2003/001/001

This album shows the Burma (Myanmar) military campaigns of 1891/1892 taken by the official photographer Felice Beato, who escorted the army. There are photographs covering the Wuntho and Kachen Hills Expeditions. These include several shots of General Wolseley and photographs of local villages and their inhabitants. This catalogue was produced with support from the National Cataloguing Grants Programme for Archives.

1891-1892

3 boxes containing 52 photographs, extracted from 1 volume

sepia Photograph album of yellow felt cover with red leather spine and corners. All photographs have been removed, conserved, and stored separately in 3 boxes.

Open

none

Collection

Felice Beato (1832–1909), also known as Felix Beato, was an Italian–British photographer. He was one of the first people to take photographs in East Asia and one of the first war photographers. He is noted for his genre works, portraits, and views and panoramas of the architecture and landscapes of Asia and the Mediterranean region. Beato's travels gave him the opportunity to create images of countries, people, and events that were unfamiliar and remote to most people in Europe and North America. His work provides images of such events as the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the Second Opium War, and represents the first substantial example of photojournalism. He had an impact on other photographers, and his influence in Japan, where he taught and worked with numerous other photographers and artists, was particularly deep and lasting. Felice Beato arrived in Burma in late 1886, after Upper Burma had been annexed by the British. Beato, who had covered military operations in India and China, was probably attracted by the news of the annexation. While he arrived in Burma after the main military operations ended, he would still get to see more of the action, as the annexation by the British led to an insurgency which lasted for the following decade, such as the Wuntho rebellion. Wuntho rebelled in 1891 but the British quelled the uprising. As a consequence a force of 1,800 British soldiers under General Sir George Wolseley occupied the town of Wuntho. It seems likely that Beato was the official photographer covering the military operation. Felice Beato set up a photographic studio in Mandalay which became very successful.