Jet Li on how he played two real-life Chinese martial arts heroes on film, and the differences between Fong Sai-yuk and Wong Fei-hung
- Playing Wong Fei-hung in Tsui Hark’s Once Upon a Time in China films was the making of Jet Li Lianjie as an action film star
- Soon after filming them, Li played another real-life Cantonese martial arts hero, Fong Sai-yuk. He talked about how he approached two contrasting roles
Hong Kong New Wave director Tsui Hark’s updated interpretation of real-life Cantonese hero Wong Fei-hung in his Once Upon a Time in China films made a star of China-born martial artist Jet Li Lianjie, and started a trend for films set in a historical China with postmodern characteristics.
While Wong was one of Li’s most memorable characters, he isn’t the only real-life Cantonese martial arts hero the action star has portrayed on screen. He also played the role of Fong Sai-yuk in two eponymous films in 1993.
Fong Sai Yuk and Fong Sai Yuk II were both directed by Corey Yuen Kwai, and featured acting legend Josephine Siao Fong-fong – a veteran of numerous swordfighting films of the 1960s – and former Miss Hong Kong Michelle Reis, who was then at the peak of her popularity.
Similar in looks to the Once Upon a Time in China films, the frantically entertaining costume kung fu movies were more comic in tone than Tsui’s works. But they still featured elaborate and expertly choreographed action sequences, co-choreographed by director Yuen.
Fong Sai-yuk (or Fang Shiyu) the martial artist is thought to have existed sometime in China’s Qing dynasty. Legend has it that his mother, a martial arts expert called Miu Tsui-fa, whose lineage extended back to the Shaolin Temple through her father, bathed the baby Sai-yuk in an elixir of Chinese herbs which gave him “copper skin and metal bone”.