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Recent Posts
- Guest blog: Andrew Hillier on Armistice Day and its Aftermath in Treaty Port China
- Guest blog: Kaori Abe on the Abe Naoko Collection –– a glimpse of a Japanese family’s life in Shanghai, c.1927-c.1934
- Guest blog: Ghassan Moazzin on Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China
- Guest blog: Helena Lopes on A connected place: Macau in the Second World War
- Andrew Hillier on Bessie Pirkis: A Renaissance Woman in Peking Part 2
- Guest blog: Rachel Meller on Uncovering the story of Shanghai’s Second World War Jewish refugees
- Andrew Hillier on Bessie Pirkis: A Renaissance Woman in Peking
- Need and opportunity: the new HPC website
- Everything’s changed, but everything’s still the same: HPC update
- Location/Dislocation – Admiral Keppel, the Chinese Buddha at Sandringham and three key photographs
- The Forbidden City at War: Images of the Wartime Evacuation of the Imperial Art Collections
- A name, a photograph, and a history of global connections
- ‘Normal’ Lives Led in Abnormal Conditions
- Charles Frederick Moore’s photographs of the ruins of the European-style palaces (西洋楼) at the Yuanmingyuan (圆明园)
- Pieces of China in Bristol – cataloguing Historical Photographs of China material
Categories
Author Archives: Jamie Carstairs
Chinese bells for the Olympics
This photograph, with its somewhat clumsy composition, was snapped inside an unidentified temple. It is really more about the two splendid, wooden idols of unidentified gods, than about the bell. These impressive and expressive statues were very colourfully painted, something … Continue reading
The Hangchow Bore
The Qiantang River and Hangchow (Hangzhou) Bay have long attracted visitors to witness the roaring tidal bore – the largest in the world. This swirling wall of water travels at up to 40 kilometers per hour (25 miles an hour) … Continue reading
Posted in Digitisation
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A photographer’s view
The great photographer Diane Arbus once observed that ‘a photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.’ NA07-107 is the very picture of such secretive photography, if only because it is such … Continue reading
Posted in Digitisation, Elsewhere on the net, Photograph of the day
Tagged Arbus, Archives, bell, Berger, Confucious, double, exposure, Faurer, gong, Kongzi, Moholy-Nagy, National, percussion, photography, Qufu, Shandong, temple, TNA
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Studio portrait of a Chinese woman
This striking photograph (JC-s037), with strong diagonals in the style of Alexander Rodchenko, may well be the work of an unidentified Chinese studio photographer working in the racy, cosmopolitan Shanghai of the 1930s. The precise combination printing and the masterly … Continue reading
Posted in Photograph of the day
Tagged Carstairs, photograph, photography, portrait, studio, surrealism
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Large pots at a pottery, c.1870
Mass production is nothing new to China, which has always been the world’s most populous country. Here (Bo02-049) large pots and blocks are being made, apparently in the thatched workshops. It looks like the large pots were made in two … Continue reading
Moving a block of ice over frozen water
Ice was cut during the winter in North China from ponds and rivers, and then stored in ice houses for cooling uses over the summer months. This photo (Ru02-34), with its curiously stagey composition (note that man peeping from behind … Continue reading
The Great Wall of China at Badaling
One of the world’s most famous structures, the Great Wall of China has been much photographed. Surprisingly though for such a massive and extensive landmark, many visitors, including John Thomson in 1871, photographed the same section – around Badaling. Here … Continue reading
Posted in cross-searching, Photograph of the day, Photographers
Tagged Archives, Badaling, defence, landmark, mountains, National, photography, Swire, wall
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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
Posted in cross-searching, Digitisation, Photograph of the day
Tagged ball, coincidence, colleague, football, leisure, Municipal, Peck, Police, score, serendipity, Shanghai, SMP, soccer, Sullivan
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Festival floats in procession, Szemao, Yunnan Province, c.1896-1902
Frederic William Carey served in the Chinese Maritime Customs, from 1891 to 1928. When stationed at Szemao in the province of Yunnan around the turn of the century, he studied the area and the multivarious tribes peoples, becoming an authority. … Continue reading
Posted in cross-searching, Elsewhere on the net, Photograph of the day
Tagged Carey, celebration, ceremony, clothing, costume, crowd, ethnic, ethnology, fan, festival, hat, ornament, parasol, procession, Simao, umbrella
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Silk filature or factory, Shanghai, c.1900
A filature was an establishment for reeling silk from cocoons. There were many such factories in Shanghai and they must have employed several hundred children. Silk was of course a luxury item for the wealthy, and much exported. This sobering … Continue reading
Posted in Photograph of the day
Tagged child, children, clothing, factory, fingerprint, Hayward, industry, labour, loom, manufacture, silk, sweatshop, textile, weave
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