Category: Arts & Humanities, Chinese culture
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John Thomson’s Illustrations of China and Its People, 1873-1874 John Thomson (1837-1921), a pioneering Scottish geographer and traveler, was the first known photographer to document the people and landscape of China for publication and dissemination to the Western world. Between 1868 and 1872, he traveled over 6,500 kilometers with his cumbersome camera and equipment, darkroom and chemicals capturing all aspects of Chinese life. The photographs in these four volumes show the many sides of China: sweeping landscapes, royalty and ruling classes, merchants and economic activity, everyday life, and the faces of men, women, and children. Thomson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, the son of a tobacco spinner and seller.
About the Collection In September 2005, UW-Madison Professor Emeritus Tse-Tsung Chow (who died in 2007) and his wife Nancy Wu Chow donated over 120 calligraphic and painted Chinese scrolls and fans, ranging from the 18th through the 20th centuries, to the Special Collections Department of the UWM Libraries. Professor Chow's collection is an invaluable addition to Special Collections, offering primary examples of Chinese culture spanning a two-hundred year period, with didactic applications in a broad range of disciplines at UWM, including art, art history, history, geography, foreign languages and linguistics, and international studies.
The East Asian Library's Collection The East Asian Library of the University of California, Berkeley has 2,700 Chinese rubbings, second in number among collections outside East Asia only to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. The nucleus of the collection, over half of the items, was acquired in 1950 from the estate of Mitsui Soken, a wealthy Japanese bibliophile, and includes albums of rubbings once owned by noted Chinese connoisseurs of the nineteenth century. Other important acquisitions were made through purchases from Chinese scholars and dealers and through the bequest of Professor Woodbridge Bingham's collection. The library's holdings are especially rich in albums of models of calligraphy and bronze inscriptions.
The Rev. Claude L. Pickens, Jr. Collection on Muslims in China Do Not Divide Moslems and Chinese "Along the Old Silk Road to Europe. East Gate, Hao Tien" (CP02.29.03) from The Rev. Claude L. Pickens, Jr., Trip to Northwest China , photograph album, p. [29] Over 1000 photos of Muslims and Christian missionaries working among them in Western China in the 1920s and 1930s form the core of this collection, which is supplemented by several hundred books, pamphlets, broadsides, etc., in several languages. Gift of Rev. Claude L. Pickens, Jr. in memory of Joseph Fletcher Professor of Chinese and Inner Asian History at Harvard University. The albums and photographs can be viewed in the VIA online catalog.
