The guy above with the floral dress was Alim Khan (1880 - 1944), the emir of Bukhara. What's so special about him? For one, he's got some pretty sweet shoes -- check out the heels on those babies. And second, this is a colour photograph taken in 1911 by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, the man who pioneered colour photography.

According to the entry in Wikipedia:

Prokudin-Gorsky's own research yielded patents for producing color film slides and for projecting color motion pictures. His process used a camera that took a series of three monochrome pictures in sequence, each through a different-colored filter. By projecting all three monochrome pictures using correctly colored light, it was possible to reconstruct the original color scene. Any stray movement within the camera's field of view showed up in the prints as multiple "ghosted" images, since the red, green and blue images were taken of the subject at slightly different times.

The Wikipedia entry also has a high-resolution gallery of some of Grosky's work. By the way, this is the problem with Wikipedia: I have no idea how I went from what I was looking for to this, but somehow an hour of my life disappeared as I clicked and clicked the endless flood of information.