JISC

8,000 rare photographs of Chinese life in the early twentieth century have just launched online through the Visualising China project, a unique virtual archive giving researchers new opportunities to explore and interact with images of China taken between 1850-1950.

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.

Funded by JISC, the project is a collaboration between the Web Futures team at the University of Bristol’s Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT) and the Historical Photographs of China  (HPC) team within the Department of Historical Studies.

Paola Marchionni, programme manager at JISC, said: “Chinese studies is a growing area of research as the UK and others seek to establish stronger links with Asia. Visualising China is particularly innovative in allowing users to explore content drawn from different sources in a serendipitous way and leveraging crowdsourcing to enrich that content.  Sophisticated resources like Visualising China will create opportunities for people across the world to carry out new research and contribute to our understanding of China’s past.”

The site offers researchers free open access to major online collections such as Historical Photographs of China (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.

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.

Robert Bickers, professor of history and director of HPC, said: "The resource brings Chinese history since the 1850s to life and informs our understanding of modern China. Likely users of the site include family history researchers and historians around the world, not least in China, where photographic documentation is not always easily available."

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.

Images come from a variety of sources – archival (e.g. School of Oriental and African Studies archive; the National Archives; British Steel Collection), commercial (e.g. John Swire and Sons Ltd), as well as privately-held collections, including family albums, prints and negatives, often somewhat neglected in attics and cupboards. The web site was built by ILRT, with additional support from the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Worldwide University Network and the University of Bristol.

Image copyright Peter Hibbard