The 1842 Treaty of Nanking (now Nanjing) was a peace treaty between Britain and China which brought to an end the first Anglo-Chinese War (also known as the First Opium War). The treaty gave Britain several concessions in China, including favourable trading terms for British merchants and the cession of the island of Hong Kong, which would remain a British possession until 1997.
This copy of the Treaty contains very early photographs of the Chinese part made by the miniaturist Henry Collen, who had recently taken up the new technology of photography. At the behest of the Foreign Secretary, Lord Aberdeen, Collen was commissioned to make two facsimiles of the Chinese part of the treaty via the process of ‘photographic drawing’ to accompany a fair copy of the English part. This facsimile, bound in red velvet, was presented to Queen Victoria in February 1843.