Arthur Jones: the lost Chinese stories of Titanic
- By Zhang Rui
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E-mail China.org.cn, April 18, 2021
British filmmaker Authur Jones, teamed up with American historian Steven Schwankert to find the lost history of six Chinese survivors on the doomed passenger liner Titanic. What they found was racism and bias that still haunts the world today.
"I am most interested in human stories related to family relationships and social issues. I felt this time we could do a Titanic documentary our own way, which is more like a detective film," Jones told China.org.cn. His new documentary film "The Six: The Untold Story of RMS Titanic's Chinese Passengers" hit Chinese screens on Friday.
Jones, born in Yorkshire in the north of England, has lived in China since 1996 and speaks fluent Chinese. He was once a journalist for Hollywood trade magazine Variety. Schwankert, a New Jersey-born American researcher and historian interested in maritime history, traveled to China in the late 1980s and was also a former reporter for Variety.
The two longtime friends and collaborators are now based in Shanghai. Their last project was the 2013 documentary film "The Poseidon Project," which was about the search for a British submarine that sunk in Chinese waters in 1931.
Titanic, the largest ship at that time, sank on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City in the early hours of April 15, 1912, after colliding with an iceberg. The tragic event was turned into a blockbuster in 1997 by the legendary filmmaker James Cameron.
There were an estimated 2,224 passengers and crew onboard the ship, and more than 1,500 died. However, Jones found there was still a missing part of the puzzle: the Chinese. It surprised him that there were eight Chinese passengers on board the British ship, but the world knew very little about the survivors and their whereabouts later.
Jones and Schwankert summoned a team of international investigators in 2015 to discover the truth. They traveled to over 20 cities around the world, interviewed over 100 people, and reviewed more than 1,000 archives and historic documents.
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