Framed by overhanging branches, this dim snapshot captures an unidentified courtyard or garden gathering in China during the 1930s, part of a personal photo album kept by a U.S. Navy sailor stationed with the American Asiatic Fleet in the years before World War II. Sailors serving aboard Yangtze Patrol gunboats and other Asiatic Fleet vessels often documented daily life ashore in Chinese port cities, leaving behind intimate, informal photographic records of a world that would be transformed by the coming war. Project: 218181