Barges towed by a water buffalo

Posted on March 29, 2012 by Jamie Carstairs
Barges towed by a water buffalo

Barges towed by a water buffalo, Ruxton collection, Ru-s134

The domestic Asian water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis) is one of the most important animals of Asia.  It is used as an agricultural draught animal (including ploughing), and makes a direct contribution to food supplies with the its milk and as meat.  In 2000, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation estimated that there were approximately 158 million water buffalo in the world.  Its range extends from the Philippines, as far west as Italy, and the animal supplies over half of India’s milk.  The milk produces pure white soft cheeses, of which mozzarella cheese is the best known (Water buffalo milk has a higher content of both buttermilk and non-fat solids than cow’s milk and lacks the yellow pigment carotene which is in cow’s milk).  Search for Chinese water buffalo images on Visualising China with the keyword: buffalo.  For further information from the world authority on these animals, see ‘The Buffaloes of China’ by W. Ross Cockrill (1976): http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Buffaloes_of_China.html?id=nOaESQAACAAJ&redir_esc=y.

The camera-savvy buffalo in Ru-s134, is pulling a train of barges loaded with bales of raw cotton in a waterway or canal.  It is not a wild water buffalo (Bubalus arnee), now alas an endangered species.  Canal building in China, and associated technological developments, goes back to the fifth century BC, when the Peking-Hangchow (Beijing-Hangzhou) Grand Canal, the longest canal or artificial river in world, was begun.

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Drying noodles between sticks

Posted on March 28, 2012 by Jamie Carstairs
Drying noodles between sticks

Drying noodles between sticks, Palmer collection, Pa02-006

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, ‘but it takes him about two years before he succeeds in harnessing the spontaneous energy’ to perform the various procedures. Chinese noodles are typically made from rice in the north, and from wheat in the south, but are also made from mung beans and tapioca.  They can be wide like fettucini, or narrow like vermicelli, and are usually eaten in soup.  Noodles came to symbolise (by their length) life longevity, and are eaten on special occasions such as birthdays (See ‘The Oxford Companion to Food’ by Alan Davidson, 2006, for extensive noodle details).

There are two fine photographs of noodle making and drying in Szechuan (Sichuan) by Cecil Beaton in his ‘Chinese Album’ (1945).  However the photo above (Pa02-006) has movement.  Some commentators are dismissive of the ‘Western gaze’ of foreign photographers in China. However their photos are pertinent precisely because they were taken by foreigners sensitive to differences from their home culture.  Just like any tourist, they were keen to record ‘things Chinese’ –  characteristic, everyday things that would otherwise barely merit a second glance, let alone be photographed.

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Water music

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Jamie Carstairs
Listening to a gramophone record, c.1910

Listening to a gramophone record, c.1910, Sullivan collection, Su01-58

At this impromptu creekside concert, a record is being played for an audience gathered on the bank of a waterway.  One wonders what sort of music was played and what the audience thought of it.  The gramophone record player is on the SMP (Shanghai Municipal Police) houseboat ‘Kathleen’.   The European man in the picture is probably Police Constable Kay, SMP, who was a friend and colleague of Detective Sub-Inspector John Sullivan, SMP, who may have taken this photograph (Su01-58).    The photo, essentially a holiday snap, is in an album owned by Sullivan.

The dog sitting by the record player is attending to the music in much the same way as the dog Nipper in the His Master’s Voice (HMV) advertisements and logo.  Nipper was bought as a puppy in Bristol, England in 1884; John Sullivan was born in Bristol, on 7 Oct 1885. The HMV imagery would have been very familiar to Sullivan and his friends.  Kay and Sullivan were touring from Shanghai in the SMP houseboat ‘Kathleen’, probably among the lakes and creeks of the Taihu region around Shanghai and Soochow (Suzhou).

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Piazza Regina Elina, Italian Concession, Tientsin

Posted on March 26, 2012 by Jamie Carstairs
Piazza Regina Elina, Italian Concession, Tientsin

Piazza Regina Elina, Italian Concession, Tientsin, Grove collection, Gr01-100

Between 1860 and 1945, the Chinese port city of Tientsin (Tianjin) was the site of up to nine foreign-controlled concessions, as well as, temporarily, a multi-national military government (1900-02), and a series of evolving municipal administrations.  This photograph (Gr01-100) on a post card dating from around the 1920s, shows a focal part of the Italian concession:  the First World War memorial in Piazza Regina Elina.  It is remarkable in that one might be forgiven for assuming that the photograph was taken in a city in Italy, were it not for the caption printed on the card.  The ‘fine prospects’ include a handsome villa, wide leafy avenues, the latest in concrete fencing, parking spaces, as well as Winged Victory on her column.  The Italian concession was noted for its progressive town planning and architecture.

The ‘Colonialism in comparative perspective: Tianjin under Nine Flags, 1860-1949’ project aims at producing a comparative and trans-national analysis of the identities, practices and rivalries of five of the major powers established in Tianjin: Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Russia.

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Cat in the Chinese countryside

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Robert Bickers

Rural woman and cat, countrside around Lake Tai, c.1920s, Armstrong Collection, ar03-106.

This one of several score portraits in the albums of Shanghai detective chief William Armstrong. They were taken in the years before he left China in 1927, when he was on houseboat holidays west of Shanghai in the Taihu region (around Lake Tai). Armstrong, who never married, is clearly sometimes travelling with another friend from the police force, but the playful intimacy suggested in some shots of one young woman (who appears more than once) suggests that he also sometimes travelled with a Chinese paramour.

The albums are quite distinctive, as this shot indicates, because someone cut around many of the portraits before pasting them on to the pages. This still puzzles us, but it could simply be (as was put to me in a workshop once) that a child, for example, had subsequently assembled the albums. But otherwise there is no obvious logical reason, or obvious effect, underpinning this method of presenting the images. This is the page from which the photograph above comes from:

Page of one of William Armstrong's albums, Armstrong Collection, ar03-p53

When we digitise individual photographs, we also digitise every page of every album, as above, although these are not placed online. We can, however, re-create albums digitally, and the albums themeselves, which have their own social history as objects, are as vital as the photographs they contain.

This takes us a long way from our cat, but in searching the archive this was the only cat I could find, and in thinking about this image, I was quickly led out to thinking about this Shanghai detective, and the lost histories of his photograph albums, his Chinese companion, and of their relationship.

 

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Dogs in Nanning, 1918

Posted on March 22, 2012 by Robert Bickers

The domestic establishment of a Customs Commissioner, with his pets, 6 April 1918, Hedgeland Collection, he01-263.

This photograph is one of two showing the domestic establishment of R.F.C. Hedgeland in 1918, when the Briton was Nanning Commissioner of the Chinese Maritime Customs. We have his ‘chair coolies’ in the back row, two other ‘coolies’ (his caption), the one of the right one perhaps a groom. Seated centrally is the ‘Boy’ (head of this establishment, and valet), with the cook on his left, and ‘House boy’ on his left. And in amongst them is Hedgeland’s menagerie: five dogs, and one monkey (and those seem to be pigeon coops in the garden behind the house).

It’s difficult to linger long on this assemblage of pets and servants without finding it spectacularly offensive, but it is in fact part of the routine offensiveness of everyday colonialism. I think nothing is intended by this combination. Posing six animals for a photograph would have required including a number of people anyway, to keep them still, so Hedgeland has simply combined the two. But it is impossible to ignore the visual result. Hedgeland’s photographs routinely, and a little unusually, recorded his houses (especially interiors), his staff, pets and his horse. Dogs appear in many of our photographs of foreign domestic life in treaty-era China, often incidentally too, nosing their way into photographs of notables and hunting trips. They were essential ancillaries to the world of the Europeans in China.

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A goose being taken to the home of a bride-to-be

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Jamie Carstairs
A goose being taken to the home of a bride-to-be

A goose being taken to the home of a bride-to-be, Carstairs collection, JC-s10

 

Apparently, at the Proposal Meeting (of the parents of the bride-to-be and her groom), the bridegroom’s family will present the bride’s family with a live goose. The bride’s family should not kill the goose and eat it, because the goose represents the groom. If the goose is quiet when it is given to the bride’s family, it indicates that the groom has a good personality. If noisy, it indicates that the groom is quick-tempered. The bride’s family should leave the goose in a pond.

We would be delighted to know if the charming account above is an accurate description of a Chinese betrothal custom – and indeed any ideas as to whereabouts in China the photograph (JC-s10) might have been taken.  The image is from a glass hand-coloured magic lantern slide prepared by the Bureau of Visual Instruction, Chicago Public Schools, USA.   It is estimated that the date the photo was taken would be in the 1920s or 30s?  The bird on the upturned table may not be a goose – rather, it might be a Tundra swan (Bewick’s swan or Whistling swan; Cygnus columbianus)?

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Bronze armillary, Peking Observatory, 1875

Posted on March 19, 2012 by Jamie Carstairs
Bronze armillary, Peking Observatory, 1875

Bronze armillary, Peking Observatory, 1875, National Archives (London), NA01-72

To mark the vernal equinox on Tuesday 20th March, this is a photograph by Thomas Child (1841-1898) of part of the Ancient (Imperial) Observatory in Peking (Beijing).  The equinox (a word from Latin, meaning ‘equal night’) heralds the start of spring in the northern hemisphere, long celebrated as a time of rebirth.  As the Emperor of China was considered the Son of Heaven, astronomy and the movements of celestial bodies were of great interest.  The Imperial Observatory is one of the oldest in the world, dating from 1442, and was built on a part of the city walls that still stand.  In the seventeenth century, the Jesuit Ferdinand Verbiest redesigned some of the instruments.  After the Boxer Uprising, the instruments were taken as ‘war-booty’, half to Berlin and half to Paris, to be returned towards the end of the First World War.  The observatory is now a museum.

Thomas Child (1841-1898) was a British photographer, employed from 1870 to 1889 in Peking (Beijing) as a gas engineer for the Imperial Maritime Customs Service.  His photographs of the city taken around 1875-80 “became, in China and abroad, ‘the’ visual reference on the old imperial capital. The images found their way into private albums and publications well into the 20th century and inspired generations of photographers.”  (source:  Régine Thiriez: ‘Barbarian Lens’)

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Photographs of photographers: Maude Carrall

Posted on March 16, 2012 by Jamie Carstairs
Muriel Carrall taking a picture at the 'Blossoms'

Maude Carrall taking a picture at the 'Blossoms', Carrall collection, ca02-066

The ‘Blossoms’ looks like an orchard of either apple or cherry trees, which was probably in, or close to, Chefoo (Yantai).  It must have been a favourite springtime picnic spot for the Carrall family, as their photograph albums hold several snaps recording their picnics and outings there, on several different dates.

By 1902, outings weren’t outings without cameras – and this photograph of Maude Carrall taking a photograph, was taken by Mr Forsyth.  Maude Carrall was one of the daughters of James Wilcocks Carrall, whose long career (1868-1902) in the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, culminated as Commissioner of Customs in Chefoo.  He was to die in May, shortly after this Sunday picnic trip to the ‘Blossoms’.

See other photographs in the album compiled by Maude Carrall (Ca02), many of which would have been taken by her, perhaps with a Kodak box camera.  These two ‘Blossoms’ images also include cameras (and so photographers): Ca02-106 and Ca02-110.

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1925 on the Nanjing road Shanghai, Bicyles, natty dressers, revolution

Posted on March 15, 2012 by Robert Bickers

Nanjing road, 1 June 1925, Armstrong collection, ar04-178

Another from Shanghai detective chief William Armstron’s albums. This is probably 1 June 1925, and it’s a view along the Nanjing road in Shanghai towards the Wing On department store. The crowd at the junction ahead are gathered around a fire-truck which has been stoned by demonstrators. An earlier shot also caught the scene, and another the demonstrators outside the store. It’s two days after Sikh and Chinese contables of the Shanghai Municipal Police, led by Briton Inspector E.W. Everson, shot and killed a dozen demonstrators outside the Louza Police Station further along Nanjing road. This was one of the single most important events in the 1920s that galvanised nationalist, and communist, sentiment and activism across China.

The photographer has caught the stillling of the city traffic, the tension and uncertainty of people on the street, and two very smartly dressed men blithely strolling away.

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