Making history

Jonathan Rhys Meyers appears behind me and plants a kiss squarely on my cheek. 'Jonny,' he says, by way of introduction - as if I needed telling that this handsome, greenish-blue-eyed guy in an olive People's Liberation Army greatcoat is anyone but the Irish actor I've come to meet.

Dusk is falling on the set of The Children of Huang Shi. We are in the hamlet of Xiandu, in the hilly centre of coastal Zhejiang province, and Rhys Meyers is rushing along a narrow, white-stoned path, which leads towards a traditional, high-roofed, wooden village hall up ahead in the gloaming, to shoot a scene with Australian co-star and love interest Radha Mitchell.

It's cold - around freezing - and there's little time to waste, since director Roger Spottiswoode must finish shooting before everything grinds to a halt for the Lunar New Year holiday, and a lot remains to be done.

In The Children of Huang Shi, Rhys Meyers plays George Hogg, an Englishman who probably came to China seeking adventure. The film is based on a true story and follows Hogg as he witnesses and reports on the 1937 Nanking Massacre before joining a school for orphans in western Shaanxi province, part of a network established in the 1930s by Rewi Alley, a communist sympathiser from New Zealand.

With the Japanese army drawing ever nearer, Hogg and a few others pack up and lead 60 children on a hazardous 1,000km trek by foot, mule and truck. They travel from a rural area west of Xian north to Gansu and Ningxia, across the Liupan mountains to end up in Shandan, in western Gansu, on the edge of Inner Mongolia's Gobi Desert. On the way, Hogg is helped by Lee (Mitchell), an Australian adventuress who is also based on a real-life person. At this point the story takes off into (mostly) fiction.

'We fudged the events around a lot,' says Spottiswoode. 'We can't say it's historical because there aren't enough records of this period for it to be historical.' Hogg befriends and comes to rely on Chen, the leader of an anti-Japanese partisan group, played by Chow Yun-fat, and Madame Wang, played by Michelle Yeoh Choo Kheng, an aristocratic survivor displaced by the war.

What is known of the real-life Hogg is that he died in Shandan in 1945, having contracted tetanus in a toe he stubbing while playing basketball. After the death of Hogg, who is buried in Shandan, Alley took over his job as headmaster of the orphans, about whom little is known.