Gustave Doré's final plate for London: A Pilgrimage, published in 1872 with Blanchard Jerrold, shows a veiled figure sketching a broken St Paul's Cathedral from a ruined London. The figure is the New Zealander, a trope that Thomas Babington Macaulay made famous in the 1840s. He imagined a traveller from New Zealand sketching the ruins of London Bridge and St Paul's in the distant future. The idea of a future visitor to a fallen city was already older, with roots in 18th-century letters, and it was later used for many purposes. Doré's plate turns it from a cautionary note into a moody vision of decay.

Hampi is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Karnataka, India, with more than 1,600 surviving remains spread over 4,100 hectares. It was the capital of the Vijayanagara Empire from 1336 to 1565. Travellers from Persia and Portugal described it as a prosperous, wealthy and grand city with temples, markets and farms along the Tungabhadra River. By 1500 it was estimated to be the world's second-largest city after Beijing, and probably India's richest at the time. In 1565 a coalition of Muslim sultanates defeated the Vijayanagara Empire, its capital was conquered and destroyed, and the city was left in ruins. Hampi remains a religious centre, with the active Virupaksha Temple at its heart.