Guest blog: Andrew Hillier on Armistice Day and its Aftermath in Treaty Port China
Visualising China Blog
by Andrew Hillier
4M ago
As we approach the 105th anniversary of Armistice Day, Andrew Hillier considers the significance of the ceremony in treaty port China and for Chinese people today. Held at the Cenotaph in Victoria Park, Tianjin (Tientsin), the Armistice Day parade was ‘the most impressive’ of the imperial celebrations to take place in the treaty port, recalled Brian Power in his memoir of his early life in China. Modelled on the service in Whitehall, London, the Consul-General (William Pollock Ker) took the place of the King alongside members of the British Municipal Council and behind them, foreign military g ..read more
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Guest blog: Kaori Abe on the Abe Naoko Collection –– a glimpse of a Japanese family’s life in Shanghai, c.1927-c.1934
Visualising China Blog
by Guest
7M ago
Kaori Abe, who has written the post below, is a historian specialising in the history of Hong Kong and port cities in East Asia. The author of Chinese Middlemen in Hong Kong’s Colonial Economy, 1830-1890 (Routledge, 2017), she has worked in Singapore, the UK, and Switzerland and holds a PhD in History from the University of Bristol. A decade ago, my grandmother, Abe Naoko (阿部 直子 née Futakami 二神), passed down to me her collection of old family photos of Shanghai and postcards of Hong Kong, which together make up the Abe Naoko Collection. What makes this collection unique is its portrayal o ..read more
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Guest blog: Ghassan Moazzin on Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China
Visualising China Blog
by Guest
9M ago
Ghassan Moazzin is an assistant professor in the School of Humanities and the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong. His first monograph, Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China: Banking on the Chinese Frontier, 1870-1919, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. He now works on the history of the electrical and electronics industries in modern China. Fig 1: Hankow Road (Hankou lu) photographed from the Bund. On the left: The Custom House. On the right: The German-Asiatic Bank © 2012 Billie Love Historical Collection, BL ..read more
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Guest blog: Helena Lopes on A connected place: Macau in the Second World War
Visualising China Blog
by Guest
9M ago
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 the Second World War has recently been published by Cambridge University Press. Nominally under Portuguese control since the sixteenth century until 1999, Macau has long been a territory shaped by regional and global connection and by the circulation of people, goods, and ideas. However, studies in the history of China’s foreign relations and Europ ..read more
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Andrew Hillier on Bessie Pirkis: A Renaissance Woman in Peking Part 2
Visualising China Blog
by Andrew Hillier
9M ago
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 the 1870s and early 1880s. As we have seen, children in the Legation spent much of their time away from their parents. It seems from one of Bessie Pirkis’s paintings, that, by Christmas 1877, Amy and Georgie, now aged six and three, each had their own amah and this certainly will have given Bessie more time for her music and art. For Christma ..read more
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Guest blog: Rachel Meller on Uncovering the story of Shanghai’s Second World War Jewish refugees
Visualising China Blog
by Robert Bickers
10M ago
In this post, author Rachel Meller introduces her newly published book, and discusses some of the documents and photographs that prompted it. These formed a small collection but, like many that HPC has seen, a complex story was waiting to be  discovered within. Rachel grew up near London, the middle of three daughters of Austrian refugees. After studying Neurobiology at the University of Sussex, followed by research into hormones and behaviour at Cambridge University, she became a writer in a communication consultancy. The Box with the Sunflower Clasp is her first book. My aunt Lisbeth, w ..read more
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Need and opportunity: the new HPC website
Visualising China Blog
by Mike Jones
1y ago
Mike Jones, Research Software Engineer (RSE) in Research IT at the University of Bristol, describes some of the choices underpinning the development of the new ‘Historical Photos of China’ web application. Moving the project’s digital assets into the custody of Special Collections – as discussed in the post ‘HPC: A Change of Pace’ – provided a need and opportunity to re-engineer the ‘Historical Photographs of China’ platform. Several considerations underpinned this development work: The new application should have similar functionality to the old one. Even though regular site users will notic ..read more
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Everything’s changed, but everything’s still the same: HPC update
Visualising China Blog
by Robert Bickers
1y ago
You might, from today, spot that Historical Photographs of China looks a little different in places. That’s because it is. Over the last two years our friends in the University of Bristol’s Research IT team have been rebuilding our platform in a new environment.  And not only is the underlying environment a new one, a change driven by the fact that our last iteration (launched in January 2016) was built on software that is nearing the end of its life, it also works in a fundamentally different way. This will not be at all visible to users, but it makes the life of those working with the p ..read more
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Location/Dislocation – Admiral Keppel, the Chinese Buddha at Sandringham and three key photographs
Visualising China Blog
by Jamie Carstairs
1y ago
Jamie Carstairs (Special Collections, University of Bristol Library) is researching the work of Charles Frederick Moore (1838-1916). In this post, Photodetective Carstairs reinvestigates a photographic cold case… Fig. 1. A gilded bronze Buddha, with two unidentified men, British Legation, Beijing, c. 1869. A rare, hand-coloured print of a photograph by Charles Frederick Moore. Image courtesy of the Terry Bennett Collection (ref: BPEK-3). In my mind, three golden Buddhas lined up in a row, as if in a one-armed bandit of yore; there was a laden, brain defogging pause, then “Aha! I think I have ..read more
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The Forbidden City at War: Images of the Wartime Evacuation of the Imperial Art Collections
Visualising China Blog
by Guest
1y ago
Adam Brookes is the author of Fragile Cargo: China’s Wartime Race to Save the Treasures of the Forbidden City, published in September 2022 by Chatto &Windus, London. He was for many years a journalist for BBC News, serving as Jakarta Correspondent, Beijing Correspondent, and Washington Correspondent.   China’s hapless last emperor, Pu Yi, vacated the Forbidden City at gunpoint in November, 1924. Less than a year later, the Forbidden City became the Palace Museum and opened its doors to Peking’s public. Rapturous crowds came to wander the halls and courtyards that had been home to the ..read more
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