Thomson's most significant work. Thomson's most significant work, made as he travelled through China between 1868 and 1872.

Richard Ovenden has argued that Thomson's Chinese photographs represent one of the first bodies of work to focus on street life in a concentrated way, prefiguring much later photography, including his own in London: 'Thomson's books... presented this great land in a way that had not been attempted hitherto... they provided a kind of encyclopaedia which conveyed images of the land, architecture, industry and commerce of China, as well as something of the people... Seen in this context, his photography of the street people was innovatory. By contrasting the superb landscape photographs with images of urban social problems, Thomson was trying to convey the whole of China as faithfully as possible. He succeeded in combining traditional representations of different types with personal investigations into the life and experiences of the individuals, a technique which he exploited more fully in Street Life in London' (Ovenden p77).

The production of Illustrations of China and its People was also groundbreaking. It utilised the newly perfected and only recently commercially practical collotype process to reproduce Thomson's original albumen prints as continuous tone in ink, meaning that the book could be printed in larger numbers than the use of original photographs would previously allow.

'It is a novel experiment,' Thomson writes in the introduction, 'to attempt to illustrate a book of travels with photographs, a few years back so perishable, and so difficult to reproduce. But the art is now so far advanced, that we can multiply the copies with the same facility and print them with the same materials as in the case of woodcuts or engravings.'

First edition; 4 vols, folio (473 x 353 mm, 18½ x 14 in); 222 photographs printed on 96 collotype plates from Thomson's original albumen prints by Spencer, Sawyer, Bird and Co., London, guards (some captioned in vols. III-IV), letterpress descriptive texts, all edges gilt, occasional light foxing to text leaves only; green coated endpapers, publisher's maroon morocco-grain cloth, rebacked, upper sides lettered in gilt within decorative borders with a gilt vignette of the Confucian Temple at the Kwo-Tsze-Keen, or National University, Peking (reproduced from plate 9 in vol. IV), ruled in blind, lower sides with decorative borders and ruled in blind, bevelled boards, shelf wear, sides rubbed.

Ovenden (John Thomson Photographer); The Photobook: A History I, p32; Imagining Paradise pp119-121.