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Wind and moon

Fengyue (literally 'wind and moon') is the euphemism that poetically describes a uniquely Chinese brand of erotica more often than not barely distinguishable from soft-core porn adorned with classical trimmings. Now entering a new era with the upcoming release of the 3-D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy, screen sex has engaged in a tug-of-war with censors since the rise of Chinese cinema just a decade after the demise of the Qing dynasty led to new attitudes on the subject.

Back in 1920s Shanghai silent pictures, a then-shocking glimpse of female anatomy was occasionally espied, like in the racy drama The Diamond Case (1928). Not that there was any nude hanky-panky, the plot making clear that the lady in deshabille was a demure model posing for a struggling artist harbouring the purest of motives.

Such scenes were far from common and became even rarer after Chiang Kai-shek's moralistic New Life Movement kicked off in 1934. The founding of the People's Republic in 1949 put the final nail in the coffin of mainland celluloid carnality for three decades, but in Hong Kong it was another story.

Nudity was occasionally, though fleetingly, on view in the 1950s, albeit neither in mainstream productions nor placed within a lascivious context. Ding Lan's skinny-dipping in a 1958 Amoy-dialect movie, for instance, was intended for release not in Hong Kong but Southeast Asia. Not until the next decade had attitudes changed sufficiently for the overseas 'sexual liberation' to be embraced by the colony's major studios.

Shaw Brothers tested the waters with an escalating amount of skin but little overt action. The studio's resident Japanese directors, Umetsugu Inoue and Koh Nakahiro (billed in Hong Kong as Yang Shu-hsi), provided a classy touch when giving local audiences a teasing peek of Lily Ho Li-li's backside in Hong Kong Nocturne (1967) and more than a peek of Fanny Fan's voluptuous form in Diary of a Lady Killer (1969).

By the 1970s, Shaw was ready to take matters one step further, aided by two of its most prestigious directors, Li Han-hsiang and Chor Yuen. Li led the way with laughs in The Warlord (1972), not a fengyue film per se, but remembered as much for comedian Michael Hui Koon-man's stunning debut as for Tina Ti's fully nude sex scenes. These were hardly hard-core, for it would be almost two decades before anything like real pornography would transpire on a mainstream Hong Kong screen. But Ti's impact was nonetheless sensational.

The same year also saw the release of Chor's Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan, an iconic work that has come to personify fengyue. With its classic setting, lavish trappings, and torrid mixture of wushu and lust, the lurid escapades of the title character (whose Chinese name, Ai-nu, literally means 'love slave') ushered in a new age for Hong Kong erotica.

Li Han-hsiang upped the ante in The Golden Lotus (1974), based on the Ming dynasty's most notorious novel, Jin Ping Mei. In Li's hands it became an entertaining exercise in excess, with murder, martial arts and soft-core action artfully elevated to a level above the merely prurient.

A studio as large as Shaw couldn't exist on 'art' alone, and most of the erotica churned out in the 1970s was of a more bargain-basement variety. This was especially apparent in the campy romps eschewing imperial China for a contemporary setting, bawdy adventures that were a speciality of director James Lui Chi, whose Starlets for Sale (1977) had the distinction of being Hong Kong's first film to display pubic hair.

Another Shaw colleague making a name for himself in the genre was actor/photographer Ho Fan, who lent his aesthetic sense to a series of soft-core comedies starring funnyman Yi Lui. The studio also knew the value of exploiting the forbidden fruit of foreign flesh, hence the hiring of Scandinavian bombshell Birte Tove for Lui's Sexy Girls of Denmark (1973) and Bamboo House of Dolls (1973).

Despite the graphicness and technical advances of Category III fengyue milestones such as Sex and Zen (1991) and its 3-D descendant, the pervasiveness of porn has diluted their overall impact compared to a time when just the sight of Lily Ho emerging from a bathtub elicited gasps.

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