Smiling through the 1920s. Two private collections of Chinese photographs

The written archives available for understanding the worlds of China’s open century between the 1840s and 1949 are vast, and many new materials have recently been made available in Shanghai, for example, at the Shanghai Municipal Archive. But there is also much, in Europe, that we are still finding, and that remains uncovered. A lot of this is in private hands, and much of it is photographic material. By way of an explanation we need to remember just how many Europeans actually visited or spent part of their career in China.

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