* University Museum and Art Gallery *

A Cantonese Schoolboy, Canton (Guangzhou)
1869
John Thomson

Young revolutionary soldiers at Hankou
October 1911
Edwin John Dingle

Representatives attending the peace negotiation between the north and south, Shanghai
February 20, 1919
Asia Photo Studio

The Road to 1911: A Visual History
30 August to 4 October 2011

The exhibition is jointly presented by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre and the University Museum and Art Gallery, in collaboration with the Beijing World Art Museum, and supported by the HKU Culture & Humanities Fund, as part of the centenary celebration of The University of Hong Kong.

It features 86 photographs of China dating from the 1860s to the early 1920s. This extraordinary collection was brought together from collections worldwide by Liu Heung Shing, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo-journalist. The exhibition is guest curated by Karen Smith, a British critic and curator who lives in Beijing. The photographs provide an insight into the origins of modern China, illustrate the social conditions and attitudes of the era, the atmosphere inside the imperial court by the end of the Qing Dynasty, the lives of the mighty and the poor and various events that helped shape the transition of China from an empire to a republic.

After this inaugural show in Hong Kong, the exhibition will begin a month-long tour from 22 September to ten museums in Guangdong, Jiangsi, Guizhou, Yunnan, Gansu, Fujian, Hubei and Hebei provinces.