Shaman dancers, coolies and suffragettes: rare photos of 1900s Beijing discovered from Austrian archive
Collection sheds light on daily life in the capital dating back a century
PUBLISHED : Friday, 12 September, 2014, 11:44am
UPDATED : Friday, 12 September, 2014, 5:35pm
Patrick Boehler [email protected]
An undated view of northern Beijing from Chongwen Gate, which has since been demolished and is now the site of a subway stop. Photo by Paula von Rosthorn, the wife of Austria-Hungary's first envoy to China. Photo: Austrian Institute for China and Southeast Asia Studies
When a relative of a long dead Austro-Hungarian navy soldier approached Gerd Kaminski, a China scholar in Vienna, in 2007, she pointed him towards a treasure trove of thousands of photos of Beijing, many of which were a century old.
Kaminski, director of the Austrian Institute for China and Southeast Asia Studies in Vienna, worked his way through the photos and published a selection along with other photos he was given by descendants of Austrian diplomats and traders in imperial China.
“These photos give precious insights into daily urban life in Beijing a century ago,” he said. “Many of the buildings don’t exist anymore and traditions seen in the photos have been lost in time.”
The photos show men dancing with animal masks, camels and traders on Changan Avenue - now Beijing’s 12-lane main thoroughfare - tea houses, the Imperial Court and women disfigured by footbinding and demonstrating for the right to vote.
