Category Archives: Digitisation

A game of two halves

Football can also bring photograph collections together.  In 2008, an enigmatic album of photos collected by Harold Edwards Peck, a policeman in the Shanghai Municipal Police, was lent to the Historical Photographs of China project and digitised.   Two years later, … Continue reading

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A hunting we will go

Incidental mention of the Shanghai Paper Hunt suggests a new post. Here are two members of the Hunt in action. The Shanghai Paper Hunt Club dated is foundation to December 1863, but as its history, published in 1930, noted, there … Continue reading

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Grooved rocks at a sharp turn in the Yangtze River, 1914

Close up photographs of Yangtze River trackers at work pulling boats along the river and through rapids, are scarce, perhaps because the men often worked naked.  Nevertheless, decorum permitted an interesting detail (El01-49), as recorded in the caption in the … Continue reading

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C is for Changsha

A snapshot of a busy thoroughfare in Changsha, capital of Hunan province. The men are not sporting the ‘queue’, so this is a post-1911 shot, and the flat cap on the left dates it perhaps to the 1920s at least. … Continue reading

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B is for … Bubbling Well Road, Shanghai 上海南京西路老照片

The Bubbling Well Road was the road to the ‘Bubbling Well’, to Jing’an Temple, an extension of the Nanjing Road, known to Chinese residents as the ‘Dama lu’ 大马路’. Early residents of what became the International Settlement used to walk … Continue reading

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This month in history, 1927: Shanghai 上海浙江路老照片

In mid-late March 1927 the force of the Guomindang’s National Revolutionary Army moved into the city of Shanghai. Communist insurrections had already taken place, but the forces of a regional militarist, Sun Chuanfang (孙传芳), including units of refugee Russian soldiers, … Continue reading

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A City Gate

The location of the above gateway to a city remains unconfirmed.  The photograph (Pe01-013) is a puzzle: it shows what looks like a body of men, some with queues, in uniform, but without weapons, going towards and through the gate.  … Continue reading

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1945: Facing the future

The caption is the photographer’s. Air Vice-Marshall Arthur Fiddament (1896-1976) took this Kodachrome colour slide in Chongqing, battered war-time capital of the Republic of China, on a whirlwind round the world trip in late 1945. They arrived in Kunming on … Continue reading

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Visualising China launched

Visualising China was launched yesterday at the “Treaty Ports in Modern China” conference held at the University of Bristol. The conference is organised by the Department of Historical Studies as part of an Economic and Social Research Council-funded project entitled “Colonialism … Continue reading

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Important new content and a pre-release peek at the website

Lots of news to report and lots of work still going on as we near the end of the project (end of March) and look forward to user interaction with the Visualising China website … We’re delighted that over 1700 … Continue reading

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