Zunhua Malanyu in Tangshan, Hebei Province, is the site of the Qing Dynasty East Tombs, a large scale Qing Dynasty royal burial complex, where five emperors, fifteen queens, 136 concubines, three brothers and two princesses, a total of 161 members of the royal family, are buried.
In 1924, American photographer Gamble, his newlywed wife and a group of friends set out from Beijing and trekked all the way to Zunhua Malanyu along the route of the royal funeral in those years. During the trip, they visited the tomb of Cixi, which had not yet been damaged, and used their cameras to record the life and labor of the people living near the tomb.
Riding a donkey, Gamble and his party arrived at Malanyu after the Mid-Autumn Festival in 1924 under the guidance of a guide. In front of the gates of Malanyu town, a group of local people were looking curiously at this group of uninvited guests.
When they arrived in front of the inn, a group of women and children quickly gathered around to see what was going on, yet when they found Gamble pulling out a camera and pointing it at them, all went silent and their expressions became very unnatural. At that moment, Gamble's new wife, Elizabeth, was bending over the suitcase looking for something.
A woman holding a child in the middle of the crowd already had deep wrinkles on her face, and it was hard to tell if she was the child's mother or grandmother; a hard life can make people age very early.
Compared with the previous two photos, this one is more likeable, because people's expressions become vivid, looking less formal and wooden. One of the young woman's face even showed a big smile.
This is a local family's house, built on an earthen slope. The house is surrounded by a stone fence, with a thatched roof and many wooden boards drying on both sides of the courtyard door, probably because the owner of the house is a carpenter.
This is another family's courtyard, the courtyard lined with four small buildings with pointed roofs, which are used to store grain granaries. Although the main house is also thatched roof, but look at the gesture, should be a relatively wealthy family.
The materials used in the construction of these silos are mainly bamboo gabions and thatch. In order to prevent rain and moisture, the top was covered with thatch and the bottom was suspended from the ground, and the walls were surrounded by mud, which was very primitive but practical.
Around mid-autumn, it is the season for sorghum, soybeans and other crops to be harvested. The men of the village are busy on the grain field, some cleaning the ground grain, some driving animals pulling stone roller pressure field threshing.
While the men are busy in the threshing floor, the women are not left idle, gathering next to the houses, chatting and peeling corn. The peeled corn husks soon became a small mountain.
The local women's hair is decorated with a round bun at the back of the head, fixed with hair nets and silver pins, decorated with various silver head ornaments, and a flower at the temples, which looks beautiful and neat.
Children playing near a residential area. It was autumn and the children in the mountains were still naked and barefoot. The bulging stomachs indicate that the food they eat on a regular basis is not of high quality.
Two small children aged five or six were struggling to push the stone mill. At first glance, I thought they were just imitating the adults' work, but their young bodies and weak strength alone cannot do the job.
This panoramic picture gives us the answer, two small children are not playing, but doing real work of strength, only on the other side there is a half-grown child. The elderly grandmother is responsible for sweeping up the grain on the mill, helping the child push it up from time to time. The old man, the young man, it is heartbreaking to watch.
An old man squats on the ground to clean up the tobacco leaves. After the hanging tobacco leaves are dried, they are taken into the baking room behind them and roasted. After roasting, the tobacco leaves turn golden yellow and are de-stemmed, compacted, and shaved to make the tobacco used by smokers, which is then ready to be sold at the market.
A boy driving a donkey to transport sorghum poles, just cut off the braid hair looks messy, this hairstyle has a special name called "Ma Zigai", in the early Republic of China can often be seen, some elderly people until the 1940s still tenaciously keep this hairstyle.
There is a "ghost face gourd" hanging on a tree next to the crop field, made of cotton sewn with an exaggerated ghost face painted on it. This is used to scare the birds to prevent them from flying into the field and harming the crops. I wonder if the sudden sight of it at night will scare people a lot.
A beekeeper builds a hive at the edge of a field. The history of beekeeping in China can be traced back to the Yin Shang Dynasty. Before the introduction of live-frame beehives into China, beekeepers used mostly wooden barrels, hollow tree sections and bamboo cages, etc. The beekeeping method shown here is called grass nest beekeeping, and has been around for many years.
