Introducing two new photographers

Posted on August 1, 2013 by Robert Bickers

Self-portrait of Jack Ephgrave, 1931. Ephgrave collection, EP01-201 ©2013 Adrienne Livesey, Elaine Ryder and Irene Brien.

The ‘Historical Photographs of China’ team was very pleased to be invited by the Arts & Humanities Research Council to contribute a set of images to its recently launched Online Gallery. We decided to use the opportunity to showcase a collection just in, and not yet on our own site, because we felt it highlighted nicely the treasures that continue to be brought to our attention.

The images came in two large albums containing almost one thousand prints, mostly taken between 1929-34 by John William Ephgrave (1914-79). Ephgrave, always known as Jack, was born in Shanghai in October 1914, and started work aged 15 as an apprentice in the printing department of British American Tobacco’s China operation, the British Cigarette Company (BCC), and later its subsidiary Capital Lithographers Ltd. From about the same time Jack started taking the photographs that fill the albums, and which are on display on the AHRC gallery. Jack’s photographs are rich in variety, and amongst things, provide wonderful views of the printing and design operation he worked within, which contributed powerfully to the dynamic visual and commercial culture of 1930s Shanghai.

They also show Shanghai from the air in 1927, labour struggles, and life on Shanghai’s bustling streets. We will be uploading the images from Ephgrave’s albums to the website over the coming months. Meanwhile, elsewhere on the net, Robert Bickers, project director, was invited to provide a commentary to a selection of images taken in 1883-85 in various East Asian ports by Asa Mattice, a US Navy engineer. As the essay points out, some of these wonderful images echo those discovered on eBay earlier this year.

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D is for …. Duke

Posted on July 17, 2013 by Robert Bickers

The Duke of Connaught, to be precise: Prince Arthur, Queen Victoria’s seventh child (and third son). Connaught served as Commander in Chief of the British Army in Bengal in 1886-90. As was increasingly common in the later nineteenth century, he made his way back to Britain by undertaking what we would now recognise as a ‘royal tour’. This journey took in Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Japan and Canada. His visit to Shanghai was brief, but the British community took the opportunity to deck the city with memorial arches and other signs of their aspiration to be considered an actively loyal part of the wider world of British power and influence. As well as a formal gathering at the Masonic Hall, the Duke officially unveiled the statue of Sir Harry Parkes on the Bund, which faced the eastern end of the Nanjing Road.

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Unveiling of the statue of Sir Harry Parkes by the Duke of Connaught, 8 April 1890, Billie Love collection, BL01-09.

An album of 13 photographs of the Duke’s visit to Shanghai has now been uploaded into ‘Historical Photographs of China’. Some of the plates are also available on Thomas Hahn’s Zenfolio site.

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On display in Chongqing

Posted on June 25, 2013 by Robert Bickers
Deputy British Consul General Benedict Mann opens the exhibition

Deputy British Consul General Benedict Mann opens the exhibition.

The project sometimes takes legs, and on 14 June at Chongqing Tiandi, British Deputy Consul-General Benedict Mann opened a new exhibition of project photographs, ‘Picturing China 1870-1950: Photographs from British Collections’, “1870—1950：英国收藏的中国影像”.

This collaboration with the communications team in Chongqing, and with the RCUK China team, has been a wonderful opportunity for us to root around and locate more of the photographs we have from the city. (And just days before it opened we were brought a suitcase full of albums and films from the 1920s, half of them relating to this Yangzi river city in Sichuan province).

Project researcher Dr Tehyun Ma was able to take part in the opening events and talk to the local press, who were keen to know more about the collections and the project. The exhibition runs until 30 June, and has been generously supported by RCUK China, the AHRC, and the British Academy.

116155108_91nOur photographs show the fascination of many of the city’s past visitors with the city’s interface with the Yangzi, the steep stone steps up from the water’s edge, and the  buildings, some of them on stilts, that once abutted the river banks. They also show Chongqing from a different perspective during its wartime years as the temporary capital city of the republic, when the National Government took refuge there from the Japanese invasion — a period explored in Rana Mitter’s superb new book, China’s War With Japan, 1937-45: The Struggle for Survival (Allen Lane).

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The Song of the River

Posted on June 12, 2013 by Jamie Carstairs
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Steps in Taiping Men, Chungking, 1920, Swire collection, Sw19-066

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.  One can perceive from these images that this was a grindingly hard way to earn a living – but other witness, in the form of words, can add further empathetic understanding.

Hear, for example, The Song of the River, a short story by Somerset Maugham (1922): “You hear it all along the river … the rowers … the trackers … But the most agonising song is the song of the coolies who bring the great bales from the junk up the steep steps to the town wall.  Up and down they go, endlessly, and endless as their toil rises their rhythmic cry. ‘He, aw – ah, oh’ … The sweat pours down their faces and their song is a groan of pain.  It is a sigh of despair.  It is heart-rending … It is the cry of souls in infinite distress, only just musical, and that last note is the ultimate sob of humanity.  Life is too hard, too cruel … That is the song of the river.”

Chungking images from HPC collections are being exhibited at Chongqing Tiandi, from 14th to 30th June.  The exhibition ‘Picturing China 1870-1950: Photographs from British Collections’ is organised by the  Research Councils UK (RCUK), Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the British Consulate-General in Chongqing, and the University of Bristol.

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Bang bang men at Taiping Men, Chungking, 1920, Swire collection, Sw19-067

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E is for … ebay (and eouch)

Posted on May 22, 2013 by Robert Bickers

For a change this post is about photographs that have been lost. A recent sale on Ebay of some materials found during a house clearance in southwestern England, left traces online of what seems to be a historically interesting voyage in 1895.

The photographs have captions identifying the locations as Chemulpo (Incheon, Korea), Hong Kong, Japan, Fuzhou in China, and Takao (Dagou, present Gaoxiong) in Taiwan. One photograph reinforces the logical conclusion from this itinerary, that this is material from a photographer in the navy, probably an officer, possibly serving on the British cruiser HMS Mercury, which is shown in one image in dry dock in Hong Kong. This is hazarding a guess. Mercury was on the China station from 1890-95, and the photos are likely to date from late in that posting, for one shot shows a Chinese fort at Takao in Taiwan, and the ship visited the port in February 1895 during the Sino-Japanese war. The fort was then, and is still in the photograph, manned by Qing troops.

Taiwan, Dagou fort, c.1895

Taiwan, Dagou fort, c.1895

There are no named individuals, no helpful self-identification. Some portraits of senior naval figures on sale at the same time do not really help, and the camera is resolutely pointed outwards from the photographer, recording place and landscape.

At any one time there are many historical photographs of China on sale on Ebay. Sometimes the seller keeps whole albums intact, but it is not always the case, and there are examples galore to find of album pages detached and sold one by one, or collections of loose photographs separated and sold. The historian’s heart sinks, as coherent collections are broken up and scattered internationally: what has been lost here? What might have been pieced together from the scraps of evidence, or froma discussion with the original owners? The historian is also a hypocrite, of course, for I have also bought online as well. Perhaps the good has outdone the damage, for much that might have ended up in landfill has instead found a new lease of life and new homes, in collections and museums and libraries, as Ebay has concentrated the minds of owners on the potential value of their materials. Perhaps the consciousness of value has also helped divert some material directly to repositories.

Saracen Head, Dagou, Taiwan

Saracen’s Head, Dagou, Taiwan

But the frustrations are also crystallised for me by the ghost voyage of HMS Mercury (perhaps) in 1895 (perhaps), and an officer (probably) strolling up to take a photograph of the Takao fort, perhaps one of the last taken when still in Chinese hands, before Japanese warships pounded them in the autumn of 1895, and then took them over.

Caption 5 Caption 1 Caption 2 Caption 3 Caption 4

 

 

 

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Smiles and coracles, 1938

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Robert Bickers

This snapshot of (I think) some boatside begging, was taken or acquired by Edgar Taylor, who served in the British Royal Navy, and was possibly taken at Hankow (Hankou, Wuhan) on the Yangzi. We do not know much about the small collection of photographs from which it comes (several of which feature the port). Taylor served on the aircraft carrier HMS Eagle, which was on the China Station from c.1933 to 1937. A few of the snaphots are gruesome — very much an occupational hazard for those of us exploring the photograph albums of foreign visitors to China or residents there. So coming across this was a blessed relief: it has charm, and it has coracles.

Smiles on the Yangzi, Special Collections, University of Bristol Library (reference: DM1973), Ta01-17, © 2012 Debbie Frampton.

Smiles on the Yangzi, Special Collections, University of Bristol Library (reference: DM1973), Ta01-17, © 2012 Debbie Frampton.

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Graduation!

Posted on April 23, 2013 by Robert Bickers

The University of Bristol this week held its first graduation cemeremony in China. Two hundred students attended the ceremony in Beijing, and it is planned that this event will be held every two years. To mark the occasion here is one from the archive, captioned as ‘The Faculty and first graduating class of the ‘Tienstin University of New Learning’, the 天津新学大书院, on 7 June 1918.

Faculty and first graduating class of Tienstin University of New Learning, 1918

Faculty and first graduating class, Tientsin University of New Learning, 7 June 1918. Copyright Bovell collection, sb-s01.

It was not a university, and is better and properly known in English as the Tientsin Anglo-Chinese College, but its buildings were certainly inspired by the Cambridge University background of its principal and founder, seated here centre, Dr Samuel Lavington Hart (赫立德).

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Volunteers

Posted on April 19, 2013 by Robert Bickers

It is 170 years ago this week that the Shanghai Volunteer Corps was first established. The SVC, as it was known, became a fixture of life in the International Settlement in the city from 1870-1942, and I have blogged a little about this on my own site. We have just received some albums with a wealth of SVC photographs, and will get them online in due course. In the meantime I thought it might be worthwhile to draw attention to the lesser-known, but nicely-uniformed, Tientsin British Volunteers. They can be seen drilling below, possibly in the winter of 1900.

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Tientsin Volunteers (British) on parade, Tientsin. From an album in The National Archives. Crown copyright image reproduced by permission of The National Archives, London, England

Such volunteer militia were an important component in the defence schemes guarding foreign concessions in times of war or civil conflict, or anti-imperialist mobilisation. While they were a source of good outdoor exercise for young men, and represent also the wider (in particular) British enthusiasm for volunteering, they were not simply toy soliders. Those guns were real, and they were sometimes used to devasting and bloody effect.

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Last years of the comprador/e

Posted on April 8, 2013 by Robert Bickers
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Butterfield & Swire, Nanjing office staff 1933, Bickers collection bi-s001. The comprador sits third from left.

The latest Wikileaks release has some interesting China material. My eye was caught by a practical note dated 24 March 1973 from the US Consulate in Hong Kong to the State Department, forwarding practical information about “administrative and other procedures of diplomatic missions in Peking”. This was as the US was proceeding with plans to open its mission. Amongst other interesting points was a note harking back to a figure from the past: the comprador (sometimes spelt compradore), a figure who worked at the heart of the Sino-foreign encounter:

“The Diplomatic Service Bureau [DSB] makes available a chief factotum experienced in serving foreign mission (often taken away on short notice from another mission). He functions much like the old fashioned compradore. He relays the mission’ s request to the DSB and other Chinese offices, acts as a walking telephone directory, translates, instructs the rest of the staff, and advises on procedures. Administrative functions center on him and he is overloaded with work.”

Compradors were omnipresent within businesses and in fact all institutions in treaty port China. The term covers a range of posts, from ‘general factotum’,  to a foreign firm’s Chinese business partner. This last is the form now more generally remembered, but the term was loosely and liberally applied. We have a few photographs with captions which identify compradors, such as the one above, showing the Swire comprador at Nanjing in 1933, but more of the portraits of Chinese business figures that we have are likely to have been compradors, such as this man at Jiujiang. Where the comprador was placed in a formal portrait like the Nanjing staff shot, and where, indeed, his office was placed in relation to the offices of the foreign branch managers, these were — the archives show — both practical issues of symbolic importance.

Debates about the role of the comprador, and foreign firms’ reliance on this intermediary, to the detriment of their own ability to directly engage with Chinese markets rumbled on throughout the twentieth century. In practical terms, for example, it hampered the readiness of foreign firms to get their staff to learn Chinese. Some British firms, such as Swires, systematically moved away from the ‘comprador’ system in the early 1930s, but compradors remained in some companies in Hong Kong well into the later twentieth century. For American and other diplomats in Hong Kong in the 1970s the concept was still quite familiar, familiar enough too for the consulate not to need to gloss the term in its cable to Washington DC.

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'Picturing China' in Beijing

Posted on April 4, 2013 by Robert Bickers

A friend of the project visiting Beijing provides further images of the display at the J.W. Marriott, organised by the British Embassy.'Picturing China 1870-1950' display, J.W. Marriott, BeijingThe exhibition, ‘Picturing China 1870-1950: Photographs from British collections’, or ‘1870-1950：英国收藏的中国影像’ runs until 7th April.

It is the Qingming festival today, and a public holiday in China: so if you are in Beijing, do pop along. Next stop for the exhibition: Chongqing.

Chinese staff, Hongkew Police Station, c.1929

Chinese staff, Hongkew Police Station, c.1929

The project has also recently received several further sets of albums, highlighting, amongst other places, Tianjin and Shanhaiguan, Changsha, Shaoyang (Hunan), as well as Shanghai and Hong Kong. As ever, even the smallest collections provides some gems. My own favourite comes from an album created by a Scottish member of the Shanghai Municipal Police, who served between 1929-35. Over three pages of the album meticulously document the Chinese staff who served at his first station, passport-sized photos of each individual annotated with his name and rank or police number. I have not previously seen anything like it. To the right is a very rough shot of one of the album pages.

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