BORGET (Auguste). China and the Chinese. Paris: Goupil et Vibert, 1842. - In-folio, 558 x 383: title, (3 ff.), 26 plates. Brown half-chagrin, smooth spine decorated (period binding). First edition, dedicated to King Louis Philippe, of this beautiful and rare album comprising a title and 25 plates with 32 subjects drawn by painter and illustrator Auguste Borget (1808-1877) and lithographed in two shades by Eugène Cicéri (1813-1890). Borget undertook a long trip around the world from 1836 to 1840. He spent ten months in China, notably in Macao, Canton and Hong Kong, where he made numerous drawings that were used to illustrate this album. An explanation of the plates, in the form of "fragments of unpublished letters by the author", appears at the front. Balzac praised Borget and the work in a book review published in the daily La Législature in October 1842: "I came home, and found China and the Chinese: thirty-two lithographs done in two shades on the drawings of a Berrichon, by a young man whose name is dear to the arts and artists, Cicéri [...]. [...] From lithograph to lithograph, there was a change in my mind. By the third, I could still hear the Stella maris of Édouard Ourliac's college friend; but by the seventh, I could no longer hear it; by the twentieth, I was in the waters of China ; and, by the thirtieth, I perfectly understood that the King of the French would have accepted the dedication of this work, would have bought the Chinese landscape we saw at the last Exhibition, would have ordered a round table from Sèvres, decorated with twelve views of China to be painted on their homeland, porcelain! [...] All those who read the fragments of letters that precede these thirty-two drawings will regret that M. Auguste Borget did not publish all the letters he wrote about his trip to China." Unbound copy, numerous rubs from use, corners dulled, bottom cap missing. Text leaves browned, foxing. Mottling on endpapers. Slight wetness on the edges of the last two plates.