I wrote an email to the Hong Kong Film Archive several days ago, asking if they might have any information on the Charlie Chan films made in Shanghai. I gave them key details in a concise way.

I wrote to the Hong Kong Film Archive instead of the China Film Archive because the website is in English and Chinese, so I was able to navigate around better and find the contact email and I thought that it would be alright to email that archive in English. There is also a Shanghai Film Archive, but I see no contact email there.

I just received the following polite reply...

++++++++++++++

Dear Douglas,

Thank you for you email.

You may try to contact China Film Archive (http://www.cfa.gov.cn/#) for
further information.

Please contact us for further query.

Regards,
Karen KAN
Cataloguer
Hong Kong Film Archive Resource Centre

The contact email for the China Film Archive appears to be:

laser_tel@sina.com

...but it would probably be best to write to this archive in Chinese.

Perhaps I can ask one of my Chinese-speaking students to email this archive on my behalf.

Dear Douglas,

It will be great if your Chinese speaking students can help you out with this. Also, have you asked any of them to provide a more accurate translation into English of the two "Charlie Chn" movies that you have been investigating?

Sincerely,
Rush

Rush:

I can ask them over time for assistance. I don't want to impose on them too greatly to do a bunch of free translation for me, but I'll see what I can do. The automatic translations are tantalizing, but extremely garbled. However, when I see 'Detective Chen Chali' in the translation, that seems to indicate that Xiyuan Xu is playing Charlie Chan in the film at least.

Doug