History of photography in China 1842-1860

We cite from the cover :
"This is the first comprehensive history of the early years of photography in China. Deeply researched, it brings together Western and Chinese sources and introduces significant new information on the photographs and the photographers alike. The earliest recorded use of a camera in China was in 1842, towards the end of the First Opium War. Following this conflict, increasing numbers of foreign traders, diplomats, colonial officials, military personnel and missionaries settled in Hong Kong and in the treaty ports along the China Coast. Among these visitors were photographers who captured on camera the land and people of China during an era of unprecedented change and, in the 1850s, the great upheavals of the Taiping Rebellion and the Second Opium War. A number of Chinese photographers were active too from the 1840s and their work is also described here. The images themselves are extremely diverse, because the photographers had different motives for using their cameras and ranged from professional portraitists and the celebrated war photographer, Felix Beato, to soldiers and pioneering amateurs struggling to use their clumsy photographic equipment in often adverse conditions. About 150 photographs, drawn from institutional and private collections from all over the world, are illustrated in this book, many for the first time. The text includes biographies of more than forty photographers working in China up to 1860, extensive documentary notes and valuable listings of early stereoviews of China."
"An acclaimed international authority on the subject, the author has been collecting and researching nineteenth-century Chinese, Japanese and Korean photography for over twenty-five years. He has lectured in Britain, France, Switzerland, Canada, the United States, Japan, Hong Kong and Shanghai. His previous books include Caught in Time: Great Photographic Archives, Japan (1995, with Sir Hugh Cortazzi), Early Japanese Images (1996), Korea: Caught in Time (1997),Japan and the Illustrated London News 1851-1890 (2006), Photography in Japan 1853—1912 (2006), and, published by Quaritch in 2006, Old Japanese Photographs: Collectors' Data Guide. Terry Bennett is currently working on a study of photography in China during the 1860s and 1870s, continuing the story he begins in this volume."
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Facsimile view of Tabel; of Contents, please click URL
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