Explorer who captured last days of a Chinese dynasty

John Thomson has given us a rare glimpse into 19th-century China, writes BERNADETTE RAE.

When the photographs by 19th-century British explorer John Thomson were first published in 1873 - in four large but elegantly slim volumes entitled Illustrations of China and its people - they were not what the retired traders or the collectors of Chinese porcelain expected to see.

Thomson's images are a thousand miles from the genteel stereotypes of a willow-pattern world. For on his travels through China, from Canton and Fukien and Formosa, now Taiwan, through Chekiang, Kiangsu and Pechili, and via a 2000km journey up the Yangtze River to Szechuan and Hupeh, Thomson captured not only the beauty of landscapes and roofscapes and ancient monuments and walls but the human face of a civilisation on the brink of dramatic change.

Thomson, with his sympathetic but probing curiosity, arrived in China just as the invention of the camera coincided with the demise of the last great Chinese dynasty. This he carefully recorded.

Most of the images, which go on show in the Unseen China exhibition at the Auckland Museum on Saturday are of people, in close-up, and against the natural backgrounds of their ordinary lives.

In Peking Thomson photographed the formidable Prince Kung and members of the Foreign Council. He also photographed a peepshow, a travelling chiropodist, a knife grinder, funeral banner men - and the Ming Tombs and the Great Wall.

Although the images speak clearly for themselves they are accompanied by detailed notes, written by Thomson, and included in the exhibition.

On the Upper Yangtze Boatmen, 1871, the same who crewed the boat that transported Thomson along the river from Hankow, he noted: "The boatmen were a miserable poor lot; nine of them sleep in a compartment of the hold about five and a half feet square, and disagreeable indeed is the odour from that hold in the morning, for the boatmen keep the hatches carefully closed and smoke themselves to sleep with tobacco and opium, according to their means and choice."

Thomson regarded his picture of "the compressed foot of a Chinese lady" as the most interesting in his collection. He wrote: "I had been assured by Chinamen that it would be impossible for me, by the offer of any sum of money, to get a Chinese woman to unbandage her foot, and yet gold and silver are arguments in favour of concessions which operate in the Celestial Empire with more than usual force. Accordingly, all my efforts failed until I reached Amoy, and there with the aid of a liberal-minded Chinaman, I at last got this lady privately conveyed to me, in order that her foot might be photographed."

It looks a poor and painful little foot alongside a natural one in Thomson's photograph. John Thomson was born in Edinburgh in June 1837. In 1861 he joined a brother in Singapore, where he established a professional photographic studio and began his extensive travels in south and South-east Asia. In 1870 he travelled through the southern parts of China, then returned to Singapore to sell his studio to fund further travels in the north.

In 1873 he published his first book, and in 1898 a second volume, Through China with a Camera.

The exhibition photographs have been made from copy negatives photographed from prints of Thomson's original glass negatives - complete with scratches.

The glass plates are preserved in the Wellcome Institute Library in London, where Thomson donated them in 1921.

At the Auckland Museum the exhibition of photographs will be accompanied by items from its own Chinese collection, including ivories, musical instruments, robes, jewellery and ceramics - and the huge temple bronzes that once graced the entranceway to the Asian Hall. The exhibition is supported by the Chinese community and a Cantonese opera and a Chinese fortune-telling day will be held to mark the opening.

* The exhibition runs from October 28 to February 18, in the Decorative Arts Gallery on the first floor.