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Hong Kong martial arts films owe much of their success to martial arts choreographers. But their history is mainly undocumented.
A brief 1999 essay by the Hong Kong Film Archive’s Yu Mo Wan, called Martial Arts Directors in Hong Kong Cinema, set out the historical framework of the craft and provided some of the material for this story.
The first wuxia films were made in Shanghai, then known as “the Hollywood of the East”, in the 1920s. According to Stephen Teo’s all-encompassing book Chinese Martial Arts Cinema, 1922’s Vampire’s Prey is the earliest example of a film with wuxia characteristics, and The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple, released in Shanghai 1928 and directed by Zhang Shichuan, is generally considered to be the first of the genre as we would recognise it.