A Hong-Kong Sedan Chair; A Chineses School-Boy; A Chinese Girl; A Hong-Kong Artist c. 1868

John Thomson made this photographic print, sometime in the 1860s, by combining four separate images of Hong Kong. The images offer a glimpse into the social and cultural landscape of Hong Kong during a period of significant transition. Thomson’s photos, like those of many Western photographers in Asia, were often made for a Western audience, keen to understand the exotic and unfamiliar cultures they encountered through trade and colonialism. Consider the subjects Thomson chose. They are mostly people from lower social strata, their occupations reflective of the local economy. How do you interpret the image of the artist? Does it provide an implicit commentary on the relationship between Western and Chinese art? To more fully understand these images, we can look to sources such as colonial records and travelogues to contextualize Thomson's work within the broader narrative of cultural exchange and colonial power dynamics in 19th-century Hong Kong.