One of two 'lost' films shot by Jesuit missionaries in China in 1947-48 identified by Prof. Joseph W. Ho (Ph.D. Michigan, Albion College, MI). The original reels, containing over 3000 feet of 16mm film, had been tucked away in an Institute storage cabinet for many years. The films contain vivid scenes of everyday life and missionary activity in China prior to the founding of the PRC. Both in full color, "Ageless China" includes soundtrack. Important historical source for the study of Jesuit missions to China during the postwar period.

"The documentary, entitled "Ageless China," is composed of footage shot by Fr. Hubbard, SJ, in 1947-1948 Peiping, Shanghai, Yangzhou, Nanjing, and Sheshan (Zose). This screenplay was proposed by Fr. William Klement, a priest attached to the Yangzhou mission who detailed the film, shot-for-shot, in a 5-page letter written in 1948. As such, the copy at the Ricci Institute is the closest version to a complete documentary of the Yangzhou mission during its postwar operation. "Ageless China" does exist as a VHS transfer at SCU but that copy is of rather poor quality. We have the original footage here, complete with the original soundtrack ...3000 feet of film in total.... The pre-1949 scenes depicted in them would be of significant interest to historians of modern China."-- Dr. Joseph Ho, Ph.D.

Dig. file (m4v, mp4, etc.) in Video folder.

Cina perduta nelle fotografie di Leone Nani / [a cura di Clara Bulfoni e Anna Pozzi].
Includes bibliographical references.

English-language edition also held.

Contents: Nani's Italy / Fulvio De Giorgi -- China at the beginning of the twentieth century / Sergio Ticozzi -- Italy and China : two millennia of encounters / Federico Masini -- The missionary photographer / Roberto Festorazzi -- China in photography between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries / Lionello Lanciotti -- Mysteries of a reporter / Giovanna Calvenzi -- The photographs. Self-portraits ; Between the empire and the republic ; The people ; Life and work ; Places of the spirit ; The mission.

"This photographic reportage of China, dating from the early part of the nineteenth century, is the work of Father Leone Nani. These unpublished images bring back to life for us the people, places, traditions and culture of an empire that has long since disappeared." "Leone Nani (Albino, 1880-1935) was a young man of only 23 when he left for China. He was bound for the mission of Hanzhong, a distant Apostolic Vicariate located in southern Shaanxi, an inland region lying between the Great Wall and the Han river. He remained in China from 1904 to 1914, and in those ten years he visited many villages where he discovered social and cultural realities that other Westerners had not easily come across." "Making use of a mobile studio and working primarily with glass plates that he then developed and printed on his own, Nani took photographs of young couples, families, dignitaries, peasants and artisans. By immortalising scenes of daily life, religious ceremonies, architecture and landscapes, he showed himself to be an excellent observer of local habits and customs as well as being an outstanding reporter. This extraordinary material, splendidly reproduced in bichrome plates, bears witness to one of the most complex periods in the history of the millenary Chinese Empire: a period of violent transition marked by the fall of the Qing dynasty and the advent of the Republic." "Father Nani reproduced features of China that would have otherwise remained unheard of or known only from the descriptions of travellers."--BOOK JACKET.

***Graphic resource -- photographs of daily life in and portraits of the inhabitants of Hanzhong 漢中 in Shaanxi 陝西 during the early 20th century.

English-language edition; Italian-language edition also held.