A century ago this year, an 18-year-old from Durrus in west Cork arrived in China. Over the next few years, he played an inestimable role in the first great revolution of the 20th century. Sean Hurley was one of the first Irish people to have had a detailed knowledge of China and he was the first Irish person to hold a Chinese passport.
From a farming background in Durrus, Hurley started travelling in his teens, first to the United States. Then in 1905, he was appointed to a job in the British customs office in Shanghai, a move that began a lifelong obsession with China. Shanghai was then a colonised city, controlled by Britain, France, Japan and the US, but already a vast port.
For the next 10 years Hurley travelled widely throughout China, at a time when the sedan chair was still one of the main means of transport. He was one of the very few Westerners to visit the troubled Sino-Russian border region.
During his first few years in China, the Qing dynasty was starting to collapse after the failed Boxer Rebellion of 1900. A man called Sun Yat-sen, later known as the "father of the revolution" and "father of the republic", was fomenting dissent against the Qing dynasty, which finally crumpled in 1911. The young Sean Hurley, who became a fluent speaker of Chinese, was active in helping to train activists loyal to Sun Yat-sen, as he sought to overthrow the corrupt and feeble old ruling order. It was a time of great turmoil and uncertainty as the old framework of dynastic rule in China, dating back over two millenia, began to collapse.
On January 1st 1912, the new Republic of China came into being, with Sun Yat-sen as its president. (It was eventually replaced in mainland China by the Communist regime, which came to power in 1949.) The young Hurley later received a gift of many items of armoury, including cannon shells and guns, as well as Chinese porcelain, from the new Chinese president, who also honoured him with the first Chinese passport given to an Irish person.
In 1915 Hurley returned home to Ireland, where intense nationalist activity was in full flow, just as it had been in China a few years previously. One of his great political friends was Michael Collins and a still extant photograph shows the two of them in obviously serious conversation as they walked across O'Connell Bridge in Dublin.
Hurley's time in China had encouraged his artistic instincts - he loved drawing and photography - and eventually he opened two photographic studios in Dublin city centre, one in Henry Street, the other in Grafton Street.
Then he poured much of his savings and income into an ill-fated film venture, a production called Land of her Fathers, with a storyline of a traditional Irish romance. His production company was called Transatlantic Pictures.
Hurley and his director, an American called Frank Winslow, lined up what was starry cast of Abbey actors. Included were Barry Fitzgerald, Arthur Shields, FJ McCormick, Gabriel Fallon, Maureen Delany and Eileen Crowe. The female lead was played by a young Trinity graduate, Phyllis Wakely, daughter of a judge in Dublin, while the male lead was played by the up-and-coming Micheál MacLiammóir, then aged 26.
The exteriors sequences were shot on the Powerscourt estate in Enniskerry, Co Wicklow and at Garinish Island, in west Cork. Most of the interiors were filmed in and around Dublin. Locations used included what was then Lady Ardilaun's residence, St Anne's in Raheny. Lady Ardilaun, one of the Guinness clan, died the year the film was made and the house itself was burned down in 1943. Its name is today remembered in the surrounding park.
Another location used was "Westbury" in Dundrum, the home of the family of Denis Devlin, the diplomat and poet, while Sean Hurley also used his own large house in Stillorgan, then still a rural part of south Co Dublin.
Duly passed by Ireland's first film censor, the film had a private screening at the old Grafton Cinema, Grafton Street, October 1st, 1925. Hurley's eye was on the American market and he hired two people recommended to him to work as distributors for the film in the US. They attended the various locations in Ireland during the shoot, then returned to the US with Hurley to screen the film there.
However, the morning after their arrival in New York, the two agents disappeared with their copy of the film. Hurley never caught up with them, despite hiring a private detective. The two men succeeded in organising clandestine showings of the film in various US cities, but Hurley never showed it publicly there or in Ireland. Hurley never made another film, though the few critics who had seen the film on its only showing, were very favourably impressed. One evening newspaper critic described it as the most ambitious Irish-made film yet attempted.
In 1960, the year before he died, Hurley presented his copy of the film to the National Library. It was last seen there in the early 1970s by Peter Kennerly, who was making a film for RTÉ television about Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards. In subsequent years, the film vanished, though some offcuts and still prints still survive.
Sean Hurley himself later became involved in the setting up of Aer Lingus and what is now IDA Ireland, but for the past 15 or 20 years of his life, he was crippled by asthma. However, he remained a fluent Chinese linguist until the very end.
His family went on to successes of their own, including a daughter, Maureen, a noted singer and harpist who worked for RTÉ for many years. She was first Irish harpist to appear on Russian television.