Untitled (Hong Kong, St. John’s Cathedral, from the Parade Ground, H.M. Regiment on Parade)

From the Cleveland Museum of Art record

Since the customers for landscape photographs were mostly Westerners, most Chinese studios focused on portraiture. Lai Fong, however, offered views of China, which set him in competition with European photographers who had monopolized that market. Here, soldiers from the Queen’s Regiment march on the Parade Ground, which sits below the Anglican St. John’s Cathedral. The picture presents two major organs of social control used by the British Empire in its colonies: the church and the military. Lai Fong was the most successful nineteenth-century Chinese commercial photographer in China.