1/7 A thread on the Xinchou Treaty and Li Hongzhang. Beijing, 1900. The Eight-Nation Alliance crushed the Boxer Rebellion. The Qing court had no leverage left. What followed was not negotiation, but damage control under pressure. (Photo: Allied troops inside the Imperial Palace)

Beijing, 1988. Peak bicycle era ~8 million in use. Urban reforms bring rising incomes and early fashion. Workwear meets new style. Big cities move first; the provinces lag.

China, mid-1970s. A school class lined up, red scarves bright against worn jackets. One boy wears a white paper flower a symbol that spread after Zhou Enlai’s death.

This is just 30 years ago. Reform era. Cargo bike as delivery truck. A woman pedals, her child behind her, fridge on board, someone’s first big appliance. Marx/Mao slogan on the wall. Early foreign cars pass by. A generation working day and night so their children could step into a different China.

1881, Kaiping (near Tangshan). China’s first working tram line. Built with Chinese labor and production. No locomotive at first the wagons pulled by mules. Introduced cautiously amid opposition and fears of disturbed feng shui, ancestral graves, and foreign intrusion.

1960s, Linxian (Henan). Villagers build the Red Flag Canal, carving channels through rock by hand. A real irrigation project under harsh conditions. The photo is carefully composed: one flag, people moving in one line. It highlights collective effort, unity, discipline, and purpose.

1930s Shanghai. Hu Die (胡蝶), China’s first real influencer, long before the livestream era. Movie star, beauty icon, face of Unilever’s Lux soap. The birth of consumer culture in the Nationalist era: aspiration, status, modern identity sold through her face.

August 1931: 50th birthday of Lu Xun, one of China’s most influential writers. Like Friedrich Nietzsche, he exposed illusion and moral decay. Nietzsche diagnosed nihilism; Lu Xun showed it in daily life—conformity and self-deception. Praised by Mao Zedong; still officially honored today.

August 1966, Tiananmen Square. Mao Zedong above the crowd at an early Cultural Revolution rally. Thousands of Red Guards raise the Little Red Book in unison. A top-down mobilization. Unusual angle: shot from below, the mass first, the leader distant and elevated. You see how the mechanism works.

Hongkong Kowloon walled city, 1980s. A narrow alley, barely wide enough for two people. An older woman walks a child through cracked concrete and exposed pipes. A place of no planning, no clear ownership, no real state control. At its peak, around 50,000 people lived here in just 2.6 hectares

A forgotten case from 1999 Guangdong: a gang led by Ou Jianneng kidnapped a family of seven, demanded ¥2M, used grenades, rammed police vehicles, and burned cash while fleeing. Multiple death sentences followed. A completely different China than today more chaotic, less controlled.

1950s China and Soviet propaganda shared a common visual language: idealized workers, peasants, and scientists, bright expressions, and forward looking compositions. Influenced by Soviet socialist realism, China adapted the style to local themes agriculture, ethnicity, and nation building.

1906-1907? Xingxingxia (Gansu–Xinjiang). A 62 year old Daoist priest from Henan stands at a Guandi temple, photographed by Australian explorer/ correspondent George Ernest Morrison Such temples offered shelter, food, and prayers to caravan traders, soldiers, and migrants crossing the desert frontier

1943, Southwest China (Yunnan–Burma front). Chinese Nationalist troops march toward the Salween River campaign during WWII. The region was part of the China-Burma-India Theater, where U.S. advisors and photographers were present documenting Allied operations against Japan.

Xinjing, 1930s. A fortune teller sits outside Prajna Temple, reading fate (命) under Manchukuo rule. He sells orientation in an era of chaos. There was plenty of opportunism and many were misled, but the system itself isn’t irrational, it follows its own logic.

1916, Shandong Province, China. An elite family carries its ancestral tablet to a hospital. In Taoist cosmology, illness reflects a disorder between Heaven and Earth, between the living and the dead. The ancestors govern the family’s fate. This ceremony was an attempt to restore balance.

April 1967, Tsinghua University, Beijing. Wang Guangmei, the wife of Liu Shaoqi, is forced into a struggle session. Around her neck: a necklace of ping-pong balls (mocking her elegance during a 1963 state visit to Indonesia), turned into a tool of ridicule during the Cultural Revolution.

A group of Manchu court women, photographed around 1910. They sit composed, dignified, perfectly in role. This is what the end the empire looks like: everything still in place, everyone still performing, while the power center has quietly disappeared.

May 1999. Students in China protest after the American NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Anger fills the streets, amplified by state approval. Patriotism and outrage merge.

This is a street court in Tianjin . During the Boxer Rebellion (1900), mobs decided guilt on the spot. Like in the French Revolution, justice turned into theater—swift verdicts, no defense. When crowds judge, truth rarely survives.

Beijing, 1980 Great Hall of the People. PLA commanders wait for a dinner with U.S. Defense Secretary Harold Brown. Photo: Liu Xiangcheng

Harbin, late 1960s , during the Cultural Revolution. Red Guards gather before a Russian Orthodox church, fists raised, banners hanging . Harbin was once a cosmopolitan city where Chinese, Russians, Jews and Europeans lived side by side a world that had already disappeared by then

20th-century rural China. A funeral procession during the Republican era. Family members walk in rough white mourning clothes — the traditional color of death in China — while the coffin and spirit tablet are carried through the village. The entire community witnesses the passage.

In 1979, photographer Liu Xiangcheng photographed Inner Mongolia while riding a camel himself. A Mongolian herder rides beside him across the steppe. Two worlds in one frame.

In 1981, photographer Liu Xiangcheng captured Pu Jie, younger brother of the last Qing emperor Puyi, sitting in front of the Hall of Supreme Harmony in the Forbidden City. Born inside that palace once filled with thousands of courtiers, he now returns as an ordinary visitor. History can be ironic.

In early 20th-century China, three men stand before a Taihu stone—a scholar’s rock symbolizing mountains, time, and the Dao’s shaping of matter. Once central to scholar culture, these stones embodied contemplation and nature’s mystery. With the empire’s fall and gardens’ ruin, many vanished.

Republican China, c. 1930? A family travels with a handcart — mother and children riding while a laborer pushes forward. Photo from the “Zou Xikou” exhibition, General’s Yamen Museum in Hohhot, reflecting the migration of poor farmers from Shanxi toward Inner Mongolia in search of land and survival.

1973 Beijing, Tiananmen Square. Photo by John Bulmer. Winter haze, vast empty space, a man quietly pushing bicycles across a monumental square. The scene is calm yet restrained. Individuals move carefully, almost cautiously a glimpse of the late Cultural Revolution.

After Japan’s defeat, U.S. Gen. George C. Marshall was sent to China to reconcile Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek. A fragile truce was signed on January 10, 1946. Marshall believed a settlement was possible. Earlier Gen. Joseph Stilwell warned Washington the struggle was about power, not compromise.

A war development: 1900–1901: Russia occupies Manchuria (Northeast China) during and after the Boxer Rebellion. 1901–1903: Moscow promises withdrawal but instead fortifies railways and garrisons. Japan grows alarmed. Feb 1904: Japan strikes Port Arthur. 1905: Russia is defeated. The rest is history

1989: Ali Khamenei visits China as Iran’s president, his last foreign trip before becoming Supreme Leader weeks later. But the China–Iran axis was already forged in the 1980s Iran–Iraq War, through embargo and Chinese arms to Tehran. Since then: oil, strategy, geopolitics..

Left, Zhang Guotao: CCP founder and May Fourth leader, commander of the larger Fourth Front Army. For a time he stood on equal footing with Mao. In 1935 he split from Mao and moved toward the Tibetan frontier. Isolated, he later withdrew from politics and died in Canada in 1979, where he is buried.

Left in the photo: Otto Braun, a German communist military adviser. He joined the Long March, imposed Soviet doctrine, failed, and lost the trust of the other men beside him. Late summer 1939, Yan’an: abruptly woken“Go to the airfield, you’re flying to Moscow.” He never saw his wife Li Lian again .

1911. Qing Dynasty officials hastily retreated from Tianjin during the revolution. During the fall of the Qing (Manchu) dynasty. In several Chinese cities, revolutionary troops and local mobs attacked Manchu garrisons and their families.Reports of executions, looting, forced marriages or kipnapping

Beijing, c.1900 Late Qing elite funeral, photographed by Philman L’Alibert. A lacquered mortuary sedan chair carries the dead “invisible” within, escorted by Manchu bannermen and officials marked by rank badges and court beads. A ritual of order, hierarchy and presence in the Qing court culture.

1994, China. On a long-distance train, a man make a phone call whit a “大哥大” (literally “Big Brother”) heavy, rare, costing around 20,000 RMB, a full year’s salary. That decade people wished each other prosperity not only in words, but in opportunity: trade, travel, connection.

1958. The Great Leap Forward begins. A printing-house propaganda official collects these images of Mao as father, leader and builder of the future. Not just propaganda , but personal faith and naïveté, carefully preserved, just before famine.

From Mao to Jiang (photo, c.2000): the body of the leader once carried power. Jiang Zemin still performs vitality, but the show fades. Under Hu and Xi the state and party takes the stage. Propaganda moves: from swimmer-hero to a controlled, quasi-imperial apparatus of ritual, order, continuity.

China, c. 1950–55. A railway ticket hall between two eras: Republican boards still hang above the windows, while a new People Republic China crowd queues below. Cloth bundles, paper tickets, destinations written in vertical script.

For a thousand years, Chinese New Year (春节) was more than fireworks. At the home altar the year began again, cleaned, renewed, red paper hung. Here a photo from the warlord era (ca. 1920). Ancestors invited back to the table. Food offered. Family bows. A new year starts with the dead include

12 February 1912 the Qing throne falls and a 2,000-year empire ends. I’ve always felt something human in Puyi: a boy raised inside walls of ritual, never taught how to be free. Emperor, puppet, prisoner, citizen. From Son of Heaven to gardener — one life carrying the weight of a vanished world.

Chinese New Year, 1990 Year of the Horse. Family gathering in a small urban home: three tables, multiple generations. Home-cooked dishes, winter coats worn indoors, a TV in the corner. A typical scene of everyday urban life in China at the time.

1975, Beijing. Pol Pot meets an aging Mao. The student wanted to surpass the master, taking Maoist zeal beyond pragmatism into total agrarian purity. The result was not an utopian paradise but the Killing Fields: ideology unrestrained by reality becomes a machine of death.

July 1971, Beijing. Marshal Ye Jianying receives Henry Kissinger. Ye wasn’t protocol, he embodied the fusion of Party, state and PLA. Kissinger grasped it: power in China was integrated, disciplined, unified. Weeks later came the Lin Biao shock. The die was cast.

Around 1915, children carrying banners were a global sight, from Beijing to Berlin. Nations learned to shape mass society through schools, discipline, and public display. These marches were not spectacle, but training: turning children into citizens for a new industrial, national age.

Around 1900, parts of Guangzhou functioned as a three-dimensional city. Streets carried trade and crowds, while rooftops formed a second network. Night patrols crossed wooden bridges between houses, watching for fire and theft, moving above the narrow, dark alleys below.

1989, Spring Festival travel in China. No high-speed rail back then only overcrowded trains, open doors, and pure determination to get home. The largest human migration on earth once looked like this.

Beijing, 1981. A veterans’ choir, photographed by He Yanguang. The same year the Party ruled Mao “70% right, 30% wrong.” A political recalibration. Start of the new era.

Suzhou, c. 1865. An abandoned Buddhist temple in what was once a Jiangnan religious center. Broken halls, exposed Buddha statue, and people moving through the ruins reflect the decline of temple institutions and shifts in folk belief during the late Qing Dynasty.

Peace Hotel, Shanghai, 1992. At a Christmas party, a young dancer performs Western glamour. A wealthy man watches calmly. A woman behind him looks on with visible unease. The moment comes just after Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour, when money, spectacle, and desire were officially let back in.