Metropole Hotel, Shanghai, 1930 上海新城饭店老照片

Posted on March 14, 2012 by Jamie Carstairs
Metropole Hotel under construction, Shanghai, September 1930

Metropole Hotel under construction, Shanghai, September 1930, British Steel Archive Project, BS-s11

This photograph (BS-s11) of the Metropole Hotel under construction, is from the British Steel Archive Project, in Teesside, from whence came the girders for the building’s steel frame.  The Metropole was designed by Palmer and Turner, and was built on a crossroads opposite its twin sister Hamilton House.  Both of these tall, striking and angular, Art Deco, edifices still stand, although the Hamilton House apartments are now offices.  The more classic and sober Shanghai Municipal Council (by R.C. Turner) is just across the junction.

The architectural firm, Palmer and Turner, designed several of Shanghai’s public buildings in the 1920s and 1930s, including Sassoon House (Cathay Hotel, now Peace Hotel), Custom House, the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation building, as well as other showcase structures along the Bund (Wai Tan).  The Bund became ‘one of the most striking and beautiful civic entrances in the world’ (Source: All About Shanghai and Environs, University Press, Shanghai, 1934) – China’s Western, international, face.

The image also shows a Sikh policeman on points duty (holding up a car, a rickshaw and pedestrians), adverts for Goodyear tyres and Chrysler cars, and the blur of a tram trundling along the Kiangse Road (Jiangxi Zhonglu).

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Photographs of photographers: Warren Swire

Posted on March 12, 2012 by Jamie Carstairs

Photographs of photographers with their cameras are not often found in their own albums of photographs.   So it was good to find a snap of Warren Swire with an unidentified woman wearing jodhpurs, taken by Ann Phipps (ph04-045).   Ann was the niece of the British Minister to China, Sir Miles Lampson and she visited her distinguished uncle in China in 1928-29.

G. Warren Swire with his camera, British Legation Lodge, Peking, Phipps collection, ph04-045

It seems that a party, probably including Ann Phipps and Warren Swire, had ridden to the British Legation Lodge outside Peking (Beijing).

The Historical Photographs of China project had already digitised several hundred photographs taken by Warren Swire, who thoroughly documenting Butterfield and Swire’s wharves, warehouses and ships –  images which the company could use to help manage the business from London.  Most serendipitously, among these photographs were four taken by Warren Swire, during this same outing to the Legation Lodge in the Western Hills (sw22-124, sw22-125, sw22-126 and sw22-127).

Horses and grooms, near Legation Lodge, Peking, Swire collection, sw22-126

 

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This month in history, 1927: Shanghai 上海浙江路老照片

Posted on March 9, 2012 by Robert Bickers

Waiting for the National Revolutionary Army, March 1927, Armstrong collection, ar04-169

In mid-late March 1927 the force of the Guomindang’s National Revolutionary Army moved into the city of Shanghai. Communist insurrections had already taken place, but the forces of a regional militarist, Sun Chuanfang (孙传芳), including units of refugee Russian soldiers, were still in place. These shots, probably taken on 22 March, show the eerie quiet of the interregnum. These busy streets are mostly empty, a few stragglers seek safety. Baskets have been dropped by others in the panic of flight.

Running for cover on Chekiang rd (Zhejiang rd), Armstrong collection, ar04-166

The International Settlement and the French concession had thrown up barbed-wire barricades and gates. They aimed to to stem the flow of refugees seeking shelter from the Chinese-administered parts of the city, prevent the defeated from seeking sancturary, and were also worried that the Guomindang forces, buoyed by success, and enthused with anti-imperialist sentiment, and allied to the Chinese Communist Party, might move to take over the foreign-controlled zones. This was an acute moment of international crisis. In the event there was no Guomindang attack on the settlements, and within a month the National Revolutionary Army’s commander, Chiang Kaishek, had launched a debilitating attack on his Communist Party allies.

These photographs came from the colleciton of William Armstrong, who for many years had been chief of the Detective Branch (the CID) of the international settlement’s Shanghai Municipal Police. Armstrong was no friend of the Guomindang, but the International Settlement quickly started working with Chiang, and assisted the April coup against the Communists.

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A City Gate

Posted on March 7, 2012 by Jamie Carstairs

People around a city gate, with soldiers, Peck collection, Pe01-013

The location of the above gateway to a city remains unconfirmed.  The photograph (Pe01-013) is a puzzle: it shows what looks like a body of men, some with queues, in uniform, but without weapons, going towards and through the gate.  Also an official on the right, in a darker uniform, is perhaps inspecting someone’s goods?  Any suggestions would be appreciated!

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You press the button, we do the rest

Posted on March 6, 2012 by Jamie Carstairs

Thomas Crellin and students at the Kodak Professional School, Shanghai, 1923, Crellin collection, DC-s01

Here then is ‘the rest’: at this Kodak Professional School in Shanghai in 1923, students are learning to spool and process negatives, enlarge, develop, fix and dry prints, then guillotine and dry mount them – the skilful practical application of the complex interplay of light, time, optics, chemicals, celluloid and paper – training for a career in a photographer’s shop, or maybe as a photographer (DC-s01).  Tommy Crellin (on the left) guides and presides.  Some of the photographs that passed through these students’ hands, may well have passed through ours here too.

Kodak famously made photography accessible to all, by simplifying and popularising, by innovation, and by maintaining a very profitable business plan, which allowed for profits to be ploughing back into research and development.  The age of the snapshot began in 1889, when Kodak’s first camera was launched by George Eastman.

Hugely successful, snaps became one of the most telling forms of visual documentation of the twentieth century (As Graham King put it in a bon mot: “I snap, therefore I am” René Cartes de Visite).  These photographs are now especially valuable to historians, as well as to families and nostalgists.

Click, click, click, thanks Kodak, for all the memories.

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Patches for a Canton panorama

Posted on March 5, 2012 by Jamie Carstairs

Many thanks to all contributors to Visualising China, including the astute person who pointing out that the location recorded for UB01-14 (http://visualisingchina.net/#hpc-ub01-14), below, was not quite accurate: Canton (Guangzhou) yes, Shamian Island no.

American Concession Grounds and Pearl River, Canton, University of Bristol collection, UB01-14

The relevant image entry details have now been corrected on Historical Photographs of China (http://hpc.vcea.net/), and this information will appear on Visualising China in due course, after harvesting.

This commentator also noted that John Thomson (http://digital.nls.uk/thomson/index.html), the great pioneer China photographer, had taken a photograph from the same tall building as in UB01-14.  Thomson’s photograph, made maybe 10-20 years before UB01-14, was reproduced in his marvellous book ‘China and Its People’ (1873), Vol 1, Plate XVI’:

John Thomson: China and Its People (1873), Vol 1, Plate XVI

Thomson’s photograph shows the buildings occupied by Messrs Russell & Co and by Messrs Smith Archer in the ‘American Concession Grounds’, as well as the wall around these properties.  See the right hand side of Thomson’s photograph for the ‘overlap’ between his photograph and UB01-14.  There must be other extant photographs of Canton, as seen from this or nearby vantage points?

Many thanks to colleagues in Special Collections, University of Bristol Library (http://www.bristol.ac.uk/library/resources/specialcollections/), who had alerted the Historical Photographs of China project to the old Chinese photographs (prefix UB01-) in an album containing mostly Japanese photographs, held in the University archive.

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At the theatre, Weihaiwei, c.1901

Posted on March 3, 2012 by Robert Bickers

Theatre performance on a temporary stage, Weihaiwei, c.1901, Ruxton collection, ru01-040.

This is one of a number of images that we have of theatrical performances in China. It was probably taken by R.M.C. Ruxton, who was variously in the British ‘Weihaiwei’ or First Chinese Regiment, the Salt Gabelle (the Chinese state salt monopoly), and the Chinese Ministry of Finance, where he served as a Financial Advisor. Ruxton was in China for most of the years from from 1900 to the late 1930s. Some of the audience (those wearing the hats) may be men of the Weihaiwei Regiment, although Chinese recruited for mine labour in South Africa after the Boer War were also issued such head wear. Weihai was a British leased territory, grabbed in a panic about Russian ambitions in north China in 1898. Where-are-we? Why-oh-why? asked British wags. It was returned to Chinese control in 1930, although the Royal Navy’s China station retained it as a naval summer base thereafter.

The stage here probably faced a local temple, and the performers were there to entertain the gods. Food vendors and others came to take advantage in various ways of the crowds which gathered to watch the spectacle.

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More moderns, in Tianjin

Posted on March 2, 2012 by Robert Bickers

Chinese Customs staff at Tianjin, 1905, Hedgeland Collection he01-158

A group shot probably taken by Customs officer, Briton Reginald F.C. Hedgeland, in 1905 in the northern port city of Tianjin. (Perhaps that is his uniform cap, balanced on the wooden frame on the right). Unusually well-educated for the Customs (very few of the British staff had been to university), Hedgeland joined in 1897, and served until 1930. He served in Tianjin between 1903-06. Hedgeland’s albums and papers are preserved in the School of Oriental and African Studies Special Collections. The men are none of them dressed in Western-style clothing (but that would start to be case soon after this), but two of them show how very ‘untraditional’ China was in this transitional period between the Boxer uprising of 1900 and the revolution of 1911. One man clutches a tree branch endeavouring to stay still and upright on his bicycle, and at the far left another is smoking a cigarette.

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1945: Facing the future

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Robert Bickers

Chongqing. Street scene. Misery, mud & rain. 1st December 1945, Booker collection, RB-t889

The caption is the photographer’s. Air Vice-Marshall Arthur Fiddament (1896-1976) took this Kodachrome colour slide in Chongqing, battered war-time capital of the Republic of China, on a whirlwind round the world trip in late 1945. They arrived in Kunming on 29 November from India, and flew out of Shanghai on to Japan on 3 December. Fiddament was investigating transport routes for the Royal Air Force, and with a small team flew around the world covering 34,000 miles in a Lancastrian in 34 days, leaving England on 12 November. All the way round he photographed the postwar world in colour, and often from the air, having acquired his Kodachrome habit during a posting to Washington D.C. The technology was still relatively new — it was introduced in 1935. These are the earliest colour photographs of China that the project team has yet uncovered.

These children, gathered to watch the foreign visitors, had with their parents suffered much during the war, having grown up in one of the most heavily-bombed of Chinese cities. Fiddament flew out of the city that same day.

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Shanghai modern

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Robert Bickers
Boy on a 'motor-bike', early 1950s?

Boy racer in a Shanghai studio, Bickers collection, bi-s020

This was a Shanghai junk-shop find in 2011. It was actually spotted by a friend, and although it came with no context whatsoever it was too good a shot to leave behind. It’s a winter shot (that scarf), taken in a studio with a nice modern prop. We might guess it’s a Shanghai studio, but it could be any city, and it could in fact be any studio fantasy of a city. We’re possibly more familiar with people posing in rickshaws in studios, but a motorbike is modern. The leather shoes suggest a young man who is not poor, even if a real motorbike might be beyond him. The hairstyle suggested to us a postwar, and possibly a post-1949 date, but we may be wrong. As ever, we would be happy to have suggestions.

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