Lost China

About this book

"This photographic reportage of China, dating from the early part of the nineteenth century, is the work of Father Leone Nani. These unpublished images bring back to life for us the people, places, traditions and culture of an empire that has long since disappeared." "Leone Nani (Albino, 1880-1935) was a young man of only 23 when he left for China. He was bound for the mission of Hanzhong, a distant Apostolic Vicariate located in southern Shaanxi, an inland region lying between the Great Wall and the Han river. He remained in China from 1904 to 1914, and in those ten years he visited many villages where he discovered social and cultural realities that other Westerners had not easily come across." "Making use of a mobile studio and working primarily with glass plates that he then developed and printed on his own, Nani took photographs of young couples, families, dignitaries, peasants and artisans. By immortalising scenes of daily life, religious ceremonies, architecture and landscapes, he showed himself to be an excellent observer of local habits and customs as well as being an outstanding reporter. This extraordinary material, splendidly reproduced in bichrome plates, bears witness to one of the most complex periods in the history of the millenary Chinese Empire: a period of violent transition marked by the fall of the Qing dynasty and the advent of the Republic." "Father Nani reproduced features of China that would have otherwise remained unheard of or known only from the descriptions of travellers."--BOOK JACKET.