Dr. Graham Hogg, Curator (19th-century Printed Collections and Photographs) writes: The National Library of Scotland is very grateful for the support of the Friends of the Nations’ Libraries, which has enabled it to add this important book to our collections.
The China Magazine was a short-lived periodical produced by and for the British ex-pat community in Hong Kong between 1868 and 1870. It is probably the first publication of any kind in the Far East to incorporate pasted-in original photographs. Only four volumes were published and there is only one known complete set, in Cornell University library in the USA.
Volume 1 (Midsummer 1868) of The China Magazine contains articles and 16 original photographs by the famous Scottish photographer and travel writer John Thomson (1837-1921), subject of a major exhibition by the Library in 1997. John Thomson was living in Hong Kong at the time and was a major contributor of text and photographs to vol.1 and, to a lesser extent, vol. 2. He had established a photographic studio in the Commercial Bank building, in which most of the photographs in this volume were processed. He did not contribute to vols. 3 and 4, presumably due to a dispute with the editor C. Langdon Davies.
We acquired a copy of vol. 2, the Christmas 1868 edition, which only has three prints definitely attributed to Thomson, back in 2002. There are no copies of vol. 1 recorded as being held elsewhere in Scotland. This copy of vol. 1 has all the 16 prints attributed to John Thomson. In total there appear to have been 33 different prints identified as pasted into the surviving copies but is likely no two surviving copies will have exactly the same number of prints in them.
Thomson’s photographs are mainly of the local Chinese population and are in a similar vein to his ground-breaking work Illustrations of China and its people published in London in the 1870s, which were the result of his extensive travels in China from his base in Hong Kong. The acquisition of this first volume is a major addition to our excellent holdings of John Thomson books and photographs, and to our holdings of early photographically illustrated books connected to Scotland. We are delighted to make it available to users of our Library.
