Collections : [Yale University -Yale Center for British Art]

This representation illustrates the fashion of British colonial modes of transport by the early 1850s. Chinese figures carry a palanquin, while a horse-drawn carriage also charges by. Happy Valley was the site of a British racecourse and a Protestant Cemetery (see watercolor "11").

The Hong Kong Cemetery (also known as the Protestant Cemetery and the Colonial Cemetery) was opposite the oldest racecourse in Hong Kong in Happy Valley, and in the middle of a line of cemeteries that included the Roman Catholic cemetery (founded 1848) and later Islamic cemetery (1870). In 1853 (a year after this view), the captain and crew of the HMS Cleopatra erected a monument to Scottish trader and explorer Robert Burns, grandson of the poet, who was killed by pirates of the Tunku River (for which the Cleopatra was dispatched to avenge, see watercolors '25' and '27').

Since the Song Dynasty, ocean-going junks of this size made trips to Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean.