This is a link to a text by Ng Ho, filmpanel advisor to the Hong Kong filmarchive and associate professor in the department of Cinema and Television Production at Hong Kong Baptist University.
The text was printed in the book ‘A Study of the Hong Kong Martial Arts Film’, Hong Kong 1980. A book that was given to me that same year as a present by the late Kwan Tak Hing, the famous actor that impersonated Wong Fei Hung many times.
It’s a text about the legends surrounding the South Shaolin Monastery and the creation of the Southern Kung Fu Styles, especially Hung Gar.
The names in this text are all in Mandarin. I left it in the original version. So Lu Acai is Luk Ah Choy, Tieqiao San is Tit Kiu Sam, Hong Xiguan is Hung Hei Kun, Huang Qiying is Wong Kai Ying, Zhi San is Gee Sim, etc.
It’s a fascinating story and Ng Ho used some interesting books for this text, notably two books of the novellist Zhu Yuzhai, a student of Lam Sai Wing.
Interesting article. Of course he was off on the conclusion. Who would have thought that Kung Fu movies would go and get popular in the Hip Hop culture in the USA in the early nineties rather than dying altogether in the eighties as the author predicted? Or that the post-modern milleu of the twenty-first century would lead to a slight revitalization in the concept of myth construction in popular consciousness.
If you can read chinese, the author gave some straight talk about wong fei hong but that’s in the later chapters. He tried to write about the actual man and not the myths.
I thought you did the translation that’s posted on your website. I never actually seen the book. I only read the online chinese edition. so, I didn’t know it was bilingual and thought you did your own translation.
