Pepohoan Female Head; Pepohoan Female Head; Pepohoan Female Head; Pepohoan Female Head; Pepohoan Male Head; Pepohoan Male Head

This collotype print showcases a curated selection of portraits taken by Scottish photographer and geographer John Thomson, originally published in the second volume of Illustrations of China and Its People (1873). Featuring more than 200 of Thomson’s photographs, the four-volume publication documents the peoples and landscapes of Qing-era China along with neighboring parts of East and Southeast Asia. The series is widely regarded as the first comprehensive Western visual survey of the region. Based in Hong Kong from 1868 to 1872, Thomson undertook several photographic expeditions across Qing China, with a particular focus on remote areas removed from Western treaty ports. This print reflects that interest, offering documentary evidence of the culturally distinct Plains Indigenous communities of Taiwan, referred to by Thomson and other 19th-century Western sources as “Pepohoan.” The six oval-cropped portraits specifically depict residents of Baksa, a former Indigenous village in central Taiwan (then known as Formosa), and the only Indigenous settlement Thomson visited on the island.

As a member of both the Ethnological Society of London and the Royal Geographical Society, Thomson aligned his photographic practice with Western efforts to use photography as a tool of scientific study. The portraits featured in this print exemplify the 19th-century colonial practice of recording physical features, such as facial structure and hairstyle, to construct so-called racial "types" through the white gaze. While the original caption accompanying this illustration acknowledges the growing influence of Qing China on Taiwan—visible here, for example, in the man's queue hairstyle—Thomson fails to recognize how his own ethnography participated in the larger colonial dynamic.