Internet resources: Unique virtual archive reveals Chinese life between 1850 – 1950

8,000 rare photographs of Chinese life in the early twentieth century have just launched online through the Visualising China, a unique virtual archive giving researchers new opportunities to explore and interact with images of China taken between 1850-1950. It offers cross-searching with related online collections to help avoid time-consuming searches across multiple sites.

The site offers researchers free open access to major online collections such as Historical Photographs of China, HPC (University of Bristol), the Sir Robert Hart Collection (Queen’s University, Belfast) and Joseph Needham’s Photographs of Wartime China (Needham Research Institute, Cambridge), as well as to previously unseen and private collections and a selected Google Books library of China-related publications. The archive includes rare shots of the nationalist leader of China Chiang Kai-Shek among photographs taken by the Chinese ambassador to the USSR during World War Two, Fu Bingchang.

Researchers may submit comments or annotations to the image entries, organise images on to their own workbenches, download low-resolution images, and explore the collections by word searches, date ranges, photographer, people depicted, maps and classification terms.

The Visualising China project grew out of five years of digitisation work undertaken by HPC in the Department of Historical Studies, culminating in one of the largest online collections of historical photographs of China, which is still growing.

New interactive resource is a tool for researchers, students and anyone interested in the photographic record of China during this period.