Charles Frederick MOORE (1838-1916), photographer, administrator, writer and notary public, was born in Manchester, England, on 29 August 1838 (according to a baptismal record). 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. 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 blogs by Jamie Carstairs: Charles Frederick Moore (1837-1916), a photographer in China and Charles Frederick Moore’s photographs of the ruins of the European-style palaces (西洋楼) at the Yuanmingyuan (圆明).
