Chinese Car Brands That Time Forgot: The mysterious Jianhua

Not long ago, we have looked at Tianlong wedding cars. Today we have another wedding car company to look at – Jianhua

Jianhua car brand is much more mysterious compared to Tianlong, their website http://jh-car.tochgo.com/ never being saved on wayback machine and thus being lost to time. However there is few facts we do know for sure – it was made by Hunan Jinyuan Auto Developing Ltd. Co., located in Wangcheng district in Changsha, Hunan province.

Thanks to Marshall_Isl, we now know the company was established on June 30th, 1989.
The earliest pictures we have of Jianhua were made when Mr. Adrian Bradshaw visited in the factory in 1990.

We do not have pictures of this particular closed top model as complete, only few more from the construction. It was powered by an unknown 4 cylinder engine.

However, it does fall in line with the design that the first confirmed Jianhua vehicle looked like: JH6450

This is likely the version that was produced in July 1991 and shown later that year in the first modern Beijing motor show.

Here with the additional 3^rd foglight:

The car got eventually reworked -sligthly different car with the more sloped window and different front grille, but same licence plate.

In this form it was entered into a series of car racing events in 1992 and 1993, beating Santanas, Peugeots and Audis. No wonder, as one of the engines avaliable was an Infiniti V8! By that point 6 different variants of Jianhua cars were made. One thing is for sure, the livery of Jianhua’s halo car very cool.

Note the fold out extra seating in the trunk, a common feature of real 1930s cars.

Some of our eagle eyed viewers might have noticed a completed sedan in the background of one of the 1990 pictures from Adrian. The bodywork doesnt match with anything we are aware of, even the body of the car next to it that is in the process of being built. I sadly do not have more pictures of it.

After these early cars the Santana based JH6620 24V300 came about in 1995, and was technically built until 2008. Tycho has covered it extensively in past: 

Jianhua has also built a budget limousine based on Xiali:

But there is one more Jianhua which is a complete mystery to me:

Blue coupé without known name (seems to be in the 4 meter range), made out of what seemingly once was a 3 door hatchback. Styling is closer to the later Jianhua cars.

Mr. Bradshaw has spotted in the year 1998 possible variant of the JH64XX. Note the ridge running under the rear window and across the C-pillar, which the colored picture does not have.

3 door hatchbacks were not common back in the day, chinese people wanted the most value for your money when buying something as expensive as a car back in the 1990s. The only 3 door hatch built in China from around that period I can think of is Subaru Rex, but that does not quite match up. The possibility of a completly custom body is always on the table. So thats where I ask you, the dear reader, to lend me a hand with this riddle.

Special thanks to Erik van Ingen Schenau and Adrian Bradshaw for providing me with many never-seen-before pictures.

EDIT: User derek c. left a picture under a different article of a mysterious car from a movie called 危情狂蝶 from 1994. Although it doesnt exactly match any of the cars we have seen, it is undoubtedly a Jianhua. It looks to have the front end similar to the light blue coupe (different grille pattern though), and at least the middle section from the racing JH6450:

1. no triangle window in the door,
2. small cutout on the top edge of the doors, old timey-car style.
3. windshield seems to be the same shape
4. A pillars seem to follow the same angle

I decided to track down the movie, to see more of the car. Interestingly enough, there are actually two different cars used!

If anybody was in doubt, rear of the car is 100% Jianhua styling. Just look at the rear lights!

It is definately a car good only for good weather – it doesnt appear to have any roof! It has the same kind of pop-out seating at the back as the racing car.

And here is the second car. Front end is almost identical to the unit we already saw, but there are some differences elsewhere. Note the apparent lack of mirrors (?), our first car had black, almost truck-like mirrors. The grille has 13 slats, compared to the 11 on the other car.

Most notably, there is a quarter glass present on the door. It doesn’t appear too well on this dark shot, but you can also see that the door cutout is different – not as deep, and there is a visible step where it meets up with the bodywork again. That was not the case on our first car, the transition from the door to the bodywork was different.

The rear part of the body looks different aswell, it’s center section is level untill the end of the car:

Interior shot, the dashboard looks incredibly rudamentary… You can see the quarter glass there very well – this is what made me realise there are actually two different Jianhuas present in the movie. And at last, final view of the other variant we get is from the back. We can see here that the interior is set up as a regular 4-seater cabriolet, no old timey pop up rear seats. The spare tire is missing from the exterior aswell.

So the result? two cars, with bodies unlike what we saw in any other Jianhua pictures. The design elements are clear, both of them are Jianghua cars, but we dont know their name or anything else…

EDIT: Tycho de Feijter has sent me some more pictures of Jianhua cars: