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Dave at the excellent China blog Mutant Palm has compiled a list of online collections of images from Chinese history. Very useful. I also continue to post new collections as I hear about them, and hopefully Dave can keep the list updated as more and more images from China’s past become available to the online public. This has nothing to do with China, but if you’ve ever worked/lived/suffered in academia, then this story is more than just a humorous anecdote from the trenches of scientific inquiry…rather it’s a wonderfully succinct and painful metaphor about our labors of love and the the grail of academic validation. From the Chronicle News blog: One Man’s Worthless Bag of Dung Is Another’s Priceless Research Daniel Bennett has vowed to sue Britain’s University of Leeds for incinerating 77 pounds of feces he collected from the rare Bhutan lizard during seven years of doctoral research in the rain forests of the Philippines. Writing in Times Higher Education, the biologist describes his horror upon returning to Leeds from his fieldwork on Varanus olivaceus, a relative of the Komodo dragon. “I was surprised to find my desk space occupied by another student and to see that photographs of my daughter, my girlfriend and my favorite lizards had been removed from the wall,” he writes. “The laboratory space where my samples had been stored was empty. Irritation turned to fear as I realized that my personal effects had been carefully stowed in boxes, but there was no sign of my 35-kilogram bag of lizard shit. Fear Via H-Asia: Historical Photographs of China Historical Photographs of China project, School of Humanities, University of Bristol, UK & Institut d’Asie Orientale (IAO), Lyon, France Self-description: “A collaboration between scholars at the University of Bristol, University of Lincoln, and the Institut d’Asie Orientale, this project aims to locate, archive, and disseminate photographs from the substantial holdings of images of modern China held mostly in private hands overseas. These are often of even greater historic interest than might ordinarily be the case, as the destruction of materials inside China in war and revolution in the twentieth century, and especially during the 1966-69 Cultural Revolution, means that there is a relative dearth today of accessible photographic records in China itself. [...] The photographs archived here come from the collections of a Chinese diplomat, foreign businessmen, staff of the administrations in the Chinese treaty ports, missionaries, and officials of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service. They shed light on political events such as the 1925 May Thirtieth incident, on working and social life, on treaty port architecture, commercial history, the history of dress and fashion, and of course the history of photography in China. They were taken by talented amateur photographers, by foreign snap-shotters, If it feels like I link to China Media Project a lot, it’s simply because David Bandurski runs a damn good blog. Allow me to do so again and recommend his excellent post “Can China forget its own history,” a must-read for anyone interested in modern Chinese history and historiography. The accompanying essay/translation will also have particular resonance for those familiar with the documentary Morning Sun, in which Song Binbin’s recollections feature prominently. I took a taxi to work this morning, always a mistake. In this case because I’m pretty sure my driver was hammered. Now I know we expats like to make our little jokes about how some taxi drivers in Beijing like to get a little lubed before heading out to work, and certainly anyone who has had lunch (or breakfast) at a restaurant frequented by cabbies has witnessed the distrubingly high liquid/food ratio, but I never had the personal pleasure of watching a cabbie squint his way down the Second Ring Road at high speed. At first, when he tried to light a cigarette, had trouble with the radio, and was driving 8 miles an hour on an open Dongzhimen Nei, I thought he was simply sleepy…these guys do put in long hours. Why didn’t I just bail? Well, I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, everytime I thought my life was truly in danger he’d rally and we’d have 10-15 minutes of uneventful driving before he would feel I was too bored and so spice up the trip with events like “Swerve into oncoming bus” and “narrowly miss bicyclist.” I was still in the middle |
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