This article traces the circulation of photographs taken in Beijing in 1865 and 1866 by Georges Morache, a medical doctor stationed at the French legation. Including sights of the city, portraits and staged outdoor scenes depicting local trades, these pictures were disseminated from the mid-1870s in two directions simultaneously. While they were issued for about twenty-five years as wood-engraved reproductions in illustrated travel publications, they also circulated up until 2003 as prints and lantern slides within anthropological institutions. This article examines the diverse material and semiotic adaptations that these photographs were subjected to along their twofold circulation. Not only verifying the mutability of photographic meaning, this case also highlights affinities between the concerns of institutionalised anthropology, popular education and illustrated travel publications in the late nineteenth century. Ultimately, the dynamic circulation of these photographs in the West fulfilled a popular desire to scrutinise Chinese people and culture – a desire that was contingent on the informal empire upheld by western powers in China since the Opium Wars.