A Visit to Hunan

Shaoyang
1946
Silent
37m

This engaging film documents the journey of a doctor sent by the Methodist Missionary Society across land and sea to rural Hunan Province.

A British doctor travels with his family across land and sea to work in rural Hunan Province. The scenes of his idyllic passage by luxury liner make a stark contrast to the basic conditions at his destination, where he records some interesting observations on local customs. The film documents the work of the Methodist Missionary Society hospital to provide both physical care and spiritual succour.

The Methodist Missionary Society was active in China from the mid-1800s, recruiting doctors to work at hospitals in rural provinces, like Hunan, where medical care was rarely available. These foreign doctors were largely welcomed by the local people, enabling them to convert some members of the community to Christianity. The overriding contribution of Methodist missionaries was the establishment of hospitals and clinics which both provided medical treatment and trained local medical workers, as seen here.

Somewhere in China

There's so much more to China than Western eyes usually see. Explore the country's giant interior in the footsteps of some of the early 20th century's more intrepid filmmakers.

China's vast interior remained largely unexplored and undocumented by British filmmakers well into the 20th century. The European concessions and colonies of the east coast - in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong - were an irresistible lure for western visitors. This is a journey into deep and distant China, through extraordinarily diverse landscapes: towering mountains, expansive deserts and along 3000-mile rivers stretching halfway across Asia. It's a record produced by intrepid explorers, missionaries and travellers, who brought portable home-movie cameras to document their holidays, anthropological studies, humanitarian work or evangelical activism.

The films showcase China's remarkable ethnic diversity, meeting Mongol, Miao, Nosu, Uyghur and Manchu minorities on journeys from Kashgar to Inner Mongolia, around Hunan and Sichuan Provinces, and deep into mountainous Yunnan Province, where centuries-old methods of farming and hunting still prevailed. On the way cities too, still uninfluenced by encroaching western modernity: Kunming, Chongqing, Suzhou, Hangzhou and Changsha. But in all of China's vastness, it's not possible to identify the source of these fascinating images. So much is still unknown.