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5 volumes. With 108 color maps, all but a few folding, 3 loose in endpaper pockets; illustrations from photographs & other sources. 6¼x4, red cloth lettered in gilt, top edges gilt.

Complete set in first edition of this important early 20th century guide to East Asia. The five volumes comprise: Manchuria & Chosen; South-Western Japan; North-Eastern Japan; China; East Indies including Philippine Islands, French Indo-China, Siam, Malay Peninsula, and Dutch East Indies. This official guide to Japan and East Asia was planned by Shimpei Goto (a leading statesman in the early twentieth century) when he was the first director of South Manchuria Railway Company in 1906 after he had discovered the incompleteness and inaccuracy of the information in the Japanese and Asian guides produced by Western publishers like John Murray and Baedeker. The final volume with rubberstamp on title-page of Geographic Branch, M.I.D., G.S.; this would be MI9, the British Military Intelligence Section 9, during World War II charged with aiding resistance fighters in enemy occupied territory and recovering Allied troops who found themselves behind enemy lines.