Riverside Scenes China

Bund
1922
Silent
2m

Four exquisite panoramic views of the Bund in Shanghai show life on the Huangpu River.

These four exquisite panoramic views of the Bund in Shanghai give a glimpse of life on the Huangpu River. The film captures the extraordinary collision of East-meets-West in one of China's most populated cities: sampans clustering around steel-hulled ships, and baroque European architecture towering over the waterfront.

Filmographic details are sparse – who shot this film, when, and why remains a mystery. But there're clues in the content: the Bund skyline isn't yet graced by the iconic Customs House, completed in 1927. The film shares its long takes, wide-angle shots, fixed tripod, ‘in camera' editing, and nautical theme with River Scenery China (1921) suggesting that the two films could be related. Perhaps they are fragments of production footage for an unrealised project?

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.