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Welcome to Historical Photographs of Hong Kong! This platform shares copies of digitised historic photographs of Hong Kong that have been donated to the Hong Kong Collections held in the University of Bristol Library’s Special Collections. This is an initiative of the Hong Kong History Centre, based in the Department of History at the University.
Since its establishment in 2022 and building on the work since 2015 of its predecessor, the Hong Kong History Project, the Centre has been running programmes of research and academic and public engagement, both offline and online. It has also been building up a growing body of archival materials, given to us by donors with historic connections to Hong Kong. Amongst those materials are significant holdings of visual records, and this platform makes those available online, open access, internationally.
This is the only initiative in the UK, and one of only two internationally outside Hong Kong, which focuses explicitly on preserving for posterity historic materials relating to Hong Kong. We hold collections donated by current and former long-term residents, whose photographs represent the rich multicultural history of Hong Kong. The content made available will grow as more material is donated, and processed by our cataloguers and digital archives team.
This is not a comprehensive image library. You will find many apparent gaps in our coverage of places, people, themes and times. This is because this platform only includes material that has been physically donated to the Hong Kong Collections, to ensure that the originals of the materials included here are being preserved to the highest of international archival standards.
The University of Bristol’s Historical Photographs of China platform, also holds material documenting Hong Kong. Any and all queries about the content on that site must be directed to the Historical Photographs of China contact point. We are unable to answer any questions about material held there.
All images on this platform are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence. You are welcome to use the images for non-commercial reasons – for example, in education, research, or a personal project. If you do this, you must include an attribution and a link back to this page. To use the image for commercial or business purposes, or to obtain a high resolution copy, please contact us first.
We warmly welcome use of these photographs in classrooms and seminar rooms. You can use them in your PowerPoints and on your blogs. You can include them in your dissertations and essays. You can share them with family members and special interest groups.
We have put a great deal of work into getting them here, so please respect our request and acknowledge provenance. Tell your audiences that you found the images you have used on the ‘Historical Photographs of Hong Kong’ platform at the University of Bristol. We are also very happy to hear how they have been used or what new information you have found about them, or insights you can provide. So do not hesitate to write and tell us.
Our Hong Kong Collections are not restricted to visual records, and we have a wider growing archive of private papers and documents, including letters, diaries, printed ephemera, maps, reports and business documents, as well as photographs, slides and negatives, loose and in albums. If you have such material, in Chinese or in English, or other languages, and would be interested in donating these to our collection, please get in touch.
We are not able to accept digital copies of material held elsewhere. Typically, we can consider accepting original material held by private individuals and families, who have or had a connection to Hong Kong. Recent offers of material came to us from the grandson of a young female Chinese office worker in the 1960s, from the sibling of a man who had served in the military in the 1950s, and from the grandson of a British man who had served in the police force in the first decade of the twentieth century.
Please email us if you would like to arrange to view the Hong Kong Collections at the University of Bristol; if you'd like to discuss donating archive material to the collections; if you'd like a high-resolution copy of the website photographs.
Your feedback will help us and our university understand the value of the Historical Photographs of Hong Kong platform. Please complete our short feedback survey or contact us to let us know what you think about the Platform and our collections.
For more information about the Hong Kong History Centre, please visit our website. You can also read our Historical Photographs of Hong Kong blog for updates and reflections on the collection, and follow the Centre on social media.
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