Tales of Old China: Snapshots from a Bygone Era

If God lets Shanghai endure, He owes an apology to Sodom and Gomorrah.

- A Christian evangelist in the early 1920s

With that random quotation served on the site Tales of Old China, we get a hint of the world that this Graham Earnshaw/SinoMedia production aims to present. As the site tells us, Tales of Old China “stores words and images from Old China, mostly the era between 1840 to 1950 when China and the West were struggling to come to terms with each other. It is the contrasts and cultural clashes between the two worlds that are at the heart of this website.”

Some of the features you’ll be entertained and fascinated by include:

• Images in a massive archive of antique postcards from China
• The complete text of 25 books related to China, published between 1901 and 1939
• Images of Chinese Currency from the 1920’s, -30’s and -40’s
• The contents of nine issues, ranging from 1926 to 1941, of a publication created by Westerners in China called [China Journal]
• A January 1935 story from [Fortune] magazine, portraying Shanghai “at its best and most vibrant”
• Reproductions of numerous maps of China created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
• Much, much more

The site is clearly an ongoing work in progress with a few bad links and the occasional dead end, but [Tales of Old China] succeeds in giving us a look into the roaring heyday of Shanghai through the eyes of Westerners who had found their ways there for commerce, missionary work, or pure (un)adulterated diversion.

Visit Tales of Old China at http://www.talesofoldchina.com/.

March 2003