Old Beijing ─ Postcards from the Imperial City

This collection of Chinese photography contains over 350 vintage postcards from pre-communist China along with extensive historical background and commentary.

Camel trains arriving at a city gate; the distinctive architecture of the Forbidden City, its pagodas, imperial buildings and temples; Manchu fashion, the Empress Dowager and the child emperor Puyi; street performers and foreign tourists—all come to life again in this extraordinary collection of rare and vintage postcards.

Old Beijing: Postcards from the Imperial City offers a unique look at a vanished China and its storied capital once known as Peking. Containing unique black-and-white and hand-tinted cards that span Chinese history from the last years of Imperial China to the Japanese invasion of 1937, it is a treasure trove for historians, collectors, Sinophiles and anyone fascinated by Chinese culture and people from times past.

Felicitas Titus grew up in the foreign concession in Hankow, China, under Chiang Kai-shek, at a time when traditional Chinese culture still flourished. She visited old Beijing, then known as Peking, as a child and later studied there for two and a half years, during World War Two. She experienced the Japanese attack on Shanghai in 1937, left Hankow during the allied bombardments, and worked in postwar China until the Communist victory in 1949. She eventually completed her education in the United States and taught college there. Her nostalgia for China prompted her to begin collecting these vintage postcards. She still considers China her homeland.

Forward writer, Susan Naquin is professor of History and East Asian Studies at Princeton University, is the author of Millenarian Rebellion in China, Shantung Rebellion, and Peking: Temples and City Life, 1400u1900. She is also coauthor with Evelyn Rawski of Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century and coeditor of Pilgrims and Sacred Sites in China.