Tianjin

Felice Beato, Panorama of the Abandoned Fort, August 1860. (Photograph taken from The Face of China: As Seen by Photographers & Travelers, 1860-1912.)

Beato was known as a master of multi-plate panoramas, a difficult process at the time. This coastal fort near modern Tianjin defended the riverine approaches to Beijing. One August 21, 1860, as part of the Second Opium War, a combined Anglo-French force stormed and captured the fort. Beato, a Venetian traveling with a British passport, accompanied the army and made photos of China’s opening to the West (an early “embedded journalist”).

Before the imperial Summer Palace outside of Beijing was burned by British and French troops in October 1860, but after the looting that James Hevia writes about in his article “Looting Peking: 1860, 1900,” Beato managed to take the first and only photographs ever made inside the Summer Palace.

Previous to his arrival in China, Beato had produced a series of photographs of Constantinople, Athens, Malta, Cairo, the biblical sites of Palestine, and India. After China, he continued on to Japan, where he became one of the leading photographers there in the 1860s. Many of his Japan images were purchased by Charles Longfellow and appear in Christine Guth’s Longfellow’s Tattoos. Click on the link below to view an online album of his photographs from Japan.