This view shows a marble bridge on the Western shore of the Kunming Lake at the Summer Palace in Beijing. Built circa 1760, it is carved with delicate railings decorated with cranes and other animals, and has a single tall thin arch - tall enough to allow passage for the Qianlong Emperor's dragon boat. The lower left corner is signed in black: T. Child, 1877.It is from "Views of Peking and its Vicinity", a series of signed and dated full-plate images; of which 208 were numbered and captioned. Most were taken between 1875 and 1880, long before Peking (Beijing) had begun to modernize. The set was sold commercially and became an important visual reference for the old imperial capital. Child generally disregarded local life: he focused on presenting Beijing as a repository of traditional monumental architecture.
