Chinese "Pedal" Water in Fight on Drought [Cuts] Topical Budget 877-2

1928-06-18
Silent
10m

Chinese farmers use pedal power to combat China's worst drought of the 20th century.

This newsreel item shows Chinese farmers irrigating fields with the aid of an impressive pedal-powered wooden contraption - a traditional method supposedly some 2,000 years old. The camera captures the action from every angle: one expertly framed shot catches a sampan sailing serenely by in the background, while there are plenty of close-ups of the men's pounding feet and smiling faces.

This footage was shot by British newsreel Topical Budget and later sold to American company MGM News. No doubt it would have been included as a novelty or 'interest' item, and is typical of the newsreel's light-hearted approach, even when dealing with serious subject matter. The 'dry spell' referred to in the intertitle was actually the beginning of a major drought, resulting in a famine which affected millions of people in northern China between 1928 and 1930.

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.