This film is part of Free
John Mills Collection Film 37 - China/Hayley-Bells
An amateur film of rural China in the early 1930s shot by the actor John Mills’ father-in-law, showing farming and transport methods in Tianjin.
Overview
This home movie was probably shot around Tianjin in northern China, where Colonel Francis Hayley Bell (father of John Mills' wife Mary) was Commissioner in 1930-31. Bell’s rather shaky film records aspects of rural life - harvesting, irrigation and river transport. While the boats are distinctive and donkeys replace horses, the methods used are not so different to those of pre-mechanised British farming.
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