By Bai Xu, Lin Li
BEIJING, Sept. 1 (Xinhua) -- Who do you think of when someone mentions the RMS Titanic? The ill-fated lovers Jack and Rose? Captain Smith who went down with his ship? Or the brave musicians who played till the end, and whose monument still stands in Southampton?
Chances are, even if you are Chinese, that you will not think of the eight Chinese aboard the ship when it hit the iceberg, six of whom survived.
Now, a British documentary, "The Six," is to tell the untold tale.
"How did six out of eight Chinese passengers on board manage to survive? Why did they disappear into history so quickly after arriving in the US, unlike the rest of the survivors? What happened to them after Titanic? Where did they go? And how come no relatives or descendants had ever claimed them?" said Arthur Jones, a British director, in an interview with Xinhua. "These, and other mysteries, were all things we wanted to find out."
Jones, 43, was born in Yorkshire in the north of England. In the town where he grew up, there was an old woman whom everyone knew had been on Titanic, so he was aware of the story from a very young age.
"I think the story of the 'unsinkable' ship has a powerful resonance in countries all around the world, and there have been many books and films made about it," he said, but he never imagined he would make one himself.
After he graduated from Cambridge, Jones wanted to find an interesting place where he could learn a new language and work on some film ideas. So, in 1996, he came to China and stayed for about 20 years. He even had a Chinese name: Luo Fei.
In 2001 he started working on his first feature documentary, about a group of retired Shanghai musicians. Since then he has made many films and directed for broadcasters like Discovery, but Titanic has always been his unsinkable dream.
An opportunity came knocking when his friend, historian and writer Steven Schwankert brought the story of the Chinese survivors to him a couple of years ago.
"Once I found out that there were Chinese people on Titanic whose story had never been told before, and that we had a chance to solve the mysteries surrounding them, I knew we had to try to make it," Jones said.
In the blockbuster Titanic, James Cameron did film at least one scene featuring the Chinese survivors but it was deleted from the released version. "Cameron is a world expert of Titanic, and I think it is great that he was aware of the Chinese story," Jones said.
On April 10, 1912, Titanic, once the most luxurious ship in the world which was claimed to be "unsinkable", started from Southampton in England to New York in its maiden voyage. Five days later, the ship struck an iceberg and sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. More than 1,500 people died.
On the ship there were eight Chinese men who had previously worked on cargo ships travelling between China and Europe. They boarded the Titanic in England on a single ticket listing eight names, working as stokers and staying in the third-class cabin.
After they survived the disaster and made to the United States, the discriminatory Chinese Exclusion Act, which was in force at the time, forced them to leave the country within 24 hours.
Since then they seemed to have vanished, leaving some questions unanswered, including a claim that they were stowaways on lifeboats.
"The fact that this story is complicated and difficult to shoot is actually the reason it has not been told before," he said.
One of the challenges was finding Chinese people from the early 20th century in overseas records. "In the days before pinyin, there was no standard way to record Chinese names. The same person might spell their own name in many different ways," Jones said.
In their research they found one of the Chinese survivors was listed as "Ali Lam" in the official records, but "Ali" is not a Chinese name. Later Jones found out that it was in fact "Ah".
"But even once we had worked out their identity in overseas records, connecting those with fully Chinese language records in China is extremely difficult. How do we know we are looking at the same person?" he said.
Finding the descendants is not easy either.
"Titanic survivors are well-known around the world, and their descendants are often interviewed on major anniversaries of the accident, but the Chinese survivors were different," he said.
Jones spent a lot of time looking for them.
The first they found were from overseas. "They had a feeling they were connected (with Titanic) but never confirmed it before. Sometimes families have rumors you know," Jones said.
But he declined to give any details of the story. "The descendants have actually asked us to keep their identities private until the film is released," he said. "The story has not been told for 100 years. They want it to be told in their own way the first time it appears."
So far they have been in touch with several descendants--no specific number was given. "We follow the story of the six, showing why they were on that journey, how they escaped, why they were treated differently from other survivors, why they disappeared from history, what happened later and we follow the team of researchers cracking those mysteries as they travel round the world looking at traces of the six in countries including the US, Cuba, Canada and the UK, as well as China."
"It's a story of survival against the odds, of overcoming huge challenges and travelling the world," he said.
The film will be released next year, which Jones describes as "moving and interesting".
But one thing is for sure. "I can say that we have found no evidence that the rumor (that Chinese were stowaways on lifeboats) is true," he said.
"Our research suggests that the six survivors waited their turn, and didn't push their way into the lifeboats, or take the place of women or children. One of the six was plucked from the water and was later praised by other survivors on the lifeboat for being so helpful."
"It seems very unfair that these rumors persist, and we suspect they may be explained in part by the racist attitudes that some people had at that time," Jones added. "We will reveal all in the film."
