Revisit Daily Life in China in 1917 Through Footage Enhanced and Colorized by AI

Revisit Daily Life in China in 1917 Through Footage Enhanced and Colorized by AI Even for Americans, keeping up with the geopolitical entanglements of the United States has never been an easy task. More than a century ago, just a few months after their country got involved in what’s now known as World War I, they got word that the military of a distant nation had joined their side: China, whose image would have been both opaque and forbiddingly vast. A dozen years before they’d even heard the name Pearl S. Buck, what impressions of that country they had would have come from scattered sources like post-Opium Wars missionary publications, newspaper coverage of complicated events like the Boxer Rebellion and the fall of the Qing dynasty, and silent-film genre stereotypes. (Perhaps the rare reader got ahold of John Thomson’s Through China with a Camera.) Most could live a lifetime without a glimpse of “the real China.” By the end of 1917, however, “there were at leas

Added 27 May 2026