Revisit Daily Life in China in 1917 Through Footage Enhanced and Colorized by AI

Even for Amer­i­cans, keep­ing up with the geopo­lit­i­cal entan­gle­ments of the Unit­ed States has nev­er been an easy task. More than a cen­tu­ry ago, just a few months after their coun­try got involved in what’s now known as World War I, they got word that the mil­i­tary of a dis­tant nation had joined their side: Chi­na, whose image would have been both opaque and for­bid­ding­ly vast. A dozen years before they’d even heard the name Pearl S. Buck, what impres­sions of that coun­try they had would have come from scat­tered sources like post-Opi­um Wars mis­sion­ary pub­li­ca­tions, news­pa­per cov­er­age of com­pli­cat­ed events like the Box­er Rebel­lion and the fall of the Qing dynasty, and silent-film genre stereo­types. (Per­haps the rare read­er got ahold of John Thom­son’s Through Chi­na with a Cam­era.) Most could live a life­time with­out a glimpse of “the real Chi­na.”

By the end of 1917, how­ev­er, “there were at least 10 doc­u­men­taries avail­able to sat­is­fy curios­i­ty about America’s new ally in the Far East,” accord­ing to the Nation­al Film Preser­va­tion Foun­da­tion. Most were shorts that played along­side fea­tures, but A Trip Through Chi­na was dif­fer­ent. At least five years in the mak­ing, “the doc­u­men­tary was the brain­child of Ben­jamin Brod­sky, a wide­ly trav­eled Russ­ian-born busi­ness­man who claimed to speak 11 lan­guages. Accord­ing to a 1912 Mov­ing Pic­ture World pro­file, the young entre­pre­neur had moved to Chi­na from San Fran­cis­co after the 1906 Earth­quake and set up shop as a film exhibitor. Soon, as the Amer­i­can rep­re­sen­ta­tive of Vari­ety Film Exchange, he had a hand in dis­tri­b­u­tion and by 1909 branched into film pro­duc­tion in Shang­hai and Hong Kong. While jug­gling busi­ness inter­ests, he filmed his trav­els,” all of which took place not just before Chi­na’s eco­nom­ic rise, but before even the Com­mu­nist Rev­o­lu­tion.

Brod­sky brought 20,000 feet of neg­a­tives with him back to San Fran­cis­co, even­tu­al­ly cut­ting it down to ten reels, which would have run around one hour and 50 min­utes. Of this fea­ture-length trav­el­ogue film only cer­tain sec­tions sur­vive, but you can see them enhanced and col­orized with arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence in the video at the top of the post. (Some of an un-enhanced black-and-white print appears just above.) Bear in mind that col­ors you see are not, of course, the col­ors Brod­sky would have seen; there’s also some dis­cus­sion about whether the AI ren­dered cer­tain com­plex­ions unre­al­is­ti­cal­ly dark for the regions in which he shot these scenes. For Chi­na is quite a diverse place, not just in region­al land­scapes, cli­mates, and cul­tures, but also in the faces of its peo­ple: some­thing many West­ern­ers would­n’t have guessed in the nine­teen-tens — and for that mat­ter, some­thing a fair few of them don’t real­ize even today.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold the Pho­tographs of John Thom­son, the First West­ern Pho­tog­ra­ph­er to Trav­el Wide­ly Through Chi­na (1870s)

A Trip Around the World in 1900: See Restored Footage Show­ing Life in New York, Lon­don, India, Japan, Chi­na & Beyond

Footage of Cities Around the World in the 1890s: Lon­don, Tokyo, New York, Venice, Moscow & More

Watch Life on the Streets of Tokyo in Footage Record­ed in 1913: Caught Between the Tra­di­tion­al and the Mod­ern

A Trip Through New York City in 1911: Vin­tage Video of NYC Gets Col­orized & Revived with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

The Pho­to That Trig­gered China’s Dis­as­trous Cul­tur­al Rev­o­lu­tion (1966)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.