The idea for this website has evolved over the last few years. Initially, all I wanted to do was to send photos of China back to friends and family in America and the world.
I simply attached the photos to my emails until Yahoo abandoned this option several years ago. I had to look elsewhere to send my photos. Someone suggested Facebook, so I joined and created several albums. Then someone said Picasaweb could host far more photos, so I created several dozen photo albums of Chinese historic and scenic places. By this time I was using PowerPoints for all my history lectures, creating outlines so students could more easily follow my lectures. Since I had quite a few photos I’ve taken over the years, I naturally added them to my PowerPoint presentations. Students wanted copies of the photos, so I added albums of historic places around the world. I also started to photograph Chinese museums to illustrate my lectures on Chinese history. Since my recent photos are all high-resolution, people interested in Chinese artifacts began to write and thank me for making these available. So by the spring of 2008 I decided to attempt to photograph every displayed artifact in every museum in China and make the photos available to anyone in the world. This is probably an impossible goal. But as my database grows, its usefulness to scholars and other interested people will increase.
At present I have created categories for photos of Chinese Historic Sites, Chinese Museums, and Chinese Scenic Places. I also created the same three categories for the United States, and finally, the same three for the rest of the world. Â Unfortunately, my earlier photos were all slides and prints which I copied with a digital camera, so the viewer will probably notice a difference in quality between my earlier and more recent albums. One of my photo albums is in a category by itself. It is part I, section D, entitled Sias International University. This is where I work. It is a pretty amazing place. I will write more about it later.
The second part of this website will consist of 28 lectures on Chinese history. These were commissioned in 2007 and completed in the fall of that year. The college which commissioned them never followed through, so I decided to make them available for free to people who want the knowledge but don’t care about the academic credit. The more I think about them, the more unhappy I am with my performance. The PowerPoint text is generally good, and the photos also, but all of us found the presence of a camera to be intimidating. I normally thrive on classroom interaction with students, but everyone sat in back of the camera and generally remained silent as long as the camera was running. All the good discussions occurred after the camera was turned off, so you won’t see these. I guess I tend to view those lectures as a sort of rough draft or dress rehearsal. I will improve the PowerPoints for future classes and hope my actual performance in person will prove somewhat more exciting. Since doing these lectures, I have learned some new things, or been exposed to new interpretations. These will not be reflected on the website lectures, but will be incorporated into future live classes. I will probably add essays to my website to correct or update my lectures. On a technical note, these lectures require a massive amount of computer memory, so it will take some time before they are fully uploaded. Because my technological skills are limited, someone else will be doing the actual work of uploading them. I will be mainly doing the photo albums and the essays.
The third part of this website will consist of essays, or blogs. I’ve taught for over thirty years and am currently in my fourth year as professor of history at Sias International University in Xinzheng, China. We have over 100 foreigners on our faculty. Many of them are recent graduates with little teaching experience. Others have taught before, but not in China. I’m hoping to share my insights and experiences with them, although what I write will be posted for anyone in the world to read. Some of the essays will be aimed at our own community of foreign teachers or others new to life in China. Others will discuss history, historiography, education, and social commentary. One project I hope to undertake is to write a history of my own city of Xinzheng, which is quite literally the birthplace of Chinese civilization. So far as I know, almost nothing in English has been published on that topic. Just looking at my Xinzheng photo album (under Chinese Historic Places) should tell you something about its fascinating past. Finally, I hope to write about some “life lessons,” those things which I have learned through some 59 years of living and making mistakes. I believe I have learned at least a couple of things which people might find useful.
A note about my photography: I started taking photos with a Brownie Bullseye camera using 620 film with 8 shots to a roll. I was 8 years old then, the same age at which I first experienced the symptoms of Tourette’s Syndrome. By the time I was 11 I had sold my first photo (of an experimental airplane) to the Register Republic newspaper of Rockford, Illinois. It was used to accompany an article written by my father, who was aviation and business editor of the newspaper. I’ll write more about my dad in the future, because he was a World War II P-47 fighter pilot, and I grew up around airplanes. Some years later dad got me a Fujica half-frame 35mm camera, and some of the earliest photos on this website were taken with that. I graduated to a Nikon SLR around 1978 while living in Duluth, Minnesota. I generally took slides because they were cheaper, but I later got a second Nikon, and when I went to China in 1991 carried two cameras with me, one for slides and one for prints. I generally used the print camera for people photos, and the slide camera for photos of historic interest. For really important shots I often took both a slide and a print. By that time I had a Ph.D. in history and was on the lookout for pictures I could project onto a screen to illustrate my history classes. I seem to have been one of the few professional historians who was also a serious amateur photographer, but I thought the combination of interests was ideal. Not everyone agreed with me. Professional historians frequently couldn’t look beyond written documents as sources of history, while family and friends thought I was wasting my time photographing all sorts of inanimate things that might someday be of limited historical value. Nevertheless, I plodded along taking my photos, oblivious to the fact that people thought I was wasting my time.
The terror events of 9-11 2001 started a chain reaction which led ultimately to my losing my teaching jobs and all of my plans for my future. But I recovered and moved to the Philippine island of Mindanao where I lived for a year with my wife Amy. I still used the old Nikon film cameras. It took nearly a year before my government would let me return with my wife, but we finally got back to Georgia where I could find no meaningful employment. I’ll probably tell about the American education system in a future essay, but finally, I answered a magazine ad and went to China to teach. China became the land of opportunity for me. I know that after teaching there one summer in 1991 I was never quite as happy living in America. So I returned to China and ended up right in the birthplace of Chinese civilization, and within short driving distance of many ancient capitals and other historic sites. Time to get back into photography!
I’m somewhat of a technophobe, so I had resisted digital photography for quite some time. But when I lived in America, I had to survive by selling off my family heirlooms and assorted junk on eBay. This required a digital camera, so I started with a 4 megapixel Minolta. It worked fine for shooting stuff I was selling, as I could plug the camera into a wall socket and shoot forever. But when I took it to China, it turned out to be a battery-eater. Besides, I had been using single lens reflex cameras for years, and this little rangefinder was just too limited for the opportunities which were beginning to present themselves. I got Amy an 8 megapixel Sony, and this inspired me to upgrade to something that was nearly professional quality. I then invested in a 10 megapixel Canon SLR, which is what I am currently using. While it doesn’t totally solve the problem of bad lighting, museum prohibitions against using tripods and flash, and shooting through glass which is at the same time reflecting multiple light sources, it does give me some pretty good images most of the time. The high resolution is especially helpful to people who want to study the images in detail, so this is pretty much where I am at today in my photography.
Many beautiful books of Chinese artifacts have been printed, but most of them are in Chinese and are not readily available to most people in the world. Moreover, the photos published in books tend to be mostly of the state treasure variety. I think the more common artifacts sometimes tell us more about the past than do the artistic masterpieces created for the elites. I know museums around the world are beginning to put their collections online. So far this has not happened in China, which has probably the largest number of ancient artifacts of any country in the world, and one of the longest and most fascinating histories. So until the professionals get the world’s museums photographed, labeled, and made freely available to everyone in the world, I intend to do my best to photograph everything I can find of historic or aesthetic value. Since my home is now in China, this means mostly artifacts of Chinese history. I am, however, going through all my old photographs as I am able to locate them, and putting online everything which is even remotely related to history. Sometimes I have only poor-quality digital photos of print pictures, or photos of slides projected onto a wall, which means that many of my earlier photos are not so good. But some of the things I have in my collection are unique, so I figure that a poor photo may be better than no photo at all. I really don’t expect to profit personally from this website, but only want to give back to the world some of the things I have been privileged to see and photograph, or some of the lessons I have learned.
While part of this website is intended as a resource for scholars and educated laymen, it is, in fact, my personal website. It deals with the things which are of interest to me. I take full responsibility for any ideas which I will express here. I will try to get my facts correct and my opinions well-founded, but I am only human. I have made many mistakes before, and I do not believe that I have yet attained perfection. Hopefully the benefits of this website will outweigh the liabilities.
October 19, 2008
Gary L. Todd, Ph.D.
Professor of History
Sias International University
Xinzheng, Henan, China