Once Upon a Time in China: The Complete Films: Past Master

Tsui’s signature frenzied storytelling and even more delirious editing mirrored Hong Kong’s constant change and relentless pace—particularly as the city’s film industry fired on all cylinders during its golden age of the eighties and nineties. In this period, his most prolific, he hit his highest artistic notes after leaving the commercial powerhouse Cinema City to found the production company Film Workshop with Nansun Shi, his work partner and future wife. Critical and box-office triumphs tumbled out under his supervision: John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow (1986) and The Killer (1989), and Ching Siu-tung’s A Chinese Ghost Story (1987) and Swordsman II (codirected with Stanley Tong, 1992). These films consolidated Tsui’s reputation as the king of remakes, or, rather, reinvention, drawing on diverse sources and blending genres, tones, and technique with the most imaginative abandon.

The pinnacle of his Hong Kong career arrived in 1991, when he dusted off a marathon martial-arts saga based on the life of Cantonese folk hero Wong Fei-hung (1847–1925), the coach of a local militia who also ran the respected apothecary Po Chi Lam. The earlier series, directed mostly by Wu Pang, is among the longest-running (1949–70) in cinematic history. Veteran Cantonese-opera star Kwan Tak-hing played the role around eighty times. Tsui’s new rendition, Once Upon a Time in China, struck box-office gold, and four subsequent films were bankrolled by Golden Harvest, the studio that had given Bruce Lee his break.

Once Upon a Time in China boasted its own impressive star turn. Most Hong Kong action stars, including Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung, got their training as Beijing-opera apprentices. But Jet Li, a “national treasure,” in Tsui’s words, took a different path. A five-time wushu national champion from Beijing, he “retired” from competitive martial arts while still a teenager. He was soon scouted to star in the Shaolin Temple trilogy (1982–86), which unleashed a kung-fu and tourism fever both within China and abroad. Li’s inimitable poise and grace were accentuated by the death-defying moves he executed as Wong Fei-hung, helping to launch him to Hollywood stardom later that decade.

Due to contract issues with Golden Harvest, Li left the series after Once Upon a Time in China III (1993). He rejoined Tsui for Once Upon a Time in China and America, but in the meantime another performer made his mark as the beloved hero: Vincent Zhao was plucked from obscurity as a replacement in OUATIC IV (1993) and V (1994). A former national wushu champion himself, Zhao had appeared alongside Li in Fong Sai Yuk (1993), which Li also produced. Nine years younger than Li, the Heilongjiang native brought strapping manliness and lithe rigor to the role of Wong.

By the nineties, the homespun virtues that Master Kwan embodied were out of step with cosmopolitan Hong Kong audiences. Tsui’s sometimes fondly irreverent approach helped rebrand the original series’s characters. The hero is transformed from a long-winded elder, prone to pausing a fight scene to dish out Confucian moral platitudes, to a vigorous man of action in his prime. Li builds on his early screen persona as a cloistered Shaolin monk in portraying the humble and righteous hero, who is also straitlaced and a little socially inept. Unlike the irreproachable authority figure projected by Kwan, Li’s Wong finds that his reverence for traditional virtues often puts him at odds with a simultaneously advancing and devolving world. He is also more introspective, at times given to despair about his country and human nature.

Tsui revitalized the franchise as well by incorporating a romantic arc that parodies sprawling Chinese family trees: Wong falls in love with his “thirteenth aunt,” a British-educated distant relative by marriage. Given her progressive ideas about industrialization, technology, and female emancipation, their courtship personifies the collision of East and West—a central theme of the series. The character’s influence was sizable: Chinese period films were soon flooded with heroines in Victorian bonnets and gowns. Played with spunky intelligence by Rosamund Kwan, who appears in all but OUATIC IV, Thirteenth Aunt lends emotional continuity to the series.

OUATIC, and the films that followed it, also redefined the hierarchical master-disciple relationships that had long been a part of the Wong mythos. Here, Wong’s foibles, among them his petty jealousies and ploys to save face, put him on the same level with his followers, who themselves are rendered relatable to a contemporary audience. Bucktooth So, a bumpkin often mocked for his stuttering in the old series, receives a radical makeover as an ABC (American-born Chinese) who speaks perfect English but struggles to pronounce Cantonese. Disciple Leung Foon, once played by portly, avuncular Tso Tat-wah, evolves substantially over the course of Tsui’s series. In OUATIC, Yuen Biao, a major star at the time, brings showstopping acrobatics to the character to underscore his grit. From OUATIC II (1992) on, Max Mok Siu-ching was recast as Leung, now a comic sidekick and streetwise foil for his master’s unwavering integrity.

While Leung provides mischievous high jinks, the rickshaw puller Clubfoot (Xiong Xin-xin) delivers emotional heft in OUATIC III with his moving transformation from a vicious adversary of Wong’s to a loyal disciple. Like Leung, he initially follows the wrong master but is eventually humbled by Wong’s compassion, and realizes that moral virtue is superior to any martial skill. Xiong first appeared in the series as Priest Kung, the leader of the White Lotus Sect, in OUATIC II. His commanding presence led to his recasting as Wong’s most accomplished disciple, who accompanies him from OUATIC III on.

The series transcends popcorn entertainment by placing its characters within the wider historical context of China’s painful thrust into modernity under the pressure of Western colonialism. As if to emphasize the relentless historical momentum that carries Wong along his personal journey, he appears throughout on many different vehicles, from steam train to rickshaw to pirate ship to stagecoach.

Tsui was born in Saigon in 1950, to a family of Chinese descent. He moved to Hong Kong as a teenager, when the war intensified in Vietnam. Through his extensive work in wuxia and other martial-arts subgenres, he has showed a continued fascination with Chinese culture and identity, viewing it with unbiased insight but at a certain remove. Such films are widely considered his forte—as evidenced by the period grandeur of the OUATIC movies, in which he explores ideas of national self-determination.

The first film in the series is set in Wong Fei-hung’s hometown of Foshan, cradle of the renowned Hung Gar and Wing Chun schools of martial arts. Early on, Wong is presented with a fan showing all of China’s “unequal treaties” with Western powers—a gift from General Lau Wing-fuk, who repelled French colonial forces in Vietnam. Wong’s promise to coach Lau’s disbanded troops as reserves against foreign invasion reflects his sense of impending crisis.

This gets him into the crosshairs of a human-trafficking ring run by the Shaho Gang and American carpetbagger Jackson, a clash that leads to his first contact with guns. As he broods over how firearms irrevocably change the meaning of martial arts, he reckons with China’s need to improve its self-defense through modernization. Even though in each film Wong repels Western weapons from bullets to cannons with “shadowless kicks” and other trademark moves, by OUATIC V, he and his disciples also plunge into full-tilt gunplay—a pragmatic adjustment to the times.

Political horizons expand in OUATIC II as the action shifts to Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province and, at the time of the film’s late-1800s setting, a hotbed of uprisings against the impotent Qing government. The installment gains gravity through Wong’s fictional entwinement with historical figures who are considered signposts of their age, such as Dr. Sun Yat-sen, founder of the Chinese Republic, and revolutionary Lu Haodong. For Tsui, meticulous research provides an opportunity for freewheeling reinterpretation. Hence, Wong and Sun team up to save an English patient by combining acupuncture with surgery—an uplifting moment epitomizing the marriage of East and West, tradition and modern science.

In stark contrast to this collaborative spirit is the xenophobia of the White Lotus Sect. Its followers’ brutality against Westerners, hatred of foreign influence, and conviction of their own invulnerability to firearms allude to the Boxer Rebellion—a violent campaign against foreigners and Chinese Christians that led to the retaliatory sacking of Beijing by international forces. Wong eventually topples the sect’s leader, Priest Kung (Xiong), from his pedestal of stacked tables, underscoring the shaky foundations of the group’s superstitious beliefs. Significantly, the film charts Wong’s political awakening as he chooses to defend the rebels against Qing official Commander Lan (Donnie Yen), who, though neither corrupt nor evil himself, unblinkingly bolsters the ruling establishment.

In OUATIC III, the protagonists arrive in Beijing, the empire’s center of power, and dive into diplomatic intrigue there. In a metafilmic homage to silent cinema, Thirteenth Aunt unravels a deadly conspiracy involving a movie camera. When the court exploits a lion-dance contest to sow discord among Han Chinese, our hero rises to the occasion to animate the cloth and papier-mâché drapery with the kind of high-flying acrobatics that the real Wong famously mastered. Self-interested bullies such as the oil tycoon Chiu Tin-bai are represented as the cause of the nation’s malaise.

Even for hard-core kung-fu fans, the warehouse showdown between Wong and Iron Vest Yim (Yen Shi-kwan) is a dazzler. Perched on ladders so high they seem to scratch the roof, the two opponents throw punches and kicks while swinging back and forth like trapeze artists, as the camera captures them from an array of angles not seen before in Hong Kong films. The Yuen brothers paid minute attention to matching characters’ fighting styles with their temperaments, physiques, and backgrounds. Yim’s dishonorable nature is revealed by his hidden weapons, while his aggressive claw-fists evoke a vulture hungry for prey. The openhearted Wong, on the other hand, unfurls his arms and legs like an eagle majestically spreading its wings. He also picks weapons that don’t draw blood, such as an umbrella and a garment that he swings around.

Yuen Wo-ping received full credit for action direction in OUATIC II, helping to earn the movie a prominent place in the canon of Chinese martial-arts films. As alumni of the Beijing Shichahai Sports School, Li and Donnie Yen were neck and neck in martial-arts pedigree, and this was their first appearance together on-screen. In one of the film’s most magnificent set pieces, the two venture through a tangle of scaffolding as if darting through a bamboo forest. Though the poles they spar with, pulled from the scaffolding, are twice as long as ones normally used as weapons, they wield them with the agility of vaulting athletes. Despite Tsui’s inordinate love of wire stunts, those are minimized here in order to focus on Li’s and Yen’s closely matched skill and athleticism.

If OUATIC II offered a “pole extravaganza,” then high kicks are king in OUATIC III, thanks to the astounding leg work of Clubfoot, who bounces off walls like a boomerang. Xiong had been Li’s stunt double as early as 1986. Not surprisingly, their combats reflect a seamless synergy, as if each is dancing with his own shadow. Tsui has long been fascinated with Chinese opera, and was eager to incorporate it into fight scenes. Yuen Bun, Jackie Chan’s China Drama Academy classmate in Beijing opera, was brought in for that purpose. The colorful outfits and pyramid formations of the lion-dance performers are strikingly theatrical. Yuen enhanced the stunts and pushed actors to their limits of limb coordination. Staying on for two more films in the series, he never seemed to run out of new choreographic ideas.

By OUATIC IV, on which Yuen served double duty as director and action choreographer, new variations on the lion dance emerge. The film starts with a silky-smooth dragon dance and ends with a campy spectacle featuring figures of mythical creatures manipulated by performers armed to the hilt with explosive weapons. The special effects and pyrotechnics deployed might seem more at home in a kaiju movie, but there’s also a knockout bout featuring World Kickboxing Association world champion Billy Chow, who as Iron Fist goes toe to toe with Zhao’s Wong and Xiong’s Clubfoot.

Rivaling any Hollywood shoot-’em-up in its plot mechanics and frenetic pacing (before Once Upon a Time in China and America’s spin on another American genre, the western), OUATIC V shows wushu skills being used to fire or avert bullets. As director, Tsui lets his maximalist instincts run wild, contriving not one but three battles royal. Action set pieces overlap, as with a jailbreak that segues into Wong going mano a mano with Cheung Po-tsai’s son (Stephen Tung  Wai), crosscut with a blazing barn ambush. Here, Yuen also turns opera billboards into hang-gliding feats and ropes into levitational miracles.

With visual spectacles and dramatic arcs never thought possible in Hong Kong cinema before, the Once Upon a Time in China series is fully transporting from start to finish. With it, Tsui and his collaborators also breathed new life into a Cantonese local legend, who grew further in stature over the course of several films, coming to stand shoulder to shoulder with the likes of the patriotic hero Chen Zhen, as embodied on-screen by Bruce Lee. While the franchise laid the groundwork for a second wave of nationalistic kung-fu movies with the birth of the Ip Man franchise in 2008, the pool of martial-arts talents that Tsui gathered in front of and behind the screen is unlikely to be rivaled by today’s CGI-dominated productions. Having withstood the test of time, the series remains one of the most towering achievements in Hong Kong film history.