In 1866, Emil Vasilyevich Bretschneider was posted to China, where he then spent eighteen years, as physician to the Russian Embassy. Not content simply to fulfil his medical role, he exercised his extraordinary energy in numerous fields. Very quickly Bretschneider acquired a good knowledge of the Chinese language, spoken and written, and early in the 1870s he published a serious monographic study on the historical-archaeological exploration of Peking. He then turned his attention to historical geography, and to the history of botanical research in China – a subject on which he would later write several key works and earn worldwide fame.

During his time at the embassy Bretschneider was especially interested in the daily lives of the Chinese people around him; curiosity and scientific rigour made him a natural ethnographer, and he appears to have desired to understand as profoundly as possible the life of the Chinese people. To make a visual record of what he saw, Bretschneider commissioned from Chinese artists a huge number of paintings detailing all aspects of daily life.

The original paintings are now held in the archive of the St Petersburg branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, one of Europe's most important collections of oriental manuscripts. The paintings have only recently been made available for publication, and a selection capturing a vivid and authentic picture of everyday life in Peking – with its acrobats, Buddhist monks, dentist and bonesetters – is published here.