Project history

 

Virtual Shanghai began in 2000 as a project dedicated to historical photographs of Shanghai. It originated as a collaboration between Christian Henriot at the Institut d’Asie Orientale (CNRS – University of Lyon) and Yeh Wen-hsin at the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, with initial funding from the France–Berkeley Fund. At that time, the project was known as Shanghai in Images and developed under the aegis of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI), guided by the invaluable mentorship of Lewis Lancaster.

In 2002, Christian Henriot received a MIRA grant from the Rhône-Alpes Regional Assembly to expand the initial database into a comprehensive photographic history of Shanghai. As the work progressed, it became clear that new tools—particularly GIS—offered exceptional potential for a more systematic exploration of Shanghai’s past. Drawing inspiration from ECAI projects, we decided to apply historical GIS to Shanghai. Building on earlier research in cartography, we gradually broadened our scope to address the methodological and conceptual challenges of writing history in the digital age. This shift led us to envision Virtual Shanghai as a platform for producing a spatial and visual history of the city.

Objective

The project seeks to write the history of Shanghai through the integrated use of textual (essays, archival documents), visual (photographs, films, drawings, images), sound (recordings, music), and cartographic materials. At its current stage, the platform primarily provides essays, textual records, photographs, and maps. While some components remain accessible only to participating scholars through a login system, the majority of the resources are freely available to the public.

Overview

The platform offers three main gateways:

  1. Textual Documents – Scholarly essays, archival records, and chronologies. Users can read texts sequentially, browse by topic, or navigate between texts and related visual or cartographic materials.

  2. Visual Paths – The visual collection is organized thematically into albums, but users may explore freely. All visual items are linked to related textual or cartographic data and include their own metadata.

  3. Cartographic Resources – A large collection of historical maps, from early survey maps to satellite imagery. A representative set has been georeferenced (GIS) and linked to the visual database. The GIS server enables users to view Shanghai at multiple points in time, from the citywide scale down to individual blocks.

Through ongoing research and contributions, the goal is to build a comprehensive archive of cartographic and territorial representations of Shanghai.

Methodology

Virtual Shanghai is structured as a set of interconnected relational databases, developed through an incremental process:

  • Phase One focused on building the photographic database, with systematic collection, identification, and documentation of historical photographs. This phase established the database’s structure and functionality, which now require further expansion in scope and features.

  • Phase Two centered on cartography, including the digitization of maps, their redrawing as vector maps, and their georeferencing in GIS. This stage also involved detailed surveys of buildings and city blocks for various periods, providing a tool for historical geography. These efforts led to the creation of thematic layers on the GIS server for real-time online mapping (see Live Maps).

  • Phase Three will reconnect the visual and cartographic databases through a common timeline, enabling integrated exploration of historical photographs and maps.

Current state of the project

Virtual Shanghai has been under active development since 2003, with a major boost in 2006 thanks to a three-year grant from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR).

Today, the platform offers a mature and comprehensive environment for scholarly work, supported by an extensive range of tools and resources accumulated over two decades. The next stage of development aims to expand international collaborations with scholars of Shanghai and to further integrate innovative digital technologies into the study of urban history.

 

[1] See Henriot, Christian & Zheng Zu’an, Atlas de Shanghai. Espace et représentation de 1849 à nos jours, Paris, CNRS-éditions, 1999.


- 最新更新 週五 15 八月 2025 (17:01) / C. Henriot -

 
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