Chinese lady with children on corner of Pottinger Street

Try contacting the China Coast Community directly.  I'm sure the matron would be happy to help if she can.  The residents are elderly, and may be able to give us much help and enjoy doing it.  It is an English speaking community.

There's a slightly better resolution copy of this on page 44 of the SCMP's 'Post Impressions'. It shows the person behind the shortest boy, walking up the hill, appears to be a man. But he still has his hair in a plaited queue, which would push the date of the photo back to the early 1910s, or even the 1900s.

The caption given is:

In the first decade of the last century, western fashions were gaining popularity. This boy, pictured in Pottinger Street, sports a sailor suit while his sibling wears the traditional Chinese male cheongsam ma kwa.

Is there anything else in the photo (eg the electric powerlines?) that would give a date to it?

Regards, David

The style of dark traditional dress and plaited queues makes me tend to put the date closer to 1900s. Postcard from Sternberg circa 1900-1910 of the same scene.

This scene below is from the 1920s. Note the electricity pole is different and the presence of sedan chairs along the side of the street

There is a zoomed in version of this on the "Hong Kong Old Pictures" facebook group that has the date 1898 on it. It looks as though it has been grabbed from a Chinese documentary program as the date looks like it is part of a subtitle.

The user has qualified the photo with the following comment: 香港-中環石板街1898

Dear reader,

This photo also features in a set of postcards, dated ca. 1910, made by Sternberg. 

You can find the postcard here:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/161392673@N02/45602804611/in/album-721577…

You can find the complete set of postcards (almost a hundred) here:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/161392673@N02/albums/72157701389199671

Kind regards,

Pieter

Greetings.  This photo might have been taken during Chinese New Year when we visit friends and relatives, and us children receive red-pocket money.  The boy on the far right appears to be wearing a coat filled with a thin layer of cotton typically worn for this special occasion.  The riser in these stone steps are interesting  for their small height - excellent workmanship.  Regards,   Peter

The image of the children on Pottinger Street is almost certainly from the early 1900's, at the latest 1906, and those same children appear in at least three other Sternberg postcards, most recognisably the boy in the sailor suit, who appears in the Sternberg postcard of a Kowloon Punch & Judy show. (Unfortunately I've only seen this Punch & Judy card in books and cannot provide a scan.) On another postcard, of the steps outside the Public Gardens, the children appear with their mother, who the caption calls their 'nurse'. Given that Sternberg's postcards seem to have been produced only before the First World War and not after, a 1920's date for any of them is unlikely. 

Cannot remember viewing the Kowloon 'Punch and Judy' postcard but can recall the Public Gardens one showing similar children which I had dated to the early 1900s. Will post a scan of the latter postcard when next through Hong Kong. 

That's the one, thanks for taking the trouble to scan and post it. It's a gret postcard and 'true' in that the scene being photographed was real and wasn't one of theose ethnographic studies (opium smokers, fantan players, road sweepers, etc.) taken in an indoor studio with a cloth backdrop to look like the outdoors. It's also a rare postcard - in 20-odd years of searching I've never found this card and have only seen it in a book and one on an Internet auction site.

We've recently had this copy of Sternberg's family uploaded. They don't match the children in the Pottinger Street postcard shown above.

Please could the source of the above opinion be stated, given that the children in the formal 1910 New Year portraits of the Sternberg family are older than in the Pottinger Street photo, in which the children are each wearing head coverings concealing the colour of their hair.

Here's what I was thinking:

1. First, to me they just look different - the children on the Sternberg family photo are clearly western children, but the children on Pottinger Street look Asian to me. The boy on the right of the Pottinger Street group looks to have the high forehead that shows it was shaved.
2. Also, I couldn't match up their ages. In eurasian_david's family tree (https://gwulo.com/comment/72774#comment-72774), the youngest of the Sternberg children is a girl named Esterina / Esther, but in the Pottinger Street group the youngest child is the boy in the sailor suit.
3. Finally I'm not sure that the Pottinger Street people are all one group of four children from the same family. To me the body language suggests the lady and the child holding her hand maybe separate from the trio holding hands. 

#3 is impossible to be sure of, so not much use. #1 makes sense to me, but we'd need a sharper copy of the Pottinger Street to be sure.

#2 looks like the best evidence, but I'm happy to be proven wrong!

Regards, David

Many thanks for your analysis, David. Here comes my interpretation, but, like you, I'm happy to be proved wrong. When I first saw this photo some years ago in a book, I was shocked. That was because I read the girl in white and the little boy in the sailor suit as Europeans. I assumed the woman on the left was their Chinese amah and the children holding the little boy's hand the amah's family. I couldn't believe that the children would have been allowed out in town on foot with their amah in this era - or any era. From the earlier posts I see that both Sean and Vanessa perceived the same children to be European, or at least not Chinese. One hopes that the photographer was a parent, but the whole scene looks constructed and very unlikely. I have assumed that the little boy is the same as the little boy on the left of the Sternberg New Year card and that the older girl is the girl in the middle. I think I can see a bit of dark hair behind the headband that the girl in white is wearing in the Pottinger Street photo. I'm still baffled as to what the photo was intended to show. I'm hoping that there is someone out there who can solve this for us. Sternbergman tells us that the same children, and particularly the little boy in the sailor suit, appear in at least three other Sternberg postcards.

For comparison with the Pottinger Street photo under discussion, this is an undated photo titled "Slab Street" that seems to show the same section of the street, although only the first sign on the right is a match.