promoter digital gallery: a section about china

img. Travel in Tibet #43 | Viaggio in Tibet #43 by Situ Zhaoguang – 1976 – Promoter Digital Gallery, Italy – CC BY-SA.

Promoter S.r.l. is an SME based in the region of Pisa, bringing together competencies and experiences in the areas of digital transformation, multimedia innovation, business promotion and project management. Promoter has a keen interest with photographic heritage, and in 2014 organized a crowdsourcing action for the digitization of family albums from citizens in the area of Pisa. The digitization action run for three months, hosted at the premises of the Museum of Graphics in Pisa, on the occasion of the successful photographic exhibition “All Our Yesterdays”, showcasing masterpieces of early photography from important archives and photo-agencies in Europe. The crowdsourcing associated with “All Our Yesterdays” resulted in over 1.000 photographs digitized at the highest standards, and released by their owners to Promoter under a Creative Commons license for the purposes of online dissemination and non-commercial reuse. A selection of this archive is presented in the digitalgallery.promoter.it and is also published on Europeana portal.

Chinese heritage at promoter digital gallery

In the Promoter Digital Gallery is also available a collection of Chinese-related content. This is the result of a digitization in high quality action of the illustrations contained in the book “Viaggio in Cina” by J. Thompson and T. Choutzé, illustrated with 167 engravings. In the book the name is misspelled as “Thompson”, but the author is the Scottish photographer and traveller John Thomson (1837-1921), while T. Choutzé (朱茨) is the pseudonym of Gabriel Devéria (1844-1899), a French diplomat and interpreter who worked and travelled in China. The book was created by Fratelli Treves Editori toward the end of 1800 and published in various editions in the early 1900.

Additionally, the collection includes a selection of highly relevant, and previously unseen, original photographs depicting life of Chinese renowned sculptor Situ Zhaoguang. The photographs digitized from the personal photoalbum by Situ Zhaoguang were made available expressly for the PAGODE – Europeana China project by Zhaoguang’s son Situ Xiaochun. 

All this China-related material is published on Europeana at the highest standards of quality and fully reusable under the license CC-BY-SA.


PAGODE – Europeana China is co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility Programme of the European Union, under GA n. INEA/CEF/ICT/A2019/1931839