John Thomson (1837 – 1921) was a pioneering Scottish photographer, geographer, and traveller. He was one of the first photographers to travel to the Far East, documenting the people, landscapes and artifacts of eastern cultures.

Thomson traveled extensively throughout China, from the southern trading ports of Hong Kong and Canton to the cities of Peking and Shanghai, to the Great Wall in the north, and deep into central China. From 1870 to 1871 he visited the Fukien region, travelling up the Min River by boat with the American Protestant missionary Reverend Justus Doolittle, and then visited Amoy and Swatow.

He went on to visit the island of Formosa (Taiwan) with the missionary Dr. James Maxwell, landing first in Takao in early April 1871. The pair visited the capital, Taiwanfu, before travelling on to the aboriginal villages on the west plains of the island. After leaving Formosa, Thomson spent the next three months travelling 3,000 miles up the Yangtze River, reaching Hupeh and Szechuan.

Thomsons travels in China were often perilous, as he visited remote, almost unpopulated regions far inland. Most of the people he encountered had never seen a Westerner or camera before. His expeditions were also especially challenging because he had to transport his bulky wooden camera, many large, fragile glass plates, and potentially explosive chemicals. He photographed in a wide variety of conditions and often had to improvise because chemicals were difficult to acquire. His subject matter varied enormously: from humble beggars and street people to Mandarins, Princes and senior government officials; from remote monasteries to Imperial Palaces; from simple rural villages to magnificent landscapes.

Thomson gives a quiet almost stolid account of his travels: his record however is a good one, including both the interior of Formosa (which was then far from safe for anybody, foreigner, Chinese, or aborigine), and the Yangtze Gorges, into which region he was one of the first foreigners to penetrate: again, though Peking, the Great Wall, and the Ming Tombs are now part of every globe-trotter’s programme, this was not the case when Mr. Thomson visited them in 1871. But the most astonishing point about Mr. Thomson’s wanderings lies in the fact that he was accompanied by his camera. Considering that photography was then almost in its infancy, we hardly know which to congratulate Thomson on most, the skill which secured the fineseries of views and figures given in his book, or the fact which brought him and his camera back safe and sound to civilization, he had once indeed to imitate the fretful porcupine with the legs of his camera~stand; and once an assailant was “warded off” into one of the Yangtze rapids: but this was all.

Country prospects and city aspects, street scenes and domestic customs, native figures, costumes, and occupations, gamblers, watchmen, and opium smokers, monks, priests, coolies, and shopmen, fine ladies and their maids, the temples, the dwellings, the pagodas, and a great variety of objects are depicted in vivid and lifelike detail.

Thompson went far aside from the paths of ordinary travel, but encountered as a general thing only kindness and hospitality, though the hardships were considerable and the accommodations primitive.

Thomson describes the belief in dragons in one passage:

"The mountain enjoys a wide celebrity, as the great Ku-Shan monastery is built in a valley near its summit, on a site said in ancient times to have been the haunt of poisonous snakes or dragons, able to diffuse pestilence, raise up storms, or blight the harvest crops. One Ling-chiau, a sage, was entreated to put a stop to these ravages; so the good man, repairing to the pool in which the evil serpents dwelt, recited a ritual called the Hua-yen treatise. . . ."

A more readable work on China, its people, its life, its atmosphere, its infinite and picturesque detail, has not appeared this long time.