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Recent Posts
- Guest blog: Yutong Wang on Policing urban ‘nuisance’: slum clearances in ‘semi-colonial’ Shanghai in the 1930s
- Some that got away
- Guest blog: Alex Thompson on British Law and Governance in Treaty Port China
- Guest blog: Andrew Hillier on Armistice Day and its Aftermath in Treaty Port China
- Guest blog: Kaori Abe on the Abe Naoko Collection –– a glimpse of a Japanese family’s life in Shanghai, c.1927-c.1934
- Guest blog: Ghassan Moazzin on Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China
- Guest blog: Helena Lopes on A connected place: Macau in the Second World War
- Andrew Hillier on Bessie Pirkis: A Renaissance Woman in Peking Part 2
- Guest blog: Rachel Meller on Uncovering the story of Shanghai’s Second World War Jewish refugees
- 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
Categories
Author Archives: Jamie Carstairs
Making popcorn
The Historical Photographs of China project team were delighted to see in a recently digitised album a sequence of three photographs showing popcorn being made the Chinese way, c.1938: When this blogger was in Shanghai in 2011, I photographed … Continue reading
Posted in Elsewhere on the net, Photograph of the day
Tagged Carstairs, food, Morrison, popcorn, Shanghai, street
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Burning bright in the forests of the night
This tiger sculpture was in the Aw Boon Haw Gardens amusement park (Tiger Balm Gardens) in Happy Valley, Hong Kong. The Tiger Balm Gardens were a sort of Chinese Disneyland theme park, but somehow even more gaudy, ostentatious, sometimes bizarre, … Continue reading
Isabella Lucy Bird – photographer and traveller
Mrs Isabella Lucy Bishop (née Bird), FRGS (1831-1904), was a remarkable traveller, writer, photographer, horsewoman and natural historian. In 1892, she became the first woman inducted into the Royal Geographical Society and she was elected to membership of the Royal Photographic Society … Continue reading
Posted in cross-searching, History of photography in China, Photographers
Tagged author, bird, CIM, hospital, Isabella, Paoning, photographer
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Christmas card
Compliments of the season to all friends of ‘Visualising China’ – and all best wishes for the road ahead.
Location Location Location
As we digitise more material, more connections are elicited. For example, a photograph (BL04-71) in the recently copied Love collection was captioned in the album ‘Great War Memorial Wei-Hai-Wei’. Seeing this photograph brought to mind a photograph in the Ruxton … Continue reading
Posted in cross-searching, Image Annotation
Tagged location, memorial, Update, war, Weihaiwei
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Darwent Revisited: Shanghai now and then
Photography is the context, subtext and pretext for an exhibition that opens today. The exhibition includes new photographs by Jamie Carstairs inspired by the text of Shanghai: A Handbook for Travellers and Residents, a guidebook to the city by Revd. … Continue reading
Posted in Exhibition, Photographers, Visualisation
Tagged Darwent, exhibition, photography, Shanghai
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Art imitates art
One of the images (on the right) in Historical Photographs of China, features the same compositional idea as Angus McBean’s photograph (below) of the theatre designer and producer William Chappell (1907-1994) – juggling heads. This brought to mind Geoff Dyer’s The Ongoing … Continue reading
Posted in Digitisation, Exhibition
Tagged Chappell, customs, Dyer, Hedgeland, IMCS, Maritime, McBean, music, Nanking, photography, Service
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Who took the photograph, reprised?
BL-n087 is a photograph of a photographer taking a photograph. You may be able to identify the photographer at work, if you recognise the photograph he probably took here: a scene including a human corpse and battle debris – the … Continue reading
Posted in Digitisation, History of photography in China, Photographers
Tagged Boxer, camera, Killie, photographer, photography, Ricalton, tripod, Uprising
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The Song of the River
Porters would carry heavy loads and full pails up from the river into the city of Chungking, scaling long flights of steps, as in this photograph taken by Warren Swire: Steps in Taiping Men, Chungking, 1920. See also Sw19-067, below. … Continue reading
Posted in Exhibition, Image Annotation, Photograph of the day
Tagged Chongqing, Chungking, exhibition, Maugham, porter, river, song, steps, Swire, work
1 Comment
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
Posted in Photograph of the day, Photographers
Tagged Admiral, advertisement, Ballard, Beijing, carrier, cook, eat, food, lunch, Mennie, pedlar, Peking, people, photogravure, pictorialism, steam
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