In 1948, a man came home to Nanjing with a color camera.
His name was Wan-go Weng (翁万戈, 1918–2020). He was a descendant of Weng Tonghe, the great Qing dynasty imperial tutor. He had spent the war years in America — studying engineering at Purdue, then switching to painting and film, working for the U.S. government making documentaries about China for American audiences. In 1946, he founded China Film Enterprises of America. In 1948, he returned to the city of his family's world and pointed his camera at it.
He could not have known that within a year, everything would change.
What the Camera Saw
The film moves through Nanjing at the end of the Republic of China era. Xinjiekou Square. The city railway station. The Ming city walls, still intact. Xuanwu Lake. Jiming Temple. Beiji Pavilion. The Ming Xiaoling Mausoleum, with its stone elephant road and Weng Zhong path. Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum. The Presidential Palace. The Parliament building. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Jinling University. Jinling Women's University. Jiangnan Gongyuan — the imperial examination hall. Qingliang Mountain and its Saoye Tower. Swallow's Rock at the Yangtze, where wooden boats with cloth sails still moved on the river.
On the streets, horse-drawn carts shared the road with automobiles. Tianshan Road was still farmland — a farmer watering his vegetables, a roadside stall selling Yuhua stones. A city in the last years of one world, not yet knowing it.
What Else Was in the Frame
Among the locations filmed: Xiaguan Railway Station and its waterfront docks.
At that same moment, in a clinic near those docks, an eighteen-year-old named Mei Yueqiang was studying guqin and painting under his teacher Wang Jianhou.
Mei Yueqiang would go on to become the tenth-generation master of the Jinling lineage and the eleventh of the Guangling school of guqin — one of the great classical traditions of Chinese music. He spent his life preserving its music, training students, carrying something forward that might otherwise have been lost. He passed away in 2003.
Wan-go Weng did not know what else his camera had captured.
The City and the Qin
Nanjing has been a capital six times. It carries the weight of dynasties — the Six Dynasties, the Ming, the Republic of China. It is a city where history does not stay in the past. It accumulates.
The Guangling school of guqin did not grow here by accident. This kind of music requires a certain kind of soil — deep, layered, long. Nanjing has always provided it.
Wan-go Weng's film is one of the earliest surviving color records of this city. We are grateful he came home when he did.
0 comments