Around 70 glass-plate negatives feature the Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908), China’s notorious head of state during the final decades of the imperial era. Cixi used photographs to enhance her image at the very moment photography was becoming a mass-media vehicle and the Qing dynasty (1644 to 1911) was struggling to survive in a hostile imperialistic world. Images
presented in this unit are courtesy of the
Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
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