Hong Kong photographer’s 40 years shooting a changing China, and why it’s more important than ever to dispel West’s ignorance
Magnus Bartlett published some of the first guide books to Chinese cities following the country’s opening up in 1978, and has been returning ever since. He believes documenting China is as vital today as it was then
Born in the wind My mother, Elizabeth, was from a Scottish shipbuilding dynasty that began in 1750. The Alexander Stephen and Sons Shipyard on the River Clyde prospered building tea clippers – ironically perhaps, since I would end up in Hong Kong – which evolved off the back of the tea trade.
To my grandparents’ dismay, their daughter married an artist, and worse, a Catholic. She met my father, Londoner Aelred Bartlett, at the Slade School of Fine Art, in London.
I was born in the middle of the maelstrom of the second world war in a house that overlooked Scapa Flow (in Scotland’s Orkney Islands). Last year, after an absence of almost 74 years, I returned to the Orkneys and had a wonderful three days visiting the 5,000-year old Neolithic sites, which make the islands a Unesco treasure chest.
It would be hard to find a more romantic location to enter the world, far from the densely populated London where I was brought up. To this day I feel a sense of deep security when I experience a big wind; that’s one of the reasons I love living in Hong Kong, and on an island no less.
