The ‘Historical Photographs of China‘ project locates privately held images of modern China from around the world, digitalizes and archives those images, and then shares those archived images online.
The project began in 2006, based in and managed by the University of Bristol in England. The project started as the ‘History of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service,’ which was a project dedicated to documenting the British-run Chinese bureaucracy that lasted from 1854 to 1950. The project has broadened its reach from the original project in the following years and now aims to document historical images from China with a wider scope. In 2007, the project was recognized as an Academy Research Project by the British Academy, which supports its primary research in the humanities and social sciences. The current website launched in 2017, and was later nominated in 2018 by Digital Humanities Awards for “Best Use of DH For Public Engagement.”
The goal of the project is to locate, digitize and preserve photographs originating in China by publishing them as part of an open-access online archive. The project hosts (mostly) privately owned photographs, prints, negatives, and slides that commonly date from around 1850 to 1950, and has collected these from across the globe. Shanghai, Tianjin, and Wuhan are some of the areas of China where the project has collected images in the largest quantity.
Thus far, over 20,000 photographs have been made available by the project, with over 30,000 additional images having also been preserved. Images published on the archive may not be used for commercial purposes but are freely available as public domain images for educational and research purposes.
The project documents its findings through the publication of a project blog and through various social media accounts.
