In “Visualizing the Anthropocene,” (2014) Nicholas Mirzoeff argues that “the aesthetics of the Anthropocene emerged as an unintended supplement to imperial aesthetics – it comes to seem natural, right, then beautiful – and thereby anaesthetized the perception of modern industrial pollution.” In a visual analysis of paintings of Claude Monet, Mirzoeff argues that the quality of light in paintings like Impression: Sun Rising, and Unloading Coal is the manifestation of a subconscious attention to industrial coal use.

Mirzoeff further notes that the bridge in Unloading Coal “is visibly a ‘higher’ level of existence, one dominated by commodities and artificially lit,” and adopts Richard Thomson’s suggestion that the image is constructed from the viewpoint of a train window as the train crosses over the river Seine (Mirzoeff, 223).

While late 19th century China was almost certainly not so polluted as to alter the quality of light in major cities, I would argue that Mirzoeff’s first two conditions apply – almost every image of a technological marvel appearing in the pictorial features plumes of coal smoke, and these technologies dominate the visual frame. One technique that artists like Wu Youru employed to make modern technology visually salient was the inclusion of smoke emerging from their smokestacks. In every image of a train appearing in Dianshizhai, billowing clouds of smoke trailing behind the locomotives produce a sense of motion through space.

In The Railway Journey: the Industrialization of TIme and Space in the 19th Century, Wolfgang Schivelbusch identifies a number of shifts in human perception and productive organization that were brought on by the advent of trains and railroads. One of these is the panoramic view afforded from within the cars of the train. The images appearing in Dianshizhai huabao use a panoramic layout, but they universally depict trains from an external perspective. There are no depictions of the landscape passing by as seen from within the train, or of the new social space within the rail car itself. Trains were relatively new and rare in China in the late 1800's, perhaps explaining why the ways the train transforms the landscape are seen from the outside. Whereas Schivelbusch cites depictions of telegraph lines that accompanied railways marking the speed with which riders perceived the passage of the landscape outside the train, Dianshizhai huabao uses the rectilinear forms of the railways and telegraphs to create a tonal juxtaposition between that which is "Chinese" and that which remains "foreign."

Images like that of the Wusong railway in Dianshizhai, and this image from Wu Youru's Shanghai travelogue Shenjiang shengjing tu, the story of a man crushed to death under a train in Tianjin, and the depiction of the opening of the Mersey Tunnel all feature nearly textbook examples of linear perspective by using a train and a railroad track diminishing in size as it approaches the vanishing point. That and the realistic depiction of the trains themselves indicate a new mode of visual representation that blends realistic perspective and a clear focal point with more traditional landscape techniques.

In the pages of Dianshizhai huabao, the spectacular new medium was very often the message. A new, highly public means of seeing the world regularly focused on spectacles, and their public nature. Just outside of the focal frame of the wondrous, and often fantastic events depicted in the pictorial, were the crowds of people gathered to take in the sight. Reflecting late Qing attitudes toward the Western world in general was a tension between admiration and opprobrium. This tension would emerge in the contrast between the visual tone of the lithographs, and the accompanying text, or between the body of the text and the final statements offering moral judgement of events.