Old photographs open a door to the past

Old photographs can preserve the memories of past times. People can see what the buildings looked like, examine the city’s layout and landscapes, and then contrast them with the scene today.

However, old photographs of smaller cities are rarely to be found. The old times seem to have disappeared into history with only written accounts to give people an idea of what they looked like many years ago.

Xu Chao, 32, who works for the Haining County Cultural Relics Protection Bureau, is trying to alter that situation. For years, he has been collecting hundreds of old photos in digital form from libraries all over the world, and has discovered a series of photos of his hometown of Haining County and other small cities in the Yangtze River Delta.

When Xu was surveying in Puyuan Town of Tongxiang County, a low-profile arch stone bridge caught his attention. It looked similar to the one in an album from Johan Gunnar Andersson (1874-1960), a Swedish archeologist and geologist closely associated with Chinese archeology in the 1920s.

However, the words under the picture said it was the Main Village Bridge in Jiangsu Province. When he compared the photo with the bridge in front of him, he found that every detail matched.

“Arch stone bridges are common in the Yangtze River Delta, but it is impossible that two bridges share the same number of slabs, bricks, and curve,” Xu said. “After rigorous comparison, I’m pretty sure that Andersson made a mistake.”

According to historical documents, the photo was taken by Donald Mennie (1875-1944), a Scottish businessman and amateur photographer who worked in China in the early 1900s.

Mennie was known as a photographer of the Republic of China (1912-1949) because his subjects evoked a romantic vision of old China, featuring dusty caravans, misty rural valleys and old palaces.

Although the bridge hasn’t changed its appearance over a century, its surroundings have altered. A wooden building with a black-tiled roof now has white walls.

Over the past 10 years, Xu has spent his weekends looking for the locations in old pictures and searching for photos from databases from overseas libraries and universities.

“The importance of photos equals written materials in the archeological field. Sometimes, they carry more information than text, because details were taken directly and we can dig deeper,” Xu said.

In 2012, Xu was sent an old photo and was asked if it was taken in Haining. Xu was fairly sure the scene was outside Haining.

Coincidentally, one of his friends posted a picture of Suzhou online that looked like the landscape in the photo. In 2014, Xu traveled to Suzhou to look for an answer.

The photograph was of a pagoda on a mountain top. Xu found the location alongside Suzhou’s Stone Lake. He stood at the same spot and took a photo with the same angle. The mountain, pagoda and bridge retained their original appearance but the fields had become roads and villages.

The picture is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It was taken by John Thomson (1837-1921), a pioneering Scottish photographer, geographer and traveler. He was the first photographer to travel around China and he took a large number of images. Regarded as a classic instance of social documentary, he laid the foundations for photojournalism. His expeditions in China were published in the “Illustrations of China and Its People (1873–1874).”

Also in 2012, Xu collected two pictures of Haining County from University of Oregon Libraries.

In one, a stone scripture column verified it was Anguo Temple in Yanguan Town. The Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907) column has stood there for a millennium and is protected as a national relic today.

In the photo, a woman photographer is placing a tripod beside the column while locals crowd round to watch. The library archive revealed the woman to be Gertrude Bass Warner (1863–1951), an American 20th-century art collector with a particular interest in Asian art, religious artifacts and photographs.

However, there was no information on who had taken her photograph.

“The photo was taken in 1904. The column is still standing here, while other buildings are gone. After comparison, we can find that even the chipped edges on the column are the same after more than 100 years,” Xu added.

The scripture column helped Xu found the location in one photo, but the other one doesn’t showcase any useful information — only ordinary folk houses without any landmark.

Last year, Xu opened an official Wechat account, Xiachuan Jushi (硖川居士), to publish his discovery from archives and photos.