A city wall tower and very clearly, the moat, Beijing, 1840-1860: just one of the many photos from around the Pacific, circa 1840-1940, now to be found online at the National Gallery of Australia’s Picture Paradise exhibition.  Well worth browsing through this eclectic collection of shots of everything from Australian aborigines to Javanese dancers, a white European man in Chinese dress in a Hong Kong studio, bathers on the Ganges, and views of Fuzhou, in “daguerreotype portraits, mass-produced views and portraits on paper made possible by the revolutionary wet-plate and dry-plate glass negative-positive process, and prints from the modern era of small format film cameras and photojournalism.”

Start at the themes page and click through to the different collections, and be prepared for the dizzying format of photos sliding into view from left to right.  I wish they wouldn’t do that.

(via The Asian Studies WWW Monitor: Aug 2008, Vol. 15, No. 9 (283))