An Introduction to the Photo Collection of Rev. Carter D. Holton Part I
These copied negatives have no written notes except for the labeling roll numbers marked by the donator or the photographer who took them, and their contents largely related with the Tibetan Buddhism and Islam, for example, the Tibetan Lama temples and the mosques in Islam, the religious rituals, religious believers, culture and education, social economy etc. My first inquiring was that where did Rev. Holton do the missionary in Northwest China? Dr. Lum informed me that it was Qinghai. By the helps from Renata Kalnins, a research librarian at Andover-Harvard Theological Library, I got knowledge that the denomination to which Rev. Carter Holton belonged was Christian & Missionary Alliance (C&MA). From this clue I learned the facts that Rev. Holton did missionary work among the Salars in the area of Xunhua (Shunhua) during the period of the 1920s and 1930s. Late on he went to Hezhou (Hechow, Linxia today) continuing his missionary work in the center of Islam in China with a popular title “Small Mecca in China”. After I had read one piece by one piece briefly from these rolls of films, I informed Dr. Lum that the photo contents were the social and cultural lives of the ethnic minorities living in the border region of Qinghai Province and Gansu Province such as Tibetans, Salars, Huis, Dongxiang and other nationalities as well as the Hans. They were the very important primary materials for the research of the religious culture and the ethnic minority societies in the region of Eastern Qinghai and Southwestern Gansu in the period of the Republic of China. Dr. Lum required me to write a brief statement in English on the content of the film negatives, therefore, I wrote a short illustration of the photo collection left by Rev. Holton, and another short note on the value of Rev. Claude Pickens Collection on Muslims in China. Dr. Lum told me that he would use these statements to apply some fund to digitalize these negatives. So this is the first time I knew in detail of the photo collection of Rev. Carter D. Holton. However, I did not see any other materials left by Rev. C. Holton. The understanding in depth to the photo collection of Rev. Holton was taken place in the summer of 2007 while I spent two months at the Harvard-Yenching Institute for a research project of Conception of Shahid (martyrdom) in the history of Islam in China, while I continued to search any information and materials on Rev. Carter Holton, and finally that summer drove me to decide to study the lives of the Christian missionary Carter D. Holton and his wife, Lora N. Holton, who had always been accompanying him in the missionary work in Northwest China, and to study the visible materials they left.
With the intense in study of the Holtons’ missionary experiences in Northwest China, I think it necessary to write notes, some kind of annotation, or at least to give the captions of these photos. Hence, I proposed to Harvard University to fund a project for this annotation work. Fortunately, I was awarded the funds once more for two months in 2011 from the Harvard-Yenching Institute, so I used my winter vacations came to Harvard- Yenching Library for the sorting out work and annotate in English over these 5100 more photos taken by Rev. Holton in Northwest China based on my reading the certain articles written by Rev. Carter Holton and his missionary colleagues in Tibetan-Gansu region published on Mission Alliance Weekly Magazine. Meanwhile and afterwards I used my summer vacations traveling to the region of Gansu and Qinghai, following the journey route trailed by Rev. Carter Holton, and interviewed the elderly over the age of 80 years old to identify the contents of these photos by their oral comments, and recorded the important clues for the historical investigation. Funded by “Religious Studies Project of the Specific Program in High Level” sponsored by Shanghai Municipal Educational Committee in 2012, I again went to the Harvard-Yenching Institute during my two months’ winter vacation for this research work and primarily completed the task of sorting, cataloguing and annotating the 5100 more photos in the Holton Photo Collection, and submitted this result to the section of the special collections of the Harvard-Yenching Library. Of course, to explain the sceneries and the contents of these images focused by a German Leica camera 70 and 80 years ago also combined with the materials based on the Chinese local gazetteers and the Alliance Weekly it would certainly occur many errors or mistakes. However, with the time going on, if there is more material on the Holtons being explored out, the commentaries and annotations of these photos done by me could be continually revised and corrected in future. During February and march in year of 2014 and year of 2015 before I retired from my position of Professor of Islamic studies at Shanghai Normal University, I used a fund allocated by Prof. Chen Weiping, former dean of College of Philosophy, Shanghai Normal University, came to the Harvard-Yenching Institute for two times and revised the notes of the photo collection of Rev. Holton on the basis of my fieldwork in Qinghai and Gansu since 2007. I submitted this revised version of the notes to the Harvard-Yenching Institute and returned back to Shanghai in March of 2015.
