A flood in a decades-old photography store along Shanghai's Nanjing Road Pedestrian Mall helped unearth thousands of photos of movie stars from the 1920s and 1930s.

The photos are now on display at the Shanghai Wangkai Photo Studio.

"We were amazed to find these photos, which had not been noticed by anyone before," said studio manager Sun Mengying, noting that many photos of stars from the golden age of Shanghai cinema were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).

Water pipes in the studio's basement burst in late December, flooding a room that was used to store archives, Sun said.

Sun and his staff sifted through undamaged boxes of photos and were astonished to find the valuable pictures dating back to the early 20th century.

"At first sight, I realized these photos were different because they are just black and white and the color was made by a special technique Wangkai used about 80 years ago," Sun said. "The cartons have been stored in our archives for many years, but we just didn't know what they contained."

"The burst of water pipes gave us the opportunity to find these valuable things," Sun said.

Many of the photos feature popular movie stars of the day, while the boxes also contained some movie posters.

Shanghai was the original center of Chinese film making, giving birth to 1930s and 1940s movie stars such as Zhou Xuan, Ruan Lingyu and Hu Die.

"At that time, film directors searched for actresses through the windows of Wangkai Photo Studio, because we photographed many beautiful girls and displayed the photos in our show window. So Wangkai Photo Studio was popular among girls during that period," Sun said.

"However, during the Cultural Revolution, almost all of the photos were destroyed, so the photos found this time will be of great value in the research of Shanghai culture."
 
The studio plans to compile the photos into a book.

(Shanghai Daily January 20, 2007)