Po Fung spent 20 years researching the life and times of the legendary martial arts master and medicine man Wong Fei-hung. But, “over the past century, his life has been added to, layer upon layer,” says Po, ahead of the 100th anniversary of Wong’s death this week, on April 17. “There are no real records, no recordings, not even a photo of him.”
The no-photo claim is contested, and even the date of his passing has been called into question. What is not disputed, however, is the outsize effect this man from Guangdong has had on Chinese culture over the past 100 years.
Kwan Tak-hing (right) plays the title role in The Story of Wong Fei-hung, Part 1 (1949). Photo: courtesy Youqiao Film Company
According to academics such as Po, a noted film critic and former research officer at the Hong Kong Film Archive (HKFA), currently relaxing into retirement in Taiwan, Wong died impoverished and embittered in 1925, not knowing he would posthumously become a hero. In the century since his death, the martial artist has been the inspiration for a continuous stream of novels and comics, and more than 100 movies and television series stretching back to the first film to use his character, Wu Pang’s The Story of Wong Fei-hung, Part 1, released in Hong Kong in 1949. Jackie Chan reprised Wong’s character in 1978’s Drunken Master, Jet Li followed suit in Once Upon a Time in China, in 1991, and, more recently, Eddie Peng Yu-yan took a turn in 2014’s Rise of the Legend.
As a master of the southern style of kung fu, hung ga in particular, Wong passed on teachings still followed by hundreds of thousands of students across the globe, “but what do we know about him as a man?” asks Po. “We don’t know much, so I guess that allows people to create whomever they want from him.”
Jet Li in a still from Once Upon a Time in China (1991). Photo: courtesy Golden Harvest
Most agree Wong was born around 1847 in the village of Luzhou, in Guangdong province, into a family deeply rooted in martial arts. His father, Wong Kei-ying, was one of the “Ten Tigers of Canton”, a group of martial artists who traced their skills and teachings back to the legendary Southern Shaolin monastery, said to have existed in the Tang dynasty (AD618-907).
By the time of his death, Wong Fei-hung had achieved some degree of local fame for his kung fu methods. He had also expanded his father’s apothecary and bone-setting shop, Po Chi Lam, into a successful business, with a sideline running lion dances on auspicious occasions throughout the region. But that world fell apart in late 1924, when Nationalist government forces quelled an uprising by a local militia known as the Canton Merchant Volunteer Corps, and Wong’s business and home fell prey to the destruction. Wong quickly spiralled into illness and despair, according to historians, and by April 1925 he had died.
