A Wedding in Shanghai Cathedral

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.

A Wedding in Shanghai Cathedral

Screen Archive South East at the University of Brighton
Shanghai
1928-01-01
Silent
2m

Period fashions and cloche hats abound in this film showing a newly married expat couple and their guests in one of Shanghai's more leafy suburbs.

It's William and Charlotte Simpson's wedding day in 1928. We first see the happy couple driving away from Shanghai's Holy Trinity Cathedral and later entering a leafy garden in one of Shanghai's suburbs - though one could be forgiven for thinking one was in Surrey. Amid the cloche hats, bridesmaids, page boys and other morning-suited guests, a single Chinese servant accidentally intrudes into the scene.

William Simpson, who made this film, worked for the Bradford Dyers Association in Shanghai, at Number 1, The Bund. His wife Charlotte was born in China's Lushan mountains and she married William, who originally came from Bradford, in Shanghai's Anglican Holy Trinity Cathedral. The couple left Shanghai before the city was overrun by the Japanese Army and by 1938 had left China for good. Holy Trinity Cathedral, which dates from the mid 19th century, was known until 1949 as the English speaking Anglican church of Shanghai. There was a boy’s school attached to the cathedral which was attended by the young J. G. Ballard. The school features in his novel ‘Empire of the Sun’. During China’s Cultural Revolution the cathedral lost its spire and was later converted into a cinema. The building has since been restored by the Three-Self Patriotic Movement of the Protestant Churches in China.

Shanghai - Pearl of the Orient

Western filmmakers captured the first moving images of one of the world's great cities. These remarkable films preserve a metropolis whose streets and waterways teem with life.

When cinema first came to China's shores, Shanghai was one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. The new technology was exhibited at the city's Xu Gardens in August 1896 (just months after the Lumière Brothers' first demonstration in Paris), and the earliest ever filmed images of the city were captured - by Western filmmakers - soon after.

Some of the oldest surviving footage of Shanghai was shot by a British war correspondent, dispatched to China to cover the 1900 Boxer Rebellion. It captures the teeming multi-national traffic on the central Nanjing Lu thoroughfare, from gliding bicycles and rattling rickshaws, to a Sikh police detachment and German soldiers enjoying a cigarette. Shanghai's famous waterfront, the Bund, captivated numerous filmmakers in the 20s and 30s, and several films here show a remarkable thronging harbour life, with sampans clustering beneath the Bund's baroque temples of commerce and leisure.

Also featuring in this collection of newsreels, travelogues and home movies are scenes of the Japanese occupation of the city in 1937, and the death and destruction that followed. These are sombre, even harrowing scenes, but a crucial chapter in Shanghai's history.