Zhuang Xueben

As Chinese art critic and writer Zhu Qi says, “Zhuang Xueben’s ‘anthropological’ photography is comparable to any western photography of its kind in the last century.” These works from the 1930s represent one of the richest periods of Zhuang Xueben’s photographic work. At a time when China itself was in turmoil, caught between the Japanese invasion on the east and north and British dominance in Tibet, the western border regions of China were vital to China’s security. They were also virtually unknown lands to most Chinese, and the government itself. Curious, perhaps deeply patriotic, Zhuang Xueben, as a young man, was conscious of the importance of these regions and their fascination.

Zhuang Xueben (traditional Chinese: 莊學本; simplified Chinese: 庄学本; 1909–1984) was one of China's first ethnographic photographers. In the 1930s, he left his native Shanghai and travelled to western China to photograph the minority people in four provinces: Sichuan, Yunnan, Gansu, and Qinghai. During the almost ten years of ethnographic research, he took more than ten thousand photographs and wrote a vast amount of materials including research reports, travel notes, and journals. In 1941, he held a photographic exhibition on Xikang in several Chinese cities and about 200,000 people attended the exhibit. These photos and written materials have become a valuable source for anthropologists to the ethnic groups in western China.

Zhuang Xueben was born in Shanghai in 1909. He left the city in 1930 and began to photograph the minority regions of western China. He mainly travelled in the provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan, Gansu, and Qinghai. Although he accompanied the 9th Panchen Lama on his journey to Tibet, he was never able to enter Tibet because of political difficulties between Tibet and China. He lived for long periods of time with the 16 minority groups he photographed, each of which spoke a different language. Many of his subjects were Tibetan Buddhists. The first trip took him nine months.