China In Pictures. MUST SEE.
Google just came out with millions of photographs from the archives of Life Magazine and, as anyone who has seen Life Magazine would know, they are riveting (h/t Shanghaiist), I have been checking out photos of old Shanghai and Beijing (a/k/a Peking). I am, however, a bit disappointed at how my searches of Qingdao, Dalian, Chongqing, Chengdu, Xiamen and Tianjin all came up empty. I highly recommend you check it out.
Comments (9)
Read through and enter the discussion by using the form at the endMatt - November 23, 2008 2:57 PM
Remember they were still using all the old spellings with Pinyin not being invented yet. So for Chongqing, you have to search Chungking. For Qingdao, use Tsingtao. I assume Wikipedia could point you towards the other old names for the rest of the cities.
b. cheng - November 23, 2008 4:25 PM
Its just like Peking/Beijing, you're using the wrong names. Dairen and Amoy turn up one photo, Chungking turns up a bunch of photos, though mostly from the war, and there's also a few under Tsingtao.
Elliott Ng - November 23, 2008 10:26 PM
Very cool. Hong Kong and Canton are also good searches. Too bad nothing came up under Shenzhen. :) Thanks for the tip Dan.
Sinosceptic - November 23, 2008 11:02 PM
Nice photos. Brings back memories :-)
Terry - November 24, 2008 12:19 AM
Tianjin was Tientsin... and Dalian was Port Arthur and Shenyang was Mukden.
Shenzhen was a bunch of fields in those days Elliot... or were you being facetious?
michael - November 24, 2008 2:12 AM
The Peking photos are more easily viewed in the collection at the Beijing Observer website:
http://beijingobserver.blogspot.com
michael - November 25, 2008 8:21 AM
There's something wrong with the Google/LIFE archive search function... typing in "new york" returns no results, although "manhattan" gets tons. Something's not right...
alex - January 16, 2009 12:24 PM
Pekin/Peking=Beijing.You're using the wrong names.
bob - January 14, 2010 2:50 PM
Tell me about it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!