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• 1 2019-10-21T17:32:26-04:00 An Introduction to the Photo Collection of Rev. Carter D. Holton Part I 14 By Prof. Jianping Wang, Shanghai Normal University, China image_header 2019-10-21T18:25:24-04:00 In the early year of 2005, as I took the advantage of the winter vacation after having taught a full semester in Shanghai Normal University, I came to the Harvard-Yenching Institute in Cambridge for three-month program as a visiting scholar for a research project on Ma Dexin, a Yunnanese Hui Muslim cleric and scholar living in the 19th century. My research orientation was a comparative study between Islam and Confucianism in China with an approach of the civilization dialogue. However, I could not expect that it would have changed my research direction and my research career in my home university afterwards. That change was followed by the online images of nearly 1000 pieces of the historical photos at Harvard-Yenching Library. These photos were taken by Rev. Claude L. Pickens who was a missionary spent his life in Central China for the period of the 1927 to 1950 in the Republic. It was very cold and snowy weather in the New England in that winter season, and I often went to the basement of Harvard-Yenching Library to look up of the collection of the Muslims in China left by Rev. Claude Pickens. While I was searching and studying the photo albums of Gansu, Ningxia and other areas in China donated by Rev. Pickens in 1984, Dr. Raymond Lum who was charged of the western books of the library sent a message to me and wanted me to visit his office if I had spare time. I thought that it could be something about the new materials collected by Rev. Pickens concerning the Muslims in China. With the desiring to gain something else I went into his office. He brought out a package of several rolls of the photo negatives which were in sized of 135mm used by the old-brand of Lycra camera made by Germany. Dr. Lum told me that these photo films were the copies left by Rev. Carter D. Holton, after he passed away, his family donated them to the Fairbank Center of the Asian Studies, Harvard University. In order to identify these contents of the photos, he allowed me to use the film reader to look at them.
  
  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.