Chinese and English) at the end of the book. Tape repair present on dust jacket flaps, with bumping and wear to the jacket edges and edges and binding. Beijing: Exhibition Bureau of the Ministry of Railways, 1965.

"Edited and published in 1965 by the Exhibition Bureau of the Ministry of Railways, this book is a collection of photographs of the Beijing (Peking) Railway Station, another one of the Ten Great Buildings. This 1965 edition revised and improved upon an earlier volume that was first published during the ten-year anniversary celebrations in 1959. According to the preface of this book, construction of the station began on January 20, 1959, and concluded merely seven months and twenty days later, its near miraculous efficiency a typical product of what the Great Leap Forward hoped to achieve. The present volume includes forty-eight photographs of the construction process, the various infrastructural elements of the station, and scenes of passengers boarding trains. The photographs are classically staged, with conscientious management of visual details. The text is both in Chinese and English. The front cover features Mao Zedong's calligraphic rendition of the characters Beijin zhan (Beijing Station). In many of the remaining copies, several pages at the beginning of the book have been glued together in order to hide photographs of several Party leaders who subsequently fell from favor." -- Martin Parr & WassinkLundgren, The Chinese Photobook: From the 1900s to the Present Day, Aperture, 2015, pp.186-187, cover.

Provenance: A private London collection