[May 2020 Update] As of March 2020, Google Fusion Tables, the framework which supports this project, has been cancelled. The information collected during the process of creating this project still remains, and will possibly be revisited in the future. Thank you to those who have supported this project, and to those who found some use in it.
About the Project:
Hong Kong in Photographs: Mapping Daily Life in the 1950s and 1960s is a semester-long digital humanities research project sponsored by the Hong Kong Studies Initiative that sought to plot photographs taken in Hong Kong onto an interactive online map in order to visualize the rapid changes brought about from modernization. It uses the photograph collections from both the Lord Kadoorie’s Photography Collection housed in the Hong Kong Heritage Project archives and the Edna Schaus Sorensen and Clarence W. Sorensen Collection from the AGS Library of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries. As their namesakes imply, both Lawrence Kadoorie and Clarence Sorensen were photographers. Of the almost 300 photographs from both collections – ranging from landscapes and cityscapes to portraits and ‘life-shots’ – 46 were successfully located and situated.
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| Lawrence Kadoorie standing in front of vegetable stands in Yau Ma Tei. Copyright of the Hong Kong Heritage Project. |
About their Hong Kong:
The Hong Kong that both Sorensen and Kadoorie photographed was one in flux. They capture scenes of rickshaw drivers and trade houses – symbols of Hong Kong as a major entrepot – but also the changes in clothing that allude to new job opportunities – specifically for women. A decade ago, Hong Kong was occupied by Imperial Japanese forces, drastically reducing the colony’s population of 1.4 million to less than 600,000. Hong Kong experienced a postwar economic revival while its population quickly swelled up. As the Cold War spread to East Asia, many mainland Chinese refugees crossed into Hong Kong to escape the newly established People's Republic of China. It exacerbated a pre-existing housing crisis and forced to the Hong Kong government to play a larger role in the colony's social policies. From the 1950s and onward, events within China would greatly affect the politics of Hong Kong. Although the colonial authorities turned a blind eye towards Chinese Communist Party activities in Hong Kong, the 1967 Leftist Riots, encouraged in part by the Cultural Revolution undergoing within China, was seen as a direct challenge to British rule and to Hong Kong’s stability. While these larger tensions were not directly photographed by Sorensen or Kadoorie, Hong Kong in the 1950s and 1960s was indeed a time of change with local and global consequences.
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| Photograph taken by Carence Sorenson of Rickshaws and Rickshaw-pullers along Connaught Road. Copyright of the The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. |
Methodology:
As a digital history project, Hong Kong in Photographs relies on Google Fusion Table, a web service created by Google for data management purposes. These Fusion tables are similar to Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and can be used to gather, visualize, and share data tables. The ability to visualize the location where these photographs were taken offers new ways of understanding Hong Kong’s relationship with its colonial history. Photographs taken around the harbourfront are now filled with buildings and roads: the result of land reclamation projects in the 1990s. Yet, despite this rapid modernization that Hong Kong experiences, the general layout during its colonial era has hardly changed: modified perhaps, but never fully removed. What this project does then, is it visualizes how Hong Kong has and has not changed.
A significant amount of time was spent in examining and determining which photographs could be located. One way in which this task done quicker was to use pre-existing data. Often times, both photographer wrote some desription on the back of the photographs. At other times, the archives themselves had already listed out this information. However, this did not specifically give a location for the photograph; rather it provided the necessary background information to begin the plotting process. One consideration was to determine whether the photograph had identifiable features such as street signs, building names or statues. Old newspapers and colonial maps of Hong Kong were used to figure out an plausible location that corresponds with the present-day location.
The photographs were plotted by the approximate location of where the photographer was rather than the subject matter itself. There were two reasons for this: firstly, it was to give recognition to the photographers themselves for framing the photograph; the second was that in some photographs, the subject matter was not often explicit. While there are some disadvantages to this (elevation is not accurately represented) decision, overall the idea of visualizing what has changed and what has been preserved remains.
A significant amount of time was spent in examining and determining which photographs could be located. One way in which this task done quicker was to use pre-existing data. Often times, both photographer wrote some desription on the back of the photographs. At other times, the archives themselves had already listed out this information. However, this did not specifically give a location for the photograph; rather it provided the necessary background information to begin the plotting process. One consideration was to determine whether the photograph had identifiable features such as street signs, building names or statues. Old newspapers and colonial maps of Hong Kong were used to figure out an plausible location that corresponds with the present-day location.
The photographs were plotted by the approximate location of where the photographer was rather than the subject matter itself. There were two reasons for this: firstly, it was to give recognition to the photographers themselves for framing the photograph; the second was that in some photographs, the subject matter was not often explicit. While there are some disadvantages to this (elevation is not accurately represented) decision, overall the idea of visualizing what has changed and what has been preserved remains.
About the Creator:
Ryan Sun received a Hon. BA (with Distinction) in History from the University of Toronto in 2017. His undergraduate thesis examined public and private responses in Hong Kong as a site of convergence among British, Chinese, and Jewish refugees. He is currently a student associate of the HKSI and pursuing a History MA at the University of British Columbia focusing on the changing perceptions of 'Jewish-ness' and 'German-ness' surrounding Jewish refugees between 1937 and 1941.
Acknowledgements:
As with any project, although there may be a main investigator, there are many more who contributed behind the scenes. Through discussions over coffee, in their offices, or by e-mail, many people have provided valuable assistance and donated their time as this project took shape. In no specific order, I offer my sincere thanks to the following:
- UBC History Department and the anonymous donor
- Melanie Li and the staff at the Hong Kong Heritage Project
- Susan M. Peschel and the staff at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries
- Professor Leo Shin, Convenor of the Hong Kong Studies Initiative
- Allan Cho, Research Commons Librarian
- Evan Thornberry, GIS Librarian
- Professor Tristan Grunow, History Department
- Staff at UBC IT
The map below has markers scattered throughout Hong Kong Island and Kowloon. The red markers indicate photographs taken from the UWM library while the blue markers are photographs from the HKHP.
Clicking on any marker opens up a pop-up that includes various details regarding the photograph such as the title, the photographer, a brief description, and a link to the original source.
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