A Stilted City. Chungking. China

Chongqing
1930-02-17
Silent
1m

Life among the limpet-like buildings clinging to the steep banks of the Yangtze in southwest China.

In a film of many contrasts, the precarious dwellings which jut out of the mountainside in this vertical city seem somehow futuristic and ancient at the same time. Those who make a hard living on these steep steps also seem a world away from the Western navy men who are carried on their backs. The jokey intertitles offer a further disparity in making the scenes entertainment for cinema audiences.

Chongqing (then Chungking) is today almost unrecognisable from the ancient city seen in this film, though the mighty Yangtze river remains an unchanging feature of life in one of China's major municipalities.

China on Film

Travel back in time to a lost China with this collection of extraordinary, rare and beautiful travelogues, newsreels and home movies from the first half of the 20th century.

See bustling, cosmopolitan Shanghai in 1901. Wander the streets around the Qianmen, Beijing, in 1910. Cruise Hangzhou's picturesque canals in 1925. Visit China's great cities - Hong Kong, Chongqing, Guangzhou, Kashgar, Kunming, Suzhou, Tianjin - before concrete expressways and steel-and-glass towers transformed their skylines. And discover rural China almost untouched by modernity, as farmhands bend their backs in paddy fields. In an odyssey embracing the exotic and the everyday, these remarkable films - many of them never published before - will guide you through thousands of miles of Chinese landscape and 50 years of history.

This is a unique and exceptional visual history of China - captured by a wealth of different filmmakers, from professionals to intrepid tourists, colonial-era ex-pats and Christian missionaries. Western filmmakers were visiting China years before any Chinese native first used a film camera. Yes, this is a China seen through Western eyes, reflecting European attitudes and expectations. But even so, it's a rare and fascinating record of a country since changed almost beyond recognition.