The History of China Lost in the West: the Late Qing Dynasty 1842-1873 Recorded in the "Illustrated London News"

The British "Illustrated London News", founded in 1842, was the world's first weekly magazine with pictures as its main content. He used delicate and vivid dense-line woodcuts and lithographs to reproduce major events around the world as fast as the technical conditions of that era could achieve. The Pictorial paid close attention to the Chinese Empire from the beginning and sent a large number of painters and reporters. From 1857 to 1901 alone, it sent back thousands of sketches and hundreds of thousands of words of written reports about China to the United Kingdom. Most of them are on-site eyewitness reports and are first-hand original data; their views and opinions on historical events are often inconsistent with those in Chinese historical materials, which provides us with an objective reference for studying history; some of the events and details of Chinese social life they report are often blind spots in Chinese historical materials; the systematicness and continuity of their reports are also beyond the reach of many other Chinese and Western historical materials.