Two newly published books -- 1937: In the Shadow of the Looming War and 1939: Entering Xikang, a Province Lost in Time -- may give readers a glimpse of that eventful period in modern Chinese history.

They were written or co-written by Sun Mingjing (1911-92), an eminent film educationalist and one of the founders of the Beijing Film Academy. The first book contains 140 old photos and the second has 240. Together, the books have a dozen essays and 25 letters that Sun wrote to his wife Lu Jin'ai.

Precious Data

While working as a documentary film-maker, Sun took tens of thousands of photos when he joined the social and scientific expeditions of 1937 and 1939, headed by renowned historian Gu Jiegang and geologist Huang Guozhang, into the western provinces of China.

A solo exhibition featuring around 80 photos from the two books was held early this month at the Sanlian Bookstore in Beijing.

An academic seminar on the value of Sun's photos and his achievement as a pioneer documentary maker in China and as a film scholar and educationalist was held last week at the bookstore.

The photos depicted giant pandas, the lives of Tibetan people and early foreign missionaries in Kangding in western Sichuan Province, the bombardment of Chongqing by the Japanese army in 1939, the centuries-old salt-well industry in Zigong in Sichuan and street scenes of old cities and villages in Sichuan, Yunnan and Guizhou provinces. But they do not merely provide viewers with a closer look at history.

Wang Hai, a professor at Beijing's University of International Business and Economics and a postgraduate student at New York University's film school, said: "The photos were taken with great care and are of high artistic value. More importantly, they were taken from the perspective of a Chinese intellectual with a deep love for his country and people.

"Sun's photos are decisively different and more emotionally appealing to viewers than previously found old photos of old Chinese society taken by some foreign colonialists in the early 20th century," he said. One example is French Consul-General Auguste François, who served in Yunnan for six years, starting in 1899.

In Sun's photos, there is a strong sense of the unbending will and unprecedented unity of Chinese people at that time in the face of a grave national crisis. From the old photos, Wang said he found that people in remote and isolated western areas of Sichuan (then called Xikang) -- both Tibetans and Han people -- also made great contributions and sacrifices to help defend the motherland from Japanese aggression.

The photos also offer precious data for studies into geography, history and cultural anthropology, experts said.

Wang Jian, a specialist in Chinese architectural history with the Guangzhou Urban Planning Committee in South China's Guangdong Province, said: "When I first saw the pictures on show in the bookstore, I was greatly astonished by the intact image of the Yanshou Lama Temple in Hohhot, in Inner Mongolia, and many other old Chinese structures and compounds in western China, such as the bird's-eye view of the old Kangding city seat.

"Because many of the precious traditional buildings filmed by Sun do not exist today for various reasons, for a long time we architecture researchers could only read about them. These photos and Sun's narrative are of high academic value."

Sun's photos also give more visual information to scholars of Tibetan studies, said Jiayong Qunpei, a Tibetan historian with the Central University of Nationalities in Beijing.

"Tibetan studies on the historical period of the 1930s are very weak due to the lack of concrete materials," he explained. "Sun's photos help revive a lost passage of history as they cover a wide scope of Tibetan society from everyday life and farming to social life, religious rituals and harmonious relations between Tibetans and other Chinese nationalities in that area."

Forerunner of Educational Film

But Sun Jiansan, a professor at the Beijing Film Academy and Sun Mingjing's son, said: "The untold story behind Sun Mingjing and his photos is basically about the history of China's higher education in motion pictures."

The prestigious Beijing Film Academy, established in 1950, has trained thousands of film-makers. But the history of film education in China first started in 1930 with the University of Nanking, in Nanjing in East China's Jiangsu Province, according to Sun Jiansan.

In 1937, on the eve of the Japanese military invasion, Sun Mingjing was working as deputy director of the university's audio-visual education center. The university sent him to northern China with a 16-millimeter camera.

Sun rushed to a number of strategic places and recorded scenes before the regions were occupied by the invading forces.

While making the films, Sun also took numerous still photos and kept systematic notes of his observations.

Unfortunately, most of Sun's photos were destroyed during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76) and the photos featured in the two new books are a small portion from the remaining 10,000-plus photos, according to Sun Jiansan.

Film historian Wang Tianjing, of the China Film Archive in Beijing, said: "The footage was made into seven documentary films totaling 10 reels of 15 minutes each. They were widely shown to people in the rear of western China to encourage their patriotic spirit and determination to reclaim the lost territory from the Japanese army." Wang has watched all of the 61 surviving documentaries out of the 98 shot or produced by Sun and his colleagues in the 1930s and 1940s.

Sun's well-crafted documentaries feature both Chinese landscapes in Anhui, Jiangsu, Qinghai, Shandong and Sichuan provinces and educational pictures of diverse subjects, from local products such as bamboo umbrellas and ceramics, to eclipses of the sun, coal mines, survival skills in gas warfare, the salt-well industry, waterworks, the lives of eagles, buffalo-breeding skills, and a brief history of transportation, according to Wang.

In November 1937, before Nanjing fell to the Japanese army, the university was evacuated to Sichuan Province and resumed classes in the provincial capital Chengdu and partly in Chongqing.

While in Sichuan, the educational film program reached new heights. In 1938, the university inaugurated a two-year college course on film and radio.

That was the period when China's then top universities -- Yenching University and Tsinghua University from Beijing, Nankai University from Tianjin, the University of Nanking from Nanjing and Cheelo University from Shandong Province -- were all on the same campus in Chengdu.

The film and radio courses were open to all students, most of whom took up the opportunity. Thus film as a powerful medium became widespread throughout the country.

From 1940 onwards, the University of Nanking sent people abroad to learn more about advances in film-making. Sun Mingjing got the opportunity to go to the United States.

Based in the American Film Center in New York, Sun visited most major film institutes in the United States and conducted lengthy interviews at leading film companies, such as Disney Studios.

On his return to Chengdu, Sun brought back half a truck of film equipment and photographic materials that he had purchased with funds he had applied for.

Sun then gave all university students regular educational film shows in Chengdu, where he also founded the magazine Film and Radio Monthly, which ran between 1942 and 1948.

In 1946, the University of Nanking moved back to Nanjing and the educational film projects soon resumed.

Respected Professor

After the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949, great emphasis was put on the motion picture industry. In 1950, the Performance Institute was inaugurated in Beijing and, in 1952, with the nationwide readjustment of college and university departments, the motion picture department of the University of Nanking moved to Beijing to join the newly formed Central Film School (now the Beijing Film Academy). Higher education in motion pictures in China thus embarked on a new era.

At the Beijing Film Academy, Sun Mingjing took up the task of establishing the curricula for the cinematography and film-printing majors. He introduced a lot of academic works that had originally been written in English to Chinese film research circles.

Apart from the period of the "cultural revolution," Sun continued teaching a wide range of subjects related to film-making theories and technology until the early 1990s.

His last batch of students included the renowned directors Chen Kaige, Tian Zhuangzhuang and Zhang Yimou, the well-known celebrity photographer Deng Wei, and Mu Deyuan, dean of the Cinematography Department of the Beijing Film Academy.

At last week's seminar in Beijing, Mu said: "Sun is one of the senior film professors that I respect most and have benefited a lot from in terms of film-making.

"But this is the first time I have found out that Sun was also an outstanding photographer."

(China Daily February 20, 2003)