I've been quietly putting historic photos of Shanghai on the map using this website: PastVu. There are now over 500 photographs mapped and briefly described, with links to their sources. I keep adding photos almost every day (to the detriment of other things I ought to be doing). I hope this is fair use of historic photos, but let me know if you ( Read more... )

Today's visit to the LSE Archives was fruitful: I dug out a bunch of historic photos of the Russian Women's Hostel - a humanitarian shelter and reeducation centre for Russian women in Shanghai. The building still exists; more stories will follow.


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Taken by Japanese intelligence in the years 1924-1944 and published in 15 volumes. The images are reproduced online in hi-res, with unobtrusive watermarks in the corner.


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Looking at the immense archive of Jack Birns' photos taken in Shanghai in 1948-1949, one cannot help but reconstruct his journeys in Shanghai, his walks in the streets, observing the pedestrians, vendors and people engaged in traffic - bicyclists, rickshaw pullers, dockworkers, beggars. One cannot help but see sequences taken on the same day, ( Read more... )

In continuation of the post from September 24, 2017.

Among the many vivid Shanghai scenes photographed by Jack Birns in 1949 there is a series of portraits of women (who look Russian to me), taken inside an empty restaurant with lush wooden paneling, inlaid floor and huge windows above the eye level:

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Although the majority of Russian businesses and residences were located in the French Concession, there was a number of them in other areas of Shanghai - in the business blocks near the Bund, along Bubbling Well Road, around the passenger terminal in Hongkou and in the Chinese-governed territories ( Read more... )

I've found an awesome archive of old photographs of Shanghai: Republican-era Images (民国图片). Some of them I've seen at the open-access Shanghai Library Historic Image Archive, but with a watermark and in a lower resolution. There are some I haven't seen before, for example:


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Leafing through the ever-delightful Frenchtown Shanghai by Tess Johnston, I was attracted by the photo of Julien Heimendinger's auto salon on Avenue Foch 627, at the corner of Route Cardinal Mercier. I decided to look it up, fearing it did not survive the construction of the elevated highway in the place of the old Avenue Foch. Luckily, the ( Read more... )

I'm trying to identify the Russians in these photographs, which were taken in Shanghai in 1945, possibly in December, by the American photographer George Lacks. This friendly meeting centered around a charismatic person in a military uniform. The event is captioned on Getty Images as Correspondents meeting the founder of the Free French Movement in ( Read more... )

Found a stack of issues of Oriental Motor on archive.org and enjoyed reading about the first ever car show in China, held in the French Concession in December 1921 ( Read more... )