‘There never was anybody,’ wrote the Spectator in 1879, ‘who had adventures quite as well as Miss Bird.’ Bird was a 19th-century English traveller and writer who, in 1892, became the first woman to become a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. She took this photograph on her last long journey, up the Yangtze River to Tibet. Bird travelled by sampan – a flat-bottomed Chinese boat, as seen in the picture – and developed her photographs en route, washing her negatives in the Yangtze. ‘Photographing has been an intense pleasure,’ she said. ‘I began too late ever to be a photographer, and have too little time to learn the technicalities of the art; but I am able to produce negatives which are faithful, though not artistic, records of what I see.’ Hankou lies where the Han River meets the Yangtze, and during the late 1800s became an important centre of mercantile activity. It was merged with two other cities in 1927 to form modern-day Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province and the political, economic, financial, educational and cultural hub of central China

Photograph from the archive of the Royal Geographical Society