Once Upon a Time in China

On the data. Six films and a television series, all made or produced by Tsui Hark between 1991 and 1997. The boundary is the thing to get right here. Wong Fei-hung was a real martial artist and physician who lived from 1847 to 1925, and more than a hundred films and series have been made about him since 1949. The Wong Fei-hung series holds Guinness records for both the longest running film series and the most films in one. Kwan Tak-hing alone played him in over seventy films. None of that is this. This page is the six film sequence Tsui Hark created, with its own continuous cast and characters, and it connects to no other Wong Fei-hung film. The one that catches people is Last Hero in China from 1993, directed by Wong Jing, in which Jet Li plays Wong Fei-hung in the same year as films three and four. It is a broad comedy riffing on this series rather than part of it, and it circulates under several more titles including Claws of Steel and Deadly China Hero. Drunken Master, Iron Monkey, Martial Club and Rise of the Legend are also Wong Fei-hung films and also not part of this. The films do follow each other, loosely, against real history: the first in Foshan in the late nineteenth century, the second in 1895 around the Treaty of Shimonoseki, the fourth ending with the Eight-Nation Alliance occupying Beijing in 1900, the fifth after that. Recurring characters carry through, with Rosamund Kwan as 13th Aunt in one, two, three, five and six, and Leung Foon recast from Yuen Biao to Max Mok after the first film. The casting is the usual source of confusion. Jet Li plays Wong in one, two, three and the final film; Vincent Zhao plays him in four and five. Tsui Hark directed one, two, three and five; Yuen Bun directed four and Sammo Hung the last. In film four, 13th Aunt is absent and replaced by a 14th Aunt, and Rosamund Kwan then returns for five. Production credits differ across the run and listing Golden Harvest on all six is wrong: it produced the first three with Film Workshop and Paragon, films four and five are Film Workshop and Paragon only, and the last is Win's Entertainment. The television series' actual title is Wong Fei Hung Series, and it was marketed in places as Once Upon a Time in China, which is why it turns up as a 1996 series of that name.

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