This delicious book derives from an album of watercolours and sketches made by the wife of the British Consul after the First Opium War, when the Treaty Ports were opened. Full of reproductions, with excellent annotations and commentary by Andrew Hillier, it gives a wonderful insight into the world of the Europeans in China – what they saw, how they lived, where they travelled: rare images of a vanished world. The album itself was acquired by the Martyn Gregory Gallery in London, who produced the superb, The Hongs of Canton: Western Merchants in South China 1700-1900, as Seen in Chinese Export Paintings, edited by Patrick Conner.