A countryman of his, Galen Bocca, who had tried but failed to instigate a film industry in Shanghai, gave Ramos all his film equipment.

Motion pictures had been introduced to Shanghai at the end of the 19th century, but they had not developed into a lucrative business.

Determined to make it work, Ramos decided on a change of tack. Instead of screening films in places frequented only by the upper-middle-classes like other movie presenters before him, Ramos sought out lower-class venues.

His first choice was Fuzhou Road, then the city's "fashionable red-light district." Ramos rented a small room on the ground floor of Qing Liang Ge, or Green Lotus Pavilion which fronted as a teahouse but was in fact a brothel.

To promote his film shows, Ramos paid some Indian vagabonds dressed in brightly-coloured clothes to stand outside the venue every day playing trumpets and drums. He also hired street prostitutes to do belly dancing to the music of the Indians which created quite a sensation. Passers-by stopped in their tracks and happily paid up the low price of a ticket to watch a 15-minute movie.

In just a few years, Ramos was able to build his own cinema, the Illusion, on a piece of waste land near a British-run horse racecourse.

In the summer of 1908, the Illusion cinema opened for business. The Illusion did blockbuster trade when a documentary about Emperor Guang Xu and the Empress Dowager Ci Xi's funeral ceremonies was screened in November 1908.

Ramos soon built another cinema, the Hongkou Motion Picture Garden, in December, 1908, where he screened a foreign feature film called "The Dragon Nest."

In the following year, Ramos had another cinema built where Haining Road and Sichuan Road North cross. The Victoria Theatre, now Shengli Dianyingyuan or Victory Cinema, was Shanghai's first cinema in the modern sense.

Later, several other foreigners came to Shanghai and built and managed cinemas. But Ramos continued to dominate the market. In 1914, he built another quality cinema - the Olympic Theatre, now Xinhua Cinema on Nanjing Road West. Many Chinese-made films were screened there.

A few years later, Ramos built three more cinemas - the Empire, the Carter and the Wan Guo in different parts of the city. In 1920, Ramos built the China Theatre to replace the old Hongkou Motion Picture Garden nearby.

Ramos now owned six cinemas and a hotel and he would put on films at upmarket entertainment spots; he even started financing the making of films.

In 1922, however, Ramos' business partner was mysteriously murdered which shocked him and made him resolve to withdraw from the business.

In 1926, Ramos rented all his six cinemas to the Chinese-run Central Film Show Company. Then he retired and returned to Spain a millionaire. In 1931, Ramos sold off the six cinemas to the Central Film Show company.

(By Bian Yi)