The sextant has an anodized brass triangle-pattern frame and a wooden handle. The tangent screw and clamping screw are on the back of the index arm. The instrument has four green shades and three green horizon shades. Index-glass adjustment is made by a screw and on the horizon-glass by a worm gear and a capped milled knob.

Attached to the sextant is a magnifier on an 83mm swivelling arm, with a frosted glass shade. There is also a threaded telescope bracket in two parts, fitted for correcting collimation error. It has perpendicular adjustment made by a rising-piece and a milled knob. The telescope is 186 mm in length with an inverted image, and two parallel cross wires, which are broken. A second telescope is 84 mm long with an erect image (star finder). It has a green shaded eyepiece and an adjusting pin. Several unidentified parts are missing.

The instrument has a polished brass limb with an inlaid silver scale from -5° to 150° by 10 arcminutes, measuring to 125°. The sextant has a silver vernier measuring to 10 arcseconds, with zero at the right.

The sextant is contained in a square fitted wooden box with a blank brass plate on the lid, lined with green textile, and containing a trade label for George Lee and Son, Portsmouth (before 1912). There is also in the lid a Class A Kew Observatory certificate of examination, dated 1892.

This instrument was captured by the donor, then a midshipman in HMS ‘Centurion’, from the naval school at the Pei Yang Arsenal, near Tientsin, China, during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. The Army and Navy Co-operative Society Ltd in London was retailer. It is likely that they obtained their sextants from a local manufacturer like Elliott Brothers who, like the Society, were situated in the Strand, or from Henry Hughes and Son or Heath and Co.