DM Monitoring
CANBERRA: The British passenger liner Titanic became known to many Chinese people thanks to a blockbuster first screened in China in 1998. However, viewers at that time had no idea that the rescue of the heroine at the end of the movie was based on the real story of a Chinese survivor.
That Chinese survivor might have been the last person to be saved, according to James Cameron, director of the movie “Titanic.” “And that became the inspiration for how Rose was saved,” he said in a trailer for “The Six: The Untold Story of RMS Titanic’s Chinese Passengers,” on which he served as executive producer.
“The Six”, a documentary exploring the little-known history of how some Chinese passengers managed to survive after Titanic struck an iceberg, is to be screened in cinemas across China starting on April 16, a day after the 109th anniversary of the legendary ship’s sinking.
“This is a documentary that tells a totally new story about a totally new set of people who almost no one knew were on board Titanic before,” said British filmmaker Arthur Jones, director of the film.
“We decided to make a kind of detective story, about a team of researchers trying to find something out,” he told media from China in a telephone interview. Jones, 47, was born in a large industrial Yorkshire town in the north of England, and grew up near the home of an old woman believed to be a Titanic survivor. That experience planted a seed deep in his heart. In 1996, he moved to China where he has been living since, learning Mandarin and working on film projects. An opportunity came knocking several years ago when his friend Steven Schwankert, a scholar in marine history, told him about the Chinese survivors on Titanic, whose stories had never been told before.
On April 10, 1912, Titanic, once the most luxurious ship in the world and often referred to as “unsinkable”, started out from Southampton in England to New York on its maiden voyage. Five days later, the ship sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. More than 1,500 people died.
On the ship there were eight Chinese men who had previously worked on cargo ships travelling around Europe. They boarded the Titanic in England on a single ticket listing eight names, staying in the third-class cabin. Though they were sailors by profession, on Titanic they were travelling as passengers – they were on their way to a new job. Then disaster struck – and six of them made it out alive. “I was pulled into the story by his (Schwankert’s) passion,” Jones recalled.
The two of them started working on the project in 2015. The search for possible descendants, relatives and even neighbors of the survivors was not easy.
“It’s 109 years ago and…records of the Chinese guys were so limited,” said Jones. “We just had a list of names, and the names were not in Chinese.”
They tried almost every way they could think of to pursue the various threads of the story. “A lot of historical work, a lot of archives, a lot of interviewing people, a lot of looking at old newspapers,” he said.
Sometimes confirmation took longer than locating the descendants and relatives.
Typically, according to Jones, people who are connected to Titanic through family have known about it since childhood – it becomes part of family legend. But that was not the case for the Chinese descendants, who either knew nothing of the link, or suspected it but worried it might be wrong.
They found some descendants relatively early, but spent about four or five years trying to confirm their connection with the survivors. “We did actually find more people we believe are descendants, but they were nervous about making such a big claim after all these years. We respected their privacy,” said the director.
Jones could understand well why the Chinese descendants didn’t know much about the survivors. There had been rumors about how the Chinese survivors escaped. One of the claims was that they dressed as women in order to get onto the life boats. “Surviving Titanic was a very traumatic experience. Then…the newspapers wrote some terrible stories about them.”
“Perhaps they felt some shame connected to it,” said Jones. So several of the survivors chose not to tell their family, if they had one, what had happened to them.
