Captivating old photos of 1890s China by famed travel writer Isabella Bird given new life
- A republished version of ‘Chinese Pictures: China Through the Eyes of Isabella Bird’ contains 61 images from across China in the 1890s
- The photos from acclaimed British travel writer Bird range from classic architecture to dying men to a tower where poor people left dead babies
In 1894, a middle-aged British woman, independently wealthy from her work as a travel writer, took a course to learn how to use a camera. She planned to use one while travelling around Asia, in what would be her final trip to the region.
The trip was an opportunity for Isabella Bird to hear and see the rapids of China’s untamed Yangtze River, observe the country’s dainty women with bound feet and relish the architecture of arched bridges, temples and the Forbidden City.
The ailments that had dogged Bird throughout her life, though, would soon become too much for her, and the bearers she hired to carry her large, tripod-mounted camera, albumen plates – used for photography at the time – and chemicals ended up having had to carry her, too.
Bird was a solo traveller at a time when it was thought unusual for a Caucasian woman to travel without a companion. She had been married to a doctor named John Bishop, and she did not remarry after he died in 1886.
Her observations of America, Hawaii, Korea, Japan, China and then-Malaya (a set of states on the Malay Peninsula and Singapore) made her a literary success in England and opened people’s eyes and minds to these faraway countries.
