The long march across China (and a very British hero)

The story of how a young Englishman, George Hogg, took 60 orphans on a journey of hundreds of miles to safety across war-ravaged China in the winter of 1944 is one of the more remarkable tales of the Second World War.

In the town of Shandan, in Gansu province on the Mongolian border, Hogg and his friend and mentor, the New Zealand philanthropist Rewi Alley, are remembered with a statue and affection, but Hogg is little known outside China. This is all set to change with a new film called The Children of Huang Shi currently being made by the Canadian-born director Roger Spottiswoode.

With Japanese forces snapping at their heels as they made their western advance across China in 1944, and with the help of Mao Zedong's Communist guerrillas, Hogg escorted the boys across 688 miles of treacherous mountainous terrain in north-western China to a temple town in Shandan. Just one year later, Hogg contracted tetanus after he injured his toe playing basketball with the students. With no medicines to stop lockjaw, he died aged 29.

His Chinese odyssey is just one small part of this remarkable Englishman's life, which encompassed the most radical changes the Middle Kingdom had seen for thousands of years. A privileged Oxford graduate, seemingly destined for middle-class security, Hogg landed in Shanghai at the tender age of 23 during a trip around the world. He worked as a journalist for the United Press news agency and among the historical events he witnessed was the brutal occupation by the Japanese of the then-capital Nanking, now Nanjing.

In China, no one talks about the Second World War, instead people talk about the Anti-Japanese War, which ran from 1931, when the Japanese invaded Manchuria, until 1945 when the Japanese capitulated. The war still has political ramifications in China and relations between the two Asian powers have yet to recover fully - the Chinese believe the Japanese have never expressed proper remorse.

In 1937 marauding Japanese troops began what has become known as the Rape of Nanking, killing many thousands of Chinese civilians. The massacre remains a contentious issue between the countries: China says that 300,000 people were killed while some Japanese researchers consider the death toll to be between 100,000 and 200,000.

Hogg became involved with Alley, who had set up a scheme known as the Industrial Co-operative, a Chinese version of the American "New Deal" programme of industrial development. The co-operative's slogan -"Gung Ho" - has passed into the language. In 1942 Alley set up a system of schools called the Bailie Schools after his friend Joseph Bailie, an American missionary who pioneered the idea of integrating theory and practice in education in China.

Hogg, who relates the story in his book I see a New China, ran the school at Shuangshipu, around 125 miles west of Xi'an, in Shaanxi province with great success, but was forced to pack up the school on carts and head for Gansu as the war encroached.

It was an incredibly dangerous journey - poor mountainous roads and Japanese soldiers everywhere. Two boys died during the journey. Once in Shandan, Alley rented a few old temples and turned them into classrooms and workshops, and appointed Hogg as headmaster.

The story of foreigners leading orphans through China in the face of adversity has been told before - Ingrid Bergman as Gladys Alward in The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958) did much the same thing. However, The Children of Huang Shi is much more of a Chinese movie than it is Hollywood's reading of Chinese history.

Spottiswoode, whose prolific output includes Hiroshima, Tomorrow Never Dies and Under Fire , is a man who likes to engage with political issues in his films: he has just come back from filming in Rwanda. His interest is in how politics plays out with the individual. For him, The Children of Huang Shi fulfils a dream of making a Chinese movie.

"I never had a story, and then this came along. The film is about people being taken out of their cultures - it's about a young Englishman from a middle-class background trying to break out, who came into this highly different world and found a courage that he didn't expect," says Spottiswoode, talking on location in Zhejiang province as the production goes all-out to finish in time for Chinese New Year later this month.

After months of shooting in the freezing badlands of western China's Gansu province, the production has arrived at the hilly heart of Zhejiang in the east, and the air is so cold that the cameras, the crew and the assembled actors are in constant danger of seizing up. But hot ginger tea and Spottiswoode's wry humour seem to be keeping things going at the moment.

The former Bond director needs to keep spirits high - his crew has put up with more than most in some of China's most spectacular and remote locations. The £10m movie, which features epic battle scenes, a strong emotional dimension and a sympathetic reading of recent Chinese history, is due in cinemas early next year. We'll have to wait and see the fate of the fictional Hogg - the film, says Spottiswoode, is more about broader truths than individual biographical detail. Just as the trek took Hogg and the orphans to Gansu, so too has this film production travelled to some of the most remote regions of China, with cast and crew staying in some inhospitable places, including an aluminium factory in Gansu province.Hogg is played by the up-and-coming Irish actor Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, who tramps about the set in muddy boots and a pea-green People's Liberation Army greatcoat, entertaining a gang of Chinese "orphans" by calling them troublemakers.

As sheets of icy rain fall on the tent, Rhys Meyers grips his precious cigarettes as dozens of young extras, malnourished looking donkeys and Muriel the goat wander around against a backdrop of a lake surrounded by steep cliffs. The convoy looks surprisingly lifelike and gives a sense of what the conditions for Hogg's journey must have been like.

In the film, Hogg meets a nurse called Lee, played by an Australian actor, Radha Mitchell. Spottiswoode says Lee is an amalgam of many women who made the decision to travel to China for adventure. Some, like the Lee character, ended up as nurses or doctors, despite their lack of formal education.

Hogg falls in with a Chinese partisan leader, played by the Hong Kong legend Chow Yun-Fat. Another Hong Kong stalwart, the Malaysian Michelle Yeoh, cameos as an aristocratic survivor called Madame Wang.

The rangy, schoolboyish philanthropist poses a big challenge for Rhys Meyers, a Dublin-born, Cork-raised actor who is better known for portraying arrogance and menace than compassion for orphans. As the Ripleyesque Chris Wilton in Woody Allen's Match Point last year, he gave a studied performance as a villain, while he has also played the sullen glam star Brian Slade in Velvet Goldmine and the petulant George Osborne in Vanity Fair.

"Many of my characters have had this air of arrogance about them. But Hogg is not an arrogant character in any way and I hope he doesn't come off as arrogant ... it's the one thing I try not to play at all," he says. "He's a man struggling in a society that he will truly never understand but yet feels an obligation to these children that he can't help himself but feel. I hope people will be able to see that in the movie."

He was not overly aware of Hogg's story when he arrived in China, despite having travelled to Tibet when he was a teenager. "It was all a shock. I've travelled in every continent in the world, there's something different about China, of all the places I've been to, it's really different, you're very far from home, and far from everything you ever knew. I was in Tibet when I was 19, but you can't really put Tibet and China in the same bracket, they are two very, very different parts of the Asian culture."

After agreeing to play Hogg, Rhys Meyers chose not to research too thoroughly but to come to China as a novice, just as Hogg did, in order to feel that same shock of the unknown.

Many of the orphans in the film were recruited from Beijing Opera schools, and other schools along the way. "This was tough at the start, but it's getting easier," says one of the "orphans", wearying of the punishing filming schedule and on-set lessons from their travelling tutor. "You know my favourite English words are, 'Go home to rest'. I don't like the English words: 'One more time'," he says.

You sense that the film-making experience has been a pretty steep learning curve for these young actors - sleeping in a power station in Gansu is an experience not afforded to every visitor to China - but this expeditionary feeling informs much of the film's energy.

Much of the production took place in Hengdian studios, a specially developed lot near Hangzhou city in eastern China, where a big chunk of old China has been recreated for shooting historical epics and costume drama TV shows. The production hauled itself out to scenic spots near the studios, hard to get to but extremely rewarding once you do.

The Rape of Nanking is set to feature in a number of Chinese and foreign film projects this year, but while being set in the China of its time, The Children of Huang Shi is not a solely a movie about the atrocities of war but of one Briton's heroism and his journey of discovery.

Interesting? Click here to explore further