Shanghai China - Personal Film 1 - C. 1937

Shanghai
1937
Silent
11m

Gruesome home movie scenes of metropolitan Shanghai brought to its knees in the first major battle of the Second Sino-Japanese War.

In the summer of 1937, Shanghai, a thriving centre of culture, finance and industry much admired by the rest of the world and nicknamed "The Pearl of the Orient", was reduced to rubble. This chilling amateur film captures the brutal onslaught against the city and its residents by the Imperial Japanese Army. The attack lasted three months and claimed an estimated 300,000 lives.

Japan had occupied much of China's north east in 1931, but in 1937 it turned its attention towards Shanghai. China's poorly equipped National Revolutionary Army was no match for Japan's military might, although they managed to defend the city for three months while vital industries were moved to the interior and their dogged resistance seriously dented their enemy's morale. The Battle of Shanghai, known in Chinese as the Battle of Songhu or "813", denoting the date (13th August) when the conflict started, was one of the largest and bloodiest of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945).

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.