[Photo provided to China Daily/Keystone View Company]

All the photos were made by the Keystone View Company, a major distributor of stereographic images in the early 20th century.

Garrison did not remember seeing these photos as a child. "I think she must have kept them because she enjoyed looking at them," he said of his mother.

His mother, a teacher whose first job was in a country school near Tecumseh, Nebraska, was in possession of the photos for decades after she got them from the state superintendent's office. She and her husband finally got to visit China in the mid-1980s on an Asia trip that took them to Thailand, Hong Kong and Beijing.