George Raleigh Gray Worcester (1890-1969) termed himself a sailor by profession. Born in England in 1890, he entered the Royal Navy in the days of sail and rounded the Horn as a midshipman. Although he turned his back on salt water in 1919, the balance of his professional life was spent within sight and sound of water of some sort. He left the Navy to join the Marine Department of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, and during his 30 years as River Inspector he assisted in surveying, marking, and opening the Yangtze to steam navigation to a point 1,450 miles from the sea. In his wanderings up and down the coast and rivers of China, he developed a deep interest in, and affection for, the junkmen and their craft. Sir Frederick Maze, the Inspector General of Customs under whom Worcester served, released him from his duties as River Inspector in order that he might spend all his time on Chinese nautical research, thus enabling him to travel in many places not usually accessible to foreigners in China, and to sketch and write about the boats, the people, and their customs. His eight years of field research were carried out during one of the most disturbed periods of China's eventful history --amidst almost continual fighting, bandit raids, enemy occupation, floods and droughts--culminating, for himself and his wife, in a three-year internment in a Japanese prison camp. Five definitive works on the seagoing and riverine junks of China were the result of the author's research, travel, curiosity, and enthusiasm. Later, after his retirement from the Chinese Customs Service, the author supervised the construction of the unique Maze Collection of Chinese junk models, now housed in the Kensington Science Museum in London--in fact, some of them were built by his own hands.  In The Junks and Sampans of the Yangtze, G. R. G. Worcester has written and illustrated a definitive work that will excite the historian, traveler, collector, naval architect, sailor, and modelmaker alike. “This unique book is a comprehensive and authoritative record of the vessels which for centuries provided practically the sole means of communication and transportation in the vast area drained by one of the world’s greatest waterways,” writes L. K. Little, former Inspector General of the Chinese Customs Service. “These remarkable ships deserve an unusual biographer, and in Mr. Worcester they have found one.” With over 900 illustrations, fully indexed, including margin notes and personal comments on the author’s 30 years among the resourceful and ingenious junkmen of the Yangtze River.