The Children of Huang Shi ( Chinese: 黄石的孩子; working title: The Bitter Sea, also known as Escape from Huang Shi and Children of the Silk Road ) is a 2008 film. The director was Roger Spottiswoode and the writers James MacManus and Jane Hawksley.

Cast

• Jonathan Rhys Meyers as George Hogg
• Radha Mitchell as Lee Pearson
• Chow Yun-Fat as Chen Hansheng
• Michelle Yeoh as Mrs. Wang

Plot summary

George Hogg (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) is a young British journalist from Hertfordshire in England. In 1938, during the early days of the Japanese occupation of China, he sneaks into Nanjing, China, by pretending to be a Red Cross aid worker. Hogg is captured by the Japanese while photographing them committing atrocities and is about to be executed when Chen Hansheng (Chow Yun-Fat), a Chinese communist resistance fighter, saves him. While hiding in the rubble with his new allies, Hogg witnesses the execution of two of his colleagues by the Japanese. Overwhelmed by shock, he inadvertently reveals their presence. A firefight ensues, and Hogg is wounded. While convalescing, he is sent to an orphanage with 60 boys in Huangshi to help Lee Pearson (Radha Mitchell), the American nurse who runs it. Soon after his arrival, the boys savagely attack Hogg with sticks; thankfully, Lee arrives just in time and threatens to abandon the boys, leaving them without medical supplies or food.

At Lee's insistence, Hogg helps her to convince the boys that the treatment of lice by flea powder does not hurt. Lee's demonstration of the treatment on a naked Hoggs in the middle of the courtyard manages to convince the boys and they all promptly accept treatment. Lee leaves for two months, and Hogg reluctantly stays behind so as not to leave the boys abandoned. Hogg gains the boys' respect by repairing the lighting, being their teacher, and getting food for them.

Fleeing from the nationalists who want to conscript the boys into their army to fight the Japanese, they make a three-month journey across the snow-bound Liu Pan Shan mountains to safety on the edge of the Mongolian desert, the first 900 km on foot. To their relief, for the last part of the journey they are supplied with four trucks.

At the destination they are supplied with a building that they turn into a new orphanage. In 1945 Hogg dies of tetanus. This was foreshadowed by Lee, when she had described the horrors of the disease to him earlier.

The film features the Rape of Nanking [1] and the Sankō Sakusen (the Japanese scorched earth policy Kill All, Destroy All, Burn All), and ends with a few brief interview snippets with real surviving orphans.