There's not much to say in this post. In 1980, right after China was opened to foreign tourists, my grandparents took a guided tour to Shanghai, Beijing, Canton, Guilin, and other top tourist spots in China. My grandfather shot a number of pictures to Kodachrome, which have preserved pretty much perfectly. Here's some of the most interesting pictures. There's not as many picture of Shanghai as I would have liked, but the pictures do show a wildly different look to them. Here's the former French Concession, I believe. Only there's no cars, and everybody's wearing blue or grey pajama-suits:
Here's another shot of the cool clothes. Sometimes maintenance workers dress a bit like this, but you don't see it much anymore:
While people aren't staring at the camera in that one, there's plenty of other photographs that demonstrate a foreigner was a big novelty. I at first thought this was some kind of fight, but really the crowd is just gathered around the foreigner with a camera:
Here's a young lady, I guess she's having her picture taken.
They still had the old boats in the Shanghai-area rivers, and they looked even more beat up then than they do now:
And here's a nice picture of Guilin. I was never much interested in visiting Guilin until I saw his shots. This is just one of many amazing pictures:
5 comments:
Wonderful photos. It's interesting that - even though they'be been scanned - there's a richness of color and shadow in these that you just wouldn't get with a comparable digital camera. Long live film!
Great photos, thanks for sharing!
I've been scanning a bunch of slides recently, and I agree. I've been very impressed how great they look projected. My scans on a junky scanner and then put through blogspot's over-compression doesn't do them justice. I think being shot with prime lenses (on a Nikon F variant) also shows.
Doris, your food blog is amazing and I plan to read through the entire thing as soon as I have time.
Very cool pictures! I visited China with a USA youth group in 1977. That's how it was!
Wanted to see what others had for information on Shanghai in 1980. It was fun to see that your photo's just as mine showed the same blue, I call them Mau jackets and the streets with few or no cars. Amazing changes in that time. Looking for any information about life then, other than what I observed while I was there, to add depth to a manuscript I am writing about the transformative trip around the world, including China, I took in that year.
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