The Shanghai Audiovisual Archive has released the first known amateur film filmed in the city and preserved in the Chinese mainland.
The short clip, just minutes long, gives a rare insight into daily life in the metropolis of the 1930s, a bustling international hub which attracted more foreign investment than even London or Paris at the time. Subsequently the second world war and the social campaigns of the 1950s and 60s left little evidence of the city’s former cosmopolitan splendour standing.
The first short film clip is only a hint of more things to come, Wang Min, its programme planning director, told the South China Morning Post.
“Early this year we obtained two film rolls from a private collector. We haven’t fully repaired them yet, but just applied some physical treatment.”
The archive started a social media campaign on Sunday on the city’s Sina Weibo account, releasing a short part of the video in the hopes of finding someone who could identify the area or the people in it, albeit 80 years later. It shows “capitalists, fooling around” in March 1936, according to a label on its containing box.
Two young women are seen playing with a dog as a cook walks past holding a wok. A grinning elderly man is seen taking out his dentures, saluting the unknown cameraman.