Macao from Penha Hill. [caption title]

(Washington).: (A.O.P. Nicholson).. [1856.]. Tinted lithograph with added hand colour heightened with gum arabic, border with later ink rule, 15.1 x 23 cm, 19.8 x 26.2 cm (sheet), lower margin a little ragged, minor spotting to the margins, but in very good condition. A picturesque view of Macau from Penha hill, attractively coloured, prepared for Commodore Perry's "Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan..." (1856). The text notes: "It was from Macao, in the days of its opulence, that many of the commercial expeditions of the Portuguese were dispatched to Japan; and at Macao, too, the church of Rome had one of its most powerful ecclesiastical establishments, sustained by the dread might of the inquisition, which, in former times, exercised in the east the full force of its dark and cruel discipline. Now, however, the opulence and enterprise of its merchants are gone, and the awful dominion of the haughty ecclesiastics and their bloody tribunal has lapsed into the weak hands of a few impoverished priests, who meekly appeal to the pity, and barely live upon the bounty, of the reduced Portuguese population... " (Vol. I, p. 299) .