The Visualising China project, a unique virtual archive of Chinese life, gives users the opportunity to explore and interact with more than 8,000 digitised photographs of China taken between 1850 and 1950. The archive includes rare photographs by the Chinese ambassador to the USSR during the Second World War and rare shots of the nationalist leader of China Chiang Kai-Shek.

The photographs come from a variety of sources, including archives, businesses, and privately-held collections, including family albums.

The site offers free access to major online collections, as well as to previously unseen collections and a selected Google Books library of China-related publications. Users may submit comments or annotations to the image entries, organise images on to their own workbenches, download low-resolution images, and explore the collections by word searches, date ranges, photographer, people depicted and maps.

Robert Bickers, professor of history, said: "The resource brings Chinese history since the 1850s to life and informs our understanding of modern China. Likely users of the site include family history researchers and historians around the world, not least in China, where documentation is not always easily available."

To view the collection, visit http://visualisingchina.net

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