Shanghai diaries
Three documentary series capture the city’s transformation from a fishing village to a financial hub, Cao Chen reports in Shanghai.
Shanghai Television is airing
Grand Shanghai, an eightepisode documentary series presenting the 176-year history of the municipality. It chronicles Shanghai’s transformation from a fishing village to a global financial hub since its opening to the world. One episode a night is shown on the documentary channel of the network, with the last episode scheduled for Monday.
“The influx of foreign culture and capital is the external contributing factor to make Shanghai what it is today,” says Xu Guanqun, chief director of the documentary.
“The original, exquisite culture based on its location in the Jiangnan region — the area south of the Yangtze River — is the core that supports the city to thrive and find new ideas,” says Xu.
The production team visited historical sites, featured people who witnessed the city’s growth and sought data from over 60 overseas archives and libraries, including the British Library, the National Portrait Gallery in the United Kingdom and Yale University in the United States.
“We desire to make Shanghai better understood, along with the goal of reviving its history,” says producer Han Yun.
“Why is the city the birth place of the Communist Party of China? How did it combine the domestic and international cultures? These questions will be answered by the documentary,” she says.
The city’s openness is rooted in its history, and its evolution has been shaped by education, finance and science, she adds.
Some stories like the expansion of foreign concessions in Shanghai are illustrated via sand paintings by Chinese painter Gao Jie.
Grand Shanghai is one of three documentary series recently released by Shanghai television stations to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the founding of New China.
New China in Color, a 50-minute documentary based on color footage of events related to the foundimprovements ing of New China produced by a Soviet film crew, was aired on Oct 1 on Dragon Television and Shanghai Television’s Documentary Channel.
The color footage, which was found in Russia, offers the audience an opportunity to view historic scenes in China during the initial days of New China, including the main ceremony in Beijing. The footage was shot by a film crew from the Soviet Union invited to China before its founding to capture people’s lives in color film in 1949 and 1950. They cooperated with Chinese photographers, who used cameras for black-and-white photography, the new documentary’s makers say.
The footage was later kept in the former Soviet Union and produced into color documentaries in Russian and Chinese, and released in both countries. However, the film released in China gradually aged.
Shanghai Audio-Visual Archives rediscovered the original footage preserved at the Russian State Film and Photo Archive — around 200 rolls of film, each lasting 10 minutes — and purchased the copyright of
some cuts this year, according to Xie Shenzhao, chief director of New China in Color.
“The new documentary is based on these precious recordings,” says Xie.
“We revisited some places and people seen in the footage, aiming to showcase both previous and modern life in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Nanjing and Hangzhou to the audience.”
For example, the Soviet team took a long overlooking shot along the Pearl River in Guangzhou from the 60-meter-high Aiqun Building, which then was the first highrise there.
Now, the 530-meter Guangzhou Chow Tai Fook Finance Center, also called East Tower, is the tallest skyscraper in the city.
Another cut was on a garden party held at Zhongshan Park in Shanghai’s Changning district on the Double Ninth, or Chongyang festival, in October 1949 to show the elderly celebrating.
“A small group of kindergarten children performs a music show in the clip. We found the members online and gathered them at the park to do the performance again,” says Xie.
Another recent documentary series, The Untold Story of 221, has been jointly produced by the Qinghai radio and television bureau and the Shanghai Radio and Television Documentary Channel. It turns its focus on China’s first nuclear-program base (No 221) in Jinyintan, Qinghai province. It’s where China’s first atomic and hydrogen bombs were developed.
It elaborates upon the establishment story of the former factory, the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, and the site’s later transformation into a tourist site.
The three-episode series premiered on Dragon Television on
Sept 27.