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Recent Posts
- 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
- A disturbing intimacy: The Private Papers of C. C. A. Kirke
- Jamie Carstairs on Remembering John Thomson in Edinburgh
- Guest blog: Nadine Attewell on Refocusing the Gaze: Leisure, Power, and Women’s Work in Interwar Hong Kong
- HPC: A Change of Pace
- Guest blog: Claire Lowrie on ‘Travelling Servants and Moving Images: A Photographic History of Chinese Domestic Workers’
- Guest blog: The Cercle Sportif Français: Elite cosmopolitanism in Shanghai’s Former French Concession.
Categories
Category Archives: Photograph of the day
French Men of War at Pagoda Anchorage, Foochow, 1884
In this, the first of a series of posts by undergraduate finalists in history at the University of Bristol, Nicholas Barker reflects on a tense moment caught in a seemingly quiet image. The stillness of this photograph masks a brutal … Continue reading
Posted in Guest blogs, Photograph of the day
Tagged Fuzhou, Navy, Oswald, Sino-French War, war, warship
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Andrew Hillier on Images of War and Regimental Memory
Following a recent visit to the Royal Hampshire Regiment Museum in Winchester, Dr Andrew Hillier discusses the rich resources that are available in such museums and their importance to the study of imperial history. There are well over one hundred … Continue reading
Posted in Guest blogs, Heritage, Photograph of the day, Regimental Collections
Tagged battle, Felice Beato, Opium War, war
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Found object
Some of the photographs and negatives we are presented with are beyond salvage, but it can be worth persevering. The following episode has no China connection, but perhaps indicates what might be done with any seemingly hopeless case. It is also … Continue reading
Posted in Digitisation, Photograph of the day
Tagged negatives, old photographs
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Spotted: James Hudson Taylor
A correspondent recently wrote to us, correcting a date and identifying in a photograph two of the China missionary enterprise’s most notable figures. This photograph, above, showing staff and pupils of the Chefoo Girls School includes, we now know, James Hudson … Continue reading
Posted in Photograph of the day
Tagged Chefoo, China Inland Mission, missionaries, school, Yantai
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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
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Our China spies
We have been attempting to persuade a friend of the project, author Adam Brookes, former BBC Beijing correspondent, to pen a note to mark the paperback publication of his second novel, Spy Games. If you have not read it, you … Continue reading
Posted in Photograph of the day, Photographers
Tagged Canton, espionage, Fu Bingchang, George Findlay Andrew, Guomindang, Hu Jibang, Mikhail Borodin, Morris 'Two-gun' Cohen, Moscow, spies, spy, Swatow
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Fu Bingchang's Diaries
One of our star photographers is Chinese diplomat Fu Bingchang (1895-1965), who pursued with fairly equal vigour all his life his activities as a diplomat, photographer, diarist, and lover. Excepting the diaries these facets of his life are fairly well … Continue reading
Posted in Collections, Elsewhere on the net, Photograph of the day, Photographers
Tagged Fu Bingchang, Radio
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‘So this is fame’! Margot Fonteyn in China
Today sees the unveiling by the blog’s colleague Ronald Hutton of an English Heritage Blue Plaque at the flat in London’s Covent Garden where Margot Fonteyn lived when Prima Ballerina of Sadler’s Wells Ballet. The blog knows her better as Peggy Hookham, … Continue reading
Posted in Heritage, Photograph of the day
Tagged dance, Shanghai, Tianjin
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Jon Chappell on burning opium in Nanning
A guest blog from Jon Chappell, who recently secured his PhD at the University of Bristol, on ‘Foreign Intervention In China: Empires And International Law In The Taiping Civil War, 1853-64’. Jon is currently working on a British Inter-university China Centre … Continue reading
Posted in Guest blogs, Photograph of the day
Tagged Chinese Maritime Customs Service, Hedgeland, Nanning, opium, smoking
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David Bellis on Warren Swire’s second visit to Hong Kong, 1911-12
In this, the second of a series of blogs, David Bellis explores the photographs taken by G. Warren Swire on his trip to Hong Kong in 1911-12. Because John Swire & Sons was headquartered in London, each year one of the … Continue reading
Posted in Guest blogs, Photograph of the day, Photographers
Tagged cable car, Circe, Hong Kong, Mount Parker, sanatorium, ship, ship building, Swire, Taikoo, University, Warren Swire
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