China's 1911 Revolution ended the rule of both the 267-year-old Manchu Qing dynasty and the more than 2,000-year-old imperial system, establishing Asia's first, if not lasting, republic. Because war correspondence was not an established profession in China and the camera was a rare apparatus in Chinese life at the time, photographs of the revolution are rare. Francis E. Stafford (1884-1938), an American working as a photographer for Asia's largest publishing company, Commercial Press in Shanghai, had unusual access to both sides of the conflict. The Birth of a Republic documents this tumultuous period through Stafford's photographic eye.Stafford trained his lens on the leaders of the revolutionaries, the imperial court, and the generals and foot soldiers, as well as on the common people. His images thus capture the stock in trade of war correspondents and photo journalists, but he also documented scenes of everyday life, from the streets of China's cities to the muddy lanes of its vill
How did ordinary people live through the extraordinary changes that have swept across modern China? How did peasants transform themselves into urbanites? How did the citizens of Shanghai cope with the
This is a rich and comprehensive study of beggars’ culture and the institution of mendicancy in China from late imperial times to the mid-twentieth century, with a glance at the resurgence of beggars
This book is a collection of translations from Old Photos, a Chinese bimonthly publication launched in 1996 that presents photographs and narratives from ordinary readers and professional historians i