That Bruce Lee world exclusive, and the one that got away: Hong Kong news veteran looks back

Former newsman Patrick Wang Sai-yu might be described as a pioneer of tabloid publishing in Hong Kong. He founded the Kam Yeh Pao newspaper at a time when there was no mobile phone, internet or powerful telephoto lenses. Nonetheless, Wang managed to get juicy scoops.

One, which the 76-year-old Wang still recalls with relish, involved the death in July 1973 of kung fu legend Bruce Lee. At the time rumours were rife that Lee died while having sex and that his lower body showed compelling evidence of that, Wang recalled recently.

“So I paid the morgue beautician HK$1,500 to let me take pictures of Lee’s corpse. There was a big swelling on the left of his neck. When I tried to photograph further down [his body], the woman shoved me aside and dragged me out of the morgue, saying that I would get her fired.”

During public viewing in the funeral parlour, Lee’s body was covered in a cloth up to the chin, Wang said. “My picture is the only one in the world that shows him with a swollen neck.”

Wang published the image of the dead movie star on the front page of Kam Yeh Pao and immediately made his newspaper the hottest one in town – one person paid over HK$1,000, a fortune at the time (equivalent to more than US$1,000 at today’s exchange rate), for a copy of the paper, which had a cover price of 50 HK cents.

The lead story with the macabre photo had come hot on the heels of another exclusive report: that Lee had died in the apartment of actress Betty Ting Pei rather than his own home, as film producer Raymond Chow Man-wai initially told the press.

“I received a call from a reader saying that her boyfriend drove the ambulance that carried Lee and it had stopped at Ting Pei’s home in Waterloo Hill. I verified [with officials] that an ambulance had really stopped at that address at the time.”