The Inmost Shrine: A Photographic Odyssey of China, 1873

Journey to a land found only in memory.

Though we can readily travel to China today, it remains a country of hidden histories. How much more might have been lost had not the Scottish explorer John Thomson embarked on a photographic journey of China in the late 1800s. His mesmerizing photographs and stories are all the more remarkable given his subjects' deeply held superstitions about cameras.

The Inmost Shrine is a digitally remastered facsimile of Thomson's work, lovingly produced with the help of the George Eastman House museum. For this collector's edition, we were able to enlarge many of Thomson's portraits for the first time, uncovering extraordinary detail heretofore hidden. We then enhanced the text with rich gold coloring and bound it in a brilliant Chinese-red linen with gold foil. This is a grandly sized, coffee-table book of history—the better to savor, as the modern-day explorer Michael Meyer says in his new foreword, this "glimpse of the Great Middle Kingdom." Only from Levenger.

Click here to read some excerpts.