Sending up a balloon to advertise ‘Hatamen’ cigarettes, c.1925, Palmer collection, Pa01-33
Modern marketing – attracting attention to a product in a new way. Here in 1925, the British American Tobacco Company are sending up a balloon to advertise ‘Hatamen’ cigarettes (Pa01-33). The location is not verified, but it may well be near Ichang (Yichang).
The city of Bristol is linked to the history of tobacco in several ways. Also, this weekend it’s the 34th Bristol International Balloon Fiesta.
Here’s five historical images from China, for the Games:
Carrying the rowing boat away from the river, Potts collection, Po01-004
Soldier with dumb-bell, Ruxton collection, Ru01-018
Target practice (shooting), Hong Kong, Swire collection, Sw17-005
Hedgeland swimming at Chinwangtao, Hedgeland collection, He01-202
Lawn tennis party outside H. Ichinose, photographer’s shop, c.1910, Sullivan collection, Su01-51
A Chinese bell for the Olympics, Ruxton collection, Ru01-070
This photograph, with its somewhat clumsy composition, was snapped inside an unidentified temple. It is really more about the two splendid, wooden idols of unidentified gods, than about the bell. These impressive and expressive statues were very colourfully painted, something not readily discernible in a black and white photograph. However, once an actual idol was seen, the brilliant colours could be easily read into a monochrome photographic image.
The idols in Ru01-070 bring to mind Wenlock™ and Mandeville™, the Olympic mascots, now all over London, including one standing outside St Paul’s Cathedral (a temple now so enthralled by Mammon that only visitors blessed with deep pockets may enter). Idols aside, let the bells ring out, and bring on the Games, ding, dong!
Hangchow Bore, Armstrong collection, Ar01-047
Hangchow Bore, Armstrong collection, Ar01-048
The Qiantang River and Hangchow (Hangzhou) Bay have long attracted visitors to witness the roaring tidal bore – the largest in the world. This swirling wall of water travels at up to 40 kilometers per hour (25 miles an hour) and can reach as much as 9 metres (30 feet) high, although more usually it is from 1.5 to 4.5 metres (5 to 15 feet) high. This force of nature is a hazard to shipping in and around the harbour, and is too dangerous to surf.
The photographs above (Ar01-047 and Ar01-048) date from around 1911. For more photographs on Visualising China of this remarkable phenomenon – search for ‘Bore’.
Sir Robert Hart’s Chinese band, directed by M. Encarnacao, Hart collection, (c) Queen’s University Belfast.
This is a personal favourite of mine, although there is plenty of competition. I love Warren Swire’s photograph of the old ‘Bridge of Ten Thousand Ages’ (万寿桥) in Fuzhou, his wonderful picture of the Bund and shipping at Jiujiang, and Fu Bingchang’s shot of Min Chin posing with a camera. But there is something very sweet about this photograph of Sir Robert Hart’s Chinese band rehearsing in, one assumes, the garden of his Peking residence in about 1907.
Hart, Inspector-General of the Imperial (late simply Chinese) Maritime Customs Service from 1863 until 1908, was perhaps the best known British figure in modern Chinese history. The activities of his Service went far beyond the simple assessment of customs revenue, as I show in my book The Scramble for China: Foreign devils in the Qing Empire. He once joked that he might as well be titled ‘Inspector General of Everything’. Hart lived in China almost without a break from 1866 onwards, having first arrived in 1854 as a young Vice-Consul. He was a lover of music, playing the violin and in the late 1880s first putting together a brass band of Chinese musicians, which played at his famous garden parties in Peking. These were mostly boys and young men, who first had to learn how to play their instruments.
The band nonetheless has a noteworthy place in the history of new Chinese music (that is European classic music in China) and of cultural exchange. It was the first (civilian) brass band composed of Chinese musicians. We have snatches of its history, and reports of how Hart’s young musicians were poached by leading Qing officials as a vogue grew for bands in the early years of the twentieth century.
This is actually my current screen-saver. It is not a particularly great photograph, in terms of composition, but the best ones often aren’t. I love the way the musicians are rehearsing oblivious to the camera, with the Portuguese bandmaster Encarnacao playing away amongst them. It scores highly on atmosphere and on charm.
Studio portrait of a Chinese woman, Carstairs collection, JC-s037.
This striking photograph (JC-s037), with strong diagonals in the style of Alexander Rodchenko, may well be the work of an unidentified Chinese studio photographer working in the racy, cosmopolitan Shanghai of the 1930s.
The precise combination printing and the masterly control of light and shade, makes for a somewhat surreal and tipsy, triple view portrait – surrealist photography being very much about ‘evoking the union of dream and reality’ (as the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History puts it, on the Metropolitan Museum website: ‘The Surrealists did not rely on reasoned analysis or sober calculation; on the contrary, they saw the forces of reason blocking the access routes to the imagination’).
The original print is small (less than 2 by 3 inches). The portrait sitter could look at this photo of herself gazing at herself – a witty, even post-modernist, at any rate modern, play on self-regard and on portrait photography itself.
Omnipresent in many of the portraits of foreign families, especially children, is the amah. Often unnamed, or simply captioned ‘Amah’ , these were the Chinese nannies and wet-nurses, servants who suckled or looked after children. They were indispensable additions to the foreign household, and often remembered with great affection by their charges, not least because, as elsewhere in the worlds of colonial settlement or back at home, they were simply a more immediate and tangible daily presence in the lives of foreign children than their mothers.
Mrs Peck, child and Amah, Peck collection, pe01-084.
This gave rise to some anxiety, which was vented in the pages of the English-language press in China. Young foreign children, it was feared with good reason in many cases, might have a better grasp of their nanny’s dialect than their native English. Boys especially were at risk of being spoilt, of being too mollycoddled by their carers. There were also darker urban legends, for example that servants would use opium to make children sleep, or that wet-nurses might pass on disease. On such generally unfounded anxieties was the foreign encounter with China grounded.
As a result many foreign children were eventuially wrenched from their homes and packed off to boarding schools, if families could afford it, to the Chefoo School run by the China Inland Mission in Yantai, or to Britain.
Life for most foreigners in China — though certainly not all — was usually a privileged one, more privileged than life back in Britain would have been, even when domestic service was a norm (my paternal grandmother’s first employment was as a housemaid). But that life also had its costs: the emotional cost of the separation of parents and children, and of the separation of children from their Amahs.
Large pots at a pottery, c.1870, Bowra collection, Bo02-049
Mass production is nothing new to China, which has always been the world’s most populous country. Here (Bo02-049) large pots and blocks are being made, apparently in the thatched workshops. It looks like the large pots were made in two parts (as in the foreground), and later joined to make a barrel shape.
Moving a block of ice over frozen water, Ruxton collection, Ru02-34
Ice was cut during the winter in North China from ponds and rivers, and then stored in ice houses for cooling uses over the summer months.
This photo (Ru02-34), with its curiously stagey composition (note that man peeping from behind a tree), is indicative of the amount of work involved in this pre-electric refrigeration technique.
Colonel Robert M. C. Ruxton, Ruxton collection, ru01-001.
Robert Minturn Clarges Ruxton 1876-1946, son of a Admiral William FitzHerbert Ruxton, joined the Essex Regiment in 1897, and began his association with China in 1900 when he was seconded to the First Chinese, or Weihaiwei, Regiment. This was the only unit of Chinese solders the British army ever raised, and was based in the Leased Territory of Weihaiwei in Shandong. It saw action in the 1900 Boxer War, and some of its men marched in the Coronation parade in London in 1902, but was disbanded in 1906. Ruxton then seems to have been in South Africa, but he returned to China working for the Chinese government’s Salt Inspectorate, between 1914-27, and again as a financial advisor to the National Government on Prevention Affairs from 1931 until at least 1937. During the First World War, like many Britons working in China who had experience of working in Shandong, he served in the Chinese Labour Corps on the Western Front.
The photographs in the collection are an eclectic mix of photographs that he seems to have taken himself, especially those showing people and scenes in Weihaiwei, and the men of the Weihaiwei Regiment, and others taken, collected or purchased elsewhere. Ruxton served in Peking and Shanghai in his later posts, and also made inspection trips into the Chinese countryside. His step-daughter married a British consular official, who later joined the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, and who was himself the son of Bishop Cassels, one of the China Inland Mission’s ‘Cambridge Seven’. There are photographs a’plenty of the life and leisure of expatriates, but the records of Weihaiwei and rural China show that Ruxton had an inquisitive and open mind about the land and its peoples.
Soldiers performing acrobatics, Weihaiwei, c.1902, Ruxton collection, ru01-103.
