The Children of Huang Shi

British journalist George Hogg finds himself running an orphanage in wartime China after witnessing Japanese atrocities, eventually leading dozens of boys on a perilous 700-mile trek across the mountains to escape advancing forces. Along the way he is aided by a Chinese Communist officer and an American nurse.

The film is based on the real story of George Hogg, an English journalist and aid worker who ran the Shandan Bailie School in China during the Japanese occupation and led students on a long march to safety in 1944–45.

The broad outline of Hogg's story is real, but numerous characters and events were altered or invented for dramatic purposes.

After the fall of Shanghai, Japanese forces advanced up the Yangtze and captured the Chinese capital, following it with weeks of mass killing and rape of civilians and disarmed soldiers.

Chinese defences collapsed on 12–13 December 1937. A small group of Western residents established the Nanjing Safety Zone, which sheltered a substantial part of the remaining civilian population. Estimates of the dead vary widely between Chinese, Japanese and Western scholarship.

Directed by Roger Spottiswoode

Cast: Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Chow Yun-fat, Radha Mitchell, Michelle Yeoh

Positioned at 1937–1945 within the Second Sino-Japanese War phase of the war, as part of the Japanese invasion of China. This is entry 4 of 150 in the chronological archive.

• George Hogg
• war orphans
• Japanese invasion of China
• wartime relief

• 

  The Eight Hundred

  26 October – 1 November 1937

• 

  John Rabe

  November 1937 – February 1938

• 

  The Flowers of War

  December 1937

• 

  City of Life and Death

  December 1937 – January 1938

• 

  The King's Speech

  1925–1939

• 

  The Gathering Storm

  1934–May 1940