Category Archives: Uncategorized

Everything’s changed, but everything’s still the same: HPC update

You might, from today, spot that Historical Photographs of China looks a little different in places. That’s because it is. Over the last two years our friends in the University of Bristol’s Research IT team have been rebuilding our platform … Continue reading

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A name, a photograph, and a history of global connections

Dr Helena F. S. Lopes is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the Department of History, University of Bristol The Portuguese were one of the largest communities in Shanghai from the 1840s until the early 1950s. Although many had … Continue reading

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HPC: A Change of Pace

It is 15 years since the launch of Historical Photographs of China. In that decade and a half we have copied about 170 mostly privately-held collections of photographs, which has generated just over 62,000 unique images in our databank, and … Continue reading

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Guest blog: The Cercle Sportif Français: Elite cosmopolitanism in Shanghai’s Former French Concession.

Lauren Walden is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Contemporary Chinese Art at Birmingham City University. Her PhD in Art History from Coventry University explored the global expanse of Surrealism in relation to cosmopolitan theory, including the advent of Surrealism … Continue reading

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Black and white Hong Kong transformed by ‘OldHKinColour’

The Instagram page OldHKinColour features vintage images of Hong Kong which have been colourised, or colourised and animated, with a view to promoting public education. HPC invited the team running the project, which has used some of our images, to … 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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About scratching, they were never wrong, the old masters

OK, that’s not what W.H. Auden actually wrote, but while I have been enjoying the selections of photographs made by Tom Larkin for our new Instagram feed — @hpcbristol, go on, follow us — Auden’s poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ … 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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Trading Places, a photographic journey through China’s former Treaty Ports

Nicholas Kitto describes the project which culminated in the recent publication of his book ‘Trading Places, A Photographic Journey Through China’s Former Treaty Ports’ (Blacksmith Books)  It was quite late on 16 December 1996, and I was walking along Racecourse … Continue reading

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Work and movement in the Hong Kong photographs of Dr Eleanor Whitworth Mitchell

Dr Helena F. S. Lopes is 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. Dr Eleanor … Continue reading

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