This book casts a unique light on the tribal minority peoples of China’s southwestern frontier region. These charming and realistic paintings, from the Miao albums of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provide a wealth of ethnographic detail on the ordinary, everyday lives of people like the Hmong and other Miao groups, the Yao and the Yi, and the speakers of the Tai languages. We see them transplanting rice, hunting and weaving, performing acts of robbery, marrying, celebrating festivals, and mourning the dead. Although the pictures may have been produced partly in response to China’s mission to colonize and subdue the southwest, there is a lively warmth and sympathy in many of these images which speak to a common understanding of humanity. Here, for the first time in print, an entire Album has been reproduced, together with samples from two other Albums, from the collections at the British Library. The illustrations are accompanied by their Chinese text and translations, ethnographic notes and an introduction by Nicholas Tapp.