Visualizing the Middle Kingdom: A Century of Early China (Street) Photography
A snapshot of a busy thoroughfare in Changsha, capital of Hunan province. The men are not sporting the "queue," so this is a post-1911 shot, and the flat cap on the left dates it perhaps to the 1920s at least. Changsha had a tumultous time in the republic. It was the scene of bloody purges targetting the Communists in early 1927 as the revolutionary alliance between the Communist Party the Guomindang collapsed; it was held briefly by Communist forces in 1930 and besieged and briefly held by the Japanese.
