Category Archives: Family photography

‘Normal’ Lives Led in Abnormal Conditions

Dr Andrew Hillier shows how a recently- discovered collection of photographs shines a spotlight on the importance of family in treaty port China in the early twentieth century. On 12 April 1899, Edith Sarah Sharples and Walter James Clennell were … Continue reading

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A disturbing intimacy: The Private Papers of C. C. A. Kirke

Andrew Hillier discusses a diary, a photograph album and a memoir which, between them, provide a fascinating insight into consular life as well as showing how such materials can be used for exploring histories of intimacy and the emotions. The … Continue reading

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Guest blog: Claire Lowrie on ‘Travelling Servants and Moving Images: A Photographic History of Chinese Domestic Workers’

Claire Lowrie is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She is the author of Masters and Servants: Cultures of Empire in the Tropics (Manchester University Press 2016) and the co-author of Colonialism and Male Domestic … Continue reading

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The Five Faces of Dr Walter Medhurst, D.D.

Andrew Hillier considers how five portraits of the London Missionary Society (LMS) missionary, Walter H. Medhurst (1796-1857), one of which can be found on HPC, made over the course of his career, were used to maintain connections and promote the … Continue reading

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A round up of recent posts: internment, a church, a shipwreck, three missing Spanish diplomats, Wuhan

This blog has hosted a fair few guest posts recently, and we have been writing our own as well. Just in case you missed them I thought I might recap a little, and flag up the fact that in the … 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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Defend Wuhan!

We spotted this on Ebay, and bought it along with a small group of prints evidently taken in Wuhan during the Sino-Japanese war. They came from an album of prints that was being sold, page by page. A little research … Continue reading

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Ian Gill on photographs and family history

While reading journalist Ian Gill’s articles in the South China Morning Post on his search into the history of his China coast family, we were struck by the place of photographs in that story and invited him to tell us … 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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Introducing the Ranjit Singh Sangha Collection

This small but evocative new collection was sent to us by Jaskaran Sangha, whose grandfather, Kartar Singh lived in Shanghai from 1920 to 1960, where he worked for the Chinese Maritime Custom Service. The set of 47 photographs includes portraits … Continue reading

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