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Tales of Old Chinatown
Chinatown is as much an idea as a place. In the early 20th century British films imagined their own Chinatown, defined by mystery, fear and the exotic.
The most famous screen Chinatown is probably the Los Angeles setting of Roman Polanski's 1974 classic, but British filmmakers have long offered up their own Chinatown. This mythic place drew on early-20th Century moral panics, forged in 19th-century opium wars and the 1900 Boxer uprising. It had little connection to the real Chinese-British people who made their homes in London's East End, Birmingham, Liverpool or Aberdeen. This screen Chinatown was exoticised, romanticised and coloured by imagined associations with vice and intrigue. It took shape in Sax Rohmer's lurid tales of the fiendish Dr Fu-Manchu - incarnated in his own mid-1920s film serial, and in the near-identical character of Dr Sin Fang, played by the same white actor). Other films, like the sensationalist Cocaine (1922), situate Chinese characters in a shadowy world of vice and drugs. Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong was allowed more complex roles, even if her characters remained tragic outsiders, shut out of British society. In the end, these tales reveal less about Chinese people in Britain than about a largely uncomprehending British culture, transfixed by ideas of mystical oriental 'Otherness'. Even so, these little-known films add up to a fascinating record of a nation taking its first faltering steps towards multiculturalism.
Dr Sin Fang: The Adventure of the Torture CageDr Sin Fang: The Adventure of the Torture Cage
Action and Adventure192830 minsSilent Location: Limehouse
An evil criminal doctor entraps and tortures a greedy trader in this only surviving episode of silent adventure serial Dr Sin Fang.
Attack on a Mission StationAttack on a Mission Station
War19001 minsSilent Location: Blackburn
Dramatised account of Chinese rebels' violent confrontation with Christian missionaries, made in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion.
Lieutenant Rose and the Chinese PiratesLieutenant Rose and the Chinese Pirates
Drama191012 minsSilent Location: Croydon
Lieutenant Rose is kidnapped by Chinese pirates in this action-packed early adventure series.
Lieutenant Lilly and the Sploge of OpiumLieutenant Lilly and the Sploge of Opium
Comedy191311 minsSilent Location: Walton-on-Thames
The intrepid Lt Lilly is called upon to quell a Chinese Boxer rebellion in a spoof adventure serial.
The Woman from ChinaThe Woman from China
Action and Adventure193176 minsSilent
A young woman is persuaded to help a Chinese businessman to kidnap a naval officer in this fun and outrageous British thriller.
Cosmopolitan LondonCosmopolitan London
Interest film192410 mins Location: Soho
An extraordinary tour of Soho's French cafés, Clerkenwell's Little Italy and the lesser-trodden streets of Limehouse in the 1920s.
Attack on a China Mission - Bluejackets to the RescueAttack on a China Mission - Bluejackets to the Rescue
War19001 minsSilent Location: Brighton
Fictional treatment of a contemporary atrocity story from the 1900 Boxer rebellion in China.
Beheading a Chinese BoxerBeheading a Chinese Boxer
War19001 minsSilent
A grisly early fictional reconstruction inspired by atrocity stories from China's Boxer Rebellion.