Life of a Legend: A Brief History of Wong Fei-hung On-Screen

Born in 1905, Kwan dropped out of school at eight years old to help support his family and eventually apprenticed to a Cantonese-opera troupe. He formed his own opera company at twenty-two, and several years later, after returning to Hong Kong from touring the United States, wrote and starred in several Chinese operas set in the Wild West that showcased his bullwhip and archery skills. But by 1946, Kwan’s macho performing style had fallen out of favor. Forty-one years old and too proud to play supporting parts, he decided to retire after touring two shows in the sticks, one of which was called Wong Fei-hung.

This Wong Fei-hung Is Too Young

After the failure of both Shaw Brothers and its rival, Golden Harvest, to revive the character in the early seventies, it looked as if Wong Fei-hung’s time had passed. But in 1976, he received two radical reinterpretations, the first on television. The TVB production Wong Fei-hung (1976) saw the young writer-director Clifford Choi hire Kwan Tak-hing to play Wong and capture the uneasy tone of seventies Hong Kong by setting his show in the politically turbulent early Republican period (1915–19). Choi dispatched Wong all over China, having him take on foreign powers, Japanese spies, and corrupt officials instead of local bullies. Cosmopolitan and political, the show also featured sophisticated action, courtesy of Simon Yuen, with the seventy-year-old Kwan still insisting on performing his own stunts.

That same year, Lau Kar-leung—son of Lau Cham, who was a student of Wong’s student Butcher Wing and also one of the film series’s original action choreographers—revived the Wong franchise on the big screen by directing Challenge of the Masters (1976). A spoiled brat whose dad doesn’t think he deserves to learn kung fu, Wong (played by Gordon Liu, then in his early twenties) gets beaten and humiliated by local thugs but eventually hones his body and spirit after apprenticing with a tough teacher. Two years later, one of Yuen’s sons, Yuen Wo-ping, cast Jackie Chan as a variation on Lau’s young, hotheaded Wong. Yuen Wo-ping and Chan had just delivered their smash-hit kung-fu comedy Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow, and now they returned with more of the same in Drunken Master (1978). Featuring Simon Yuen as Beggar So, a seriously decrepit alcoholic who teaches Wong to be a badass, the flick is mostly concerned with showing Chan’s Wong macking on women, picking fights, and falling face-first in poop. Worlds away from Kwan’s righteous portrayal of the master, it became a bigger hit than Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow.

This Wong Fei-hung Is Just Right

Kwan Tak-hing’s stern but loving Wong Fei-hung had presided over a Hong Kong experiencing decades of growth that culminated in a youth revolution in 1967. The economic boom of the late seventies gave birth to a generation of yuppies who wanted Yuen Wo-ping’s younger, funnier Wong. The eighties saw Britain and China negotiate Hong Kong’s return to Chinese rule in 1997, in a “one country, two systems” model, but the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of prodemocracy protesters on the Mainland sent Hong Kong reeling. Hundreds of thousands of Hong Kongers rushed to secure foreign passports in its wake, and many of the colony’s residents experienced an identity crisis. Were they Chinese? Were they Westerners? How could they navigate a changing world while holding on to their past? Enter Tsui Hark, Hong Kong’s most reliable hitmaker of the eighties, bringing a decade of filmmaking innovation to his own Wong series.

Controversially, Tsui cast Jet Li, a divorced, B-list Mainland martial artist, as the southern-Chinese saint. Tsui and composer James Wong Jim modernized the famous theme song from the original series, “On the General’s Orders,” turning it into the pop song “A Man Should Strengthen Himself.” In addition, Tsui rewound the clock to set his film late in the Qing dynasty, around 1875, when Wong was twenty-eight, the same age as Li at the time. Although Yuen and Lau Kar-leung had given audiences a late-Qing Wong, Tsui’s wasn’t a brash young punk but already a teacher himself. However, the director’s biggest innovation was to treat Wong as a human being. In contrast to the rigid icon played by Kwan, Tsui portrayed Wong as a naive, sheltered kid with no knowledge of the world outside Chinese medicine and martial arts, and with little sense of how to navigate a country flooded by foreigners. Unlike Lau’s and Yuen’s Wongs, Tsui’s adheres to Confucian tradition but gradually learns to embrace change while preserving his identity. Another important contribution to the mythos was Thirteenth Aunt. Played by Rosamund Kwan, she is Wong’s distant aunt by marriage, just returned from getting an education in England and sporting a crush on Wong. She’s the voice of progress, embracing Western technology and ideas and encouraging Wong to modernize, and she has been part of almost every iteration of the Wong legend since.

Once Upon a Time in China became an award-winning blockbuster, spawning parodies and imitations, including the slapstick Once Upon a Time a Hero in China (1992), as well as many sequels. Taking a cue from Clifford Choi’s seventies television series, Tsui wanted to involve Wong in every aspect of Chinese history, and so Once Upon a Time in China II (1992) sends him, Leung Foon, and Thirteenth Aunt to Canton, where a revolt by the anti-Western White Lotus Sect is coming down like a hammer. OUATIC III (1993) sees the same group traveling to Beijing, where they get caught up in a Russian plot to kill the Chinese prime minister amid a massive lion-dance competition. The film climaxes with Wong spurning recognition from the empress and dressing down her ministers for failing the people, a revolutionary moment in the character’s evolution from Kwan’s respectful avatar of Confucian virtue to a man rejecting the second-highest authority in existence.