This Week in China’s History: April 15, 1912
It wasn’t the world’s deadliest shipwreck, but without question it is the most famous. The first book about the R.M.S. Titanic appeared just months after the liner collided with an iceberg and sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, taking some 1,500 souls with her, and the attention has not let up. More than 500 books have been published — in English alone — on the ship and its sinking, along with dozens of documentary and feature films.
Certainly, the best-known of these is James Cameron’s 1997 film Titanic, which was for a time the highest-grossing movie in history, and remains near the top of the list. In a deleted scene, one of Titanic’s lifeboats moves grimly through the wreckage, searching for survivors amid dozens of bobbing, half-frozen corpses. As the ship’s crew calls out, a man floating on a piece of debris responds in Chinese. He is soon pulled aboard the lifeboat to safety.
Even though the director/producer is reported to have gone to great lengths seeking historical accuracy, Cameron’s film is a work of fiction. With that in mind, many viewers would be forgiven (had the scene made it into the final cut) for thinking the episode was a product of Cameron’s imagination. And for that matter, a rather unlikely one, since what are the chances that there was a Chinese survivor on Titanic, making its way from Britain to the United States?
As it turns out, there wasn’t one Chinese passenger on Titanic; there were eight. Six of them survived, including the man depicted in Cameron’s deleted scene.
That there were Chinese on Titanic was not altogether new information. Maritime historian Steven Schwankert has spent decades living in China, giving him the opportunity to dive on and research wrecks on the China coast. His research into the 1931 sinking of the British submarine Poseidon yielded a book and then a documentary film. His book Jiangya, on the 1948 sinking of a Yangtze River ferry near Shanghai — a wreck that claimed more than twice as many lives as the sinking of Titanic — is forthcoming in May. But of course, anyone interested in history and shipwrecks will look into that fateful night in April 1912, and so did Schwankert, informed by his vantage point and experience in China.
Schwankert found that eight Chinese passengers had boarded Titanic in Southampton, and that six of them, it seemed, had survived. Their names were recorded as Ah Lam, Fang Lang, Len Lam, Cheong Foo, Chang Chip, Ling Hee, Lee Bing, and Lee Ling (though tracking down their names was itself a challenging journey!).
Schwankert suggested the topic to film director Arthur Jones — they were working together on the documentary that would accompany Poseidon — but Jones demurred. Understandably, Jones doubted that there was anything new to say after 111 years about the ship that The Onion called the “world’s largest metaphor.”
Happily, Schwankert persisted, and Jones relented. The result was a film called The Six (the film is available here to view through April 19) that has shown that despite all the scrutiny, there is much new to learn.
It is a good reminder that history is not the same as the past. Rather, history is produced by the interaction of past events, available sources about those events, and the questions that historians ask. Since the last two of these are constantly changing, history is itself continually evolving, as new questions and new sources add to our understanding of the past. In this case, the sinking of Titanic can provide new insights about the social history of early-20th-century China and the racial policy and politics of the United States. All of this came together in The Six.
For those expecting another rehash of icebergs, hubris, and excess, Jones and Schwankert’s film presents something entirely different, and much more, opening a window onto labor, politics, and migration. “We could have picked any group of eight men from southern China,” Schwankert told me in an interview, “but by hanging the story on the Titanic peg, it gives the viewer instant context to understand where they are in both time and place.”
Like any good work of microhistory, The Six gives insights into the particulars of a specific moment, but uses that moment to illustrate and analyze broad trends and processes. The eight Chinese men were not migrants, but workers: professional seafarers who had left southern China to find work in the United Kingdom, and found employment firing the coal boilers that powered British sea power. But a month-long coal strike in 1912 sowed chaos in Britain’s shipping industry, and these men were transferred to work in the Caribbean. Titanic was just their means of passage to New York: from there, they would catch a steamer to Cuba. At least, that was the plan.
Remarkably, having survived the ordeal in the North Atlantic and been rescued to New York, the six survivors faced even more adversity: it was illegal for them to come to the United States because of the Chinese Exclusion Act. For these men, the sinking of Titanic was just the beginning as they began new lives across the Atlantic. Some went to Canada, others back to Britain. Those who remained in the United States had to obscure their identity and hide the story of how they came to be there so that they could claim legal immigration status, a travail not unique to survivors of celebrated shipwrecks. In some cases, Schwankert’s research team was able to confirm rumors for descendants of “the six” that their ancestors had, in fact, been aboard Titanic. In other cases, the revelation was a shock. But for all of them, the story of Titanic was just a part of lives shaped by vast historical processes.
“Seeing what the men faced then in terms of exclusion laws and other difficulties, we know immediately that these problems have been around for more than a century, and that therefore, they aren’t going to be solved quickly,” said Schwankert. “But their story is one of hope: to them, the sinking of Titanic was just another obstacle to overcome.”
Surprisingly, perhaps, for a film about such a well-known event, the narrative structure takes unexpected twists and deserves not to be spoiled. But I will let Steven Schwankert tease it just a little: “Of course, two of the men perished, leaving us with the six survivors for which the documentary is named. Those that lived always moved forward, overcoming each barrier as it presented itself. For many Titanic survivors, that was the worst moment of their lives. For these six men, it was just one more impediment.”
This Week in China’s History is a weekly column.
