Say Eggplant! Capturing the Smiles of Humble Workers

Hatty Liu

Photographer Xin Ting captures workers at their happiest

According to an apocryphal story about the late Qing dynasty (1616 – 1911), the formidable Empress Dowager Cixi invented the practice of smiling for the camera circa 1903.

When Yu Derling, the empress’s French-educated lady-in-waiting, brought back a camera from abroad, the empress believed that the black, smoke-emitting contraption could steal a person’s soul and print it on a piece of paper—so to get her employer to relax and smile, Derling asked her to say “cheese,” which the empress mispronounced as qiezi (茄子 “eggplant”).

This incident probably never took place, as Derling’s own memoir Two Years in the Forbidden City makes no mention of it, and actually portrays the empress as being quite enthusiastic about the technology. Still, saying “ qiezi ” before taking one’s photo is now common practice in China today, and there’s evidence that smiling has always been common in early Chinese photography .

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