Transnational China Project Subway Advertising Archive

This archive presents images of commercial and public service advertisements from the tunnels and platforms of subway systems in six Sinic language cities: Beijing, Hong Kong, Kaohsiung, Shanghai, Singapore, and Taipei. The first tranche of translation, transcription and coding is for advertisements from 1998 to 2003, with subsequent years up to current day folded in later. Each year's survey of each city's subway system reflects an attempt to capture and present an image of each advertisement displayed during the randomly chosen month for that year, including multiple formats of the same advertisement, but not multiple versions of the exact same advertisement. The collection thus captures the array of commercial and public service advertisements that commuters might encounter on any given ride on the subway, but it does not capture the ubiquity of individual advertisements displayed during that period.

This collection was created by Steven W. Lewis, C.V. Starr Transnational China Fellow at the China Studies Program of the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, and is currently curated by Brandon Zheng, research associate and digital materials archivist of the China Studies Program. This archive was begun with funding from the Henry Luce Foundation, and subsequently maintained by support from Anne and Albert Chao and the Starr Foundation, with administrative and technical support from the Baker Institute and Fondren Library.