Filmmaker Christopher Doyle narrates this second installment of a series built from the British Film Institute's China collection, drawing on footage that had sat unseen for decades. The reels open on 1930s Beijing captured in what is identified as the first color film ever shot in China, moving between temple rituals and street life before the war arrives. Shanghai appears in its jazz-age glamour, nightclubs and foreign concessions running alongside the poverty just outside their doors, a contrast the cameras of the time recorded almost by accident. The film then follows the country into the Japanese invasion of 1937, using newsreel and amateur footage to show a China that vanishes as the fighting spreads. It closes on Nanjing Road decades later, filmed again as the People's Liberation Army marches past with Mao Zedong's portrait held above the crowd, a bookend to the same street shot fifty years earlier. Doyle's narration stays close to the images, letting the footage carry the sense of a country remaking itself twice within one lifetime.