Through China with a camera

With nearly 100 illustrations. Westminster : A. Constable, 1898. Octavo, gilt-lettered cloth (corners a little bumped), pp. xiv; 284, photographic plates, a fine copy.

Scottish-born photographer John Thomson moved to Hong Kong in 1868, after spending three years as a professional photographer with a studio in Singapore and another year in Bangkok. From his base in Hong Kong, Thomson sailed far up the east coast of China and ventured inland to places where the population had never seen a Westerner or a camera before. Thomson photographed a wide array of Chinese people and topography, returning to England in 1872. In 1873, the first two volumes of his monumental Illustrations of China and its people was published by Sampson Low, Marston, Low, and Searle, featuring photographs reproduced using the autotype proces. The third and fourth volumes were published in 1874.

In 1898, with the permission of Sampson Low, Marston, Low, and Searle, Thomson republished the photographs in this small octavo format. This is the American issue of the sheets of the first edition, while the title page states the publisher is Constable, the publisher on the foot of the spine reads Dodd, Mead & Company, a publisher based in New York.

The accessible smaller format of the important nineteenth-century photographic publication on China.