Dragon dance and street theatre – rare video of old China 1901-1904

Thanks to Jarek Szymanski for posting about this clip.

“Unique documentary footage taken between 1901 and 1904 in Yunnan in southwestern China by Auguste François (1857-1935) french consul stationed there. Street performers, barbers, funerals, official visits, leopard catching a pigeon and monkey wearing opera outfit doing somersaults, opium smoker, it’s all there – and more. Absolutely stunning over fifty minutes of footage from China that none of us has ever seen. Somewhere there were probably also martial artists, hiding in plain sight;)”

https://www.cinematheque.fr/henri/film/129752-images-de-chine-auguste-francois-1901-1904/

Of particular note for martial arts fans are the Dragon Dance scene at 32 minutes and the street theatre dancing at 46m which looks an aweful lot like Baguazhang….

One thought on “Dragon dance and street theatre – rare video of old China 1901-1904

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s