AN online search for J. O. P. Bland -- former Shanghai mandarin, old China hand and author -- delivered the November 18, 1912, New York Times story featuring his assertion that post-imperial China was not a republic in the form that "hypnotized" Americans wanted it to be.

Bland, a guest in the United States of J. P Morgan & Co, was sharing some unpalatable information with audiences in lectures at the Lowell Institute in Boston and at Cornell University.

His message was that Americans "had gained a false impression of the situation in China" in the aftermath of the establishment of a republic in 1911.

"You may recall that all of your noted men and women placed the formation of a republic in China among the commanding events of the year," he said, referring to The New York Times selection of the six great events of 1911.

"I wish their expectations could be justified, but respect for the facts compels the assertion that the republic in China is a befuddling thing that has largely befuddled your people," British-born Bland said.

China continued to be dominated by the same forces from before the name change, he said, confounding the popular view spread overseas, swayed by the optimism of missionaries.

Bland wore the full cloak of knowledge of China as he stood at those lecterns in the United States.

By 1912, he was a China "expert," having arrived in Shanghai in 1883, the year he turned 20, to join the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs under Sir Robert Hart, eventually receiving the Imperial Order of the Double Dragon for his services to the Chinese Government.

In 1896, he took up the position of secretary in the Shanghai Municipal Council, and then moved to Beijing where he represented the British Chinese Corp during negotiation of four large loans of British capital to the Chinese Government to build railways.

In between, Bland was a correspondent for The Times of London until leaving China in 1910, and an author, of which "Houseboat Days in China" is the third of 12 books he wrote.

It was reissued late last year by Earnshaw Books, 99 years after its first edition.

It is neither a treatise on the state of China under oppressive imperial rule nor an insight into the liberating republican forces at play as could be expected from such a well-placed, contemporary senior mandarin.

Instead it is, as the author describes: "A record of Idleness, my dear sir, trivial things set down in garrulous mood and chiefly for the delectation (if so it may be) of fellow-Idlers. Herein you shall find little geography and even less science...a little chronicle, Madam, in memory of glad sunlit days, of cheery companions, and the joy of living."

But, yet, it is more.

Bland's mode of passage for this contemplative literary journey through idyllic days in late 19th-early 20th century China is the "Saucy Jane" houseboat from whose captain's bridge he purviews life and purveys a rich medley of social insights, philosophical views and harsh facts about his adopted land.

An expatriate tradition that survives in Hong Kong today, the houseboat is no longer the foreigner's toy in China that it was in Bland's day when, on the lower Yangtze, it owed its "existence to several causes, of which the first is the wanderlust inbred in the Anglo-Saxon, and, second, the absence of all roads, except waterways, in China."

His excursions in a timber and tarpaulin vessel along the Yangtze, with seven "coolies" as crew and a selection of hunting dogs, were for camaraderie with fellow foreigners on weekend respites from the "money mills and counting houses" of city life, and serious game hunting in British style for sport.

And there was a romanticism "to sail among the lagoons or out into the lake ... down the long reaches dreamily to watch the banks go by, to the creaking of buffalo wheels and the thousand familiar sights and sounds of Chinese life afloat and onshore."

They hunted wild geese and water-fowl, bustard on the gray mud-flats beyond Battery Creek, partridge and woodcock, the autumn snipe on its southern trek from Siberia, and pheasant in October beyond Changchow and the Pen-yu Creek.

And in these killing fields, "the little region of our wanderings," they learned about China, its seasons, winds and tides, the habits of their prey, and the idiosyncrasies of its people in matters of trade, theft and survival, and the farmers.

"I love to sit on the sunny side of a hill, looking down on the tender green of the rice bearing valleys, to dream of the forgotten centuries, the uncounted generations that have passed, leaving the patient toiler of this land as they found him, adding little to the knowledge and the needs that were his before our mushroom Empires were dreamt of," Bland wrote.

"Here, before all the storm and stress of our conflicting creeds, before the first Roman set foot in Britain, these fields had been tilled by men like him, men who dreamed of no world beyond their Middle Kingdom, and asked nothing better of life than to be able to live it after the manner of their forefathers."

His empathy with the Chinese lead to intolerance of the missionaries trying to save them: "Because the Chinese are a thinking race, we cannot bring to their edification the men or the methods we employ for...savages, nor can we expect them to recognize in our shrieking theologies the simple messages taught to Asiatics long ago by the Sea of Galilee."

The heritage of the farmer, the folly of missionaries, the "cobwebbed" Chinese civilization and the like are substantive diversions from the pervasive theme of the pleasure of the journey and the hunt, no better described than in the anticipation of three weeks holiday on the "Saucy Jane": "Back now to the land, to man's forfeited estate of freedom; whither neither 'chit coolies' nor Reuter's telegrams can follow."

And en route to Hangchow (today's Hangzhou), which could only be accessed by water: "All night and all day we steamed through the rich river lands of Kiangsu (Jiangsu), the rice and mulberry country of Chekiang (Zhejiang), through the close-packed narrow waterways...down the long reaches of the Grand Canal, whose time defying masonry speaks of glories long departed; through villages pulsating with life..."

An evocative visit to a ghost town named Cholin that was vanquished during the Taiping rebellion (1850-1864), provides a haunting description of streets of "desolate homes" and the "forsaken haunts of men" in a "brooding silence" where half a century earlier "the stream of life flowed fast" but now "the eyes rest on the abomination of desolation."

The author's philosophical view of life is leavened with irony and humor and the prose is rich and thick in the romanticism style of the era, albeit a touch quaint, redolent of cigar and port sessions at an English gentleman's club.

Bland focuses a keen eye and wields a deft pen as he weaves his sharp social commentary between seasonal hunting tips, discourses on the ethics of houseboat travel, the morals of missionaries and mandarins, salt smuggling and the art of government, and the need for books to read en route when not killing game.

He reveals some of the best hunting spots, although he laments that encroaching civilization is driving birds away from grounds that 20 years earlier had been richer with wildlife. And this, in 1908.

Bland has written an enchanting homage to the associated joys of boating and game hunting in the Shanghai region around the turn of the 20th century, along the way delivering a vivid snapshot of a long lost idyll in a newly emerging China, but also providing a quirky insight into himself, a notable foreigner of the day.

And some storyteller.

("Houseboat Days in China", J. O. P. Bland, US$25, Earnshaw Books, www.talesofoldchina.com. The author of this book review can be reached at david.maguire@shanghaidaily.com)