PEKING BETWEEN 1800 AND 1900

Foreigners began to settle in Peking after 1840, an unhappy date for Chinese history since it brings to mind the First Opium war, i.e. the beginning of the haphazard colonisation of the Empire and , in the end, the acceleration of its fall an 1911. Those seventy years, however, were decisive in giving China the necessary incentive to leave behind its medieval decrepitude and in sowing the seeds of the modern era in Chinese society. That year, which also coincides with the growing popularity of the extraordinary invention of the Frenchman Daguerre - photography - saw the start of the era of documentation with snapshots that brought about a rapid decline in patient artistic engraving. The first photographs of China date back to around the mid Nineteenth century. The author has managed to collect several hundreds of photographs taken in Peking between the mid Nineteenth century and the early Twentieth century. In addition to the photographs, however, he has also collected engravings ­ no longer copied from drawings as in the past, but from daguerrotypes ­ which represent the places described by venturesome travllers in those years with greater realism. A portrait of the old Peking emerges that is always fascinating and has a touch of extraordinary exoticism.