Tag Archives: Chinese Maritime Customs Service

Guest blog: Yorgos Moraitis on Robert Hart and his Loyalties, Neither Chinese Nor British

Posted on October 19, 2025 by Guest

Robert Hart is a key figure in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Chinese history, best known for building and expanding the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs (CIMC) during his nearly fifty years as Inspector General (1863-1910). Beyond overseeing tax collection on … Continue reading →

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Guest blog: Helena Lopes on A connected place: Macau in the Second World War

Posted on July 4, 2023 by Guest

Dr Helena F. S. Lopes is Lecturer in Modern Asian History at Cardiff University. She was previously a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in History at the University of Bristol. Her book Neutrality and Collaboration in South China: Macau during … Continue reading →

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Andrew Hillier on Bessie Pirkis: A Renaissance Woman in Peking Part 2

Posted on June 25, 2023 by Andrew Hillier

Concluding his overview of the recently digitised Pirkis Collection, Dr Andrew Hillier digs further into these 400 cartes de visite to consider what the collection tells us about the legation world and the European presence in Peking more generally during … Continue reading →

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Andrew Hillier on Bessie Pirkis: A Renaissance Woman in Peking

Posted on April 16, 2023 by Andrew Hillier

A recent approach to HPC revealed a treasure trove of material relating to life in the British Legation, Peking, in the 1870s and early 1880s, but, as Dr Andrew Hillier explains, making sense of the photographs can be a challenge.  … Continue reading →

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Guest blog: Nadine Attewell on Refocusing the Gaze: Leisure, Power, and Women’s Work in Interwar Hong Kong

Posted on August 2, 2021 by Guest

Our guest writer today is Nadine Attewell, Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies atSimon Fraser University, and director of the undergraduate program in Global Asia. She is the author of Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Afterlife of Empire (2014), and is currently … Continue reading →

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Guest post: Spaniards in the treaty ports: Archivo China-España and Juan Mencarini

Posted on June 25, 2020 by Guest

Our latest post comes from Xavier Ortells-Nicolau, an adjunct professor at the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and English Studies, Universitat de Barcelona. His recent work has focused on images of China in late nineteenth and early twentieth century … Continue reading →

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‘With a Camera in Yunnan’: the Ethnographic Expeditions of Fred W. Carey, RGS #2

Posted on April 27, 2018 by Andrew Hillier

PART 2 – COLLECTING AND DISPLAY In this second blog, Dr Andrew Hillier explores how the International Exhibition in Paris (1900) provided this young Customs man with the opportunity to collect local costumes in Yunnan but how their acquisition and … Continue reading →

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‘With a Camera in Yunnan’: the Ethnographic Expeditions of Frederic W. Carey, RGS #1

Posted on March 29, 2018 by Andrew Hillier

Drawing on a collection of photographs taken in Yunnan at the turn of the twentieth century, in this, the first of two blogs, Dr Andrew Hillier discusses what these images tell us about ‘the imperial gaze’ and the mind-set of … Continue reading →

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Ian Gill on photographs and family history

Posted on October 20, 2017 by Guest

While reading journalist Ian Gill’s articles in the South China Morning Post on his search into the history of his China coast family, we were struck by the place of photographs in that story and invited him to tell us … Continue reading →

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No Great Wall

Posted on July 7, 2017 by Robert Bickers

The latest book to use one of our photographs on its cover has just arrived in the post. Felix Boecking teaches modern Chinese economic and political history at the University of Edinburgh, and his volume, which grew out of the … Continue reading →

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