China at the Turn of the Century: Travel, Memory and Europeana
Overview
My first journey to China took place at the turn of the millennium. It was a different historical moment and, in many respects, a different China. The country’s extraordinary transformation was already under way, but many of the changes now associated with contemporary China were only beginning to become visible. The contrasts between rapidly globalising cities and the social, cultural and architectural diversity of the provinces were still especially striking.
I travelled to China by train, following the Trans-Siberian Railway across Europe and Asia. The journey was not motivated solely by an interest in a country undergoing rapid change. It was also connected with a fragment of my own family history.
I was following the traces of a relative remembered in the family simply as the “Chinese Aunt.” She had left for the Far East before the First World War and returned to Poland only after the Second World War. Her biography connected Poland with a now largely forgotten history of migration to Siberia, Manchuria and China. Reaching Harbin, where she had lived among the local Polish community, gave the journey the structure of a return to a place that I had previously known only through family memory.
Over the following years, further journeys produced a large photographic record of China during an accelerated period of transformation. Part of that archive—around 1,200 photographs—has now been made openly available through Europeana. The published collection consists of digital photographs, taken when digital photography itself was still a relatively new way of documenting travel. A much larger, still undigitised collection also survives: traditional colour slides taken with a single-lens reflex camera during journeys through different Chinese provinces.
The project is therefore more than a photographic record of one country. It connects travel, family memory, technological change and the public circulation of knowledge. It also raises a wider question: how can a private visual archive become part of a shared and openly accessible cultural heritage?
A Journey Through a Changing China
The photographs now available online come principally from a month-long journey in 2008 through numerous Chinese provinces and cities. By then, China had already changed considerably since my first visit at the turn of the century. Modernisation had accelerated, urban landscapes were being reconstructed and new infrastructures were transforming everyday mobility and communication.
The route led from Beijing to Suzhou and Shanghai and then southwards through Fujian Province, including Fuzhou, Xiamen, Gulangyu and the Hakka houses of Yongding. It continued through the Pearl River Delta—to Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Macau—and then towards Guilin and Yangshuo. Further stages included Sichuan and Chengdu, Xi’an and, finally, Harbin.
The photographs include well-known monuments and recognisable urban landscapes, but their principal subject is everyday life. They record work, food, education, religious practice, mourning, travel, recreation and encounters in public space. They show traditional architecture and historical sites, but also bicycles, streets, markets, schools, parks and rapidly changing cities.
Seen from the present, the collection documents a historical threshold. It captures a society already moving at extraordinary speed, but before many elements of contemporary Chinese urban life became dominant. What initially appeared to be travel photography has gradually acquired the character of a visual historical archive.
Discover the China collection on Europeana
Watch a short film presenting selected photographs
Following the “Chinese Aunt”
The final destination of the 2008 journey was Harbin. The city occupies a distinctive place in the history of relations between Central Europe, Russia and China. Its development was connected with the construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway, and before the Second World War it was home to a diverse international population, including a Polish community.
It was also the city associated with my “Chinese Aunt.” She had travelled to the Far East before the First World War and did not return to Poland until after the Second. The precise geography of her life became part of a family story transmitted across generations: fragmentary, personal and inseparable from the wider history of war, revolution, migration and changing borders.
Travelling to Harbin therefore brought two temporalities together. One was the experience of contemporary China at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The other was the memory of an earlier Polish presence in the region, preserved only partially in family narratives and scattered visual materials.
The journey came full circle in Harbin. It returned to the geographical starting point of the family story while also revealing how much of the historical relationship between Poland and China remains absent from dominant national narratives.
From Slides to a Digital Archive
The photographic archive reflects a major technological transition.
My earliest journeys were documented primarily on traditional photographic slides taken with a single-lens reflex camera. This analogue collection remains largely undigitised. It contains an extensive visual record of journeys through Chinese cities and provinces at the turn of the millennium—a period immediately preceding some of the country’s most dramatic urban, infrastructural and social transformations.
The photographs made available through Europeana were born digital. At the time, digital photography still represented a relatively new form of travel documentation. It increased the number of images that could be taken, changed the relationship between photographer and subject, and eventually made large-scale online dissemination possible.
The coexistence of the two collections—the still largely inaccessible slides and the openly available digital photographs—shows that archives are shaped not only by what was photographed, but also by the technologies through which images were produced, preserved and circulated.
Digitisation does not simply reproduce an analogue object in another format. It changes its possible audiences and uses. A photograph once kept in a private collection can become available to researchers, teachers, students and members of the public across different countries. It can also be reused, compared with other collections and incorporated into new historical narratives.
The future digitisation of the slide archive would make it possible to place the earlier and later journeys alongside one another and document the speed and scale of China’s transformation across the turn of the twenty-first century.
PAGODE – Europeana China
The photographs were made available through PAGODE – Europeana China, a European project devoted to Chinese cultural heritage preserved in European collections.
The project brought together museums, libraries, archives, research organisations and digital-heritage institutions. Its purpose was not only to digitise objects, but also to improve their description, contextualisation and public accessibility. PAGODE sought to move beyond a simple opposition between “East” and “West” by showing the long history of exchanges, collections, migrations and cultural encounters connecting China and Europe.
My contribution was developed in cooperation with the International Center for Information Management Systems and Services — ICIMSS, a Polish scientific association working in information, education, culture and digital heritage.
Around 1,200 photographs from my journeys were included in the project. They are freely accessible through Europeana and available for reuse under a CC BY-SA licence. Open licensing is important here. It transforms the collection from a personal record into a public resource that can be used in research, education and cultural communication.
The project demonstrates how European digital infrastructure can support the public circulation of knowledge. Europeana does not merely preserve cultural objects. It connects collections held by different institutions, creates common standards of access and enables materials originating in private or local archives to enter a wider transnational space.
Discover the photographs on Europeana
Read the detailed presentation of the photographic collection
Visit the PAGODE – Europeana China project website
Publication
“ICIMSS and Chinese Cultural Heritage”
With Maria Śliwińska. In PAGODE – Europeana China: A Contribution Towards a Different Understanding of the Binary Relationships of East and West, edited by Antonella Fresa. Rome and Ljubljana: University of Ljubljana Press, 2021, pp. 145–147.
The chapter presents the contribution of ICIMSS to the PAGODE project and places the contemporary photographic collection alongside historical materials documenting the Polish presence in China.
The two collections represent different forms of memory. Historical photographs preserve traces of the Polish community in Harbin during the first half of the twentieth century. The contemporary images document China during a period of accelerated transformation at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Placed together, they connect institutional and personal archives, historical migration and contemporary travel, and analogue and digital forms of photography. They also demonstrate how open digital platforms can reveal relationships that remain invisible when collections are dispersed among families, associations and local repositories.
Read or download the open-access PAGODE book
An Open Archive and an Unfinished Project
The Europeana collection is a completed outcome of the PAGODE project, but the larger photographic archive remains unfinished.
The digital photographs already made public offer a record of China in 2008 and of a journey through multiple regions, cities and cultural landscapes. The undigitised slide collection reaches further back, towards the turn of the millennium and the beginning of my encounters with China.
Bringing these materials together would create a visual history of transformation viewed not from a single major city or political event, but through repeated journeys and observations of everyday life. It would also reconnect the public digital archive with the personal and family history from which the first journey partly emerged.
The archive therefore moves between several scales: an individual journey, a family story, the history of Polish mobility in Asia, China’s rapid transformation and a European infrastructure for open cultural knowledge. Its value lies precisely in the connections among them.