Engineering Abroad: the Mersey Tunnel in Anglophone Media
While the image from Dianshizhai was an original lithograph, the artist clearly borrowed from the visual style used by western news sources.
Reports of the tunnel's planning, construction, and eventual opening appearing in Illustrated London News between 1881 and 1886 are stylistically very similar, featuring a panorama of the Mersey River teeming with steamships at the top of the page, and a cutaway view of the tunnel descending beneath the river. Both Chinese and English-language images include rudimentary depictions of the support and ventilation structure of the tunnel.
The Dianshizhai huabao image appears to combine these two images, featuring both a panoramic cutaway, and a more detailed illustration of the train itself moving through the tunnel.
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