Two new digital photograph collections, the Edward Bangs Drew Collection and the John Freeman Collection, have been added to the collections of Harvard–Yenching Library. The images are of particular significance to researchers, said Raymond Lum, librarian for the Western Languages Collection in the Harvard–Yenching Library, because they illustrate a China that vanished decades ago.

“There’s a tremendous interest now in old photographs of Asia,” Lum said. “One reason is that China has changed so tremendously in the 20th century that a lot of what was photographed, like temple buildings, customs, and clothing styles, has disappeared. A lot of Chinese don’t have any memory of these things.” By allowing students to see the cultural practices they discuss in class, the photo collections have proven an effective pedagogical tool, Lum said.

Made up of more than 500 photos, the Drew Collection was amassed by Edward Bangs Drew, Class of 1863, who worked for decades in China at the end of the 19th century. Shortly after graduating from Harvard, Drew was recruited by Sir Robert Hart to join the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service, a Chinese governmental agency created to collect customs on inland and ocean trade. He returned to Boston following his retirement in 1908.

The Freeman collection includes nearly 750 photographs of northeast China and Manchuria taken by John Freeman in the 1930s. The photographs are collected in albums and mounted on black paper, and it is the albums themselves that have been digitized. The Freeman albums came to Harvard in the 1970s through a National Endowment for the Humanities grant overseen by Mary Ellen Alonso, then an associate of Harvard’s Fairbank Center for East Asian Research. Through the grant, Alonso had travelled throughout the US, identifying and copying photo collections of China’s minorities still held in private hands.

“Digitizing photos allows us to make them available to the international scholarly community without having to let anybody handle the originals,” Lum said. “These digital projects, and others, like the Hedda Morrison Photographs of China and the Rev. Claude L. Pickens Jr. Collection on Muslims in China, also alert people to what we have, and that’s part of the mission of the library. The success of our digital projects has led people who are not associated with Harvard to donate their collections. We’ve received thousands of additional photographs, mainly of China, but also some of Japan, because people know we’re interested, and we’re doing something with them.”

View the Edward Bangs Drew Collection in VIA. Search for “Edward Bangs Drew” in “anywhere.”

Using Harvard’s Page Delivery Service, view the John Freeman Collection.