Titanic’s Chinese Survivors

Episode details

Eight Names on a List

Eight Chinese passengers boarded RMS Titanic. Six survived. So why did their story nearly disappear from Titanic history?

In this episode of The Titanic Provenance Files, Damon Henrichs talks with Steven Schwankert, author of The Six: The Untold Story of Titanic’s Chinese Survivors and part of the team behind the documentary The Six.

The investigation begins with an extraordinarily simple artifact: eight names on a passenger list. From there, Schwankert and his research team followed an evidence trail through shipping records, immigration documents, survivor testimony, family history, and original archival files to reconstruct the lives behind those names.

Along the way, we explore why Chinese sailors were traveling through Britain and New York in 1912, how the Chinese Exclusion Act shaped what happened to them after the disaster, and why changing names and transliterations make their identities so difficult to follow more than a century later.

We also examine Fang Lang, also known as Fong Wing Sun, one of the last people rescued from the freezing Atlantic, and the accusations surrounding Chinese passengers in Collapsible C. Were they hiding? Were they disguised as women? Or did generations of Titanic storytelling build a dramatic narrative from fragments of testimony that do not survive closer scrutiny?

Schwankert explains how he tests those claims against other testimony, archival records, and even the physical realities of Titanic’s lifeboats. As he puts it during the conversation:

“The referee in this world is physics.”

This is a story about more than six survivors. It is about how historical narratives are built, how prejudice can become embedded in the record, and what happens when researchers return to the original evidence and ask the questions that were left unanswered.

Because these men may not have been heroes.

But they certainly were not villains.

Featuring Steven Schwankert, author of The Six: The Untold Story of Titanic’s Chinese Survivors.

Find Steven Schwankert’s book: The Six: The Untold Story of Titanic’s Chinese Survivors

Watch the documentary: The Six