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.

How does China project its image in the world? Why and how has the world come to form certain impressions of the Chinese and their way of life? These are issues that preoccupy Chinese citizens in the globalizing 21st century as they travel overseas, riding on the capacity of the country’s newly acquired economic power. In Visualizing China, the authors join forces to launch a broader inquiry aimed at a synergistic understanding of the larger story of visuality in modern China. The essays cluster around several nodal points including photographs, advertising, posters and movies, spanning from the 1840s to the 1960s, and devote special attention to modern Chinese practices in the visualization of things Chinese.

The Historical Dictionary of Modern China (1800-1949) offers a concise but comprehensive examination of the political, military, economic, social, and cultural development of modern China. Instead of focusing merely on the political elites of China, this reference covers a variety of significant persons, including women and ethnic minorities; new historical concepts; cultural and educational institutions; and economic activities. Drawing on newly-available records, including a large mass of governmental and family archives, the narratives presented reveal new facts, offer a new interpretation in accordance with China's modernization process during the late Qing period, and a revisionist perspective on the Republican history. The chronology records not only political and military events but also other experiences of the Chinese people. The bibliography gives prominence to current literature on China's drive towards modernization and appendixes provide the reader with detailed information on China's cultural and economic transformation.

Accompanies an exhibition held at the J. Paul Getty Museum, 8 February-1 May 2011.

In the early nineteenth century China remained almost untouched by British and European powers - but as new technology started to change this balance, foreigners gathered like wolves around the weakening Qing Empire. Would the Chinese suffer the fate of much of the rest of the world, carved into pieces by Europeans? Or could they adapt rapidly enough to maintain their independence? This important and compelling book explains the roots of China's complex relationship with the West by illuminating a dramatic, colourful and sometimes shocking period of the country's history.

With its lush and diverse landscapes, ancient ruins, and stunning architecture, China is a photographer’s dream. Exploring this visually rich and evocative country, Photography and China highlights Chinese photographers and subjects from the inception of photography to the present day. Drawing on works in museums, and archival and private collections across China, the United States, Europe, and Australia, Claire Roberts locates images from commercial, art, and documentary photography within the broader context of Chinese history. She focuses on the images as well as the studios and individuals who created them, describing the long tradition of Chinese artistic culture into which photography was first absorbed and subsequently expanded. As she recounts the stories of practitioners—from China and overseas—who were agents in that process of change, she also examines the commercial, political, and artistic purposes for which they used photography. Featuring one hundred striking, little-known images, Photography and China will make a significant contribution to photography, Chinese art, and twentieth-century history.

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris examines a history of contact between modern Europe and East Asia through three collectors: Henri Cernuschi, Emile Guimet, and Edmond de Goncourt. Drawing on a wealth of material including European travelogues of the East and Asian reports of the West, Ting Chang explores the politics of mobility and cross-cultural encounter in the nineteenth century. This book takes a new approach to museum studies and institutional critique by highlighting what is missing from the existing scholarship -- the foreign labors, social relations, and somatic experiences of travel that are constitutive of museums yet left out of their histories. The author explores how global trade and monetary theory shaped Cernuschi's collection of archaic Chinese bronze. Exchange systems, both material and immaterial, determined Guimet's museum of religious objects and Goncourt's private collection of Asian art. Bronze, porcelain, and prints articulated the shifting relations and frameworks of understanding between France, Japan, and China in a time of profound transformation. Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris thus looks at what Asian art was imagined to do for Europe. This book will be of interest to scholars and students interested in art history, travel imagery, museum studies, cross-cultural encounters, and modern transnational histories.