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”).
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