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During her stay in Beijing (1933–1946), Hedda Hammer (later known as Hedda Morrison) made a visual record of shop signs with her camera. In this paper I rely on this visual record to examine what shop signs represented in Chinese material culture and their function in the urban setting. I argue that Morrison's photographic record reveals a fascinating element of street culture in the capital city that the textual records cannot document. I also contend that shop signs worked as genuine urban markers of the various trades and crafts in the city. As such, these artefacts constituted an expression of Chinese material culture, but were also a form of visual language to guide the gaze and pace of Beijing urbanites. This paper supports the idea that photographs have a particular relevance and value for the exploration of the Chinese urban setting in the Republican period. The use of photography goes beyond the record of disincarnated artefacts. It allows us to perceive and understand a fascinating dimension of visual culture in Republican Beijing, one of the numerous layers of signs that were displayed quite extensively through the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Although since reforms rural-urban geographic mobility is no longer as much impeded by the hukou system, new institutional mechanisms have emerged that likewise impede the equal participation of rural migrant workers in the urban labour market. Given the daunting challenges implied in rural-urban migration flows, the burgeoning of labour fairs, job advertisements in the media, and intermediate service centres offer migrants some respite. Migrant women in particular can participate in the domestic service labour sector through the 'housemaid agencies', which often appear as ineffective, but may also offer significant possibilities for migrant women to find a job in China's cities. In this paper the author examines the activities and functions of these housemaid agencies and the role they play in shaping the employment opportunities of migrant women. Most of the information is based on fieldwork achieved between 1998 and 2001 in Beijing and Shanghai. The aim is to assess the extent of these agencies' benefits to migrant women's work opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new species of subterranean amphipod from China, Procrangonyx limpidus n. sp., is reported in the present paper. Detailed drawings of body parts and remarks on its affinities to related species are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Western Learning has long been conceptualised as an intellectual encounter between Chinese and Western civilisations, an approach exemplified by Joseph Needham and Jacques Gernet's classical works. Today, this framework is no longer satisfactory. As an alternative, we advocate a microhistorical approach, which historians of Catholicism have fruitfully used to reveal the plurality of local, regional and global networks that made Catholicism possible in particular places. Similar microanalysis allows the history of Western Learning to reconceptualise the Jesuits' European traditions materially through the circulation of books, and to separate the Chinese reaction into the two geographically, chronologically, and socially distinct models of patronage, driven respectively by late Ming literati and by the early and mid-Qing court. We suggest further research on the circulation of Western Learning beyond Beijing and Jiangnan in the eighteenth century, particularly in the peripheral regions of the empire and in the rural textual culture of Catholic communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on largely uninvestigated archival material in the First Historical Archives in Beijing. It addresses the following issues: (1) How and why an internal office, the Nanfu, which was responsible for drama performances inside the palace, expanded its functions to become a monitoring organisation, the Shengpingshu, which exercised censorship over all the drama groups in the capital. (2) How political events were reflected in drama performed on both public and private occasions, thus shedding light on the inner world of individual emperors. (3) How these institutional changes led to the Qing court playing an active role in the transformation of a regional lower-class entertainment into Peking opera, a national art form appreciated by all classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]