At Home in Shanghai and a Trip to Hong Kong

From the collection of

Screen Archive South East at the University of Brighton collects, preserves, catalogues and provides public access to its collection of films and magic lantern slides. The collection charts the rise of screen culture in the region and the nation and captures many aspects of life, work and creativity in the South East from the late 19th century to the present day. It is available for research, screenings, creative re-use and commercial access.

At Home in Shanghai and a Trip to Hong Kong

Screen Archive South East at the University of Brighton
Shanghai
1 Jan 1928
Silent
3m

Chinese junks and British battleships appear together in this film depicting the 1928 Armistice Day in Hong Kong.

This remarkable film shows the filmmakers, William and Charlotte Simpson, posing in their Shanghai garden before they are seen playing shuffleboard aboard the S.S. President McKinley en-route to Hong Kong. Chinese junks can be seen jostling alongside British battleships and liners. The film then shows the wreath laying ceremony at Hong Kong's Cenotaph on Armistice Day. The final scenes show the Simpsons at home and William is seen wearing his Remembrance Day poppy.

The carrier seen in this film is quite possibly HMS Hermes, the world's first purpose-built aircraft carrier, though not the first to be commissioned. Until 1938 she spent many years on patrol in Chinese waters before becoming a training ship in the Home Fleet. Recommissioned into the Eastern Fleet she was eventually sunk by Japanese dive-bombers near Sri Lanka in April 1942.

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From the collection

Hong Kong - Fragrant Harbour

Discover a Hong Kong before the tide of modernity swept all before it, a land of striking contrasts where old and new, European and Chinese shared a crowded island.

Hong Kong before the skyscraper: it's barely possible to imagine today. But this collection of films shows island life before the steel-and-glass towers and the elevated expressways, when Hong Kong and the neighbouring New Territories were still parts of a rugged but rapidly developing outpost of the British Empire.

Visit the genteel colonial centre, including the long-gone Hong Kong Club; explore the waterfront streets around Wan Chai and Causeway Bay, before the major land reclamations of the 60s and 70s pushed them inland. A few select landmarks in the footage can still be seen today, notably Aberdeen Bay, the Peak Tram and Victoria Harbour. But what these films preserve is a largely lost Hong Kong, a city whose recent past is vanishing and whose ever-shifting landscape is fading from recognition.

The films are rich in contrasts. Traditional Duanwu Festival dragon-boat racing share the waters with Royal Navy warships enjoying the interwar calm. While peasant farmers bend their backs in the New Territories paddy fields, expat Brits tour the colony in motorcars. As today's Hong Kong faces yet more uncertainty and change, these films highlight a very different time on the crowded island where East met West.