The Historial Photographs of China project features a collection of over 20,000 photos that would otherwise have remained behind closed doors, with a further 30,000 photos that have been stored but not yet published on the web platform. These photographs, which were mostly held in private hands, are now accessible to the public, and provide a rich visual insight into the history of China from the latter part of the Qing Dynasty to the middle of the 20th Century.  

Research IT were primarily responsible for developing the Historical Photographs of China web platform, and therefore played a significant role in bringing the project’s visual form to life. They used the open-source content management framework Drupal and the MySQL relational database. This provided a mechanism to manage the images and add and enrich metadata prior to their publication on the website. The platform has a mirror site in China, hosted at Shanghai Jiaotong University.  

Research IT began rebuilding the public platform for rerelease in 2021 using the Django framework (Python) which will integrate with the University of Bristol’s digital asset management system. The new version of Historical Photographs of China takes advantage of containerization by using Docker and will be hosted on Microsoft’s cloud-based platform, Azure.