Category Archives: Uncategorized

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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Entrance to the Huihuiying Mosque, Peking

To mark the Islamic New Year, here is part of a rare photograph of the entrance to the Huihuiying Mosque [回回营清真寺遗存], in Donganfu Hutong, near Beihai Park, Beijing, taken about 1870.  The image shown above, is a cropped version to … Continue reading

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Sailing on

We have been on our holidays, but were also overwhelmed by correspondence resulting from July’s BBC Radio 4 documentary about the project, ‘Old Photographs Fever‘, and the accompanying BBC News slideshow. Many wonderful new collections were offered to us, and … Continue reading

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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

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Listen again

‘Old Photographs Fever: The search for China’s pictured past’, which explores our project through interviews with the team, with some of our contributors, and with some of those who make use of the project, was broadcast earlier today on BBC … Continue reading

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Taikoo ships and buildings

For readers interested in the photographs of shipping that can be found in the collections, notably those of G. Warren Swire, or the architectural history of the treaty ports, there are two new sites to investigate. John Swire & Sons … 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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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

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Catastrophe at the races, Hong Kong 1918

Our last post showed the fairly rudimentary Peking Race Club in 1891. The first of the important foreign race tracks in China was at Happy Valley in Hong Kong. This photographic postcard shows the scene just after 3 p.m. on … Continue reading

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Visualising China visits Nanjing University

As part of the 110th anniversary celebrations of Nanjing University, historians there led by Professor Chen Qianping, head of department, have mounted an exhibiton of 160 photographs selected from the Visualising China collections. The universities of Bristol and Nanjing have … Continue reading

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