Thomas Child, Great Wall, China, ca. 1875
Amateur photographer Thomas Child (1841–1898) worked in Beijing as a gas engineer from 1870 to 1889. A British citizen, Child photographed in and around the capital during his free time. Although his early photographic career included portraiture, later work focused almost exclusively on Beijing’s monuments. These images, taken with a large-format camera, are some of the best documents of nineteenth-century Chinese architecture, much of which has been destroyed.
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