Curating the legacy of 1930s eyewitness to a changing China

John Murphy, curator of L. Tom Perry Special Collections at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, is in charge of the collection.

Consisting of 179 boxes, the collection contains more than 5,000 photographs taken by Snow, according to Murphy.

He displayed some of the collection to provide a glimpse of what's in store.

There are some artifacts — two Chinese traditional shirts, one red and one gray — that had been worn by Snow in China; a checkered pattern scarf of gray, yellow and black colors made by the Chinese Industrial Co-operatives was a gift to Snow for her effort to organize the movement.

"This is one of the only two scarfs made at that time that are available today. It's very precious," Murphy explained.

One document is titled Interview with Po Ku on National Minorities.

Among the numerous displayed photos, several show Mao in front of the cave residence in Yan'an. In one photo, Mao and Zhu sit at a desk together.

Another showed Snow with a Red Army soldier. "That's her assigned bodyguard," Murphy explained.

Murphy pointed to a photo showing a few little boys performing. "They called themselves Little Red Devils. This is one of my favorites," Murphy said.

"One of those Little Red Devils later became a famous musician in China," added Adam Foster.

"Some of the photos are licensed by Magnum, but many of the photos were never licensed," Murphy said. "For many of the photos, Helen wrote information on the back, where it was, when it was, who they are, critical information like that."

BYU is collaborating with Northwest University in Xi'an to translate the captions into Chinese. "We made scans of them. Both English and Chinese captions will be embedded in the photo as metadata," Murphy said.

When the project is complete, BYU plans to put them online, free and readily available worldwide.