Founded in 1928, the Harvard-Yenching Library is the largest university library devoted to East Asian research in the Western world. All told, the library's collections currently stand at over a million volumes. This particular online archive holds over 5,000 photographs and 10,000 negatives taken by Hedda Morrision while she resided in Beijing from 1933 to 1946. Mrs. Morrison later mounted the photographs into thematic albums and donated them to the Harvard-Yenching Library, which her husband described as "the best permanent home for her vision of a city and people that she loved." The photographs themselves document various trades, professions, landscapes, and architectural structures of China that in many instances no longer exist. Visitors seeking to search this particular archive will need to use the Harvard University Library's Visual Information Access system. A user-friendly guide to using the database is provided here, along with a chronology of Mrs. Morrison's life, and a listing of the contents of each photo album, as originally conceived by Mrs. Morrison.
Comments