Category Archives: Collections

Guest blog: Kaori Abe on the Abe Naoko Collection –– a glimpse of a Japanese family’s life in Shanghai, c.1927-c.1934

Kaori Abe, who has written the post below, is a historian specialising in the history of Hong Kong and port cities in East Asia. The author of Chinese Middlemen in Hong Kong’s Colonial Economy, 1830-1890 (Routledge, 2017), she has worked in … Continue reading

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Andrew Hillier on Bessie Pirkis: A Renaissance Woman in Peking Part 2

Concluding his overview of the recently digitised Pirkis Collection, Dr Andrew Hillier digs further into these 400 cartes de visite to consider what the collection tells us about the legation world and the European presence in Peking more generally during … Continue reading

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Andrew Hillier on Bessie Pirkis: A Renaissance Woman in Peking

A recent approach to HPC revealed a treasure trove of material relating to life in the British Legation, Peking, in the 1870s and early 1880s, but, as Dr Andrew Hillier explains, making sense of the photographs can be a challenge.  … Continue reading

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A name, a photograph, and a history of global connections

Dr Helena F. S. Lopes is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the Department of History, University of Bristol The Portuguese were one of the largest communities in Shanghai from the 1840s until the early 1950s. Although many had … Continue reading

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Pieces of China in Bristol – cataloguing Historical Photographs of China material

Jamie Carstairs has recently catalogued the ‘Historical Photographs of China’ material held in Special Collections, University of Bristol Library. In this post, he describes the material in outline and mentions some highlights. During the fifteen years of the Historical Photographs … Continue reading

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Ruins of Macau in Historical Photographs of China collection – part three

Dr. Helena F. S. Lopes is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the Department of History, University of Bristol. This posting is the final part of a three-part series on the ruins of Macau. You can read part one … Continue reading

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Ruins of Macau in Historical Photographs of China collections – part two

Dr. Helena F. S. Lopes is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the Department of History, University of Bristol. This posting is part two of three-part series on the ruins of Macau. Part one can be read here. In … Continue reading

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Ruins of Macau in Historical Photographs of China collections – part one

Dr. Helena F. S. Lopes is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the Department of History, University of Bristol. This posting is part one of three-part series on the ruins of Macau. The South China territory of Macau (澳門) … Continue reading

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The joys of everyday life on the China Coast

The F. Hagger collection encompasses some 260 photographs of China in the early 1930s, as well as many of Japan, Singapore, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), North Borneo, Manila, India, Egypt, and others which are not on the Historical Photographs of China … Continue reading

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The sinking of the Chusan

There are several photographs of disasters, including some of shipwrecks, on the Historical Photographs of China site. A collection we are in the midst of readying for publication includes several that show the aftermath of the disaster that befell the … Continue reading

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