Chongqing, early 1980s. Opened in 1954, the Lianglukou–Caiyuanba cable car , spared thousands the city’s steep stairways. The 146-metre line carried up to 58,000 passengers a day. The fare captured another era: 1 fen downhill, 2 fen uphill. It closed in 1996.

3/3Thousands of CJ50 motorcycles rolled out of Luoyang in the mid-1980s. It marked the beginning of China’s industrial transformation. Military factories became manufacturers of consumer goods, laying the foundation for the world’s largest manufacturing economy only a few decades later.

2/3 The assembly line in Luoyang tells an even bigger story. The former State Factory 5111 received technology from Jialing Chongqing, which had signed a technical cooperation agreement with Honda in 1981. Honda supplied designs, production know-how and training; the factory remained Chinese-owned.

1/3. 1984. A young woman poses on a new Luoyang Jialing CJ50 motorcycle. It symbolized a changing China. The bike was built in a former military factory that had switched to civilian production during Deng Xiaoping’s 军转民 (“military to civilian”) reforms. Honda technology, Chinese ambition.

Gubeikou (古北口), 1907. A mule train climbs toward Nantianmen, the southern gate on the imperial mail road from Beijing to Chengde. For Qing emperors, officials and couriers, this was the main mountain route through the Great Wall. Photo by Ernst Boerschmann.

Harbin, late 1930s.A Russian flower seller serves a fashionably dressed customer outside a pharmacy signed in Russian, English, Japanese and Chinese.A perfect Potemkin image of Manchukuo: so called cosmopolitan harmony and prosperity, with the violence of Japanese occupation kept outside the picture

Guangxi, 1930s. Nine men carry a single piece of stone. John Shackelford captured an ancient technology of balance and cooperation, using bamboo poles similar to sedan chairs. Behind China’s temples, roads and bridges was a hidden world of engineering and labor, refined over thousands of years.

In 1871 John Thomson photographed an 800-year-old Liao dynasty pagoda at Xiangshan, Beijing. Its decay reflected a weakening Qing imperial order which was drained by war, and foreign pressure. In the traditional Chinese worldview, it was a sign that Heaven itself seemed to withdraw its mandate.

Republican-era Xi’an: the bridal sedan chair was far more than a wedding vehicle. It carried the bride through a sacred transition between two families and two stages of life, a journey between the cosmic order and the human world. To ward off the harmful spirits and seeking the blessing of heaven天.

Jiangsu, around 1975. Farmers carry cotton to a state collection station. Before Xinjiang became China’s cotton heartland, Jiangsu was a major producer. Cotton was sold to the state, while payments passed through the collective work-point system,where the final distribution was far from transparent.

Photographs by Pat Nixon, Beijing, 22 February 1972. While President Richard Nixon met with Premier Zhou Enlai, Pat Nixon spent the day exploring Beijing. From the back seat of her car, she photographed ordinary street life on Kodachrome film, rare records of Beijing during this historic visit.

Xing’an County, Guangxi, 1930. John B. Shackelford photographed a woman carrying her baby on her back while operating a traditional waterwheel. This simple scene belongs to a 2,000-year-old culture of irrigation shaped by the Lingqu Canal, which connected the Xiang and Li River systems

In the 1930s, John Shackford photographed this Long Miao woman in the mountains of Guangxi. She appears not to pose, but to continue her journey, briefly interrupted by a stranger’s camera.In the time of intense political turmoil, ethnic minorities were often among the first to bear its consequences

3/3 This image was produced in the same period over the Anyuan miners’ strike but was rejected.Competition over narrative ownership.Competing claims over memory.What begins as contested labour history is resolved through ideological closure: history rewritten as loyalty,and loyalty defined as truth.

2/3During the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), this poster reverses the logic of the first image. Mao is no longer alone but multiplied through circulation: workers and students physically carry his portrait as they march forward.The crowd no longer interprets history it carries it forward.

1/3 A story of myth-making. Liu Chunhua’s 1968 painting Chairman Mao goes to Anyuan is the core myth-making image. It turns history into a single directional narrative.Mao stands in a vast landscape, moving alone toward revolution’s origin. No masses a deliberate choice. A messianic figure in motion

Children of famous fathers often become prisoners of their legacy. So was Lin Xiaolin, Lin Biao’s eldest daughter. Born in the Soviet Union, she barely spoke Chinese and hardly knew her father. After his 1971 plane crash while fleeing to the Soviet Union, she was shunned as the “traitor’s” daughter.

Men on their Flying Pigeon bicycles cling to a long-distance bus, selling snacks and drinks through the windows. Around 1978–1980, China’s Reform and Opening policies had only just begun to take shape. This was grassroots entrepreneurship in its earliest form.

2/2 Exile transformed Kang Youwei from a pragmatic reformer into a utopian thinker. In Datong Shu, he imagined abolishing the family, replacing marriage with one-year contracts, and raising children in state institutions. One of China’s greatest reformers became one of its most radical visionaries.

1/2 Kang Youwei (1858–1927) believed the Qing Empire could still be saved. After China’s defeat by Japan, he urged constitutional monarchy, modern education, industry and military reform. The Hundred Days’ Reform of 1898 failed, forcing him into exile.

Mother and child, Shanghai, 1871. William Saunders photographed them in his studio on the Bund. A gifted commercial photographer and entrepreneur, he served private clients while also supplying magazines and postcards. Today his images are among the finest visual records of late Qing China.

12 February 1912. Puyi crowned as emperor at just two years old, he later became a prisoner, a war criminal, and finally an ordinary citizen. Puyi’s biography asks timeless questions: Can privilege be overcome? How much responsibility does a child ruler bear for later actions? Villain or a victim?

20 June 1946. Eighty years ago this week, Wanrong, the last Empress of China, died in captivity at the age of 39. Intelligent, witty, well-educated and fond of jazz, she entered the Forbidden City as an empress and died forgotten in northeast China. Her grave has never been found.

In 1900 Jingshan Park Beijing looked very different. Photograph show a barren hill, covered in yellow dust with few trees in sight. Much of the greenery was planted during large-scale urban greening campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s. The transformation of Beijing’s landscape has been remarkable.

In 1935, the Temple of Heaven in Beijing underwent a major restoration. Among those who climbed the bamboo scaffolding to inspect the ancient structure were architect Liang Sicheng and his wife Lin Huiyin, pioneers of Chinese architectural preservation.

A Qing official’s wife sits before the camera in the 1860s. We know her rank from her robes, her husband’s status from the badge she wears, yet not her name. Like an ancestral portrait, she faces eternity rather than the photographer.

Hong Kong in 1976 captures a dragon boat race still closely connected to the Tanka fishing communities who lived on the water.Hong Kong hosted the first International Dragon Boat Festival, marking the beginning of the transformation of a local tradition into a global cultural and sporting event.

Published in a French magazine in 1908, this photograph was identified as the Guangxu Emperor (1871–1908; reigned 1875–1908) descending from his sedan chair. If authentic, it is a rare glimpse of the Qing ruler. Yet we cannot be certain. Early Western publications from China are often misidentified

Mao Zedong helps carry the coffin of Lin Yuying in Yan’an, 1942. The only known time Mao did so. What makes this photo remarkable is its lack of propaganda: no grand stage, no heroic poses. It shows revolutionaries before they became famous and before history turned them into legends.

An 1860s photograph of Xiaogushan, the famous “Little Orphan Mountain” in the Yangtze River. ( Elgin collection) it dates from the turbulent era of the Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion. For centuries, Chinese poets saw this isolated peak as a symbol of the upright and steadfast man.