-
Recent Posts
- Guest blog: Visualising china in China: life, labour and loss
- About scratching, they were never wrong, the old masters
- Guest blog: Sarah Yu on China’s war against the fly
- A round up of recent posts: internment, a church, a shipwreck, three missing Spanish diplomats, Wuhan
- ‘A Miniature World’: Photographs and Memories of Internment in China
- Guest post: Spaniards in the treaty ports: Archivo China-España and Juan Mencarini
- Guest blog: A ‘Magic Weapon’ on the Sino-Tibetan Frontier
- New Perspective: Trinity Church and Treaty Port-Era Shanghai
- The joys of everyday life on the China Coast
- The sinking of the Chusan
- Guest blog: It’s the End of the World as They Knew It
- Gina Tam on Dialect and Nationalism in China, and a grave in Amoy
- Guest Blog: The Chile Pepper: Mao’s Little Red Spice
- Trading Places, a photographic journey through China’s former Treaty Ports
- A Chan (Ya Zhen) in Guangzhou
Categories
Category Archives: Family photography
A round up of recent posts: internment, a church, a shipwreck, three missing Spanish diplomats, Wuhan
This blog has hosted a fair few guest posts recently, and we have been writing our own as well. Just in case you missed them I thought I might recap a little, and flag up the fact that in the … Continue reading
Posted in About us, Family photography, Guest blogs, Heritage
Comments Off on A round up of recent posts: internment, a church, a shipwreck, three missing Spanish diplomats, Wuhan
A Banker and his Amanuensis
Andrew Hillier draws on the Richard Family Collection in Historical Photographs of China to evoke the moving relationship between Guy Hillier and his young amanuensis, Ella Richard. Andrew’s book, Mediating Empire: An English Family in China, 1817-1927, is published this … Continue reading
Posted in Collections, Family photography, Guest blogs
Tagged Beijing, Hillier, Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, Richard family collection
Comments Off on A Banker and his Amanuensis
Defend Wuhan!
We spotted this on Ebay, and bought it along with a small group of prints evidently taken in Wuhan during the Sino-Japanese war. They came from an album of prints that was being sold, page by page. A little research … Continue reading
Posted in Collections, Family photography
Tagged poster, Royal Navy, Sino-Japanese War, Wuhan
Comments Off on Defend Wuhan!
Ian Gill on photographs and family history
While reading journalist Ian Gill’s articles in the South China Morning Post on his search into the history of his China coast family, we were struck by the place of photographs in that story and invited him to tell us … Continue reading
Posted in Family photography, Guest blogs
Tagged Chefoo, Chinese Maritime Customs Service, family history, Yantai
Comments Off on Ian Gill on photographs and family history
The Kodak comes to Peking
Dr Andrew Hillier has been looking at the unpublished letters of a British Student Interpreter, later Consul, Walter Clennell. The correspondence highlights the importance of photography to Legation life in Beijing in the late 1880s. Andrew recently completed his PhD at the University … Continue reading
Posted in cross-searching, Family photography, Guest blogs, History of photography in China
Tagged Beijing, Consular Service, Legation, Peking
Comments Off on The Kodak comes to Peking
Introducing the Ranjit Singh Sangha Collection
This small but evocative new collection was sent to us by Jaskaran Sangha, whose grandfather, Kartar Singh lived in Shanghai from 1920 to 1960, where he worked for the Chinese Maritime Custom Service. The set of 47 photographs includes portraits … Continue reading
Posted in Collections, Family photography, New Collections
Tagged Chinese Maritime Customs Service, Shanghai Municipal Police, Sikhs
Comments Off on Introducing the Ranjit Singh Sangha Collection
Andrew Hillier reflects on Three Brothers in China: Visualising Family in Empire
Having just completed his PhD at Bristol, ‘Three Brothers in China: A Study of Family in Empire’, Andrew Hillier is now working on developing it into a book. On 12 May 1846, Eliza Medhurst set off by boat from her family … Continue reading
Posted in Collections, Family photography, Guest blogs, Photograph of the day
Tagged Beijing, cemeteries, Chinese Maritime Customs Service, Consular Service, family history, Hillier, Hongkong Shanghai Bank, Shanghai
Comments Off on Andrew Hillier reflects on Three Brothers in China: Visualising Family in Empire
The Japanese afterlife of Frank B. Strawn
On this site you can find over 9,000 digitised images, but one key thing lost in this mode of presentation is their existence as physical objects. The social lives of our photographs took many forms: they are given as gifts, … Continue reading
Posted in Family photography
Tagged history of things, Japan, photographs
Comments Off on The Japanese afterlife of Frank B. Strawn
Who took the photographs?
Our collections are generally identified with a single individual, in most cases the woman or man who lived and worked in China, and who provides the current owner’s family link to China. In some cases we can certainly state with … Continue reading