This took me by surprise. I pass the ‘Mind’ shop twice a day as I walk to and from work, but I rarely go in and browse. It’s a charity shop, one of several on this stretch of Cotham Hill, a few hundred yards from my office which (mostly) sell donated items to raise money for the charity which runs them. It’s the books I usually look over, rarely finding anything; but if you don’t look, you never find. And there today at the back, lying flat, bottom edge out from the wall on top of a pile of other books on a shelf was something I recognised immediately: a lacquer-coated wood-bound photograph album, made in Japan.
I have seen several of these as I worked on the ‘Historical Photographs of China’ project. You can find several for sale online. This one was a bit battered, with some of the mother-of-pearl inlay broken off. I now know that this style of inlay, which is more like appliqué because it is not flush with the lacquer surface, is called shibayama work. It will have been made in Japan at least a hundred years ago, and the endpapers and each of the pages were covered in silk with hand-painted scenes of village huts, flowers, storks. It’s huge – 14 inches wide, 11 high, and 3 inches thick.
That was an unusual enough sighting, but what made me start was the statement handwritten on the pink note that was placed inside: ‘Shanghai Municipal Police / British Officers Photo Album’
Isn’t it interesting, agreed the woman in the stock room when I asked if she could tell me anything about it. It was brought in two or three months ago by a man who told us all about it. It was in his family. It’s a shame about the condition. We looked it up and it could have been worth a thousand pounds if it wasn’t damaged. No, there were no photographs in it, but there were also a couple of albums full of old photographs, Victorian photographs. She looked around the storeroom then back into the store. I put them out on the shelves. No, they’re not there now. I can’t tell you anything more.
There we left it. There were no photographs inside, and not a single clue otherwise; there were no captions above or below the now vacant pockets in which photographs of different sizes and shapes will have been placed.
Perhaps it once held the assortment of coloured postcards, and photographs of formal groups, street scenes, executions and landscapes that can be seen in this quite similarly-bound album that is currently on sale in Australia. .Here at least, ‘Andy’ had written some captions as well as his name: ‘Police on Parade’, ‘Harbour’, ‘Jetties’, ‘Native Court’, ‘Hairdressing in the Street’, ‘In Egypt on Parade’. With these details I can guess the identity of the original owner, probably a man called Andrew Murphy, who most likely, given his age, had served in the British army on a ten-year contract and then in August 1906 sailed to China to join the Shanghai Municipal Police. He may have bought the album in Japan on vacation, or in a store in Shanghai. But the one I had in my hand in Bristol, a better grade of album – for Andy did not pay for one with hand painted pages — left everything to the imagination.
There you have it, as I have it. Nothing definite to report, except a near-miss with someone’s Shanghai story documented in photographs that, after being housed by a family somewhere in Bristol — somewhere probably within walking distance of my office and this shop — were briefly lodged there while I passed and repassed this summer. Then someone bought them.
I think this album still speaks, nonetheless, of journeys to Asia at the start of the twentieth century, of sojourns there, keen experiences of difference, and then perhaps after only a few years, a return home, with the usual souvenirs, including this elaborately decorated album, then in a more pristine state. It certainly once held a collection of photographs, and its tattered spine shows that it was pored over, the pages opened and turned, tales probably told and sights, scenes, and faces remembered, while memory held. The cover will have prompted exclamations, fingers will have run along and over the flowers and the hen, in time dislodging first this piece, and then that one.
As generations passed the names will have been forgotten, and the stories will have started to get muddled up, gaps appearing in them like the holes in the lacquer, and finally this album will have meant very little to those who had to find space for it. It was something that came from Shanghai, something to do with perhaps a great-uncle or great-grandfather or someone in the police. And then it was passed on, as clutter was cleared. Orphaned albums like this came to the project over the years that were found in skips, overlooked and marooned on top of old furniture, or given away. Many, many others like this, most, were thrown away and lost.
This one now lies emptied, the Shanghai memory it housed all broken up, the pages reduced to an elegant and still impressive silence; yet, it remains inviting, and yes, I bought it.