A new compilation of rare photos found in archives and private collections unravels the origins of today's Shanghai. David Maguire talks on the eve of its launch with one of the authors, Pulitzer Prize-winning photo journalist Liu Heung Shing.

Liu Heung Shing has spent the best part of his professional life scurrying around looking for the right picture, mostly with a camera in his hand.

If he wasn't running behind the tanks during turmoil in Moscow when Mikhail Gorbachev was overthrown, he was snapping celebrities in Hollywood, or following Ronald Reagan during his primaries campaign for the presidency.

But for most of the past decade he's been looking for the right picture by scouring news agency files, historical archives and public and private photo collections.

That's because Liu the photo journalist has become the "expert eye" curator with all the right contacts and knowledge, coupled with an unimpeachable international reputation, to pull together the content for two major pictorial books on China.

The latest, "Shanghai: A History in Photographs, 1842-Today" co-authored by Liu and Karen Smith, was given its global launch last night in Shanghai by Penguin China. A work of stunning breadth, it features images of life in Shanghai spanning the past 168 years.

The book is a by-product of Liu and Smith being commissioned to curate the photography for a display within the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion at World Expo that is being designed by Edmund Schlossberg, husband of former US President John Kennedy's daughter Caroline.

Although Liu contends that the book came about in a "circuitous" way, it's hard to discount it being a direct consequence of the kudos he earned producing the first pictorial collation, "China: A Portrait of a Country," to coincide with the Beijing Olympics.

He spent four and a half years researching "Portrait" and was inspired to tell a story that he thought other publications in and outside the country had missed in their attempts to convey the substance of China.

"I had a sense that before the Olympics opened the world would pay attention to China and I wondered if most people outside China would understand the journey it had taken in nearly 60 years from 1949 to 2008. My intuition was no," the urbane veteran said in Shanghai recently.

"Then I asked myself a second question. Would the younger Chinese understand the journey, and my answer was also no."

Fuelled by these observations and his disappointment at the standard of books -- "I have seen a lot of pictorial books on China but I didn't find in them the kind of China I know" -- and local "jingoistic" photography "lacking depth and appreciation of small details," he set about producing what was a very well-received publication.

Hot on the heels of the Games, he and Smith were included in the cream of talent working on the Expo pavilion project. And their credentials are impressive.

Hong Kong-born Liu, 58, won a Pulitzer Prize for his stint as an Associated Press photographer covering the demise of Gorbachev, the first ethnic Chinese person to win the award. It capped a career on assignment around the world and in China running news bureaus, working for News Corporation and shooting photos for agencies and magazines. He was Time Magazine's first official photographer when US news companies opened offices in Beijing after relationship normalization in 1978.

British-born Smith has lived in Beijing since 1992, and is an internationally renowned expert on Chinese contemporary art.

She was a contributing author on "Portrait," is author of "Nine Lives: The Birth of Avante Garde in New China," and is finishing her new book "Bang to Boom: Chinese Art in the 1990s."

Although based in Beijing for much of his career in China, Liu was a regular visitor to Shanghai to cover developing stories so has a good grasp of the goal posts of its development since reforms began.

"Our project concept was to show how rural Shanghai became the Shanghai of today, a highly urbanized society. The project spans three centuries to the first decade of the 21st century," Liu said.

"I was thrilled to be given the opportunity because if we weren't doing it for the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion I probably would never have had the access or resources to get the pictures," he said.

Their extensive trawling reached into Shanghai government archives, to which they were given special access, and the Shanghai Library collection. They went to Duke University and to Canada, accessed the library of celebrated French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, sourced private collections and checked the images of a lot of former Life Magazine photographers and Magnum agency files. Scholars around the world were consulted.

To cover the modern era, they commissioned 10 photographers from overseas and China to shoot contemporary Shanghai.

"We must have looked at tens of thousands of pictures but I discarded many very quickly because they didn't fit the narrative that I wanted," Liu said.

"Karen talked to Chinese historians who, interestingly, were self-confident enough to not whitewash or say imperialism brought us nothing. They acknowledged how Shanghai was built and the contributions made by the Europeans, Americans and British and so on.

"My inspiration for the narrative was how this Chineseness -- in embracing Western science, technology and knowledge and the so-called 100 years of humiliation -- is all embodied in the story of Shanghai."

Photos of the early days of Shanghai included are in monotones and some are rare indeed.

"Shanghai was opened up by gunboat diplomacy through the Nanjing Treaty in 1842 and photography was only invented a year later in 1843," Liu said.

"So I went to everybody and found in the Jardine Matheson company this amazing engraving of the signing of the Nanjing Treaty on board a British naval vessel."

The picture discovery process took Liu back to his reporting days and it's clear when his eyes light up that he has been back in his element.

"You pick up one lead, you follow it and it takes you somewhere," he said enthusiastically.

"For example, the owner of the Harvey Nichols department store in the UK, Dickson Poon, left Shanghai for Hong Kong in 1948. Dickson Poon's family were industrialists in Shanghai, owning a lot of properties, and recently they managed to repurchase one of the houses where they grew up.

"It had been state appropriated after 1949 and a member of the Gang of Four happened to be working for the Liberation Daily in it when he penned the editorial that was supported by Chairman Mao which triggered the Cultural Revolution," he added.

"So Dickson Poon's daughter provided us a photograph."

A photo of the great Chinese writer Liu Chin eventually materialized on a wood engraving held by the celebrated war photographer Ca Bei after an unsuccessful search through the writer's grandson's collection.

"Karen and I have had this amazing opportunity to do a photographic survey with a perspective of daily lives during different periods, showing how people lived, how they dressed, what their hair-dos were like. Daily life is the most powerful way to show the changes," he said.

"In our editing, we wanted photographs that were strong and aesthetically beautiful and to make sure the images fit the narrative about how Chinese embraced modernity."

The book has about 400 photos and Liu believes some of the archival pictures have never been properly published in such a collection.

"We spent hundreds and hundreds of hours retouching negatives to get rid of dirt and scratches and then rescanning because I wanted to ensure the tones were consistent, that the book was the same on page one and page 504 in terms of quality," he said.

Liu believes an important difference between his two books in that "Portrait" depicted China through the eyes of Chinese photographers over about 60 years from 1949 whereas, because Shanghai is such an international city, he can incorporate in the new tome wider perspectives over a longer evolving period.