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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
Category Archives: Photograph of the day
Chongqing 1920 重庆老照片
Chongqing, capital of Sichuan province is in the news at present. This photograph of a crowded narrow street there was taken in 1920 by British businessman Warren Swire. Many of our photographs of the city focus on the stunning, steep … Continue reading
Posted in Photograph of the day
Tagged Chongqing, gate, signs, street
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S.S. Shu Tung on Yangtze River
The hazards and drama of steaming through rapids and gorges in the Yangtze River is evident in this picture (Pa01-10). The Shu Tung, built by Messrs. Thorneycroft and Co. in Britain in 1910, was a stalwart Upper Yangtze steamer, owned … Continue reading
Sun Ke reading on a wooden chaise longue
Sun Ke (Sun Fo) (1891-1973), was a Nationalist politician and, briefly, in 1932, Premier of the Republic of China, as well as an educational reformer. He was the son of Sun Yat-sen. In this informal portrait (Fu-n119) by Fu Bingchang, … Continue reading
Posted in Photograph of the day
Tagged book, Foo, Fu, furniture, leisure, politician, politics, reading
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Boy with silk animal face hat, Kunming, 1945
Traditionally, animal face hats were made by a maternal grandmother for her grandson. The animal face – especially the large teeth and eyes – would frighten evil spirits away and so protect the infant. The fruit being sold at the … Continue reading
Bioscoping in Shanghai, c.1923
In this East Meets West, tradition and modernity, studio tableaux, c.1923, two Chinese opera actors meet the celebrity of the day: Charlie Chaplin – or at least Tommy Crellin dressed up as Charlie Chaplin. So, in effect, three photographers in … Continue reading
Egg and spoon race, Chefoo, Easter 1902
If some things Chinese were puzzling to foreigners, some things European may have seemed most odd to the Chinese. How to explain the why and wherefore of an egg and spoon race? In the Commissioner of Customs’s garden at ‘Hillfields’, … Continue reading
Grooved rocks at a sharp turn in the Yangtze River, 1914
Close up photographs of Yangtze River trackers at work pulling boats along the river and through rapids, are scarce, perhaps because the men often worked naked. Nevertheless, decorum permitted an interesting detail (El01-49), as recorded in the caption in the … Continue reading
Posted in Digitisation, Photograph of the day
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C is for Changsha
A snapshot of a busy thoroughfare in Changsha, capital of Hunan province. The men are not sporting the ‘queue’, so this is a post-1911 shot, and the flat cap on the left dates it perhaps to the 1920s at least. … Continue reading
Posted in Alphabet China, Digitisation, Photograph of the day
Tagged hats, peddler, rickshaw, signs
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Drying noodles between sticks
There is an account of the traditional way of making (‘swinging’) noodles by hand in ‘Classic Food of China’ (1992) by Yan-Kit So: from dancing the dough to splitting it into noodle strands takes a noodle master about fifteen minutes, … Continue reading
Posted in Photograph of the day
Tagged Beaton, food, noodle, Palmer
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