Author Archives: Robert Bickers

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

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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

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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

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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

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Postgraduate workshop: 'Snapshots in Time: Photography and History in Modern China'

The British Inter-university China Centre, and the Historical Photographs of China project at the University of Bristol warmly invite applications from Masters and Doctoral students working in modern Chinese and East Asian history to participate in a three-day research training … Continue reading

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The Japanese afterlife of Frank B. Strawn

On this site you can find over 9,000 digitised images, but one key thing lost in this mode of presentation is their existence as physical objects. The social lives of our photographs took many forms: they are given as gifts, … Continue reading

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Royal fakes

Not for the first time, a correspondent asks us about the genuineness, or otherwise, of some photographs of the Manchu royal family. This accordion-style booklet certainly looks old, but you can find many news items online in Chinese about it … Continue reading

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Another Prince on the Bund, 1926

This is Prince George, great-grand uncle of the Duke of Cambridge, who is currently visiting Shanghai. The date is 3 June 1926: Empire Day. The Prince is just about to inspect a parade in the extensive grounds of the old British Consulate-General at … Continue reading

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A Prince on the Bund

The Duke of Cambridge, Prince William, has arrived in Shanghai to open the ‘GREAT Festival of Creativity‘ being held at the Long Museum from 2-4 March. It was a century and a quarter ago, on 8 April 1890, that an English Prince … Continue reading

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Filmed!

One of our funders, and strong supporters, is the UK’s Arts & Humanities Research Council, which is marking its tenth anniversary with a series of films about its activities since 2005. The Historical Photographs of China project is the subject … Continue reading

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