Page:Peking the Beautiful.pdf/15

 temples and palaces, which until very recent years were closed to the general public Soon he is exploring the Dinter and the Summer Palace, the Hunting Park, the temples in, and far beyond, the Western Hills. Later he is tramping the Great Wall and the Ming Tombs. Soon he is looking for a house in which to settle down. He has "done" Peking, but cannot pull himself away from this City Beautiful. He must study further into these architectural glories which Religion and Power and Wealth have created. Such an ardent admirer of Peking is the author of this album of Peking the Beautiful. Mr. Herbert C. White, art director of the Signs of the Times Publishing House in Shanghai, arrived in this city in 1922, and shortly after joined his brother in Peking for language study. Both the brothers confess that they fell deeply in love with Peking from the first day of their arrival. During their one year of language study, they spent every holiday and every moment of spare time in exploring the great monuments and places of artistic and architectural interest. In that year they made seven hundred photographs of Peking and its vicinity. Since taking up his duties in Shanghai, Mr. White has returned to Peking every summer. His collection of photographs has now grown to three thousand, and it is from this vast collection that the present album of seventy pictures is selected. In 1925, two of his photographs were awarded first prize by the Henderson Photographic Competition : these now for the first and last plates of the present volume. Beginning with a Graflex camera, Mr. White has constantly studied the difficulties which he has had to encounter in photographing objects insufficiently lighted, or views too distant or too wide in range for the ordinary camera. Through sheer love of the art, he has gradually equipped himself to meet all kinds of emerqency situations. The strikingly beautiful picture on page 87, showing the palaces with the marble bridges, would have been impossible without the aid of a special lens. And the almost miraculous effect of the view of the Drum and the Bell Tower taken from the high White Dagoba (page 41) is only made possible by the use of unusual equipment Several of the views in this collection have already become records of history. The marble remains of the Benoist Fountain in the Yaan Ming Yuan shown on page 33, for example, have now disappeared from the scene where they were photographed. The Yuan Ming Yuan-of which the Jesuit Father Benoist wrote in 1767: "Nothing can com pare with the gardens, which are indeed an earthly paradise" – was destroyed in the war of 1860. Its glory is now preserved only in the records left to us by Benoist, Attiret, and others who visited it. What a pity it is, that of this earliest monument of combined architecture of the East and the best, so small a fragment is recorded by the modern art of photography) . I am convinced that such a collection of pictures of Peking as appear in this volume will not only serve the purpose of introducing or further endearing Peking to its Western friends, but will also help to teach the Chinese people to put aside their traditional prejudices and learn to admire and appreciate the monuments of Peking as a most valuable part of their artistic heritage. Let us forget the crimes that were committed in the palaces: forget those great ministers and censors of the Ming dynasty who died under