Documentary reveals untold story of six Chinese survivors on Titanic

The Untold Story of RMS Titanic's Chinese Passengers, a new documentary focusing on the Chinese survivors aboard the infamous liner a century ago. [Photo provided to China Daily]

A new documentary reveals the story of Chinese on board the Titanic, where six survived, Xu Fan reports.

Over a century after RMS Titanic, the then-largest ship in the world, sank into the Atlantic Ocean in 1912, a new documentary, with James Cameron as the executive producer, is revealing a little-known story of Chinese on board.

Eight Chinese passengers were on the British liner on a single ticket in the third class, a common practice for the cheapest cabin back then. Six of them survived the tragic sinking.

One of the deadliest disasters in maritime history, the Titanic collided with an iceberg during its maiden voyage from Southampton in England to New York, killing about 1,500 of more than 2,220 passengers and crew on board.

Fang Lang, a Chinese man, one of the last survivors rescued by a lifeboat of the ship, inspired Cameron to create the iconic scene of his blockbuster movie, Titanic, in which Leonardo DiCaprio, who stars as Jack, leaves the chances of survival to Kate Winslet's Rose by pushing his beloved onto a floating door.

This is told in the documentary The Six: The Untold Story of RMS Titanic's Chinese Passengers, which debuted in China on Friday.

Arthur Jones, the documentary's director, says he heard the Chinese survivors' story from his friend Steven Schwankert for the first time in 2015. Jones, a Shanghai-based British filmmaker, says he was shocked to find that few of his Chinese friends knew about it.

Clues of these survivors' lives are pieced together, presenting a picture of early-generation immigrants struggling against discrimination and racism. [Photo provided to China Daily]

"We knew two of the eight Chinese passengers died, but nobody talked about the six survivors. Most of the Titanic survivors have their stories, but those six seem to have completely disappeared," says Jones, 47.

The Yorkshire native has lived in China since 1996. He once worked as a film reporter before shifting his interest to documentaries.

The Six marks his second cooperative documentary with Schwankert, a New Jersey-born US researcher and historian, after their 2013 feature, The Poseidon Project, about the search of a sunken British submarine.

"I grew up near the ocean. I've always held an interest in maritime history, ships and shipwrecks since I was a little kid," says Schwankert, who traveled to China in the late 1980s.

Stumbling upon the Titanic's passenger list and other clues, Schwankert realized that he could turn his personal interest into a new project, for which he, alongside Jones, traveled to 20 cities and interviewed more than 100 people over five years, as well as read 1,000 archived works.

By studying events around the ship's sinking, the documentary's crew re-created some rescue moments and pieced together the story of the six survivors: Fang, Lee Bing, Chang Chip, Ah Lam, Chung Foo and Ling Hee.

Unlike most other survivors who were taken to hospitals or hotels in the United States, the six Chinese survivors were barred from entering the US because of the Chinese Exclusion Act, designed to curb Chinese immigration at that time.