Image of the Month for August: Bishop Montgomery on the Great Wall of China

Over the next month, Beijing will be much in the news as it hosts the Olympic Games.  In this image we look back almost a hundred years to a visit made by Bishop Henry Montgomery, Secretary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.  Before taking on this key role in co-ordinating overseas mission work Montgomery had been Bishop of Tasmania. “Monty”, Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein was one of his nine children. 

In September 1910, he set off on a seven month tour of the Far East, arriving in Beijing in October via Warsaw, Moscow, Irkutsk and Harbin.  In his diary he records, “No one could fail to place Peking among the greatest cities...  A sort of mystery clings to it which I cannot describe.” 

Of the Great Wall, where this photograph was taken, he writes, “...after four miles in a rickshaw we started in a saloon carriage, had lunch at 11 a.m. and then we were pushed up a steep gradient to the wall.  At last therefore I have seen the mountains round Peking, foggy weather preventing a view before.  They are fine craggy heights up to 4000 ft… I was photographed, with a mile of wall as a background.  The preservation of parts of the Wall is astonishing.  It really looks new, the stones just put together, the brickwork less durable at the top, especially the parapets.  Fancy! Parapets on both sides four feet high, for 1,500 miles!” 

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