The revolution that brought down the Qing dynasty one hundred years ago, relegating China's imperial system to the dustbin of history, was a sprawling and complicated series of events. It still lacks a compelling, wide-angle, English-language account of the caliber of God's Chinese Son (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), Jonathan Spence's treatment of the Taipings. Perhaps this newly published collection of photographs of the conflict will inspire someone to write one. The photographs, though, do an excellent job of illustrating the challenges of producing a coherent narrative about the 1911 Revolution. Historian Hanchao Lu provides basic contextual information about each image, and together they offer rich detail on Chinese life and death in the years before and after 1911. No clear conclusions on the nature of the political and social transformations occurring at that time emerge, however. The pictures tell a hundred little stories, tragic and mundane.

Francis Stafford, as Lu tells us in an introductory essay, was a professional photographer from the United States who worked for Shanghai's Commercial Press between 1909 and 1915. During those six years, he traveled extensively across China. The photographs he took and collected were preserved in his family. His grandson worked with Lu to select 162 photographs for this volume. No doubt due to the state of the collection, Lu is not able to provide the dates and locations of the images, although many, such as the shot of the Great Wall that leads off the volume, are recognizable. Some of the pictures may not have been taken by Stafford himself. He appears in a few of them, and it seems unlikely that Stafford took the studio photo of Yuan Shikai that appears on p. 124. Historians of photography will be frustrated at the lack of discussion of what can be known about the circumstances under which these images were taken. It is not clear that the photograph collection itself—along with whatever supplementary records exist—is available for scholarly analysis. The growth in the number of websites offering scholars access to visual materials with contextual “metadata” is a promising trend for historians. For one fine example, see Lafayette College's East Asian Image Collection (http://digital.lafayette.edu/collections/eastasia).

Still, there is an important place for books such as this one. The complete package—the images themselves, Lu's concise and excellent synopsis of the 1911 Revolution with suggested additional reading, the lively captions that frequently draw attention to the framing or arrangement of subjects chosen by the photographer and suggest reasons for it—provides a thought-provoking entrée to this period in Chinese history. The photographs of the aftermath of the 1911 fighting around Wuhan are gruesome. Severed heads on display, stripped-bare corpses, and a scavenging dog illustrate the horror of armed conflict. Compared to the soldiers of regional armies in the 1920s and 1930s, it is surprising to see how well uniformed and healthy-looking the soldiers on both sides of the 1911 battles were.

Many of the photographs in this collection do not focus on the battlefield. Stafford chronicled daily life in peacetime, as well, and the book includes many photographs of his co-workers and the offices at the Commercial Press, as well as one taken during the funeral of the assassinated head of the Press, Xia Ruifang. Shanghai is very well covered, and there are pictures from Suzhou, Nanjing, Beijing, and Shenyang, as well. The quality of printing and editing is very good.