"With 40 illustrations in colour by the Author". Publishers blue cloth with gilt title and gilt vignette. Gilt title and gilt vignette to spine. Gilt top page-block, others untrimmed. Sporadic foxing. Minor wear to cover. xiii, 203 pages. Colour frontispiece plate with captioned tissue-guard. Title vignette. 39 full-page colour plates with captioned tissue-guards. Liddell (1860-1925) was a British landscape painter who traveled extensively in China, where his family had business interests. A contemporary advertisement for this book says that "the author was actually admitted to parts of the Imperial Palace never before opened to a European, and his work [in China] is absolutely unique." A charming travelogue that includes chapters and attractive full-page colour plates from the authors' paintings while travelling through Hong Kong, Shanghai, Hangchow, Peking, Tientsin and many other areas of China in 1908. He had travelled to the East for the express purpose of painting some of its scenery and found himself to be the object of much attention when he set up his easel to paint from nature, as he himself says "One has only to think of how the crowd would gather if a Chinaman, in national costume, were to set up an easel and begin to paint in one of our own streets, to realise a little of what I had to put up with. I had great crowds of curious natives to manage and to humour, and in other cases I had to persuade the officials to allow me to sketch. Their whole idea, it seemed to me, was that a foreigner sketching meant making maps and plans for some ulterior purpose." Shipped and insured [courier liability] by recorded delivery with UPS.