Continuing our series on historical photographs of China, this week’s blog looks at John Oswald’s photographs of Foochow [Fuzhou]. His photographs document the home, work and social life of a British tea merchant living in a treaty port. John Charles Oswald (1857-1930) arrived in Foochow in the late 1880s, having worked for a tea importer in London for thirteen years. Initially working for Odell & Co. as a clerk, he
This week’s blog looks at a new donation of photograph albums received by SOAS Archives, offering a glimpse of life in a mission hospital in North China at the beginning of the 20th century, in the immediate aftermath of the Boxer Uprising[1]. The six captioned photograph albums (reference: MS 381326), dating from c.1902-1908, contain black & white prints and also cyanotypes with a blue image hue, which picture the ‘Roberts
SOAS Archives are rich in the life-stories of individual women. To mark International Women’s Day 2018, we take a look at the life and work of Lilias Trotter (1853-1928), a talented artist who became a missionary in North Africa. Papers relating to Lilias Trotter can be found with the papers of the Algiers Mission Band – a new collection for SOAS Library, deposited in 2017 by Arab World Ministries. Lilias Trotter
This week’s blog comes from Jiyeon Wood, Subject Librarian for Arts & Multi-Media, and celebrates the Chinese New Year through SOAS Library’s fascinating collection of Chinese woodblock prints. Are you familiar with the lunar calendar? In Korea, where I’m from, the lunar calendar is still used. For example, my parents’ birthdays are set by the lunar calendar, which means that they celebrate their birthdays on a different day every year
Our collections at SOAS Archives reflect the British interaction with Africa and Asia over the last 250 years and include the papers of missionary societies, NGOs and campaign groups, and business organisations. Not where you would expect to find tales of love, perhaps, but every Archive has its romances and Valentine’s Day seems to be a good day to share a few! Voices of those in our Archive who travelled and explored Asia and
This week’s blog comes from Dawn Wright, SOAS subject Librarian for Africa, and looks at the Furniss Collection (E Coll 7), a collection of Hausa Popular Fiction made by Professor Graham Furniss (former Pro-Director for Research and Enterprise at SOAS, University of London) and acquired by SOAS Library in 2008. The collection was amongst a larger selection of Hausa materials from the Library’s collections on display for a recent visit
This week’s guest blog comes from Nicola Lawson, Assistant Curator at the Beacon Museum, Whitehaven, Cumbria, to coincide with the opening of an exhibition at the Museum, ‘Edith Brown: Medicine Woman’, which runs from 13th January to 25th March 2018. A number of items relating to Edith Brown held in a collection of papers relating to the Ludhiana Medical College (ref: MS 381189) have been loaned to the Museum from
As we wind up for the winter holidays and bid farewell to 2017, it seems every archivist here at SOAS Archives and Special Collections has a festive archive anecdote to share, so we thought we would collate our favourites into a short seasonal Blog post! SOAS Archives and Special collections, broadly speaking, documents the British interaction with Africa, Asia and the Middle East over the past two centuries. The collections
“Amazing! Diaries, photos, maps, SOAS history – absolutely wonderful!” “The range of material is a real testament to the collections SOAS holds” “Useful to see the range of the collection so I can promote it when training students and speaking to staff” “I have a far less abstract idea of the archives and special collections now and feel increased confidence in visiting” Just some of the great feedback from our
Taking place in the wake of serious drought, floods and hunger, The Boxer Rebellion, Yihetuan or most poetically, The Righteous and Harmonious Fists Movement, was an uprising in China that took place between 1899 and 1900. Tensions rose quickly, culminating with serious anti-foreigner violence in Peking (Beijing) and the city being taken under siege by ‘the Boxers’. Eight international forces eventually forcibly subdued the rebels and the following September the Peking Protocol was
