Charles Frederick MOORE (1837-1916), photographer, administrator, writer and notary public, was born in Manchester, England on 1 August 1837. In 1860 he began working in Hong Kong, at the Colonial Office’s Commissariat Department. He served as a paymaster for General Charles Gordon's forces in China during the Taiping Rebellion, and, for nine years, in the Imperial Maritime Customs Service in Beijing. Moore photographed extensively in north China and also around Ningbo and Jiujiang. By the early 1880s, Moore was a professional photographer based in Beijing and he produced a concertina album entitled ‘Views of Peking, Tientsin and Neighbourhood’ containing 48 prints with letterpress label captioning. C.F. Moore married Bibianne Yii at the British Legation in Beijing on 23 March 1868 and the couple went on to have eleven children. The Moore family moved to British Columbia, Canada in 1885, and Charles worked as a notary public. He died in Victoria BC on 21 June 1916. Surviving glass plate negatives (MS-3171) and an album (MS-3171.1) are among items held at the BC Archives, Royal BC Museum, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Notably among these negatives, there are more than a dozen photographs of the ruins of the European-style palaces at the Yuanmingyuan (圆明园) (‘Old Summer Palace’), Beijing.

See three blogs about Moore:

Charles Frederick Moore (1837-1916), a photographer in China  

Charles Frederick Moore’s photographs of the ruins of the European-style palaces (西洋楼) at the Yuanmingyuan (圆明)

Location/Dislocation – Admiral Keppel, the Chinese Buddha at Sandringham and three key photographs