In 1979, after a 15-year struggle to get a visa, photojournalist Eve Arnold took the first of her two trips to China, a journey she had long wanted to make. “From the very beginning of my becoming a photographer,” she once wrote, “high on the agenda was a plan to go to China.”

For many years, it was impossible. Red China, as it was then known, and America, the place of Arnold’s birth, were sworn enemies. But if anyone could break that deadlock, it was Eve Arnold. She’d had a distinguished career as one of the first women to join the prestigious Magnum Photos (founded by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa, among others). Her trademark was to tell a great, visual story, to use her camera as an instrument for capturing lives.

She did so, with great dignity and precision, in the Middle East, South Africa, Afghanistan and America. And she was tenacious. She had already taken on difficult assignments: as a young photographer given a camera by a boyfriend, she had ventured into Harlem to capture social life. She had also gone behind the veil to record the lives of Muslim women and their customs and practices.

But still, she slept with books of China by her bed. She planned the regions she would visit. She looked at maps. “I did not get a visa, but it did not stop me dreaming about it.”

Eventually, her wait was rewarded. In 1979, when the photographer was 67 years old, America and China established diplomatic relations and Arnold finally got her visa. The results of that extraordinary trip are now on show in an exhibition at Asia House in London.

We meet on a misty autumn morning in her small apartment in a Pimlico rest home to look through the photographs together. Although taken only 30 years ago, they evoke a lost China, a nation very different to the skyscraper-filled country we see today. Arnold is now 95 and frail. Yet she is as elegant and self-possessed as ever. She sits very straight in a chair, her snowy hair wound artfully into her usual chic bun, wearing a lavender cardigan, purple silk blouse and velvet trousers. Her eyes are still incredibly wise and you wonder at all the things she must have witnessed over the ten decades of her life. (The second day I go to visit her, I take a Viennese friend whose aunt married a friend of Arnold’s; my friend says Arnold in old age reminds her of a solid oak tree.)

She remembers her preparation for what would be a long and arduous trip. She collected letters of introduction and researched assignments. She had no brief other than to “photograph Peking duck” for The Sunday Times, and to create a book for the legendary Knopf editor Bob Gottlieb that “100 years from publication would show people how the Chinese had lived a century before”.

She packed a suitcase of carefully preserved beef and dolcelatte cheese from Harrods (presents for officials), and since it was winter in Beijing, bought a fur-lined coat and boots (for a trip she hoped to take down the Yangtze) and serious gloves. She boarded the plane, and 24 hours later arrived in the place she had spent much of her life dreaming of. Her first assignment after the long trip was to rise in the icy cold of a Beijing morning at 6am and photograph people doing t’ai chi in a park.

Arnold worked flat out in China for more than five months: she did two separate trips, travelling alongside the tourist bureau’s official interpreter. They covered 40,000 miles, from Beijing to Mongolia, documenting the people, the land and the customs.

“The general plan was to start at 6am every morning and stop only for meals and an hour’s siesta at lunch,” she remembers. In the evening, she photographed entertainers: “Sophisticated operas or the naively sweet children’s plays in the factories or communes.”

Her routine was gruelling. She woke at 5am, had a cup of tea from a Thermos by her bed, then, following the official Chinese schedule (which was packed), she shot hundreds, maybe thousands of images with her Nikon. She used available light, never flashlight. She met scores of young Chinese photographers who asked her advice. And as a foreign woman with a camera, “in areas where people had never seen a white woman or a street photographer”, she was followed by crowds “like the Pied Piper of Hamelin”.

But the schedule took its toll. By the time Arnold got to Suzhou, a case of the sniffles which became a cough had turned into pneumonia, and possible tuberculosis. She was tired, but she kept shooting, because the tough schedule was, she felt, the only way to capture such a huge country. “To keep the fresh impressions coming,” as she would call it. “It meant keeping notes and interviewing up to date, before the vividness could fade.”

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