China through Victorian eyes

Was it curiosity that, in 1868, inspired a disaffected, thirtysomething former optician’s apprentice from Edinburgh to travel to China with his camera? Certainly John Thomson was acting in no official capacity. The previous year he had published The Antiquities of Cambodia and successfully completed the transition from young man with wanderlust to professional photographer and travel writer.

From Cambodia he had gone on to photograph Vietnam and Singapore. Then he set up studio in Hong Kong. China was the obvious next step. Thomson would spend four years there, travelling far into the country’s hidden interior, an odyssey of more than 5,000 miles. Glass negatives of the photographs he took in China filled three huge packing crates for the voyage home. Now, for the first time, a selection of more than 140 of Thomson’s Chinese photographs goes on display in Britain, in a Liverpool museum.

China Through the Lens of John Thomson, 1868-72 presents a snapshot of vanished Imperial China. It includes landscape, portrait and reportage photography. Thomson did not work as part of a government survey or religious mission. A pioneer of photo-journalism, he set out simply to record what he saw in the decade after the European sacking of Peking. His work appears to be untouched by 19th-century Western prejudice towards China.

Afterwards he recorded the “many instances of simple, genuine hospitality” he had encountered during his travels: “I feel assured that any foreigner knowing enough of the language to make his immediate wants understood, and endowed with a reasonable, even temper, would encounter little opposition in travelling over the greater part of China.”

finish article at Times Online.