Travelogue films showing indigenous life in the interwar period, filmed by the British traveller, linguist, spy and author Reginald Teague Jones OBE, who changed his name to Sinclair after his alleged involvement in the massacre of Bolshevik commissars from Baku in the Caucasus in September 1918.

Malaya: various small craft, Singapore harbour. Shots taken from dockside. Chinese junk at sea. Brief sequence of street scenes. Chinese labourers working in rice paddies and tilling fields. Forest landscape shots. Peasants, carrying heavy loads, walk along a road (shot list: ‘Chinese on road approaching Malacca’). Street scenes, town identified in shot list as Malacca: man carrying heavy load across shoulders; bullock cart; hand-drawn rickshaw. Scenes up country: peasants carrying heavy loads, identified in shot list as ‘chinese women tin-washers’; Ipoh. Temple built into cliff face (location?). Penang: street procession. Many people carrying banners and lanterns, musical ensembles. Bangkok: harbour scenes. Shot list: ‘Arrival of Commander in Chief’: smartly dressed Thais and Europeans (military and colonial dress) apparently awaiting an event, stand together in a courtyard. Backwater scenes, Bangkok: various small craft, water market scenes. The Mekong: shots of river traffic. Various domestic scenes on banks of river; crowded street scenes. Further shots on river, taken from a motorised boat: bankside houses, temples, jetties, warehouses, small river craft, large commercial vessels – a varied panorama of river life.

Notes

Catalogue entry by Dr Francis Gooding, AHRC Colonial Film Database 2010.