How Chinese opera influenced Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung, the movies of King Hu and Chang Cheh, and Golden Swallow’s white outfits

The stylised martial arts movements of Chinese opera influenced the films of King Hu and Chang Cheh, and later films drew on the way operas present combat

Many of the genre’s biggest stars were trained in Chinese opera schools

Reading Time:4 minutes

Jimmy Wang Yu’s white outfit in Golden Swallow (1968) is one of many examples of director Chang Cheh’s preference for the costumes of wusheng characters from the Chinese opera tradition, in his martial arts films.

Published: 7:15am, 25 Jul 2021Updated: 7:15am, 25 Jul 2021

One of the beautiful things about martial arts films is the different influences that are present in them: real-life combat forms like hung gar and wing chun kung fu, and circus skills like wirework and trampolining, to name a few.

But the main influence on martial arts as they are depicted on screen is certainly Peking opera – or more accurately Chinese opera, as martial arts films choreography also draws from many regional Chinese opera forms.

The first martial arts film, The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple (1928), based its action scenes on Shanghainese opera, as only it had developed techniques to present martial arts in a performance setting.

In the 1960s, movies by King Hu – and the violent films of Chang Cheh, who was an authority on Chinese opera – were influenced by the stylised martial arts movements of the opera. Even when a form of realism took hold in the genre in the 1970s, lessons learned from opera about presenting combat on screen were not forgotten.

Yu Jim-yuen, founder of the China Drama Academy, a Peking opera school in Hong Kong which trained future stars Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung Kam-bo and Yuen Biao, is the most cited Chinese opera influence on Hong Kong films.

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How Chinese opera influenced Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung, the movies of King Hu and Chang Cheh, and Golden Swallow’s white outfits

The stylised martial arts movements of Chinese opera influenced the films of King Hu and Chang Cheh, and later films drew on the way operas present combat Many of the genre’s biggest stars were trained in Chinese opera schools

The stylised martial arts movements of Chinese opera influenced the films of King Hu and Chang Cheh, and later films drew on the way operas present combat

Many of the genre’s biggest stars were trained in Chinese opera schools