Refugees in Shanghai Their Life and Their Education

Content warning:

Graphic scenes of death, injury, violence

Trigger warning:

Footage of wartime atrocities

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Refugees in Shanghai Their Life and Their Education

Shanghai
1945
Silent
21m

Fascinating, sometimes harrowing record of life in camps run by international aid agencies following the bombing of Shanghai by the Japanese.

This film contains harrowing scenes of corpses littering the streets and famous landmarks destroyed following an intense air raid of Shanghai by the Japanese in 1937. The only safe haven for local residents was to be found in the city's International Settlement, where children and adults could lead some semblance of ordinary life in refugee camps run by foreign charitable organisations.

From 1937 to 1945, the Japanese carried out indiscriminate bombing of densely populated cities, including Shanghai, by then the most prosperous city in Asia. Refugees flooded the International Settlement (set up by the British and Americans after China was forced to cede extra-territorial rights in the 1842 Treaty of Nanking), as it was safe from attack. The classes, regular meals and clean bedding provided by various international aid agencies and missionary churches were the only chance of a decent life in an otherwise chaotic country torn apart by Japanese invasion and civil war.

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.