Changsha Historical Pics

My friend Damion Braithwaite is crazy good at keeping the What’s New in Changsha goup updated about events and news about Changsha and China. But what I really like about his posts are when he finds out interesting things about Changsha’s history. He is amazing at scouring the internet for interesting history sites. His latest find is in Chinese, so I’m not exactly sure what it is. But for some reason a Changsha resident put this project together of collecting old photographs of Changsha people through the years. And they are so great! Click here to see the project and brows through all the pictures. But here are some of my favorites.

This one was really interesting. It was taken in 1964 and the caption talks about how the father was wrongly sent to the countryside. I’m not sure if it was part of Mao’s reeducation program, but for anyone to speak out about this time in China’s history is a rarity.
This is the front of a school that is still standing today.
This picture looks soo old, like something from the 40’s, but it was only taken in 1989.
All of the pictures from this family were so interesting it was hard to pick just one! So wonderful how they are reading the book on the back of the cow.
This darling picture was from the same family as the one just above.
The girls are so styalized in this.
A typical family in 1970. I think all of these pictures are great examples of what life was like in China and Changsha in the 70’s and 80’s. I think that Rian Dundon could learn a lot about capturing “real life” from looking at these pictures.
*UPDATE* Ok, so according to my friend Daria who has mad Chinese language skills, the website wasn’t specifically designed to be historical. It was a competition put on by a local real estate company that asked people to post old pictures to win discounts on buying property, lol. But regardless of the intent, what came out was a bunch of really cool old pictures mainly from Changsha, so it is still a great website with a lot of great pictures to browse.