‘The Six’ Chinese survivors of the Titanic: The little known story

There were more than 700 survivors of Titanic, and almost all of them are well known, at least in their country of origin. When I was a child, we lived opposite the house of an elderly woman who had survived Titanic. Everyone knew about her. If you check online now, you can find her year of birth, her children, the story of her life, her story on Titanic. And the same is true of all the other survivors. Except our six men.

So, why were the Chinese so uniquely forgotten by history? Why had no one come forward to claim them as grandparents, uncles, or even friends?

Arthur jones 罗飞

The round table discussion on the Titanic and ‘The Six’ Documentary

The Chinese Culture Forum at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) presents this round-table discussion to mark the 111th anniversary of Titanic tragedy, focusing on the recent documentary ‘The Six’ (2021), which explores the little known story of the six Chinese passengers who survived the accident but their subsequent hard lives were little known to the public over the past century. In this round-table discussion, we invite our QUB PhD researcher Tianpeng YAO (姚天鹏) to host a conversation with ‘The Six’ Documentary team, Arthur Jones (罗飞), the director, and Steven Schwankert (施万克), the lead researcher, to share their filming experience, the presentation of the narrative through filming, as well as to explore its historic and social impact on today’s world. 

Date: Fri 14 April 2023
Time: 13:00-14:30 (UK) | 20:00-21:30 (CN) | 08:00-09:30 (US)
Channel: MS Teams (links to be sent after registration)

Round-table chair

Tianpeng YAO (姚天鹏) is a PhD candidate in Film Studies at Queen’s University Belfast, with his research focus on the audio-visual representation of Eastern philosophical symbols. Before studying at Queen’s, he had directed films such as “Searching for Zen” and “Bicycle,” which was accepted in the Official Selection for the 24th Shanghai International Film Festival and won the first prize at the 10th International University Student Microfilm Festival, as well as the Best Micro-movie Award at the 2022 World Film Carnival-Singapore. He is the founder of the China-Europe Youth Film Society, through which he has been committed to promoting cultural exchanges between Chinese and European young filmmakers.

Guest speakers

Arthur Jones (罗飞) is a British filmmaker based in Shanghai, China. His work includes The Six, The Poseidon Project and A Farewell Song, the latter of which was backed by Channel 4’s BritDoc foundation and won the Special Jury Prize for Documentaries at the Syracuse International Film Festival. He has also made commissioned films for the Special Olympics, the World Expo and Shanghai Disneyland. Arthur also regularly directs for NatGeo, BBC and Discovery. He was the China correspondent for the Hollywood film magazine Variety.

Steven Schwankert (施万克) is an explorer and writer based in Beijing. He is the co-creator and lead researcher of The Six, a book and documentary film project revealing the story of RMS Titanic’s Chinese passengers. In 2006, he discovered the unknown fate of Royal Navy submarine HMS Poseidon, which became both the book Poseidon: China’s Secret Salvage of Britain’s Lost Submarine《波塞冬号正传》and the documentary film The Poseidon Project. In 2007, he and his team discovered two century-old wooden shipwrecks in Mongolia’s Lake Khovsgol. Other explorations include the Underwater Great Wall of China (潘家口书库水下长城), and the Lion City, a sunken Ming dynasty town (千岛湖水下古城).

LP Films (上海罗家文化艺术交流有限公司)

LP Films has been producing high-quality documentaries and commercial films since 2004. What began as three passionate young artists with a singular vision has grown into Shanghai’s leading documentary production house, powered by an international team with a wide range of complementary skills, including ideation, creative development, planning, directing, shooting, post-production, and overseas co-production.

Webinar review

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Related reading

• The official website of ‘The Six’ Documentary
• Amazon: The Six: An Untold Story of Titanic’s Chinese Survivors《六人-泰坦尼克上的中国幸存者》(in Chinese)
• 《六人-泰坦尼克上的中国幸存者》英国重映，揭开百年前被掩盖的真相 (bilingual)