Old Beijing: Postcards from the Imperial City
by Felicitas Titus
Tuttle Publishing
With the advent of the internet, postcards now seem redundant. We Tweet our impressions, Instagram our photos, and track our travels on a timeline on Facebook. The humble postcard is a quaint relic from yesteryear.
Still, postcards provide a window into foreign lands - and, crucially, provide a view into how those places are perceived by outsiders: produced, packaged, and sold within a single image. Now a new book has resurrected 350 vintage postcards from the largely vanished vistas of the capital from the 1890s to the 1930s. Old Beijing: Postcards from the Imperial City is the collection of former resident Felicitas Titus, lovingly assembled in a book that continues to charm long after many of the sights themselves have gone.
Few places have captured the public imagination as Beijing has. In imperial times the capital was home to emperors, concubines and eunuchs; countless temples and monuments were contained within its imposing city walls; and the Great Wall of China stretched for thousands of kilometres beyond its borders. Today, this throbbing, messy metropolis is the political centre of an economic superpower flexing its muscles on the world stage for the first time.
In 1936, when Titus first visited Beijing as a girl with her mother, it was 'a hushed, storybook city behind a series of 40-foot-high ramparts lying on the wind-swept northern Chinese plain below the Great Wall'. They came from the river port city Hankow (modern-day Wuhan), where Titus was born and raised in the foreign concession. Her father, a businessman, dealt in exports of tea, silk, and tung oil.
Titus returned to Beijing at the end of the second world war to study the Chinese language, literature and history at the College of Chinese Studies and Catholic Fu Jen University. Her vision of the city - first as a wide-eyed tourist on a trip to see the capital of her adopted homeland; second, as a student spending her days riding under Beijing's many pailou (decorative memorial arches) on her bicycle - ignited a fascination and love that has lasted a lifetime.