Prints

The Mandarin Chungwun Hesing, visitor to England by the Royal Chinese Junk Keying. Now lying at the Temple Bar Pier, Strand, London.

Hesing  Xi Cheng or Xi Sheng), was mandarin who travelled in the Keying, which was the first Chinese junk to sail from Hong Kong to New York and then to London. The Keying was a three-masted Chinese trading junk that sailed from Hong Kong  December 1846 with a mixed crew of Chinese and British sailors. The vessel had been purchased surreptitiously by a conglomerate of enterprising English businessmen. It was placed under the command of Captain Kellett with the intention of carrying curiosities and merchandise to England and thereafter serving as a kind of floating museum.

Selous painted the mandarin Hesing in a splendid oil painting of the opening of the Great exhibition in 1851.The painting is in the V&A Museum, London.

Henry Courtney Selous was an English painter, illustrator and lithographer. He was the son of Gideon "George" Slous, a Flemish portrait and miniature painter, who was a pupil of John Martin, an important and influential English painter of the 19th century.

Scarce lithograph.