Photo card captioned "A Chinese soldier stands sentry atop a destroyed tank"

The objectphotographed as held, uncropped

Catalogue description

A soldier stands upright on the roof of a tank, against a sky of heavy cumulus. He wears a light-coloured helmet whose pattern is not determinable from this reproduction, a belted tunic and short trousers; below the knee the legs fall into blocked shadow and the legwear cannot be identified. He carries a long arm across his shoulders, one hand raised to it; the weapon type cannot be read from the silhouette. A dark object hangs at his waist and cannot be identified. His head is turned slightly to his own left and his torso is square to the lens: he faces the lens rather than looking outward, so the picture does not show the act the caption names. He stands almost dead centre of the frame and well above the horizon, with sky behind him on every side.

The vehicle under him is derelict. The turret sits open and battered, ringed by a horseshoe-shaped tubular handrail; a short gun barrel projects to the left, and a second barrel or torn fitting projects from the hull at the left-hand end. Below, the running gear is exposed and broken: two large spoked wheels, a toothed sprocket at the far end (at the right in the picture), the track lying loose in the grass. Whether the machine was knocked out in combat, abandoned, or long derelict is not established — "destroyed" is the caption's word, not a condition the photograph settles. On the hull side below the turret is a small white rayed sun, of the type used for the Republic of China's Blue Sky with a White Sun device; at the highest magnification the rays merge and cannot be counted, so the identification is a reading and not a fact. The ground is scrub grass and the background is low hills. The archive has not identified the vehicle, positively or negatively, and does not assert whether it was Chinese, Japanese or captured; the hull marking should not be used to settle that. Features offered for a specialist: the horseshoe-shaped tubular rail encircling a low turret, the large spoked road wheels, the toothed sprocket at the opposite end, and an aperture or fitting in the hull at the same end as the projecting barrel.

The object is a printed card and the caption line beneath the image is the whole of its text. It gives no place, no date, no unit and no name — only the nationality of the man and a word for the condition of the machine. The caption supplies the identification the picture does not, and in doing so turns one photograph of one man at one wreck into a general figure: the Chinese soldier, standing on the wreckage. The caption is in English, and it is the only language on the face; nothing else on the face indicates where the card was made or for whom.

No imprint, series number, credit or stamp appears on the face, and the reverse was not photographed, so the publisher, the market and the date of this printing are all open. Whether this is a wartime card or a later reprint of a wartime photograph is not settled by anything the archive can currently read.

Transcriptiontext on the object, as printed

A Chinese soldier stands sentry atop a destroyed tank

[This is the only text on the face of the card. No imprint, publisher credit, series or stock number, stamp, cancellation, pencil note or signature appears in any margin or corner at full resolution, and there is no Chinese-language text on the face. The white rayed sun on the tank's hull is a painted device within the photograph, not text. The reverse of the card was not photographed and is not transcribed.]

Historical context

The Blue Sky with a White Sun is the device to which the marking on this hull is being compared: a white sun of twelve rays, conventionally read as the twelve months and the twelve traditional Chinese hours, set as the national emblem of the Republic of China by the law of the national flag and national emblem in 1928 and used on the mainland until 1949. China's small armoured force went into the Second Sino-Japanese War with imported equipment. Twenty Vickers Mark E Type B tanks were bought from Britain between 1934 and 1936 and assigned to the 1st and 2nd Armoured Companies; at the Battle of Shanghai in August 1937 the committed tanks were lost, the source dating this to the first phase of the battle only probably. At least one captured Chinese vehicle was afterwards put on public display in Japan, at Hanshin Koshien Stadium in Nishinomiya in February 1939. This is background on Chinese armour and its losses, not an identification: the archive does not claim that the vehicle in this photograph is a Vickers, or that it is Chinese.

What is not known

• The publisher, series, market and printing date of the card are not established; there is no imprint on the face and the reverse was not photographed. The reverse is the single most useful thing still to image.
• The date of this printing is not established, and the archive neither asserts nor denies that the card is a later reproduction. The caption typeface is consistent with a later printing, but a typeface reading is not evidence of a date.
• The photographer is unidentified and there is no credit line.
• The date range rests substantially on the caption's own word "Chinese". Nothing on the object dates the photograph, and the vehicle supplies no independent date because it has not been identified. A date earlier than 1937 is not excluded; 1937 is used as a sorting lower bound only.
• The vehicle is not identified. It was not matched to a documented type within the research budget, and the archive does not assert whether it is Chinese, Japanese or captured. An earlier draft asserted that it does not match the Vickers Mark E; that negative identification was unsupported and has been withdrawn.
• The function of the horseshoe-shaped tubular rail around the turret is not established; the archive describes it only as a rail.
• Which end of the vehicle is the front and which the rear is not established; positions are given as they appear in the picture.
• The white sun on the hull is read as the Republic of China device from its form alone; at full magnification the rays merge and cannot be counted. An independent re-reader called it a twelve-rayed Kuomintang sun; the editor's own enlargement will not support a count, so the reading is recorded as probable, not established.
• The soldier is unidentified. His helmet pattern, his weapon and the dark object at his waist are not determinable from this reproduction.
• The soldier's legwear is not determinable; an earlier reading of puttees is not supported at this reproduction.
• The subject terms "Republic of China" and "Second Sino-Japanese War" index the context discussed in historical_context. They do not assert the allegiance of the soldier or the vehicle, or the conflict in which the photograph was made.
• The place and date of the original photograph are not stated on the object and were not established. The geographic point given is a notional centre of China, not a located site.
• Whether the tank was knocked out, abandoned, salvaged or posed for the camera is not established; "destroyed" is the caption's word.
• The archive has not located this photograph or caption in any published source. Searches run: the exact caption phrase (which returned only material on the 1989 Tiananmen "Tank Man" photographs) and searches for Chinese tank wrecks of 1937 (which returned general pages on Chinese armour). Another cataloguer should extend these.
• No link has been established between this card and United China Relief, or any American relief or information campaign, or any American publisher. A draft paragraph placing the card inside that campaign has been removed for want of any evidence connecting the two.
• The corners are not uniform — the upper left and the lower right are rounded, the upper right and the lower left close to square — and the archive does not speculate about why.