Hyree Lake. Hill Station in the Himmalayahs. View of the Taj Lake with Assembly Rooms, Lhutse

This 1863 albumen print captures Hyree Lake (also known as the Taj Lake) at a hill station in the Himalayas, complete with its Assembly Rooms — a social hub for the British colonial elite who retreated to the cool mountain air. It was made during Samuel Bourne's very first year in India, likely on his inaugural Himalayan expedition that began on 29 July 1863, when he set out from Simla with a retinue of some 30 porters carrying his heavy wet plate collodion equipment across the Simla Hills. That single journey yielded 147 fine negatives, and this image almost certainly belongs to that remarkable haul.

Bourne arrived in Calcutta in early 1863 after giving up a banking career in Nottingham, driven by a passion for landscape photography honed in the English Lake District. Working with a 10x12-inch plate camera and the demanding wet plate collodion process — which required coating, exposing, and developing glass plates before they dried — in remote mountain terrain was an extraordinary technical feat. The result here is characteristic of Bourne's mastery: a serene, luminous view that balances natural grandeur with the quiet imprint of colonial life, placing a genteel British institution squarely within one of the world's most dramatic landscapes.