ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that China owed as much to Chinese as outside ingenuity, and its most important sources both voice and visualize the Chinese discourse that contributed to photography’s invention in China. It discusses photography as an invention in China. The chapter situates the earliest Chinese technical literature in its diverse social contexts. It turns to a body of texts that progressively provided up-to-date technical information translated into Chinese via collaborations between foreign visitors and local scientific experts, and joined autochthonous and imported knowledge to construct a scientific discourse paying attention to objective vision and the work of the human eye. The chapter considers how photography’s history was reviewed in Chinese opinion one hundred years after the announcements of the medium’s existence in 1839. Cast images devoted considerable space to the camera obscura, comparing the device to already questionable notions of ocular vision.
