Four Hundred Million Customers: the Experiences--Some Happy, Some Sad of an American in China, and What They Taught Him

New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1937. First edition. Octavo with black boads and gold paper spine title; illustrated endpapers; 8 unnumbered pages, 11-316 pages, 2 unnumbered pages: illustrations; 23 cm Very good (-); pages are clean and binding tight; some sunning to spine and cracking to spine title paper; ex-libris sticker on front pastedown; a wee bit of rubbing extremities and corners. Hardcover.

The Chinese as seen by an American businessman. "Carl Crow (1883-1945) arrived in Shanghai in 1911 and for a quarter of a century worked there as a journalist, newspaper proprietor, and ad-man. He also did stints as a hostage negotiator, emergency police sergeant, gentleman farmer, go-between for the American government, and propagandist. As his career progressed, so did the fortunes of Shanghai. The city transformed itself from a colonial backwater when Crow arrived, to the cosmopolitan metropolis of the 1930s when Crow wrote his pioneering book 400 Million Customers, which encouraged a flood of business into China." --Wikipedia. ¶"Carl Crow was an American advertising agent who arrived in Shanghai in 1911 with one suitcase, and stayed three decades. His book 400 Million Customers was a blockbuster hit in 1937, and recently has spawned a crop of modern-day imitators. Many of his insights about Chinese customers — and doing business in the Middle Kingdom — still hold true today, despite a half-century of communist rule." --NPR.org ¶

// China, China Description and travel, China Economic conditions, China Economic conditions 1912-1949, China Social conditions, China Social life and customs