Tag Archives: Beijing

The Forbidden City at War: Images of the Wartime Evacuation of the Imperial Art Collections

Adam Brookes is the author of Fragile Cargo: China’s Wartime Race to Save the Treasures of the Forbidden City, published in September 2022 by Chatto & Windus, London. He was for many years a journalist for BBC News, serving as … 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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Visualising China in a global war

Dr Helena F. S. Lopes is currently a Senior Research Associate in the History of Hong Kong and a Lecturer in Modern Chinese History at the University of Bristol. She holds a DPhil in History from the University of Oxford. … Continue reading

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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

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Gregory Scott on Chinese Religious Spaces in the Historical Photographs of China collections

Dr Gregory Adam Scott is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, and from September 2017 will take up the post of Lecturer in Chinese Cultural History at the University of Manchester. For the most part, … Continue reading

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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Dr Andrew Hillier has been looking at the unpublished letters of a British Student Interpreter, later Consul, Walter Clennell.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

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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

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Mid-day meal at a street food kitchen, Peking, 1915-1920

The Historical Photographs of China project was recently kindly given a copy of ‘The Pageant of Peking’.  Published in Shanghai in 1920 and bound in exquisite gold blocked turquoise silk, this coffee (or tea) table book is introduced by Putnam … Continue reading

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Christmas Quiz

This intriguing montage photograph (DH-s019) of forty sketched portraits of foreigners and one photographic portrait, is labelled “PEKING CHRISTMAS 1877”. Their faces can be studied more closely at DH-s020, DH-s021 and DH-s022. Most of the photographs in the Henderson collection … 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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