Project resources
This strand of the project, still currently under development, is a collaboration with colleagues at the Institut d'Asie Orientale. It includes images from various collections. The project provides two sets of photographic resources:
1. Maritime Customs-related photographs at the Historical Photographs of China website (external link). This is a parallel initiative, and includes photographs from the RFC Hedgeland collection at SOAS, and others. Please also note our exhibitions of photographs and related material from this initiative. The project was the subject of a supplement to the winter 2008 (No.46) International Institute of Asian Studies Newsletter. This can be accessed at the IIAS site, or as an Adobe Acrobat file of the entire supplement here (warning, this is a large file, 3.24mb).
2. Portraits of Customs staff These are photographs of staff, many taken at the beginning of their careers, but others supplied by families, and used here with permission.The Second Historical Archives of China at Nanjing published in 2007 a very full ten-volume collection of historical photographs of the Maritime Customs 'Pictorial history of the former Chinese Maritime Customs and modern society'. Details on the publisher's site (slow external link) in Chinese. Most of this material is not from the Archive itself (nor indeed does most of it concern the Customs), but there are still interesting photographs of staff, estate, equipment and vessels etc.
Links
Sites with substantial photographs relating to the Chinese Maritime Customs Service.
- Edward Bangs Drew collection
The Harvard-Yenching Library holds the papers and 225 photographs of E.B. Drew (1843-1924). Drew was an 1863 Harvard graduate, who served in the Customs from 1865-1908 (and who also nominated Harvard's first instructor in Chinese (Ko K'un-hua)). The photographs can be accessed on harvard University Library's Visual Information Access online catalogue using Drew and China as search terms..
Robert Hart Photographic Collection, Special Collections, Queen's University Belfast- Peter Hodge's Customs page
Mr Hodge is researching the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service in which his great-grandfather, William Francis STEVENSON, served from 1865-1903. The site includes photographs of Stevenson, places in which he served and his burial place in Shanghai. - Photographs of T.T. Liang (Liang Tung-Tsai) 2013: This link to the photographs is now dead, but the information is retained here for interest.
Liang served in the Customs from 1924 until at least 1949. He became a taiqiquan teacher, and his biographer notes that 'With his passing the T'ai Chi community has lost one of the greatest icons and contributors of T'ai Chi practice and philosophy'. Well-illustrated site. The material is drawn from Steal My Art: The Life and Times of T'ai Chi Master T.T. Liang by Stuart Alve Olson (North Atlantic Books, 2002). - The Takao Club
This site includes images and other information about Customs staff stationed in Taiwan in the nineteenth century. - Virtual Shanghai: Shanghai Urban Space in Time
This digitization project, which focuses on Shanghai, includes various images related to the Customs.