“Hotel de China”, Union Pacific Rail Road

The objectphotographed as held, uncropped

Catalogue description

A long low building of rough vertical boards stands against a steep rocky slope, with a dark doorway at its centre and stacked timber and barrels along the base of the cliff above. The structure is workers’ housing built from the cheapest available material, put up where the line ran.

The title is the point of this record. Someone — the photographer, the publisher, or the men on the line whose joke it repeats — named a board shed “Hotel de China”, and the name was printed on a label and sold nationally. It is a small piece of text that carries a whole attitude: mock-grand French, applied to the quarters of Chinese railroad workers.

Filed in the Anthony catalogue as one of Views Along the Line of the Pacific Rail Road, the card belongs to the vast commercial genre of railroad progress views. The building is included as a curiosity along the route, in the same way a rock formation or a trestle would be.

Transcriptiontext on the object, as printed

FACE:
Pacific Rail Road.
American Views.

VERSO:
VIEWS ALONG THE LINE OF THE PACIFIC RAIL ROAD.
No. 7147
“HOTEL DE CHINA.”
UNION PACIFIC RAIL ROAD.
Published by E. & H. T. ANTHONY & CO.,
EMPORIUM OF AMERICAN AND FOREIGN STEREOSCOPIC VIEWS, CHROMOS, AND ALBUMS,
591 Broadway, opposite Metropolitan Hotel. New York.
[pencil, upper left:] M3

Historical context

E. & H. T. Anthony & Co. of New York was the largest American photographic supply house and stereograph publisher of the period, distributing views made by many photographers under its own imprint. Railroad view series were among its most commercially successful lines after the completion of the transcontinental route in 1869.

What is not known

• The face and verso are treated here as one object on the basis of sequential photography and the matching Pacific Rail Road series title; one intermediate frame is absent from the source set, so the pairing should be confirmed against the object.
• The label names the Union Pacific, while the mount face carries only the general series title; the specific location along the line is not stated.
• The photographer behind the Anthony imprint is not named on the object.
• The pencilled M3 is unexplained.