Ever since shooting for Shaolin began in October 2009, director Benny Chan Muk-sing has stressed that his film is neither a simple remake of either of Chang Cheh's Shaolin Temple films from the 1970s, nor an update of the 1982 film of the same name which propelled the erstwhile unknown Jet Li Lianjie to prominence.
Prefixed by the word 'new' in its Chinese title, Chan's film bears a story significantly different from its similarly named predecessors: while Chang's films had the monks battling the newly established Qing dynasty in the mid-17th century, and Lee headed a cast of fighters allied to the founders of the Tang era, Shaolin is set in more contemporary times, when the monastery's clean-living inhabitants are forced to confront malevolent warlords who ruled early 20th-century China as personal fiefdoms.
Despite the disparate time frames, these films offer one thing in common: they allow viewers a glimpse of the political climate in which each film was made, and how Hong Kong cinema - or Hong Kong in general - has moved on in its relationship with its northerly neighbours.
At the centre of Chang's films - Five Masters of Shaolin (1974) and its prequel Shaolin Temple (1976) - is the one premise common to a lot of the Shaw Brothers' martial arts dramas: its protagonists are patriots trying to defeat the evil Manchus - the Qing court was considered to be an interloper regime - and restore the country to Han rule.
The studio's post-war roots were as a rightist, anti-communist institution and Chang had a close working relationship with Chiang Kai-shek's son, Chiang Ching-kuo, before he became a filmmaker in the 1950s. With that in mind, this narrative could easily be seen as an allegory of the Kuomintang's struggle to regain its footing on the communist-ruled mainland. The way its heroes fled to the south of the country to regroup also mirrors the way the Kuomintang government relocated to Taiwan after the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949.
The Qing soldiers' burning down of the Shaolin temple in Chang's films also bears a resemblance to the real-life destruction of the institution during the Cultural Revolution, just years before the films were made.
Mao Zedong set young men and women to subverting cultural and religious traditions. Red Guards shackled placard-wearing monks and subjected them to physical and mental abuse as well as emptying the monastery of its relics.