During his China voyage of 1907, the Russian sinologist Vasiliy M. Alekseyev (1881–1951) visited a small town on the banks of the grand canal, famed for its production of popular New Year prints: Yangliuqing. Here Alekseyev bought a sizeable amount of prints, becoming one of the first scholars to prolifically collect this hitherto overlooked expression of Chinese popular culture. Being fascinated with, but unable to decipher the prints’ complex symbolic language, he asked his Chinese teac...
