Heroic headmaster on silver sreen

The life of Oxford graduate turned Chinese war hero George Hogg is the stuff film-makers dream of.

Hogg was just 23 when he left England and arrived in China for a two-day visit in 1937.

Fascinated by the place, he flung himself into life in civil war China, first reporting on the war, then smuggling food and medicines to guerrillas.

But it was during his time as headmaster of a school for orphans, when he led a group of 60 children on a 1126km march across high mountain ranges in the winter of 1944-45 to escape the advancing Japanese forces, that Hogg really found his calling.

Despite treacherous conditions, all but one boy survived the expedition.

Their schoolmaster was not to be so lucky, however.

Just a few months later Hogg cut his foot and developed tetanus.

He passed away in July 1945 - seven years after arriving in China.

"My all to the school" was all his will read.

But he was not forgotten by the many young charges who owed their lives to the charismatic Englishman, and who many years later erected a statue in his memory.

Which is how journalist James MacManus came across the previously little-known story, when he was working in China in 1984.

"This whole saga started in the bar, as some great stories do start, of the British Embassy Club in Beijing, where I was having a quiet beer on a Friday evening in August 1984," MacManus said.

"I heard a British diplomat complaining loudly to a colleague that he had to fly to a little place called Shandan [in northwest China] because the Chinese were putting up a statue to an Englishman, and the diplomat said he'd never heard of this Englishman.

"I found out this was George Hogg, and George Hogg was being honoured by the old schoolboys of a school he'd run in the 1940s.

"So I wrote the story for the Daily Telegraph of London . . . and I forgot about it.

"And when I got back to London I got a call from . . . a big Hollywood producer, who flew straight over to London and said this is a great story, it's going to make a great film."

MacManus insisted on writing the script himself, and six weeks later presented a first draft.

Years of rewrites, a revolving door of producers and directors, and difficulties with filming in China, held the film back from being made.

Now, some 23 years later, Children Of The Silk Road hits cinemas in New Zealand, directed by Roger Spottiswoode, and starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Australian actress Radha Mitchell.

But MacManus, who is now an executive director of Rupert Murdoch's News International in London and managing director of The Times Literary Supplement, says the film was written before he knew Hogg's full story.

He says the truth is even more intriguing than he imagined.

"The script is a work of imagination," he says.

"When I wrote the film script I researched his life, certainly his life in China, and I wrote the film around that, but clearly you're writing a work of imagination.

"Once the film was made I was then asked to write a book, and in many ways his real life, I discovered, was actually more exciting and adventurous than what I put into the script."

Extensive research, interviews with surviving family members and friends, letters sent home and news stories written by Hogg painted a picture of a young, passionate and joyful man.

MacManus recounts Hogg's life faithfully in his book Ocean Devil.

"The great secret of George Hogg's time in China was he really enjoyed himself," MacManus says.

"He loved what he was doing, he loved where he was, despite all the privations and the violence and the danger, and when he took over that school he really did find his mission in life.

"When he took the children over the mountains on that trek, this was a very high-risk decision, and had he failed he would have gone down in history as a mad Englishman who sacrificed Chinese children for his own vanity.

"But he didn't. Apart from the loss of one child he got them all to safety."

- Alyssa Braithwaite