Photos of Beijing in the 1930s and ’40s

1930s Beijing lady by Hedda Morrison

One of the delights of the English language China blog scene is In the Footsteps of Joseph Rock, a photoblog about western Yunnan and eastern Tibet, where the botanist Joseph Rock travelled extensively in the 1920s. The blog compares photos taken back then with images shot by himself in the last decade or so.

He also posts photos to The Beijing Observer where has been running a series of old photos of Beijing by German photographer Hedda Morrison who lived in the city from 1934 to1946 when it was known as Peiping (北平) or ‘Northern Peace’.

Hedda Morrison neé Hammer married Alastair Morrison, who born in Beijing in 1915, the son of the famous (or perhaps notroious) Australian correspondent for The Times and political fixer George Morrison.

Coal Hill, Beijing 1946 or ‘7 by Dmitri Kessel

More recently, The Beijing Observer has been posting color photos by Kiev-born soldier-turned photographer Dmitri Kessel. From an email to Danwei:

Looking through the newly released Life magazine image files on Google Image, I came across some stunning old pictures of Beijing by Dmitri Kessel. I presume they come form his time in China in 1946-7. I’ve put a few samples on The Beijing Observer, or you can see the whole collection on Google Images.

From Kessel’s obituary in The Independent:

Kessel’s Peiping in Life

Dmitri Kessel was trained as a soldier, attending the Paltava Military Academy in Russia before serving as a cavalry officer in the Ukrainian and Red Armies in the early 1920s. After his time in the military was over, he studied industrial chemistry in Moscow, but was soon to join the flow of emigrants to the United States. By 1925, he had settled in New York City.

Few Eastern European emigrants found the transition to life in the US an easy one. Kessel took part-time jobs, working in the fur industry and as a correspondent for Russian-language newspapers before enrolling on a course at the Rabinovitch School of Photography in 1934. His training in photography coincided with rapid changes within the medium itself. The coming of the new miniature 35mm Leica camera, enabled photographers to work quickly and unobtrusively in the most difficult situations; the consequent emergence of the great American picture magazines Life and Fortune provided a perfect platform for new young photojournalists including Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt and Kessel.

In 1942, Kessel became a war correspondent for Life, and after the war shot almost exclusively for that magazine, in places as far afield as China, Hungary, Palestine, India and Japan.