China film history
Film arrived in China only a few months after its world premiere by the Lumiere Brothers in the Grand Café in Paris on December 28, 1895. It is recorded that a few Lumière films made their Chinese debut on August 11, 1896 in Xu Garden (Xu yuan), a popular entertainment quarter in Shanghai. In the next year, American showman James Rialto showed several Edison films in Shanghai and other large cities in China. This new medium was introduced as "Xiyang yingxi," or "Western shadow play," which related it to China's millenary-old indigenous tradition of shadow play [Figure 1]. For many years (continued on into the 1930s), these "western shadow play" were often shown as part of a variety show, sharing the stage with traditional opera, vaudevilles, acrobatics, storytelling and other popular performances in teahouses, theater houses, and amusement parks, sometimes even on streets [Figure 2,Peep-show, from Leyda's Dianying]. Audiences would enjoy the shows with tea, snacks, and cold towels. The first theatre exclusively devoted to film appeared in Beijing in 1907. A Spaniard Antonio Ramos opened the first movie theater in Shanghai, the 250-seat Hongkew Cinema [Figure 3: Hongkew Cinema], in 1908. The following years saw the mushrooming of movie theaters in Shanghai and other major cities, which numbered 233 in seven cities by 1929. Shanghai alone housed 53 movie theaters; with a total seating capacity of 37,110 (see Cui 2003, 4).