'India, China &c.', late 1850s - circa 1881

A fine album including portraits of General Sir Robert Napier with Col. Wilberforce [Gr]eathe[..] and Sir Henry Harness with Col. Yule, a view of the Taj Mahal, an unidentified Indian landscape (D7), six views of the North Taku Fort, China, four other individual Chinese subjects and two panoramas of the interior fort all by Beato; views of Calcutta, the Hooghly River, Government House, the Residency Lucknow and the Governor General's elephant by Sach; the opening ceremony (1875) and other views of the Agra Canal and the Lower Ganges Canal, the latter including the construction of the canal signed Woodcroft in the negatives and with printed paper title labels; views at Futtehpore and Kashmir by Bourne; five photographs identified as Camp Roorkee 1869; Nynee Tal before and after the landslip of 1881; portrait groups of the Government of the North Western Region at Allahabad, 1875; a good oval still life of feathered game and a hunting group with a dead bear; and seventeen Egyptian subjects including Cairo, Alexandria, the Sphinx and the Khedive's gardens, three with the blindstamp of Meissner and one signed Hammerschmidt.

The photographs in this album by Beato include two views of Chinese gateways, the porcelain tower, Peking and a statue of Confucius as well as excellent examples from his series at the North Taku Fort, four of which show the bodies of Chinese soldiers in the foreground. When English and French forces stormed the Taku Forts in Peking on August 21, 1860 at the beginning of the Second Opium War, the photographer Felice Beato accompanied the British army led by Lord Elgin.