Paper coins dance in the sky as a funeral procession goes on.

Rickshaw drivers wait anxiously for clients in the street.

Girls in traditional dresses assemble glass grapes at home...

Such scenes are ordinary and trivial compared to the drastic social turbulences in old Beijing (Peking) and the rest of China during the 1930s and 40s.

What makes them significant is that they tell people today what the daily lives of ordinary Beijingers were like and represent another side of the city's history and culture that should not be overlooked or forgotten.

The exhibition "Old Peking: Photographs by Hedda Morrison 1933-46" is displaying a vivid landscape of the ancient city through the lens of a foreigner and drawing today's Beijingers back to the almost vanished slices of memory.

Now showing at the Art Museum of the China Millennium Monument in Beijing until June 9, the exhibition features 85 works by internationally renowned photographer Hedda Morrison (1908-91). All black-and-white, the photographs are selected from the collection of the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia.

According to Jiang Jianqiu, acting director of the art museum in Beijing, the exhibition is part of the "Meet in Beijing" International Arts Festival and marks the 30th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Australia.

Long-held wish

"It is the first time in more than 50 years that these photographs are exhibited in the city that they chronicle, fulfilling a long-held wish of Hedda Morrison and her husband Alastair to share the photographs with the people of Beijing," remarked Claire Roberts, senior curator of Asian Decorative Arts and Design of the Powerhouse Museum.

Hedda Morrison was born Hedda Hammer to a publisher's family in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1908.

At the age of 11, she received her first camera and was fascinated by the art of photography.

In 1929, her parents sent her to a medical school in Austria despite the fact that she was not at all interested in becoming a doctor. A few months later, she persuaded her parents to allow he go to enroll in the State Institute for Photography in Munich where she studied for three years.

Two years after graduation, Hedda, like many German artists and intellectuals, made plans to leave Germany, which was experiencing the Depression and was coming increasingly under Nazi control.

She decided to travel to China in 1933 in response to an advertisement in a photography journal and secured a job as a manager of Hartung's, a German-owned commercial photographic studio in old Beijing.

The photo shop, which was located in the downtown diplomatic area, had a well-established clientele including diplomats and foreign residents as well as local Chinese.

After her contract expired in 1938, Hedda felt it hard to leave the city she had loved so much and continued to work as a freelance photographer in Beijing.

A new life

Upon her arrival at the old Chinese city, Hedda did not know that her answer to the advertisement would lead to her 13 years' living here as a professional photographer. She also did not expect that here she would meet and eventually marry her future husband Alastair, an Australian from the famous Morrison family.

Alastair is the son of Dr George Ernest Morrison (1862-1920), who in 1897 was appointed a correspondent for The Times of London in the Chinese capital and quickly became one of the most influential correspondents and an authority on China.

Hedda and Alastair met in 1940 in old Beijing and married in a small church in the city in 1946.

Due to the increasing instability of the political situation in China, they left the ancient city soon after. The Morrisons spent six months in Hong Kong before relocating to Sarawak, a British colony where they worked until 1966. In 1967, the couple settled in Canberra, Australia. Hedda died there in 1991, at the age of 82.

During those years in old Beijing, the young woman photographer could often be seen cycling through the city with a Rolleiflex camera around her neck, capturing those times through her lens as both participant and observer.

After 1938, she built her own studio in the ancient city and her photographs of the city were well known. She sold many prints and albums to overseas visitors as souvenirs.

"During her 13 years in the city, Hedda Morrison took thousands of photographs that document architecture and streetscapes, craftspeople at work, street vendors, and religious or folk customs," said Roberts. "She was particularly interested in traditional crafts and took many series of photographs that record artistic processes."

Among the most impressive works in the exhibition are photographs detailing the process involved in repairing ancient books and paper making by traditional methods, as well as calligraphy and painting scroll mounting.

Equally fascinating are some works featuring traditional customs such as burning incense for the city god, traditional musical instruments played at a funeral and street puppet shows.

Artfully composed and visually striking with the influence of Modernist training, her photographs of old Beijing provide a rare, detailed look into China's past, as most of the scenes in her photographs have disappeared from modern Beijing.

Lost memory

"I have some nostalgic feelings when I look at these photographs of old Beijing and its inhabitants. The city nowadays looks so different," said Frida Murck, an American teacher who has lived in Beijing for five years.

"Young Chinese people don't know about former times any more. In the exhibition, I saw them in front of the excellent pictures of hutong, street vendors, craftspeople at work and old folk customs as if they were looking at a foreign country on a different planet," said Murck. "That is interesting, but it is also quite alarming."

Hu Zhuanglin, an English professor from Peking University, was one of the visitors to the show. He told China Daily that it is of equal importance to both preserve valuable cultural heritages and to build up a modern city of Beijing.

"It is true that the exhibits give us a rare opportunity to look back into the daily lives in old Beijing and to enjoy the artistic appeal of Hedda Morrison's photographs," Hu said. "But I am even glad to see the city and the lives of its people changing for the better year by year. Otherwise, there would be no development in Beijing."

Besides including her photographs in numerous books, albums and exhibitions, Hedda Morrison published two books on China: "A Photographer in Old Peking" (Oxford University Press, 1985) and "Travels of a Photographer in China 1933-1946" (Oxford University Press, 1987).

Upon her death in 1991, she bequeathed her collection of approximately 10,000 negatives of China, many with accompanying prints she had printed and cropped, to the Harvard-Yenching Library at Harvard University.

Another 400 photographs of China were donated by her husband to the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia in 1992.

Fiona Ehlers, a journalist from the German magazine Der Spiegel and currently visiting China Daily on a Sino-German journalistic exchange, contributed to this article.

(China Daily May 20, 2002)