Octavo ca. 18x11,5 cm (7 x 4 ½ in). Two pages; black ink on laid paper, written in a legible hand. The text of the letter is clear, despite parts of three words on verso having been trimmed away in detaching the leaf from the second leaf of what was previously a bifolium. These include the last three letters of Colquhoun's signature. Letter with folds but overall in a very good condition.

In his letter Archibald Ross Colquhoun, an explorer, colonial administrator and author, talks about his work on a prospective book, dedicated to his travels in China and Burma in 1881-1882: the "narrative is to be 2 vols: and to be entitled | ACROSS CHRYSÊ | being the narrative of an exploration Through the South China Borderlands from Canton to Mandalay." In a short footnote he describes the derivation of "Chrysê" and afterwards asks Mrs MacGregor to "tell all yr. Friends to make certain of securing tickets for a certain lecture by a certain distinguished Ind<o> China traveller!" Seeing Mr MacGregor "amongst the audience at the c/commerce [i.e. Chamber of Commerce] on Wedy." brought back to him "days wh. Seem very far off now <..,>  and indeed hardly part of my own life!" Colquhoun's book was published shortly afterwards under the same title by Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington (London, 1883).

Colquhoun "joined the Indian Public Works Department in 1871 as an assistant surveyor. In 1879 he was secretary and second in command of a government mission to Siam and the Shan States, and in 1881-2 he travelled from Canton (Guangzhou) to Bhamo to find the best railway route between China and Burma. Widely regarded as an explorer of the first rank, his Indian administrative obligations prevented him from accepting an offer from Henry Morton Stanley to act as second in command of his Congo expedition <..,> He was in reality an accomplished writer of more than fourteen scholarly books and numerous articles on colonial administration, comparative ethnography, railway and canal construction, land settlement, trade prospects, and geopolitics and defence in the European colonial empires, Russia, China, east Asia, and the Americas. He was a regular contributor on these subjects to British, North American, and German journals and newspapers. He was one of the most widely respected travel authors of his time and he built up a series of influential friendships, counting sometime American presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Taft, and the Canadian imperialist Sir George Parkin, among his friends" (Oxford DNB).