 Good evening everyone. Welcome. Welcome to the lecture on the Chinese photographs of John Thompson. This is part of the program that links with the exhibition currently on at the Brunei Gallery. We also have a special welcome for the Chopstick Club members. I think there's a group here tonight. Just a bit of housekeeping before we introduce Michael. First, could you please silence your mobile phone and also but please tweet, send you know Instagram whatever, do lots of those things social media. And also I do appreciate if you because I don't it's six o'clock is quite an early start so can you please bunch in a bit so that the two sides for the latecomers I'd appreciate that for people to you know don't have to climb over you. And also we're videoing tonight so I think that the last row if you stand we'll just get the back of your head. So thank you. Our speaker tonight of course Michael Wood doesn't need any introduction as I'm sure you are all here because of him because you know and admire his work as a historian as a filmmaker and as a broadcaster. And besides his vast body of work on British you know Western history many of you would have seen the I think it's a six part documentary the story of China this is from 2016. This is where I saw and I sort of spotted the title pages had a few images of John Thompson and that's why I got in touch with Michael because he has an incredibly busy schedule and travels schedule so we're really greatly honoured Michael is here tonight to spend time to speak and to share his thoughts on John Thompson with us. Thank you. Thanks very much but it's a real pleasure to be here. Actually the the reason there were John Thompson photographs in the films in 2016 was that year or two or three before I'd seen your exhibition in Dublin of John Thompson and anyway it's a real pleasure to be here and big thanks to so us to you Betty of course and to the wonderful welcome library without whom and to whom of course Thompson bequeathed his his plates back in 1921 it's amazing to think he lived for so long isn't it. I hope you've seen the exhibition over the road if you haven't you're in for an unforgettable treat. He had I think one exhibition in the UK before which was at the late lamented National Museum of Photography in 1985 but never in London and never in China I think until Betty made it happen with an incredible reaction from the Chinese public a deeply emotional reaction to these pictures I hope I'll give you a tiny sense of why. I should confess to you if you didn't know already that I'm not an expert in any of these things really I'm neither a historian of China nor an expert in the history of photography but long been interested in Thompson trying to persuade the BBC to do a documentary about him I've been for three years I've been trying but maybe this exhibition will will finally clinch it because he's one of the greatest of all photographers it seems to me and and of course also a pioneer writer teacher publisher on what he called this new art science of photography and next month if you're really in for the the longer haul on this as I hope you are Richard's coming Richard Overton who wrote a wonderful book on on Thompson is coming here to talk about his whole career tonight we just going to look at some of the the China photos that made his name there he is as a young man don't know where this was shot Penang possibly is that kind of age he's in his 20s eyes set on the eastern horizon a later Chinese sitter for Thompson wrote about him that what an impressive character he was what a keen mind Thompson this is and he wrote the lines of us Thompson the visitor from overseas had piercing eyes dragon like whiskers and a great forehead charismatic you know I must have been someone of incredible charm as well as patience and tenacity and stamina to do the things that he did which I hope to show you the kind of images we've got of him very few there he is with his what new wife in Hong Kong is it you know suggest classic Victorian imperialist doesn't it you know the kind of and he's making his money from the elites in Penang and Singapore and Hong Kong but he's much more than that he's traveler and explorer and writer who photographs the native indigenous peoples of East Asia with real empathy a real engagement with the lives of the poor and ordinary people and with women as I hope to show you and that's not merely just my subjective or our subjective response to the pictures because he writes about his subjects to his notes on individual people within the photographs sometimes very ordinary people show you how he felt and he wrote about his subjects so it's the China end of the story we're going to look at I ought to give you a few words of background so you have to be patient with me we won't get on to the four Chinese journeys for a few minutes he was born let's just go back to that shall we he was born in 1837 only a few days before Victoria comes to the throne so if you think about it this way he's a younger only just younger contemporary of speak and Burton some of those famous Victorian explorers who like him were also polymaths in a way translators and writers and scientists as well as explored he's an older contemporary of Charles Darwin and an older contemporary of Joseph Conrad and Richard in his book actually describes the arc of Thompson's life as Conradian in its sweep you know he was of lower middle lower class background the apprentice that these are worth remembering when you see how the life develops lower class background he apprentices at the age of 13 to an Edinburgh family of instrument makers the horologist James Bryson they make lenses scientific instruments they're also photographers at the very moment of the birth of photography so right from the beginning that the incredible technical ability that he's got when you see him on his travels it starts to develop the understanding of the properties of lenses how to construct instruments and and here I'm gonna sound hopelessly romantic and you know forgive me for being my unscientific language I think you're partly comes from being a five-year-old in our little house imagine to with my father who was obsessive about photography with his own darkroom and the chemicals and all this but it seems to me that right at the beginning there's a sense there's a quest for the properties of light in somebody like him you see these old processes like the wet collodion process that he uses they involve skills that are both technical and they won't say intuitive they're chemical but you know our chemical they are physical but also metaphysical that the combination of emulsions and chemicals and salts and time carefully measured time are the means by which light can be harnessed or depicted or preserved you know I mean that's a very romantic way of saying it but my point is this doesn't come by accident this comes from a seven-year apprenticeship with people who are in lenses optics opticians instrument making and photography from the age of 19 let's move him on now let's have a look at this incredible picture I have no idea where the five volunteers were what his relation to them was that's him on the left putting on the look of the grown-up boys he attends evening classes at the Edinburgh School of Arts the predecessor of Harriet what he does natural philosophy and natural philosophy it then equals optics magnetism electricity heat the new sciences of the early Victorian age and you know you get a sense of how his competence builds and builds although where his language competence came from I can't tell you either because he translates scientific books from French and from Spanish histories of photography adding translations of new new terminology for the scientific terminology of cameras he even helps on the first publication of the history of photography that or the the methods of photography in Chinese so where that all comes from who knows but he's born this is the other moment of his background that is worth remembering at the very moment of the both of photography daguerre's first practical process is announced in Paris two years after his birth Fox Tolbert has already been producing negatives back in in in the mid-1830s and Edinburgh is the center of all this there are many photographers in Edinburgh at that time and his art school library held a copy of Leroy Boer's treatise on photography from 1843 which we know he read and which influenced him in that sensational series of photographs from Cambodia that you can see in the exhibition Edinburgh last bit of his introduction also has direct contacts with China from the 1830s first clippers are docking at Leith in the 1830s they're bringing tea silk cotton ceramics you could you know they published a history of China in Edinburgh in 1834 which he knew so you can see it's not only the science and it's not only the knowledge but it's the flavors and smells of textures that you could access by going down to the docks in Leith the lure for talent to go east now historians often look at the British Empire in terms of the peoples of the UK in terms of an interlocking circle of many empires the Irish especially with the armies of the Empire the English with the Navy the Cornish in mining for example and the Scots Empire in the 19th century especially rich in scientists botanist doctors experts in optics mechanics seeking their fortune out east that's what he goes to do we need to say a little bit more about the China that he went to but the China that he went to and I've just marked on here some of the key places we're going to be looking at with a more detailed maps of his journeys later has just gone through cataclysms they've had the 16-year war of the Taiping in which 20 million people are thought to have died and although the rebellion is crushed in the mid 1860s at its capital of Nanjing the fighting rebel armies continue until the early 1870s so he's actually there while these this war is still being fought and this is after two opium wars fought by the British extorting their colonies and their treaty ports and their punitive exactions from the Qing government these kind of events were the fledgling art of photography was also recording in fact a lot of the photography that came out of the east in the first 20 years of photography concerned the actions of the Empire this is by Felix Beato and it's the depiction of the aftermath of what the British called the great Indian mutiny in 1857 58 and a lot of Beato's photographs depict the reality of war the aftermath of war the residents at Lucknow there were stories afterwards that these bones had been exhumed from an ossuary by the in order for the photographer to take this picture but he but he also depicted the the reprisals and he also depicted the second opium war and these are shots Beato took in China in the second opium war the Taku forts these images were the images that went back with images too of the power of the Allied armies assisting the Qing armies fighting against the Taiping rebels these incredible photographs of the the berms and the defensive embankments of these forces the ever victorious army included among them which was a Chinese regiment in the Qing army commanded by European officers including Charles Gordon Gordon of Khartoum and it's interesting that Thompson's first book that he actually published was a photographic record of the ever victorious army to go with a a book about it that wasn't illustrated so that's one background to this story which you can't you one mustn't forget the we're in a high tide of imperialism Hong Kong 1860s and one of his photographs background to this is he'd gone out first of all in 1861 age 24 to visit his brother William in Singapore who'd been a was a watchmaker and also a photographer big market for photographers in the new colonial elites in these fledgling colonies after all the Brits had only got Hong Kong in 1842 by the Nanjing Treaty of 7,000 people there then and by the time he got there there's more than 80,000 in such a short time it's a booming place and and he returns goes out for a brief time but then returns in 1862 and settles first in Penang where he starts to develop his portraiture and he's already very interesting because he wrote about that moment I'm fully wrote back to Britain I'm photographing everybody descendants of the early Portuguese foragers he says smile Chinese Malays, Parsis, Arabs, Armenians, Klings, that's people from Kalinga the East Coast of India, Bengalis and Africans so he's already starting to get interested in the street if I can put it that way even though he's making a lot of his money from you know the high ups in colonial society he produces a book of photographs of the royal tour and so on and then he does his great journey to Cambodia which we're not going to talk about today 1866 the rumors of these great ruins in the Cambodian jungle take him there a grueling journey he had ten porters interpreter he came back with malaria which plagued him during his life as well as the staggering images you can see over the road and at that point you'd guess he's still a kind of typical European and Orientalist in his reaction to the indigenous cultures talks about the apathy of the people in Southeast Asia and he goes to Vietnam Cambodia and Siam he approves the French colonial influence in Indochina but he's starting to change I think and in late 1867 he comes here to Hong Kong and settles here this some of his photographs you see how swiftly the Europeans had created their own their own world on the island at a point when the typing armies are still fighting in parts of the mainland south across the water he marries here in late 869 sorry 1869 Isabel Petrie the daughter of Manx Scots and has a baby boy and his business is taking off but his real goal is to go into the interior of China and here I should say another word or two about background China of course was not a dark continent a blank on the map as Conrad had imagined Africa would imagine Africa but a vast ancient civilization cities far bigger than anywhere in the West but due to restrictions on travel the interior was still relatively unknown to Westerners until after 1860 the Second Opium War treat more treaty ports were established and the possibilities of travel were really opened up and before we look in detail about his journeys just put a few of these pictures in which are not among his most celebrated photographs but convey something which he saw and which he records in a lot of his photographs which is that China at that point was going into a period of crisis and a period of decline and in terms of the infrastructure in terms of local bureaucracies and the tide rising tide of poverty he sees that everywhere and he photographs it the great age of the Qing Dynasty this is the last great imperial dynasty of China of course in the 18th century they'd taken Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet China reached its greatest extent they were the greatest civilization in the world they had the highest standard of living probably than anywhere else an extraordinary stability that three rulers ruled 116 years between them over the 18th century the last of whom Qianlong had met the McCartney embassy in 1793 near Beijing so still assured that China was the center of the world but from the early 1800s this begins to change with what historians have termed the great divergence as the West starts to go ahead the industrial revolution technological advance and so on and China becomes left behind there's more to it than that but we can't go into it in detail just now but this crisis in China the impact of the West the failures of the the bureaucratic system which seemed to happen in the current cycles in the Dynasties of China but above all and it's really evident in his photographs and his writings the population crisis China's population doubles under the Qing to 450 million the farm lost a farmland became massive in the early 19th century between the 1750s and the 1810s it's been calculated the per capita acreage declined by nearly half to less than half an acre per person so you get a huge population rise you get massive poverty huge amount of unemployment itinerant labor and when you couple that with us bureaucracy which is becoming increasingly kind of ossified despite all the talent in the system the country which started the early 19th century is the greatest in the world is in a path of decline in which the center of which is the rural problem as a standard of living goes and and he constantly remarks on this in his photographs the you know he photographs foundling hospitals this is one that he shoots in siamen in Fujian and he notes in his annotations to the in his book in which this is reproduced extreme poverty caused by in part by war in Fujian and he's this is the aftermath of the Tai Ping has led to a huge increase in female infanticide for example he says and in this town a local merchant whom he records created this founding hospital to care for unwanted children girls could be sold to the hospital for a mere five pens he said boys for up to three pounds and if you were a respectable person without children and you went to these founding hospitals you could take the child away as your own for free but he's recording what is a very big fact in the life of China here he records the nature of itinerant labor these are again in Fujian and these these local laborers who at the time he says were often known as rebels and of course it was a lot of the disc disinherited poor rural workforce the miners and some people like that who had joined the Tai Ping rebellion which are still continuing in some places in the countryside but these were the people who the British called Coolies and these were people who Thompson notes were in many of these coastal towns leaving to go to America to work in in plantations in Southeast Asia and the Philippines you know that these are these are difficult conditions he records poor families in Kowloon and what's amazing about his passage on these people here this particular family he talks about their poverty due to their poverty their insufficient and unwholesome food the humid atmosphere a temperature of 90 degrees in the shade count in great measure for the frequent visits of cholera and the black plague the lack of sanitation he said examples of which can be found much near a home in the centres of congested population in our own great cities in Britain and of course he will come back and do his the record he's most famous for which is his account of the East End poor it could almost be Friedrich Engels in Manchester that passage so I'm just trying to give you a sense of the way his interests start to go it's not that he isn't a big classic Victorian imperialist in some ways but what will distinguish his work is the humanity if China travels begin in earnest in the summer of 1870 that June concerned about her and her child's health his pregnant wife sails for England and it's at this point he embarks on a series of major journeys through China which give him all these the greatest photographs and we'll look at four of these Pearl River they're marked here the Min River near Fuzhou the Yangtze and the northern journey up to Beijing he does many many more he seems to constantly be taking steamers up these coasts he's a freelancer he's not employed by the government he's not in hop to anybody he's got enough money from his business to to do what he wants to do so he's driven by a quest by curiosity by desire to record and he's forever taking the boats up and down the steamships that regularly ply up and down there and this is these are some images from his first series of journeys in the North River in the Pearl River bearing the marks of the plates as they have survived in welcome library he gets very interested in Chinese landscapes and the effect of Chinese landscapes and you look at some of these and you wonder whether had he seen Chinese landscape painting is this only a western eye or is he trying to see it as they saw it the portraiture is well go and see the exhibition to see these things blown up this size is that they're they're amazing images but here is is and he tells you about their lives the Rui Lin the governor of Guangdong 1869 a man greatly admired by the foreigners for his courtesy and what they felt was a genuine desire to establish good relations with the foreigners despite the fact of the opium wars and everything else that had happened you know and wonderful quality isn't there to the he takes these pictures even of you know the Buddhist abbot in the local temple fussing over his geraniums you know he takes portraits of merchants who in the scale of Chinese society were not highly reputed then of course not not high up in the scale of things merchants you know they've been very looked down on in the Ming dynasty and not you know if their status it improved under the Qing and now of course you know Alibaba's ancestors here you know and he describes these people in their character he observes he talks a lot about the children for example talks about the education system and how there were many flaws in the education system he says it is too traditional it's too based on the Confucian learning you learn all this stuff by rote but how impressive was the diligence and attitude of the children and their learning abilities and he notes that Western learning coming is coming in in some of the towns he visits you know the Chinese are in a headlong attempt to try and adjust to the impact of the West what was called the modernization program which went from building naval dockyards on a Western model in Fuzhou to adopting you know Western military gear in Nanjing he photographs it I'll show you and even bringing in some Western ideas about education but it's a gorgeous gorgeous portrait isn't it some of these people come to him through friends through contacts many of them he meets just by chance we'll see examples of them and he's just cannot resist the street there's there's seven or eight hundred I can't remember how many there are negatives in plates in the welcome and there are others in other collections in the world but that's the greatest collection which he gave to them but the streets he keeps coming back to gamblers this is a setup photograph of course doesn't look like a studio but there's a certain how do you describe that look certain tough devil may care this is thinking of that gambler and some of the portraits of women he loved the boat the boat people of Fujian he loved their freedom despite their poverty there's a great description of one boatman he said about radiant face and who always was smiling and always was singing but what he had to sing about only a philosopher greater than I could possibly imagine the tushness of their lives and but he loved the boat people and he does several versions of this photograph of a Fujian boat woman right isn't it it takes a minute or two I think with the Kolodian process for the for the the whole process you've got to do in 15 minutes before the plates dry you know but the actual photograph I think takes both here perhaps you've got to stay still for a good couple of minutes and but he extracts some magical vivacity doesn't he from from these fabulous photographs and some of them so touching this is a maid effectively a slave from from Guangzhou very ordinary person and he will shoot ordinary people right down to the poorest beggars on the streets in Guangdong but she's in perhaps in the house where she works she's going out to the shops for her mistress he tells you all about them often gives you their names you can see the pillars it's a slightly Western style house in Guangdong of some wealthy Chinese merchant or somebody the screen on the other side she's about to go off in an errand she's got her fan which gives the photograph a beautiful kind of shape doesn't it and and the tenderness of the face is just okay the next southern journey is the River Min here which is we did mark Fuzhou in here but Fuzhou is there and the Min goes into the mountains and this was a series of landscapes that he he his pursuit of the landscape starts to get really interesting they're just you have two faithful Chinese servants who've been with him from the beginning and who stayed with him for there till the end and on some of these great pictures you he's probably asked one of them to go and stand on that rock this river flows down from the interior of Fujian and and they're just incredible pictures this is this is in the exhibition and this is the state of the plate as it is now but here's a scan of when he published this wonderful book called Fuzhou and the River Min of which only 47 copies were made they hadn't mastered the techniques yet of of printing the album and paper that so they're actually gluing them into albums here but that's the image in the in the book and when you look close to it every grain in the kind of wood about this is kind of I mean staggering stuff isn't it and it was a famous landmark in the River Min and quite a lot of people photographed it but nobody and it's actually joined to the the bank the other side but nobody had just got round to take that and again is he what's he thinking in his composition of landscape there I don't know he goes into further into the mountains visits lonely Buddhist monasteries places of pilgrimage this was a place where he said he slept for four or five nights and eats with the the monks and must have had translators with him usually travels with other people often hitches up with missionaries Protestant missionaries and who would speak the language the dialect down there of course is its own world I'm sure he picked up some Chinese judging by his contributions to other people's books but and again you know the blind monk at his table I mean that could be a scene from a do more poem from from the 850s you know sitting waiting to go into the refectory in a lonely Buddhist monastery with the old monk who's seen it all the Buddhist way they say takes a thousand years so as you can see some of these are wonderful wonderful compositions of landscape some of them are remarkable personal portraiture and some of them capture seemed to capture a moment except you know that it's they've had to stand there for a couple of minutes for that shot but it's they're smiling they know him and he goes on up into the interior and you know these that this landscape and we know quite a lot about it in the mid 19th century there's quite a lot of evidence from the local gazetteers some inscriptional evidence that tells you about the lives of the ordinary folk up in these valleys you know how tough things were how things had declined in the previous 20 or 30 years how the exactions of the government and raising taxes that had been fixed in the previous rain were just couldn't be met how crooked local administrators were using fake weighing scales to you know take more than that quota of grain and how in one inscription how the villagers of tining had been defended by a local an ordinary local magistrate who'd fought for them and and got the central government to change that what was happening there and they directed a steely to to commemorate this loyal local magistrate had been full of humanity and it's still there you know fantastic he records their kind of communities and even traditional places sacred places this is the altar of heaven in a site in the Min Valley which he he was he describes in some detail as a place of pilgrimage by the local people of the indigenous religion and again these great portraits sometimes just snatched if you can ever snatch with a tripod and a wet collodion camera but I'm a shopkeeper on a balmy night in the the Min River just great isn't it I mean so human and these are the kind of people who were described in those inscriptions the ordinary folk native people you know the lot of in the south of China there are many indigenous peoples and who were lower down the social scale often performing the menial tasks and wherever he could he records them and all through his career in China astounding access to women as we'll see when we get to Beijing on the other end of the social scale all not all these images but the best ones are in in better book which I'm really really strongly recommend you to to get and he crosses over to Taiwan for most of the beautiful islanders as the Portuguese had called it and where he meets an old Scottish friend from Edinburgh James Maxwell who's a missionary doctor out there who acts as his translator with the local dialects in in Taiwan and they stay with the indigenous people even though he've been told you mustn't do that they're cannibals they kind of all shipwrecked sailors get eaten alive but he had a great time and found them very very hospitable again it's a whole other story almost but those images of the ordinary people stay with you from this this part of his journey the poor folk who the the the government gazetteer the local gazetteers the inscriptions the historians only give you a tiny sense of their lives but and of course he's interested in as a lot of Western commentators were in in in footbinding he records that for his Western audience I remember meeting a woman in Kaifeng in 1984 who still had bound feet and because it's easy to censure from our lofty position but what women do to their bodies in the West today is that any less awful than this I don't know what is done to women's bodies anyway so third of these great journeys is he goes up to Beijing and you remember he's been based in Hong Kong he's based himself sometime in Fuzhou the business is still ticking over low he will sell that he goes up to Shanghai and then at some point in 1872 I probably can tell you exactly when summer 1871 sells his business and he's sales he goes up to Shanghai and then 1300 mile boat journey to Tianjin and a short overland journey to Beijing and incredible amazing experience he's mesmerized by I do not have the space you said in one of his letters to relate a tenth of what I beheld or experienced in this great city and of course you read any of the great foreign guidebooks to Beijing in the 1930 20th century you get a sense of if Constantinople and Rome kind of compared in no way and really came up to the unbelievable life of this great city they were the great walls sadly demolished and very short sightedly demolished by Mao in the 1950s the enormous shanties outside the there's the Manchu city still Manchu Empire of course the rulers the Chinese sitting and outside enormous shanties of the poor the great ceremonial rows of lanes and rows he stays in the foreign quarter the legation quarter he records the he goes out to the great wall wonderful image and he just he records the destruction of the summer palace by the British and French forces in the Second Opium War in photographs that are really extraordinary even the ones that had not been demolished by the and looted by the Allied armies a few years before now overgrown and abandoned the giant terraces their buildings smashed their contents and looted of course still up still come up for sale in Western sail rooms the great temple on the terrace here destroyed only its pagoda surviving he records all this and now he's got access he's got a name you know and he's got access to some of the the leading people this is Prince Gong who was the younger brother of the old Emperor we've now got a child Emperor here of course but Gong was a modernizer pro-western Thompson's were impressed by him quick of apprehension always open to advice he said and comparatively liberal in his views is Thompson's view exactly that means in 1871 but some of these shots are I love these shots there's a humanity to these images even when they're great figures of state these are three great ministers of the Qing Empire in the foreign office the guy on the left Shan Guifeng would have been a famous fighter in the anti-opium policy he was a part of the modernizing movement that we've got to move China on you know and these were really hard working men of state where simple robes they're not taught you can see from their clothes they're not tarted up they're simply sitting there outside their office if you like Thompson says they were as fine-looking men as ever our own cabinet could boast and all of them had an air of quiet dignified repose and the middle guy don't show who he did some fabulous portraits I'm just single portraits one of them with his long pipe he was especially impressed by because he was a he was into science of technology and he was really trying to devise plans to improve irrigation and drainage across China to bump up to to modernize the state by bumping up agricultural production and and Thompson liked him Thompson liked him but he goes out into the street he can't resist the street so I'm as you can tell now I'm not talking to any script so I must must um I must watch the time he goes out into the street he just bumps into people the knife grinder the guy who comes around with grapes around the houses and the whole tongs shouting out fresh grapes fresh grapes come down come down you can see his origin is probably one of the southern tribal peoples isn't it a Muslim cook this fabulous series fabulous series of shots around one of the great markets and in Beijing with Mongolian traders and their camels and their tents you know they put the animals in the barns and they sleep outdoors you know and and and they're obviously street corners and we do the same as filmmakers actually I remember when we were filming story of China in Suzhou and we had a wonderful street corner there was canals there was a whole tongue there was an old Ming merchant's house and there was a stall where hot pancakes were made first thing in the morning and it just became a wonderful focus for images and he does the same if there's a little cluster of them all around this particular neighborhood this is great isn't it a Muslim butcher Muslims often butchers in the markets of Beijing just great with his assistant and they make panic they make they put them they do meat pancakes and the young boys assistant rolls the dough and they you know every life has a story even the rag and bone man poor poor guy who literally lives on scraps and you could say well it's a bit like imperialist Orientalist photography you know he's he's he's working in the framework of those Victorian ideas about ethnic types you know the kind of stuff you have in Victorian literature I see more than that in this I don't know how should I know but I think most of us have seen these and he's and the women in Beijing very interesting this this one an ordinary woman not at the poorest levels of society but you can see from her clothes and the clothes of her kids an ordinary woman and he says that he'd met her outside the butcher shop he'd met her outside the Muslim butcher shop and he'd asked her what she stand for a photo for him there's even somebody just walking into the shot just there can you see or maybe just sitting in the shot and then he goes behind the scenes in the women's quarters and here's a bunch of well to do manchu women connected with the the royal imperial establishment probably got to them through Prince Gong or one of those top guys who he'd photographed and here they are having a meal in their courtyard the servants are there standing there the women are talking it looks like a frozen moment doesn't it's incredible but you can capture that in the way he's done and some of these portraits are well very very touching the manchu bride that's become known as isn't it it's a haunting picture and he talks about the rights at some length about the life that she had to look forward to and remarks that in some sense the slave women who go on their errands are freer than them than the wives in that manchu imperial compound that's his own scribbles on the top of the plate extraordinary powerful human record then you think I mean this one just amazingly touching she's looking down she's in the garden almost floating and that kind of sadness in her face extraordinary glimpsed moment but achieved by a process that doesn't allow you to glimpse that's the crazy thing isn't it and then the next year he makes his yangsi journey in 1872 the summer and he goes by a scheduled steamer from Shanghai up to what they called Hong Kong which is now part of a woolhands I want woolhands in for sometimes in the books you'll see a confusion in Richard's book for example he's going to Han Zhou which of course is completely the wrong direction Han Zhou is on the the river below Shanghai there it's Hanco and that's the point where the steamers the regular steams that's as far as the steam services go on on the yangsi the ancient fortified town of Wu Chang shown on all the old maps and from there he sets off on local transport a journey which is actually all it's all another six or seven hundred miles by river I put this in I don't think the boat would have been that big on the the middle yangsi but it just gives you a sense he's now on a local boat on local transport with two American companions I dare say one of them was they spoke better Chinese than John did but and I'd love to know more about this journey it's an you know he he's very writes very amusingly about the married couple Mr. and Mrs. Wang who are the captain and his wife on the boat and and John and his two friends are a narrow bulkhead separated from the husband and wife over you know several weeks of travel and Mrs. Wang's voice he said come here before you really wanted to wake up you know and and the worst thing about is was they smoked stale tobacco long into the night which pervaded our chamber to the point where one could hardly sleep and anyway that there's there's his boat that's what it looked like when you unloaded all your photographic gear can you see that that's the photographic gear all bagged up you're taking it off from the boat to photograph a landscape and the effort that it takes just to make one great photograph so we must have assistance with him along with the boys on the boat because the boys on the boat that Mr. and Mrs. Wang are captains of the kind of people you still meet on the Grand Canal today by the way I'm gonna have been on a barge on the Grand Canal with a married couple and a lot of people you know they live on the boat they have a garden on the boat they grow herbs for their food and all that stuff so that's what it's like on long distance travel still on on the great river they've also got the boys and the boys when you can't the winds against you they take the long ropes out and they pull the boat and there's the cabin oh there he is nice actually isn't it see the carved wooden but this is their living room not their bedroom and you see how well wrapped up they are it was absolutely freezing he says freezing at night in his description of it resembles nothing more than well Richard Overton compared it to the Conradian journey for me it's a bit like you remember Philip Pullman's dark materials and the journey up to the Arctic and the the armored bears it's that sort of thing it was freezing let the reader imagine says Thompson let the reader imagine himself afloat in such a vessel as I have described on a river red like the soil through which it flows we're up out of the countryside now and from half a mile to a league in bread three miles let him conceive himself ascending the stream between low monotonous clay walls he will then have a picture of our craft and our surroundings for many days as we pursued our voyage towards the gorgeous that's where he's heading he gets into the mid-February 18th of February reaches Wushan Sichuan province 12 or 1300 miles by river from Shanghai and you enter the scenery of the gorgeous and well I put this in because this is a kind of legendary place in Chinese culture this is the place where China's greatest poet Dufu on his penultimate journey lived in his thatched hut and wrote 400 poems before his final journey to Changsha and his death so there's a lot of great Chinese literature about this place did he know any of that stuff I mean you don't really need to know this but John Davis's book on Chinese poetry was published by the East India Company Press in Macau in 1834 with transcriptions and did he know any of this it was a famous landmark I love the I love the range of photography don't you the intimacy of the portraiture and the staggering vistas I'm not even in this because I'm trying to stitch a few pictures together to tell you a story I'm not even chosen some of his best or most famous pictures perhaps but there you are entering the gorgeous and of course you can't see this anymore because of the three gorgeous down but okay so he leaves that behind he sails back down gets off goes to Nanjing where I just added this the world is being restored for the moment the great Imperial City the capital of the Ming the capital of the Taiping rebels have been devastated he speaks about square miles of the interior of the city which has got 30 miles circuit walls being completely leveled by the warfare and the destruction and everywhere rebuilding and he photographed a bit of the rebuilding and that photograph reminds me of what you see everywhere in China today which is antiquities being rebuilt in the same dreadful style whilst you know and he even goes up onto the battlements to see the arrival of Western artillery gatling guns and all that he even sets himself up demonstrating one just for fun of it okay we're almost there and that's pretty much the end of his Chinese story he's 35 years old now met so Del Camind in Ostra vita as Dante said had he agreed to go back home had he told Isabelle give me ten years let me do the yang see and then I'll bring all the pictures back the kids will be I'll see the kids grow up they're more kids he loved his family life was that the deal he never goes to the east again in fact he hardly travels again really although he lives virtually 50 years more it wasn't that now met so they'll come in of his life at all had it taken a lot out of him and was the malaria is something that constantly docked him we don't know back in London he publishes the lovely food Joe and the river men if you can get a copy now it probably cost you half a million pounds I was one went not 2012 for 350,000 and then he runs 600 print run of China and its people a novel experiment he says only years before the photograph is so perishable so difficult to reproduce and now the artist so far advanced we can reproduce many copies with the same felicity facility sorry the nearest approach that can be made to placing the reader actually before the scene which is reproduced and he also adds the Chinese people themselves as you'll see in this book are in many respects the most interesting and most remarkable race on the face of the earth it made his name it made his name he does all sorts of other things translates books on photography becomes a major figure in London society imagine that that's different man from the one we saw in the opening picture isn't it the marks of life on him perhaps although he's only 35 or is his nervousness will this picture work as I'm standing here and not behind the camera and 1881 his status is celebrated by becoming by appointment to Queen Victoria herself just all those the man who'd slept in Buddhist monasteries in the Ming River and cannibal villages in Formosa so they claimed who'd photographed and talked to and recorded the lives of slaves and boatwomen who'd shivered in a rat infested junk on the young sea reefed in stale tobacco smoke now has tea in Windsor who could have foretold 40 years ago he recalled in 1877 that the modest sensitive plate was destined to play a part so important in the history of progress in all those travels he'd had no government role no official status he was essentially just a lone traveler driven sustained by strength of character curiosity the desire to travel and the desire to see and I hope you've seen from this and you'll see even more if you go to bet his wonderful exhibition that it's one of the great bodies of work in the history of photography a final word from a non-expert if I may add my own thoughts and this is purely subjective and if Thompson were here tonight he'd probably say I'll come off it you know that's not what was in my mind at all but when you see these photos Thompson had been privileged to see and immerse himself in one of the most extraordinary spectacles in human civilization a great classical civilization still alive in all its beauty and cruelty and vitality its diversity is inequality its strengths its weaknesses its princes and Mandarin street vendors and gamblers and peep shows and camel drivers and boatmen and slaves he'd seen and been immersed in that and recorded it he had no reason to think that all of this this 2000 year empire would collapse in in only a few decades and that much of the traditional cult not all but much of the traditional culture he'd recorded high and low would be swept away in the 20th century by civil war and foreign invasion and revolution and and by the subsequent tide of materialism since but he tried hard to record it high and low in all its humanity and I think the reaction to to Betty's exhibition in China just shows you that he was successful in that people of China have gained much from the amazing successes of the last 40 years in lifting so many hundreds of millions out of the poverty that Thompson portrayed but at the same time I think you can't really see these pictures without a sense of loss sense of this world whose roots laid so deep in history and prehistory the creation of so many generations of ancestors a world that through all the upheavals of history come down to our time that it it's gone but as for the spirit of the people he portrayed so luminously as anybody will know who travels in China today that still survives and Thompson would still recognize the world of the people that he portrayed so powerfully 150 years ago and such a vivid talk it's really your your breath of knowledge and you've added so much to this context of life of of John Thompson setting in the times much more than what we can do in the exhibition you spoke straight from the heart thank you thank you very much so as Michael said because of the space my co-curator Marissa Chakabong here and I both have to curate a much smaller show so both the books as I am which is wonderful rarely seen never seen really maybe the Chinas to it more so at the books have a lot more plates in them but what we'd like to do now is maybe take a couple of short questions and then will all Narissa Michael I will move to the Brunei gallery so let's not get stuck here because they close at eight and what we'd like to do is continue to chat and take some questions over there so all three of us will be there so shall we have one or two no no question let's do Jim certainly when he goes up river he says that they he almost caused a riot in one or two places where people they'd got some idea that camera would you know take their soul or you know that it was threat to them and he felt in danger but I'm using danger in quite a few places actually I mean they took guns with them on the Yangtze and fired them to ward off pirates at one point so they had to protect themselves in one or two cases don't know whether he pays them it's debatable so we there was some someone said about the the bound foot maybe had to pay but I think often is through through fans through people in New Year for instance this the mantra official he's actually rich man but he taught him something about photography so in exchange was able to photograph his family something like that in a lot of these places you don't get that impression when he stays in the monastery and he you know eats with the monks for four or five days I don't get any impression that that's the relationship because he's not taking photographs all the time he's actually experiencing life you know I mean it's a surprisingly few photos really it's a long process to take a photo and so he's quite careful about choosing his moment but when he meets the lady with her kids outside the butcher's shop and ask her to pose did he give her a small we don't know he's certainly left not in not in Siam but in he definitely left stuff in didn't he didn't take everything back and there are a lot of things in Singapore that is mystery that's lost so because his brother was near too good so yeah we don't know what happened to them so there's a lot of material lost six months he spent in Penang in that first year didn't he so I don't know whether Larissa knows whole set of the that's been lost that's been lost yeah so there are issues about what happened it's very unlikely that they'd turn up the big collection the Eastman collection in America have got some plates I'm the University of Massachusetts there are collections in other places nothing like this but yeah we we do have a PhD student researching on John Thompson as part of the legacy of this exhibition so what what any questions are we done we're logging up all the questions too far and she's can't do everything it's amazing that there is no bar for you I mean I know Richard Richard's is the but it's not so well only one yeah all it's amazing given that yeah you know when you think of the great figures of science and arts and in the 19th century it's extraordinary interesting because of the reach that it has isn't it and you know we're not even talking about his the range of publications that he made for so long afterwards his influence in you know the books on China that he wrote you you even the technique of actually reproducing photographs well in a printed text you know rather because when he starts off they're simply gluing yes that's a number of print prints into a book form that's why and then it didn't work it's so so short a print run so his role in in the the development of the technology is fantastic his role in letting the Victorian public through his later books see what China was like he's a major major figure in 19th century culture we should mention that time around just before the print withdrawal of photos the street life of London which exposed the the homeless immigrants and the street traders very much like the decade before in China that's going to be on show at the Museum of London in the autumn yes I sort of I went and talked and they had no idea they have these but it's a wonderful set so they will be showing some yeah the portraits of the East End poor isn't amazing in fascicles first of all before it's published as a major volume but amazing that he could have done that in China and then come back to do it in his own backyard I think it's really interesting isn't the London ones are not as good as the Chinese ones and also there's this whole other work at the Royal Geographic Society of his role as a teacher of travel photography that's a whole other dimension so there's so many many great biography to be written so today yes I totally agree yes I'll mention his grave yes economics of this it seems that he's quite different from people like Beato who set up studios he doesn't look like he was pre-funded by the RGS like a lot of the no no is it an investment that he capitalizes no studio studio photography well he's built up a business from his first time in Palau and then in Singapore then in Hong Kong and the business continues right up till he sells it before he goes on the Yangtze you know so that's made up made a lot of money and publishes books you know and it publishes sells photographs charges society people for photography you know and I think it continues when he goes on his trips he's the there's he's got people working for him so it's a it's a you know you look at the Gazetteer for Hong Kong for the 1860 whenever it was and he's there as a photograph so you know he's making good money you know and it's not expensive to go take a boat to Fuzhou and then stay in a monastery all right we let's move and continue to chat over there but let me just mention that every exhibition we find out something new this time someone approached us called us to say they discovered John Thompson's grave which his own family didn't know anything about in two-ting at the Stretton Museum the great is the great son has killed over Moscow so we've just recently pulled together a committee and we are fundraising it's not the money that matters the matters that all of you can then get stay connected and do justice to you know at least show something about his legacy so there's some leaflets out there you can always email us thank you let's let's move over there let's all you've got the flyer yes thank you