Book Description

This book provides an addition to the small but growing body of literature on the practices of photography in China. Using a collection of a surviving nineteenth century photographs of Beijing held in the collection of the Oriental Museum, University of Durham, the author explores both the cityscape as it was recorded by two Scottish photographers and the interplay of personality and professional identities within the Foreign Legation quarter during a thirty-five year period. Three people are central to the book: the professional photographer John Thomson, the amateur photographer and missionary doctor, John Dudgeon and Stephen Bushell, physician to the British Legation, pioneer historian of Chinese art and original owner of the collection of the photographs. They provide the context and practice and provenance for the photographs and offer insight into the life of the small contingent of Westerners who resided within the walls of China's capital. here for the first time, the former revealed as an important contributor to the development of photography in China, the latter a major influence on the formation and interpretation of a number of important collections of a Chinese art in Britain and America. This book will be of interest to historians of photography, art, architecture and China during the late nineteenth century. [This] erudite study... is of interest not only to art historians, but also to historians of China and of comparative colonialisms.