Daniell and his uncle, Thomas Daniell, were important artist-explorers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. They travelled throughout the East, above all in India, and published an influential series of illustrated volumes of ‘Oriental Scenery’. Both also exhibited large-scale paintings of Indian and Chinese subjects like this at the Royal Academy. Here, Daniell shows the warehouses or ‘factories’ run by European states trading with China at Canton, the contact zone between China and the West. It is shown as thriving, populous and ordered, with exaggeratedly large ships to suggest the volume of trade conducted there.