Author | Lightnews

China Historical Photos @chinahistorypics.bsky.social · 14h

Discovered in 1986 at Sanxingdui heart of the ancient Shu kingdom (1200BC)this bronze standing figure embodies a forgotten vision of governance.Part priest, part king, it stood at the center of a sacred order where power flowed from communion with heaven, long before the Mandate of Heaven took form.

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China Historical Photos @chinahistorypics.bsky.social · 2d

Tibet, 1950..
Pilgrims walk clockwise beside a monastery wall, turning prayer wheels as part of daily devotion. Each spin releases written mantras, believed to spread compassion through the world — a practice linking movement, faith, and the order of the cosmos.

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China Historical Photos @chinahistorypics.bsky.social · 3d

In the 1990s, millions of small workshops like this powered China’s industrial rise. Working from home with treadle machines and hand tools, young couples produced shoes, clothes, and goods for local markets. Their labor and discipline built the foundation of China’s manufacturing economy today.

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China Historical Photos @chinahistorypics.bsky.social · 5d

In 1974, photographer Wang Shuzhou 王树洲 captured this group of rural laborers — men and women bound by the duty of collective work.
Under the village registration system, they couldn’t freely migrate to cities or change jobs without official approval — approval that was almost never given.

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China Historical Photos @chinahistorypics.bsky.social · 7d

Photograph probably post 1949, likely taken in eastern China. Cormorant fishing ,once widespread across China’s rivers and lakes ,shows the close bond between man and bird. The method, where trained cormorants catch fish and return them to the boat, was already described by Marco Polo.

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China Historical Photos @chinahistorypics.bsky.social · 9d

Early 20th-century China.
Women with bound feet, unable to climb stairways, are carried by porters on mountain paths in bamboo chairs.
The men wear simple cloth shoes, ascending steep stone steps under heavy loads.
Their strength sustained a system that called women’s immobility “grace.”

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China Historical Photos @chinahistorypics.bsky.social · 9d

Writer Yu Hua:in his book :To live. (活着1992): “They sweep the dust of yesterday into baskets, as if order could hold back sorrow.
The revolution promised new life,
but the street stayed the same —
dust, mud, and the stubborn grace of survival.” Yu Hua sensitivity about the details of every day life

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China Historical Photos @chinahistorypics.bsky.social · 11d

Two sixteen-year-olds in an imperial wedding procession, children draped in the ghosts of an empire.
The ceremony was perfect but their world already gone.
Even the palace walls behind them were crumbling,

The last emperor Puyi and empress Wanrong, Forbidden City, 1922

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China Historical Photos @chinahistorypics.bsky.social · 12d

In the warlord era Feng Yuxiang overthrew his commander Cao Kun in 1924 — smiling the night before. Later he served Chiang Kai-shek, the Soviets, then the Communists — each time leaving corpses behind. He called it moral cleansing. He believed himself righteous — and that made him dangerous

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China Historical Photos @chinahistorypics.bsky.social · 14d

Hou Dengke, 1983.
Seasonal wheat harvesters on the road near Fengxiang, Shaanxi — men carrying their bundles toward the railway line after weeks in the fields.
A quiet record of labor and dignity from one of China’s most truthful documentary photographers.

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China Historical Photos @chinahistorypics.bsky.social · 14d

Mark Bischop, 1983.
A street scene seen through a bus window — children, elders, shop signs, small gestures of daily life in a Beijing alley.
Bischop searched for traces of humanity in places where history was already beginning to fade.

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China Historical Photos @chinahistorypics.bsky.social · 17d

Beijing, early 20th century . A street performer shows lā yáng piàn (拉洋片), a wooden box with illustrated slides. By pulling cords, he changes the images while narrating and singing. This visual storytelling form was common in fairs before cinema appeared in China.

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China Historical Photos @chinahistorypics.bsky.social · 17d

October 18, 1860, James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin, ordered the destruction of the Old Summer Palace. Soon after, he entered Beijing in triumph, a display of Western power and Chinese humiliation. Later that month, he signed the Convention of Peking, ceding Kowloon (Hong Kong) to Britain.

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China Historical Photos @chinahistorypics.bsky.social · 19d

In this photo, you can clearly see a flotilla of goat-skin rafts drifting downstream , Michael.

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China Historical Photos @chinahistorypics.bsky.social · 19d

Lanzhou, Gansu, c. 1930, timber-beam rafts on the Yellow River near the city’s south gate fortress. Such rafts carried logs and goods downstream before bridges and motor transport replaced them. Photo by Father Leo Van Dyke, Belgian Franciscan.

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China Historical Photos @chinahistorypics.bsky.social · 20d

Xinjiang cotton collection depot, late 1980s–1990s. Farmers deliver bales by cart and tractor to state depots, where cotton is weighed and stacked before shipment to inland mills. By this time, Xinjiang supplied nearly half of China’s raw cotton, vital to the national textile industry.

China Historical Photos @chinahistorypics.bsky.social · 21d

Beijing, late 1980s. On summer nights in Tiananmen Square, students and workers read under the streetlights, escaping the heat of their homes. Long before air-conditioning, the city’s open squares became study rooms in the cool night air.

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China Historical Photos @chinahistorypics.bsky.social · 21d

Today marks the Double Ninth Festival a day for climbing mountains and honoring elders. In this 1980s photo, three ladies wear chrysanthemum garlands to celebrate Chongyang, once a rural autumn rite, later reborn as a symbol of unity and endurance in modern China.

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China Historical Photos @chinahistorypics.bsky.social · 23d

Ürümqi, 1956 Xinjiang had recently come under Mao’s control after the peaceful handover of 1949. Uyghur women shop for enamel basins as a Han shop assistant smiles from behind the counter daily life in a new socialist Xinjiang, where the CCP takeover met Uyghur traditional society.

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China Historical Photos @chinahistorypics.bsky.social · 24d

Deng (right) was the architect, Jiang(left) the executioner, and Hu Jintao the institutionalizer of China’s rare earth dominance, from 1980 onwards. China flooded the market. By the mid-1990s it supplied 80% of global REE demand. Deng quipped in 1992: “The Middle East has oil; China has rare earths”

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China Historical Photos @chinahistorypics.bsky.social · 24d

Pyongyang, November 1958.
Zhou Enlai stands beside Kim Il Sung in an open car, two victors of war, smiling through winter light.
Behind the parade,Chinese troops quietly withdraw.
The visit sealed their friendship, even as the first hairline crack appeared in the so called “lips and teeth” alliance.

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China Historical Photos @chinahistorypics.bsky.social · 26d

Shanghai, late 1970s.
Families gather in a shared courtyard , kitchens and restrooms. This is urban China under the hukou system: residents bound to their city by the hùkǒu , entitled housing, rations, and schooling. Outside these walls, millions of rural citizens could not legally stay overnight.

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China Historical Photos @chinahistorypics.bsky.social · 26d

Hengyang, 1944.
17 000 Chinese held out 48 days against 350 000 Japanese—starved, outgunned, encircled.
When it ended, skulls were exhumed not for spectacle but to count, mourn, and bear witness to the cost of that unequal fight.
The hills of Hengyang became China’s killing fields.

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China Historical Photos @chinahistorypics.bsky.social · Oct 5

Kargalik (Xinjiang), Christmas Eve 1898. Swedish explorer Hedin sketches the Qing governor over dinner. Then she enters: the governors young wife unveiled, curious, with tiny “goat-feet.” She asks for her portrait too. Hedin, flattered, agrees. Later, he writes lyrically of her in his diary.

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China Historical Photos @chinahistorypics.bsky.social · Oct 5

Beijing, 1923–24 In the warlord era, amid bronze phoenixes and fading imperial splendor, President-warlord Cao Kun poses in full ceremonial dress. One of many would-be emperors of a crumbling republic, he bought his presidency through mass bribery only to be toppled by a coup soon after

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