The East Asian Collection

The China in the 1930s Collection/Tianjin Collection
http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/EastAsian.China1930s

The majority of images in this collection are connected with the military, including the Chinese 19th Route Army, the US 15th Infantry Regiment at China Service, and the Japanese Army. Many depict scenes of the Japanese invasion and Chinese defense, the Sino-Japanese Conflict (1937-1945), and the World War II theatre in China.

The other images in this collection portray village and city lives, street scenes, and Chinese architecture.

The Holmes Welch Collection
http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/EastAsian.HolmesWelchCollection

Holmes Hinkley Welch (1921-1981) was a twentieth century eminent scholar on modern Chinese religions, especially Buddhism. After Welch's death, his family donated his library collection to Memorial Library, the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This collection includes different materials and media, among which are hundreds of photographs, where most have never been published or circulated. In an effort to make these photographs more accessible, a digitization project of selected photographs is underway.

The collection of digitized photographs is mostly about religious life in China and Hong Kong, between the 1930s and 1960s. The images capture different aspects of the Chinese Buddhist monastic life as well as Chinese Buddhist architecture.

The other images in this collection portray village and city lives, street scenes, and Chinese architecture.

The William Hervie Dobson Collection
http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/EastAsian.Dobson

The William Hervie Dobson collection presents images of the Yeungkong area in southern China, and its residents, as documented by Dr. William Hervie Dobson, pioneer missionary, doctor, and lifelong inhabitant of this area.

William Hervie Dobson (1870-1965) was born in Vineland, New Jersey. In 1897, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) sent Dr. Dobson to southern China where he spent the next forty years practicing medicine at the Forman Memorial Hospital and working as a medical missionary at the Yeungkong Station, South China Mission. The first Presbyterian missionary to learn the Yeungkong dialect, Dobson worked in Yeungkong as an evangelist, surgeon, and teacher until the early 1940s when he was honorably retired from the mission field. <more>