A Small Town in China

Missionaries mingle with the locals in this intimate portrait of community life in an unidentified Chinese town.

Shot by Methodist missionaries, this is an incredibly charming record of small-town life in an unidentified location in China. We see a bustling wharf town with canal-side dwellings, distinctive school buildings, and a hospital where newly graduated nurses pose for a group portrait. The relaxed smiles of Chinese and Europeans are captured in intimate close-ups, suggesting a tight-knit community.

Highlights include children leap-frogging in the school yard, an extensive Boy Scout parade, grinning schoolteachers in dickie bows, and a lovely scene in which young nurses cheer up a forlorn-looking patient with an apple. We've not found a town known as Dan Tau - the phonetic English translation of Chinese characters on a railway sign in the film's opening scene. But we can speculate that this may have been shot somewhere near Hong Kong or in Guangdong Province, where English signage was common.