United China Relief sheet: “We Salute the CHINESE REPUBLIC On her Birthday OCTOBER 10TH”

The objectphotographed as held, uncropped

Catalogue description

Two men shake hands across the centre of the sheet. On the left, an elderly man with swept-back white hair and a goatee, in a dark suit and high collar, leans in from the front of a United States flag whose canton is drawn with forty-eight stars in eight rows of six. On the right, a soldier in a peaked cap and a belted tunic stands at the flag of the Republic of China, a bayoneted rifle rising behind his right shoulder; he is drawn in profile, looking level at the older man. Between and above them hangs a portrait panel: a head-and-shoulders portrait image, captioned SUN YAT-SEN, a seven-character heading printed right to left, a vertical line of characters down each side, and an English caption below. The lower half of the sheet is text.

The sheet is a fundraising appeal. The two lines at its foot — UNITED CHINA RELIEF / Member Agency of the National War Fund — are the only institutional text on it: the National War Fund began in February 1943, so the sheet cannot be earlier than that. The occasion is the one the sheet names for itself, the tenth of October, printed as the Chinese Republic's birthday and, in the caption under the portrait, as the date the Republic was founded in 1911.

The framing the sheet performs runs through the handshake. Each country is given a figure — an elderly civilian at the American flag, a young soldier at the flag of the Republic of China — and the printed text sets China's progress on an American timetable: "struggling victoriously toward Democracy as we did 150 years ago". A hundred and fifty years is a round figure rather than a date, and the sheet is itself undated. A second line runs the other way and claims priority for China: "the First of our Allies to fight Japan". The Chinese on the sheet is not translated. Sun's couplet and the heading over his portrait stand untranslated, and the English caption printed beneath them supplies the only English reading on the sheet: founder of the Republic of China on October 10, 1911.

All four margins of this copy are blank. There is no artist's signature, no printer's line, no union bug and no stock or campaign number on any margin; the only text below the image is the two-line United China Relief imprint. Another United China Relief sheet issued under the same member-agency formula, "China fights on", is catalogued by the Library of Congress with an artist credit; this one carries none. The reverse was not photographed.

Transcriptiontext on the object, as printed

[Portrait panel at top centre, light border, dark bar across its foot. Heading across the top of the panel, printed right to left:]
孫中山先生遺像 [Memorial portrait of Mr. Sun Yat-sen]

[Vertical column at the right of the panel, read first:]
革命尚未成功 [The revolution has not yet succeeded]

[Vertical column at the left of the panel:]
同志仍須努力 [Comrades must still strive]

[Beneath the portrait, inside the panel:]
SUN YAT-SEN
FOUNDER OF THE REPUBLIC OF CHINA
ON OCTOBER 10.1911 [the mark between day and year reads as a full point in this display face]

[Lower half of the sheet:]
We Salute the
CHINESE REPUBLIC
On her Birthday OCTOBER 10TH [TH set as a raised ordinal]

China - the First of our Allies to fight Japan,
China - in spite of war, struggling victoriously
toward Democracy as we did 150 years ago.

HELP HER TO FIGHT BRAVELY ON!

UNITED CHINA RELIEF
Member Agency of the National War Fund

[No other text of any kind: no printer's imprint, series or stock number, stamp, cancellation, pencil note or signature on any margin.]

Historical context

The imprint on the sheet names the National War Fund, the joint American war-charity drive started in February 1943. The Fund pooled the appeals of some nineteen national and twelve local member organisations — among them the USO and the United Seamen's Service alongside overseas relief agencies — and raised money through roughly a thousand local campaigns run by Community Chest organisations. It admitted only one agency for any given overseas country or function, and forbade member organisations from running drives of their own. The Fund ended at the start of 1947 and was formally liquidated in April 1948. The Library of Congress catalogues another United China Relief poster, "China fights on", whose title statement carries the same "member agency of the National War Fund" formula; that sheet is dated there c. 1943, measures 104.4 x 68.3 cm, and is credited to an artist (Gaydos).

What is not known

• No date, artist, printer, address or stock number is printed anywhere on the sheet; the only institutional text is the two-line UNITED CHINA RELIEF / Member Agency of the National War Fund imprint. The c. 1943–1944 range is inferred from that imprint and from the sheet's wartime present tense.
• The date of this printing is not established, and the archive does not deny that it may be a later reproduction; nothing on the sheet fixes when it was printed.
• Which Double Ten campaign the sheet was printed for — 1943 or 1944 — is not established.
• The sheet was not measured and no scale object appears in the photograph, so its size is unknown; whether it is a wall poster or a smaller card or leaflet is an open question. dc_type "Poster" is the closest term the archive's vocabulary offers and does not settle it.
• The paper's making, the printing process, and the medium of the original artwork are not established. The dark masses break into ragged spiked edges, which is consistent with a drybrush or scratchboard original, but the sheet was not examined in raking or transmitted light or under magnification and nothing on it states a medium; "continuous-tone image" for the portrait panel is a reading of the photograph, not a confirmed technical fact.
• The elderly figure at the left is not identified on the object. He wears a plain dark suit and carries none of the usual Uncle Sam attributes — no top hat, no star-spangled coat, no striped trousers — so any identification rests on convention and on his position in front of the United States flag, not on anything printed.
• The soldier at the right is a drawn type, not a portrait, and is not identified.
• The photograph reproduced in the portrait panel has not been traced to a specific original negative or sitting.
• New York is not printed on the sheet. The place given in geo and the creator field is taken from off-object catalogue and finding-aid summaries that the archive was unable to open at source.
• United China Relief's own institutional history — its incorporation date and place, the bodies it consolidated, its stated purpose, and the year it joined the National War Fund — is not established here. Search summaries of the Princeton (MC135), NYPL (mss/3078) and Columbia/Burke finding aids give 7 February 1941, New York, and a 1943 accession to the Fund, and name the American Bureau for Medical Aid to China, the Associated Boards for Christian Colleges in China, the China Emergency Relief Committee, the Church Committee for China Relief and the China Aid Council among the constituent bodies, but every attempt to fetch those pages failed (the Burke finding-aid PDF returned a connection reset again during editing), so none of it is asserted in the archive's voice.
• The background of the date the sheet celebrates is likewise unfetched: the Wuchang uprising of 10 October 1911, Sun Yat-sen's absence from China at the time, and the keeping of the day as the national day of the Republic of China are the standard account, but the source the archive tried to open for them did not resolve, so they are not stated as established facts here.
• The couplet 革命尚未成功／同志仍須努力 [The revolution has not yet succeeded / Comrades must still strive] is associated with Sun Yat-sen; Chinese-language searches trace it to a handwritten inscription for a Kuomintang gathering at Guangzhou in October 1923 and describe it as a distillation of, rather than a verbatim line from, his 1925 political testament. No page carrying that account was opened at source, so it is recorded here as an open question rather than in historical_context.
• Copies of the same sheet are reported by search results at the UNT Digital Library (ark:/67531/metadc472/, published New York, dated there 1941–1946) and at the University of Minnesota; both record pages refused connection for the drafter and again for the refuter, so no printing, dimensions or artist attribution could be compared.
• The mark between day and year in ON OCTOBER 10.1911 reads as a full point to two independent readers at full resolution; a comma cannot be entirely excluded in this display face.
• Whether the sheet was distributed to Chinese American organisations as well as through general community-chest campaigns is not established by the object, and nothing on it speaks to how or where this printing was distributed.
• The reverse of the sheet was not photographed, so any stamp, label or annotation on the verso is unrecorded.
• Whether this sheet was issued through the National War Fund's campaign machinery, and whether United China Relief was a member agency at the date of this printing, rest only on the sheet's own imprint; no fetched source attests the membership.
• The end of the war with Japan in 1945, on which the upper bound of the date range depends, is the standard account and was not verified against a fetched source here — the same limitation recorded above for the 1911 background.