In the film, Wong utilises the world of jiang hu (the community of martial artists in wuxia stories) to explore a network of personal relationships that would normally by expressed through combat scenes, by using thoughtful dialogue and poetic imagery instead. The result is a unique masterpiece that exists both within the wuxia genre and outside it.

Ashes of Time, which took two years to finish – actual shooting only took four months – was released in 1994. Appearing around a year after the modernised sword-fighting genre popularised by Tsui Hark’s Swordsman films had faded, it met with a muted response from audiences, but was acclaimed by critics in Hong Kong.

The script, written by Wong, was based on a four-volume saga by martial arts novelist Louis Cha (aka Jin Yong), one of the best-known writers of the new wave of martial arts novelists who modernised the long-standing literary genre in the 1950s.

Hong Kong martial arts cinema: everything you need to know

Cha’s The Eagle Shooting Heroes – sometimes known in English as The Legend of the Condor Heroes – was originally serialised in the Hong Kong Commercial Daily in 1957. As is typical of the literary genre, it detailed the interwoven relationships and combat exploits of a large group of martial artists.

The series was well known in Hong Kong, and had been filmed before, notably as the Brave Archer trilogy directed by Chang Cheh. It had also been adapted for television four times.

For Ashes of Time, Wong chose three characters from the novel – members of a group in the book known as the “Five Heroes”, who were not the main protagonists – and freely invented a story about their lives during the time before the novel started.

Wong was asked to adapt the book in the winter of 1992, and felt he couldn’t pass up the chance to make a big-budget wuxia picture.

“I read the four-volume novel again, and in the end, instead of doing a film version of the book, I decided to use only two of its many characters, Dongxie (Eastern Heretic) and Xidu (Western Venom), and develop a separate story about their early days,” Wong said in the film’s original production notes.

Wong also uses a third character from the novel, Northern Beggar.

“I chose them as they have extremely different personalities, sometimes to the point of one being the antithesis of the other. I tried to depart a little from the traditional martial arts genre. Instead of treating these characters as heroes, I wanted to treat them as common people, before they became heroes,” he said.

Wong’s story is labyrinthine in the manner of a typical martial arts novel, but hardly impenetrable once the relationships of the criss-crossing characters are understood.

The latter plays both male and female characters, referencing her gender-bending role in the Swordsman series.

“I always like to emphasise communication in my films. But Ashes of Time is full of characters who don’t want to communicate in case they feel rejected,” Wong told this writer in an interview in 1995.

The film ends with Ouyang departing to take up his role in Cha’s storyline – in which he is a villain – following Huang and the Northern Beggar.

Much of the story is conveyed through voice-over. Although this technique was popularised by the French New Wave as a way of revealing a character’s inner thoughts, Wong says that it’s also a reference to wuxia novels being narrated on the radio.

“My first encounters with martial arts stories were not in the form of words in a book,” he said in an interview at the New York Film Festival.

“At that point, I was listening to them on radio programmes. So I wanted Ashes of Time to be heard as well as seen. That’s why I included the narration from one person – that way you can also imagine it’s a radio programme.”

Wong also refers to books by including intertitles in the style of printed title pages.

There were a few different versions of the film at the time of release, including an international version, a Hong Kong version, and versions for Southeast Asia which included more action scenes. The 2008 Redux version, reconstructed to preserve the film, trims some of the action scenes because the footage was missing or unusable.

Most of the action scenes feature the technique of shooting at 10 frames per second and then printing each frame twice to achieve a blurry, non-naturalistic effect.

Wong aimed for Ashes of Time to be a compendium of martial arts styles.

The opening features sped-up fight combat reminiscent of early martial arts films, and there are references to Chang Cheh’s bloody one-versus-many scenes and Akira Kurosawa’s samurai swordsmanship. Brigitte Lin’s scenes are filmed in the exaggerated style of her Swordsman films.

“I wanted to synthesise the different forms of the genre into my own vision,” Wong said.

“Traditional martial arts films are designed to stimulate the senses of the spectator. I wanted to make mine a means of expressing the emotions of the character,” Wong told French critic Michel Ciment. “For instance, when I shoot Tony Leung as the blind warrior in the snow, the weight of his sword is meant to show that he is weary of life.”

Wong also said that with the exception of Lin’s scenes, he tried to avoid the wirework technique that had characterised Tsui Hark’s action films as “it seemed dead … I wanted the actors to fight on the ground so that it had a realistic feel”.

The meaning of the film is rendered poetically, but it is not obscure. In his production notes, Wong directs viewers to the film’s opening Buddhist text: “The flags are still/No wind blows/It’s the heart of man that is in tumult.”

This idea of the transitory nature of human existence is reinforced by Wong’s use of the “24 Solar Terms” from the Chinese Almanac – the Tung Shing, well known to Hongkongers – to divide the film. “Using the Almanac allowed me to give the story a structure. The seasons change in the film, and it follows a cycle. Spring always comes next year, but the faces change,” Wong said at the New York Film Festival.

The sense of fatalism which runs through Ashes of Time, Wong says in his notes, results from the fact that he knew how the stories of the characters ended from the start. Wong doesn’t usually know how a film will end until he starts editing.

“With Ashes, I knew the endings of these characters before I started, and I could not change them. This imbued a sense of fatalism in both me and the film,” he said.

In this regular feature series on the best of Hong Kong martial arts cinema, we examine the legacy of classic films, re-evaluate the careers of its greatest stars, and revisit some of the lesser-known aspects of the beloved genre.