Rare early photographs of Peking | Hacker News Reader

Rare early photographs of Peking

bbc.com

65 pointsyitchelle23 comments

Thomas Child died in 1898[1]. If current US copyright law, as expressed in the TPP, had existed when these photos were taken, then the copyright on these photos would have expired in 1968, seventy years after their creator's death and about a hundred years after they were taken. If they were taken as works for hire, then they would have expired around the year 2000, more than one hundred years after their creator's death and one-century-and-two-decades after they were taken.

[1] http://hpc.vcea.net/Database/Photographers?ID=39

On a related note:

The majority of Beijingers used to live in courtyards flanked by houses by four sides: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siheyuan

Growing up in one, you get to know all of your neighbors really well since you see each other every day. My mom who grew up in a one, still knows all of her childhood friends and they have regular reunions.

Wish they were more communal spaces like this today where you're bound to regularly run into and interact with your neighbors.

While making life-long friends growing up is great, there are many problems and inconveniences caused by sharing your living space with other people.

Hence nowadays when people have a choice, most choose to live in their own apartment as opposed to share with others.

Certainly that is part of it, but I think a bigger part of it is that finding a group of people you'd like to live with a space that enables communal living is really hard. Therefore developers build for the plug-and-play self contained dwelling.

Stated another way, the prevalence of independent living is more a consequence of high "coincidence of wants" costs and not of preferences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coincidence_of_wants

Typically the choice is to either have your own space entirely, or share everything but the bedrooms. There's approximately nothing available like what's described above, with a shared courtyard and separate adjoining houses. How can we meaningfully be said to have a choice when they don't exist?

In Los Angeles you see quite a few of these. Big courtyard with one entrance from the street. Inside of it small houses facing the courtyard.

I noticed lots of spaces like this in a trip to northern Italy, as well. Buildings push right up to the sidewalk, and surround private courtyards with a single entrance.

Not sure how communal these spaces are, but I presume not all of these blocks of buildings were owned by single families.

Interesting set of photos. I think the Great Wall was most striking to me, as I was there recently and had no idea the vast forests around it were so new.

I find it a bit grating that they describe the Marble Boat as "suffered damage from the Second Opium War." OK, BBC, I get that you're not going to go all "DESTROYED BY WESTERN IMPERIALISTS AS PUNISHMENT FOR REJECTING ADDICTIVE DRUGS," but at least say who damaged it (the British and French, naturally).

Very neat photos. The Azure Cloud Temple in the Fragrant Hills park is one of my favorite places on earth. The park is very busy in general, but the entire path leading up to the Cloud Temple and the temple itself are typically empty, peaceful, and serene.

rant: it never was Peking. "Peking" is a phonetic spelling performed by westerners listening to non-mandarin speakers, who weren't from Beijing. If they had listened to a mandarin speaker, which most Chinese are, even at that time, we wouldn't have that horribly mis-spelled name.

Depending on the dialect spoken, the phonetic translation is going to be different. For example, my dialect pronounces the city name as "Buck Gen" (hard g).

From Wikipedia:

An older English spelling, Peking, is the postal romanization of the same two characters as they are pronounced in Chinese dialects spoken in the southern port towns first visited by European traders and missionaries. Those dialects preserve the Middle Chinese pronunciation of 京 as kjaeng, prior to a phonetic shift in the northern dialects to the modern pronunciation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing

While I wouldn't call it misspelled (any Romanization is going to be flawed), I do find it strange that the article says it's "now known as Beijing." The name didn't change, only the spelling changed. It really should say "now spelled as Beijing" or something like that.

Its name in English changed. Peking was its old name in English and now it is Beijing. The old name wasn't wrong and the new name isn't right. The concept of wrongness or rightness doesn't even make sense in this context.

It isn't controversial that the city that the Italians call Roma has an English name of Rome, or that the city the Germans call München has an English name of Munich, but somehow if the English name for 北京 doesn't sound as close as possible to what the locals call it in their own language, that's awful cultural imperialism.

The defensive attitude comes from the fact the name Peking was given by imperialists invading China. Thus the name Peking reminds some people of the sad part of history, triggering negative emotions toward it.

That's... not even close to true. Peking is a romanization of how the actual Chinese name was pronounced by actual Chinese people in the port towns that British travelers first encountered.

The fact that there are about 200 different dialects which change the pronunciation doesn't make Peking wrong, or "imperialistic" in any way. In fact it is just as correct as Bejing (which is also "wrong" it's just the currently accepted form of romanization that's closer to local dialect sounds).

I don't see "Beijing" as an "English name," just a Romanization of the Chinese name. In programming terms, it's a double indirection: Peking/Beijing points to 北京 which points to the actual city.

Note that I'm not saying anything about the rightness or wrongness of either name. In fact, I explicitly said that any Romanized version is going to be imperfect. I'm just saying that I think the BBC's wording here implies the something other than what happened.

Are Rome and Munich pointers or English names?

I'd call Rome an English name. We could easily write/say Roma in our own alphabet, after all, but we choose a different name. Munich, I guess depends on how you count the dots.

Basically, it seems to me that there's a difference between using a different name from what the natives use because of some long tradition or linguistic drift ("English name") and using a different name from what the natives use out of necessity because nobody would know how to read it if you used the original.

The name of the place didn't change, but that's not what the article said. The article said that the city was formerly known as "Peking." The same could be said of Mumbai, which was formerly known as "Bombay" but alway referred to as Mumbai by the Speakers of Marathi and Gujarati [0]. The purpose of this statement is to make readers, who may be familiar with both terms, understand that they are the same place, despite having two different names. And I think it's safe to say that a person unfamiliar with the origin of the name would count Peking and Bejing as two different names, since western speakers pronounce them differently. I think saying the spelling changed and not the name itself would be confusing to readers.

[0]http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...

Mumbai actually got renamed, though. It was previously Bombay, then the name was changed to Mumbai. So yes, the same could be said of Mumbai, because it actually fits. My whole objection is that the phrasing describes a case like Mumbai's, which is not what happened with Beijing. In the case of Beijing, the official name is the same, it's just a question of which romanization you use. Both Beijing and Peking are right, or wrong, and to a roughly similar degree. (I'd argue that English speakers unfamiliar with Chinese will usually produce something slightly more accurate when phonetically reading "Beijing," but it's not a huge difference.)

I know the purpose of the statement is to make readers understand that the two spellings refer to the same place. And I agree that a person unfamiliar with the origins would consider the two spellings to be different names. Which is my whole objection: the article encourages people to think this way, when with a simple change in phrasing they could still convey the main point without also encouraging people to think the city got renamed.

  > any Romanization ...

Heck, the residents of Rome don't call it ‘Rome’, either.

Well, it was known as Peking, and it is now known as Beijing. So I guess that statement is correct, right?

Perhaps correct, but misleading, because it makes it sound like the underlying name changed rather than just how it's spelled.

For example, if you were doing a similar series of photos from 1930, you might say the photos were from Beiping, now known as Beijing. That's actually a different name, not just a different spelling.

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