The untold story of the Chinese aboard Titanic
Print Edition
IT is a little known fact that eight Chinese passengers were on the legendary liner Titanic when she went down in 1912. Six survived.
Now a new documentary, “The Six,” made by a British director, is going to tell the story of the Chinese survivors.
Arthur Jones, a professional documentary director from Yorkshire, speaking in his Shanghai studio, said that after he learnt about the Chinese survivors almost two years ago from his friend, Steven Schwankert, a US maritime historian, he decided to make the documentary to tell the world about who the six Chinese survivors are, how they survived and why they vanished from the records.
“Out of over 700 survivors of the Titanic disaster, the six Chinese people were the only ones who never told their stories,” said Jones, who has been living and working in China for over 20 years.
According to the historical evidence and accounts that Jones’ team have collected, all the eight Chinese men had previously worked on cargo ships traveling 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 area.
When the giant ship struck an iceberg, the men tried to escape with their own survival skills. Five of the six survivors boarded lifeboats, while the sixth was found floating on a door and luckily picked up by a lifeboat that returned to search for survivors.
But when the six survivors finally arrived in the US, the discriminatory Chinese Exclusion Act in force at the time forced them to leave within 24 hours.
Since then, they disappeared from the history books.
Their absence has left questions unanswered, including a claim that they were stowaways on lifeboats. Jones and his research team believe this rumor was born of racism and is unjust.
“We visited a large number of foreign archives and museums, worked with historians from the United States and China, searched and studied much evidence,” Jones said.
“There is not a single shred of evidence to prove the Chinese survivors were stowaways. I believe they did not do anything dishonorable.”
Courage, not cowardice
Schwankert, now also working on the documentary, said the Chinese survivors' story is not of cowardice as the Western media unfairly portrayed more than a century ago, but actually one of courage and of quick thinking.
"We don’t accept the reports and the history as it is presented,” he said.
“The six Chinese men have been put into a position of injustice for more than 100 years. We can finally tell their story correctly.”
In order to trace the descendants of the survivors, Jones and his team went to the US, Britain, Canada, Cuba and other countries and found their descendants.
The British passenger liner Titanic, the largest ship afloat at the time — and declared “unsinkable” — sank in the North Atlantic in the early hours of April 15, 1912, after it hit an iceberg on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City.
Of the estimated 2,224 passengers and crew aboard the ship, more than 1,500 died, making it one of the deadliest commercial peacetime maritime disasters in modern history.
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