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The Collections
Fu Bingchang
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Historical Photographs of China
About the project and using this site
About the project
A collaboration between scholars at the University of Bristol, University of Lincoln, and the Institut d'Asie Orientale, this project aims to locate, archive, and disseminate photographs from the substantial holdings of images of modern China held mostly in private hands overseas. These are often of even greater historic interest than might ordinarily be the case, as the destruction of materials inside China in war and revolution in the twentieth century, and especially during the 1966-69 Cultural Revolution, means that there is a relative dearth today of accessible photographic records in China itself. Turmoil in China, and emigration from the country, also led to the development of a large Chinese diaspora. Moreover, thousands of foreigners lived and worked in China between the 1840s and the 1950s, and many thousands more visited for longer or shorter periods. Chinese emigrants, foreign expatriates and visitors alike took, bought or otherwise acquired photographs. Many of these are in libraries and collections in the West, and in addition our research in modern Chinese history has led us to many interesting private collections. Images from private and public collections are available here. An exhibition of some of this material 'Picturing China 1870-1950: Photographs from British Collections' took place in London, Bath, and Durham in 2007-2008. A further exhibition took place at the Grant Bradley Gallery, Bristol, from 17th January to 21st February 2009. Click here for more details about the exhibitions in England. Collaborators in Spain held an exhibition of photographs from the collection in Pamplona in November 2009. The companion volume to the exhibition, Picturing China 1870-1950: Photographs from British Collections (Chinese Maritime Customs Project Occasional Papers No.1, 2007, ISSN: 1755-6643) can be ordered via the order form. The project was also the subject of a supplement to the winter 2008 (No.46) International Institute of Asian Studies Newsletter. This can be accessed at the IIAS site, or as an Adobe Acrobat file of the entire supplement here (warning, this is a large file, 3.24mb).
The photographs archived here come from the collections of a Chinese diplomat, foreign businessmen, staff of the administrations in the Chinese treaty ports, missionaries, and officials of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service. They shed light on political events such as the 1925 May Thirtieth incident, on working and social life, on treaty port architecture, commercial history, the history of dress and fashion, and of course the history of photography in China. They were taken by talented amateur photographers, by foreign snap-shotters, professional studio photographers, and others. These images were taken, acquired or bought by those living or visiting China.
These digital copies of the images are made available here for educational, reference and research purposes. As well as a variety of modestly sized collections, this project has worked with a number of larger bodies of material including photographs related to the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, diplomat Foo Ping-sheung (Fu Bingchang), holdings relating to the Shanghai Municipal Police, the G. Warren Swire collection, and the J.C. Oswald collection (SOAS).
How to use the site
This is a free, open-access site. You do not need to log in. Please use the left-hand menu to select either 'All images', or images within one of the main collections. From each of these front pages for each collection you can either browse all the images, or search for specific key words. You can search for places, types of building, institution, names etc. We use both pinyin romanization, and older transliterations of Chinese words. You can also search using Chinese characters. These images are all copyrighted, and details are given with each photograph. If you wish to use an image for any purpose other than for research or study purposes or if you require a higher resolution copy of an image then you must contact the copyright owner. Please direct any such requests to Historical Photographs of China (hums-chinaphotos@bristol.ac.uk).
Funding
Funding for this project has come from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which funded the History of the Chinese Maritime Customs Project, John Swire and Sons, the British Academy, the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Bristol, the Worldwide Universities Network, and the University of Lincoln. We are also extremely grateful to our collaborators at the Institut d'Asie Orientale (IAO) at Lyon, especially Christian Henriot, and Gérald Foliot, to Susannah Rayner, Archivist at the Library of the School of Oriental and African Studies, and to all the owners of photographs who have been in touch with us.
Contact
Professor Robert Bickers
Historical Photographs of China project,
School of Humanities,
University of Bristol,
11 Woodland Road,
Bristol BS8 1TB,
United Kingdom.
Email: Historical Photographs of China (hums-chinaphotos@bristol.ac.uk).
Page modified on 12 July 2010