Tag Archives: Chinese Maritime Customs Service

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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Introducing the Ranjit Singh Sangha Collection

Posted on January 13, 2017 by Robert Bickers

This small but evocative new collection was sent to us by Jaskaran Sangha, whose grandfather, Kartar Singh lived in Shanghai from 1920 to 1960, where he worked for the Chinese Maritime Custom Service. The set of 47 photographs includes portraits … Continue reading →

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Andrew Hillier reflects on Three Brothers in China: Visualising Family in Empire

Posted on September 22, 2016 by Andrew Hillier

Having just completed his PhD at Bristol, ‘Three Brothers in China: A Study of Family in Empire’, Andrew Hillier is now working on developing it  into a book. On 12 May 1846, Eliza Medhurst set off by boat from her family … Continue reading →

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Jon Chappell on burning opium in Nanning

Posted on June 6, 2016 by Guest

A guest blog from Jon Chappell, who recently secured his PhD at the University of Bristol, on ‘Foreign Intervention In China: Empires And International Law In The Taiping Civil War, 1853-64’. Jon is currently working on a British Inter-university China Centre … Continue reading →

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