Category Archives: Alphabet China

M is for Ming!

‘Ming: 50 years that changed China’, the British Museum’s autumn exhibition opens today. Photographs in Historical Photographs of China of surviving artefacts from the 1368-1644 Ming dynasty include tourist silliness like this early 1900s shot of a visitor posing with one of … Continue reading

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D is for …. Duke

The Duke of Connaught, to be precise: Prince Arthur, Queen Victoria’s seventh child (and third son). Connaught served as Commander in Chief of the British Army in Bengal in 1886-90. As was increasingly common in the later nineteenth century, he … Continue reading

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E is for … ebay (and eouch)

For a change this post is about photographs that have been lost. A recent sale on Ebay of some materials found during a house clearance in southwestern England, left traces online of what seems to be a historically interesting voyage … Continue reading

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L is for … Leaders

China has just changed its leadership team, at the 18th Party Congress in Beijing. The photograph below, a favourite of ours, shows three Premiers in waiting, and the widow of one just deceased. Here we have Wang Jingwei (second left); … Continue reading

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N is for Ningbo

The team has recently been corresponding with an informal group in the eastern Chinese city of Ningbo, who are researching the architectural heritage of this former treaty port. Opened under the first of the Sino-British treaties (Nanjing, 1842), Ningbo was … Continue reading

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D is for Dalny, Dairen だいれん, Dalian, 大連

History made this former Liaodong Peninsular fishing village a transational city, as it was taken from Russian control (1898-1905), to become a Japanese leased territory (1905-45), then a USSR-controlled zone in the People’s Republic of China until the end of … 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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A is for … Antung (Dandong) 丹东市老照片

Warren Swire made a handful of visits to this port at the mouth of Yalu River between 1911-12 and 1934. The border with Korea, then under Japanese control was close by. This shot shows the installation at the harbourside of … Continue reading

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