The Chinese Mirror

Welcome to The Chinese Mirror

"The art of a people is a true mirror to their minds."
--Jawaharlal Nehru

    The national cinema of every nation reflects to some degree the culture, heritage and traditions of that nation, its historical concerns and its people's joys, sorrows and aspirations throughout history.  Even many films which appear at first to be little more than sheer escapist entertainment may still provide some insight into these matters, as a reflection of what has concerned and still interests the people of that nation.

    The Chinese Mirror is an online journal devoted to the history of one of the world's most productive national cinemas of the 20th Century, reflecting the hopes and sufferings of the Chinese people throughout a century of revolution, civil war and foreign invasion. The primary objective of this journal is to provide an historical record of China's contributions to world cinema, and introduce its classic films and filmmakers to the Western world.  The secondary objective is to convey to Western readers some understanding of China and the Chinese people through their motion pictures, and hopefully provide some insight into how their modern history has influenced their contemporary world outlook.  The articles published here are provided as a service to scholars and researchers in the West, particularly those who may not be proficient in the Chinese language.  It is hoped that what is presented here will inspire some visitors to this site to learn more about China's motion picture tradition, and perhaps guide them to some greater understanding of this massive, complex, fascinating country and its people. While the majority of the topics discussed will be concerned with classical films and filmmakers, there will be some attention to the modern era as well.  All of the articles presented in these pages are the work of the website publisher, either authored or translated by him from the Chinese film literature.  This material is made available to the public under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-Noncommercial).

    Any use of this content should cite The Chinese Mirror as the source, and if the article is labeled as a translation, use of that material in further research should also cite the original Chinese source, for which full bibliographic information will be provided with the translation.       

Wen Yimin 文逸民 (1890 - 1978)

    Wen Yimin was of Manchu ethnicity, born in Beijing.  He joined the Youlian Film Company in Shanghai in 1925, and became the studio's top director in 1927 when he directed "Heroic Son and Daughter," in which he also co-starred with his  future wife, Fan Xuepeng.  The movie had four sequels, and was one of the major successes of the early swordsman genre that became a mania in China at the end of the 1920s.  In 1934, he and Fan moved to the Tianyi studio, where he directed her in such successes as "Shattered Dream in the Dance Hall" and "Mother."  The couple later split up, and in 1939 he moved to Yihua and in 1943 to Zhonghua, two of Shanghai's wartime studios.  At both of these he continued to both act and direct.  In 1947 he left the Chinese mainland and worked for several studios in Hong Kong.  Wen directed his last film in 1959, but continued acting work in Hong Kong and Taiwan into the early 1970s.  Wen Yimin died in Hong Kong on December 22, 1978.  In a career that spanned five decades, he amassed over 100 credits as a director and actor.

"Heroic Son and Daughter" (1927-31)

    In our last post, concerning the life and movie career of Fan Xuepeng, one of Chinese cinema's earliest martial arts heroines, we mentioned "Heroic Son and Daughter," the five-part series that brought her fame.  She also mentions the making of the series frequently in her own memoir that was a major source for the article.  Although we cannot view these films today, we do have written plot summaries for four parts, which give us some idea of what these early sword movies were like.  Although the stories were told in series, they were not a "serial," in the sense that one episode ended with a cliffhanger that left the audience in suspense.  Rather, each part was a separate and complete movie in itself. 

[right, '13th Sister' confronts a foe]

    One thing that stands out is that despite the title, there seems to have been little "heroic" about the principal male character, the honest scholar-official An Ji, played by Wen Yimin, the films' director (and Fan Xuepeng's later lover and eventual husband).  An Ji sounds much like a male character from the earlier "Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies" romance genre, with a penchant for getting into trouble from which his wife's ingenuity and fighting skills were his only means of escape. 

Fan Xuepeng (1908-1974): Swordswoman "Thirteenth Sister"

    In the long and rich history of martial arts movies, Chinese cinema's gift to world cinema, a characteristic of these films that sets the Chinese language versions apart from the products of Hollywood and other Western film capitals is the profusion of strong leading roles for women.  The women warriors portrayed in recent decades by Cheng Peipei, Brigitte Lin and Michelle Yeoh, as well as the more recent Hong Kong subgenre of "Girls with Guns," had their antecedents in the various schools of China's traditional operas, and the classic Chinese cinema.  The sword genre on screen emerged and flourished in the late 1920s, with a staggering output of these films from Chinese studios of all sizes.  These were not shrinking violets, no damsels in distress, but true heroines, battling male villains on an equal basis.  As we will see from one series we will examine in depth, as often as not the leading men were the ones in distress, with the lady boldly and bravely charging to the rescue.  Each studio had at least one actress it could rely on for these costume epics, but four were dominant:  Fan Xuepeng and Xu Qinfang at the Youlian studio, Wu Lizhu at Yueming, and Xia Peizhen at Mingxing.  In upcoming posts, we will examine the careers of each of these wudan  武旦, although the degree of detail will vary somewhat, dependent on the amount of research material available.  We begin with Fan Xuepeng.

Xu Qinfang (1909-1985): the 'Huangjiang Heroine'

     Xu Qinfang (徐琴芳) was born in 1909 to a scholarly family in Wujin, Jiangsu, the daughter of a famous Confucian scholar.  Her father taught her to read Tang poetry at an early age, and while she excelled in school, she was also athletic, fond of horseback riding and able to drive a chariot at high speed.  At the age of 16, her father escorted her from Wujin to Shanghai where she enrolled in the Da Zhonghua studio's film school, but later joined the new Youlian studio, operated by Chen Kengran, who she later married.  After acting in several films for Youlian, she made her first sword film in 1928, writing and acting the lead in "Shuang Jian Xia" 《双剑侠》(Double Sword Heroes), then from 1930-32 she had the title role in a popular 10-part series, "Huangjiang Nüxia," 《荒江女侠》(Huangjiang Heroine) becoming one the female stars of Chinese cinema's classic era of martial arts movies.  When the Japanese attacked Shanghai in January, 1932, setting off a two-month conflict, several of the city's film studios were forced out of business, Youlian among them.  So in 1933 Xu Qinfang and Chen Kangran moved to the Mingxing studio, where they continued their movie careers as actress and director, respectively.  Xu's first film for Mingxing was a talkie, "Jian Mei zhi Lu"《健美质路》(An Actress on the Way), in which she co-starred with Zheng Xiaoqiu.  In 1935, she moved over to the Xinhua (New China) film company, then after full scale war with Japan erupted in 1937, she had lead roles in films for Shanghai's handful of wartime studios:  Tianyi, Yihua, Guohua and Huaxin.  She left Shanghai in 1941 and participated in theater work in the unoccupied areas of Guilin and Chengdu, modern plays and Beijing operas which were patriotic and morale-boosting.  In 1949, she resumed her movie career, but after two films returned to the stage, acting in and teaching Beijing opera performing with the Shanghai People's Opera Troupe.  [right, Xu Qinfang with Zheng Xiaoqiu in 1933 publicity still]
    Xu Qinfang died February 8, 1985.  Not much information is available concerning her early years other than what is given above.  This is unfortunate because Chinese sources describe her as having been a "heroine" off-screen as well as on from her activism during the student demonstrations of 1925.  If further research turns up more information, this article will be updated.

1927: A Beauty of 16

    While this 1927 romance enjoyed some success, its genre and several of its plot twists indicate why audiences were eager to embrace the two hot new trends that emerged that year, the traditional costume drama and the swordsman action adventure.   While the film was a well-done major production from the leading Shanghai studio with some of its top movie talent involved, “A Beauty” repeated such then-common plot devices of struggle over an inheritance, or two young people meeting and falling in love while one is nursing the other through recovery from illness or injury.  Moreover, although arranged marriages were much less common by the time it was made, through a historical prologue and later flashbacks Zheng Zhengqiu was still able to launch another attack on that traditional practice, one of his favorite targets, by presenting it as the root cause of many later problems.

Er Ba Jiaren (1927) 二八佳人 (A Beauty of 16)

    Mingxing.  B&W.  Silent.  12 reels.  Premiered May 25, 1927 at the Palace.  Direction, Screenplay and Program notes:  Zheng Zhengqiu.  Assistant Directors  Zhu Fei, Gao Lihen.  Cinematography:  Shi Zhongheng.  Cast:  Ding Ziming (Laibao), Gong Jianong (Uncle Ma), Xiao Ying (Ma Laoxiang), Fu Beiqiu (Aunt Ma), Zhu Fei (Tang Xiaoyu), Wang Xianzhai (Tang Youdao), Huang Junpu (Zhang Baicheng), Li Lina (Gu Xuehong), Tang Jia (Old Lin), Gao Lihen (Bao Liren), Wang Mengshi (Xu Zeren), Lin Aiwen (younger sister-in-law),), Yuan Jinhua (elder sister-in-law), Yan Zhongying (Weng Zuomin), Ding Hua (Xu's second wife, Madame Wang), Zheng Yisheng (Bao Weiliang), Tao Jingqu (Weiliang’s stepmother), Ding Xiangping (Liang San), Ye Liangde (Young Liu), Wang Xieyan (Xu's first wife, Madame Zhu).

    Some years earlier, the family of a young man named Xu Zeren had committed him to an arranged marriage.  With the passage of time, he became prosperous but the marriage was not a happy one.  He fell in love with Lianxiang ("Lotus Fragrance"), a young servant in his household, and she became pregnant from the relationship.  When his wife learned of this, she drove the girl from their home.  Broken-hearted at losing Lianxiang, the one he really loved, Zeren gave her a valuable parting gift:  a diamond ring encrusted with emeralds.  Sixteen years go by, and the widowed but now happily remarried Xu Zeren recalls his lost first love, and asks his cousin Tang Youdao to find out what became of her and the child. 
    Meanwhile, in a rural community called Ma Family Village, an elderly man called Ma Laoxiang takes out that same ring to give to his daughter Laibao ("Treasure Comes") on the occasion of her 16th birthday.  But after a brief celebration, he tells her the sad story of her origins.  She is not really his daughter:  years before, a pregnant young woman had come through the village, and the lonely and kindly old man had taken her in.  After giving birth to a baby girl, the young woman had committed suicide by jumping from the stone bridge that spanned the stream flowing through the village.  But before that, she asked him to raise her daughter as his own, and to give her that ring on her 16th birthday in remembrance of the mother she never knew. 

[above, On her 16th birthday, Laibao (Ding Ziming) receives a beautiful ring and the story of her origins]

    Deeply moved by these revelations, Laibao takes to going alone to the bridge on moonlit nights to weep for her mother, and on one of these occasions she sees a young man trip and fall while crossing the bridge, injuring himself.  Seeing he cannot walk unaided, she helps him back to her home and sends for a doctor.  The young man's name is Bao Weiliang, and during the time of his  recovery, he and Laibao fall in love.  But his stepmother and sisters-in-law are adamantly opposed to Weiliang's marrying a country girl, and although sympathetic, Weiliang's henpecked father orders his son to return home.  The lovers part sadly.  Shortly thereafter the Xu family locates Laibao, her possession of the ring proves her identity, and her overjoyed birth father Xu Zeren convinces her to join his family.  He also renames her Yilian ("Memories of Lotus").

[Laibao, now Yilian, is warmly welcomed by her birth father and stepmother]

Back home, Weiliang misses Laibao so much that he lets himself go and falls ill.  His father, deciding his son really is in love, for once stands up to the women in his household and grants permission for the couple to wed.  Weiliang happily returns to the countryside to tell Laibao the happy news, but finds her home empty when he arrives.  Tang Youdao has been carrying out his own agenda:  he covets the Xu family wealth and property, and plans to gain control of it by having his son Xiaoyu marry into the Xu family.  Xiaoyu has been engaged to another girl, Gu Xuehong, but likes the idea of marrying money so much that he breaks off this earlier commitment.  Laibao (now Yilian) has learned of this plot, and when she sees Weiliang passing by on the road outside the family home, she escapes by jumping from her bedroom window and joins him.  Under cover of night the young couple flee to the Ma Family Village, with Xiaoyu leading the Tang and Xu families in pursuit.  But when they arrive at the village, they are confronted by all the village people, summoned by her adoptive father Ma Laoxiang via the village emergency gong.  The girl publicly exposes the Tangs' scheme to gain control of the Xu family fortune, as well as Xiaoyu's shameful treatment of his fiancée Xuehong.  Weiliang persuades his stepmother and stepsisters to accept Yilian as his wife (not too difficult, since the country girl is now an heiress-apparent), and all ends well.

1926: Why Not Her?

Another of our mythical award winners of 1926 is a tale of romance and self-sacrifice, with 

some pointed observations about class conflicts. We discuss it further following the plot synopsis.

Yujiebingqing (1926) 玉洁冰清 (Why Not Her?)

[alternate English title:  Pure and Noble]

Minxin.  B&W.  Silent.  11 reels.  Direction:  Bu Wancang.  Screenplay:  Ouyang Yuqian.  Cinematography:  Liang Linguang.  Chinese program notes:  Ouyang Yuqian.  English program notes:  Xu Houyu.  Asst. Director:  Tang Jie.  Cast:  Zhang Zhiyun (Kong Suxian), Liu Yushan (Kong Fengchun), Lin Chuchu (Qian Mengqi), Ouyang Yuqian (Qian Weide), Gong Jianong (Huang Bojian), Zhu Yaoting (Huang Fayuan), Shen Lixia (Huang's wife), Tang Jie (Chen Youcai), Li Dandan (Kong Qiongxian), Xiao Ying (sublandlord), Wang Mengshi (Zhu Ming), Dai Buping (Qiu Dawang). 

[Zhang Zhiyun as the fisherman's daughter]

Wealthy landlord Qian Weide has amassed his fortune by exploiting the poor in his area, charging them exorbitant rent and lending money at usurious rates.  His daughter Mengqi loves Huang Bojian, the son of one of his debtors.  But the young man drifts apart from Mengqi because of the despicable way her father treats his.  Bojian goes away to college, and graduates with such high honors in economics, he receives a commendation from the provincial governor.  Impressed with the young man's early achievements and future promise, Qian Weide wants his daughter Mengqi betrothed to Bojian, an offer the young man rejects.  But his father, seeing a way out of debt, orders his son to marry the girl.  To get away and think, the depressed Bojian goes for a bike ride in the country, where he has an accident and is badly hurt.  The daughters of a fisherman named Kong come upon the injured young man and take him to their home.  Under the attentive care of the fisherman and his two daughters, Bojian recovers, during which time he and the elder daughter Suxian fall in love. 

[Ouyang Yuqian making sure his villain is sufficiently despicable]

When Qian Weide learns what has happened he forces the Kongs to move out of the area, which infuriates Bojian.  He smashes the inscribed tablet on his family's mansion, then leaves for Shanghai, where he lives in poverty while writing a book, "Economic History of China."   To help him, Mengqi covertly sells his manuscript, and the book is published to much praise.  Before long, Mengqi's younger brother dies, and she uses this as an opportunity to persuade her father to change his ways and cancel all the debts owed to him as a memorial to his son.  

While visiting her brother's grave, Mengqi happens upon the fisherman's daughter living in a cave, out of her mind over missing Bojian.  Over Suxian's name, Mengqi writes to Bojian, seeking a meeting at the cave.  He arrives just in time to rescue Suxian, who is about to throw herself into a river.  When Suxian sees him she immediately regains her senses, and the couple is happily reunited.  Mengqi keeps her feelings to herself, but each day she reads from Bojian's book and thinks of him. 

Comment:

This was the first film made by the Minxin film studio after Li Minwei moved its operations from Hong Kong to Shanghai.  The literal Chinese title translates as "Pure as jade and clean as ice," an idiom for "pure and noble," which has been used as an alternate English title.  It was a romance, dealing with human feelings, particularly the entangled feelings of three people.

Huang Bojian, the principal male character, reflected the class consciousness of Ouyang Yuqian.  Unlike so many first-time Shanghai filmmakers who were usually young people in their 20s, Ouyang was 37, a veteran stage actor and writer.  By the time he made "Why Not Her," he had obviously acquired a sense of outrage at the inequalities of Chinese society.  Through Bojian's fury at the actions of the landlord (played by Ouyang himself), the writer was expressing his own contempt for China's  economically powerful who ruthlessly exploited the less well-off under their control.  But the character of Bojian was not the one Ouyang wanted the audience to empathize with:  rather, it was the loyal and self-sacrificing Mengqi that Ouyang's title described.  Through his rejection of Mengqi, a friend from childhood who obviously loved him, Bojian was not a heroic figure, a righteous advocate for equality and justice, but rather an extremist radical, and a pretty childish one at that.

But behavioral extremes could also apply to the rest of the characters in "Why Not Her?"  There is nothing simple about the contradictions between them – the good are extremely good, the bad extremely bad – but their interactions still revealed Ouyang Yuqian's basic message, the complexity of relationships and personal feelings in a class society.  As he wrote in an article that same year: 

 

"Humans are creatures of contradiction, and it is these contradictions that make human affairs so complex and varied.  For example, different individuals may approach the same issue with resistance or concession, with power or weakness, with acceptance or repulsion, with selfishness or self-sacrifice.  Individuals are not equal in strength of character, and in their psychological makeup will always swing between stability and instability." -- [Ouyang, Yuqian.  "Dao 'Sannian yihou' ganyan"  导三年以后感言 (Feelings on directing 'Three Years Later').  Minxin Special Issue on 'Three Years Later'.  Shanghai:  Minxin Film Company, 1926.]

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The Great Wall Studio: born from ethnic resentment

[left, Alla Nazimova, as a half-Chinese girl in Metro's 1919 production of 'The Red Lantern.' ]

  In January, 1921, a movie opened in New York City which provoked considerable outrage among the city's Overseas Chinese community.  The movie was "The First Born," which, while produced by and starring Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa, featured Caucasians in yellowface filling all other significant roles.  But it was not the casting the Chinese found most objectionable; rather, it was the movie's distorted stereotypes of what was purported to be everyday Chinese life and common practices:  female foot-binding, bizarre foods and drink, drug-dealing in the streets, opium smoking, frequenting brothels, etc. This was a second cinematic blow to Chinese ethnic pride:  less than two years earlier, another movie, "The Red Lantern," had opened in New York (ironically, on May 4, 1919), which gave similarly negative and warped images of the Chinese people and their culture.  Like "The First Born," it also had an A-list cast for the time, including Noah Berry, Reginald Denny, and Alla Nazimova in a key dual role as half-sisters, one of mixed race.  (The only authentic Asians were uncredited extras, including a teen-aged Anna May Wong.)

[right, a scene from 'The Red Lantern.'  Alla Nazimova is at left.  At the time, she was the studio's top money-making star]

   A delegation of Chinese community leaders went to the New York representative of Sun Yat-sen's Guangdong government, demanding he approach Mayor John Francis Hylan about the matter, which they did.  Hylan, a proud Irish-American familiar with ethnic slurs and stereotypes, agreed the films were unacceptably offensive, and took steps to ban them from further exhibition in NYC.  Unfortunately, this was the petitioners' only success at the urban level, as both movies continued to be shown in other American cities.  So the Overseas Chinese leaders took their grievance to the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, expressing to the board members how unacceptable they found these outrageous caricatures of the Chinese people and their culture.  The Board's response was not at all what the petitioners had wanted, in fact was insulting:  in effect, the Chinese were told that if they wanted accurate reflections of themselves, they should make movies that foreigners would want to see, not the silly and ephemeral comedy shorts that were the staple of Chinese moviemaking until that time.
    So the Chinese decided to do just that.  In May, 1921, with the financial support of Li Qidao (李期道), a wealthy New York Chinese, a group composed of New York Chinese residents and Chinese students pooled their talents and founded their own company to make movies which would accurately portray China and the Chinese.  At first, it was called the Changcheng [Great Wall] Motion Picture Manufacturing Company, and in 1922 they released two short films in New York:  these were "Zhongguo de Fuzhuang" 中国的服装  (Chinese Costume), and "Zhongguo de Guoshu" 中国的国术 (China's National Art) which were, respectively, introductions to China's traditional costume and its martial arts.  But the prospects for such a company in the US were dim, plus becoming a major US studio had never been the objective, so in 1924 the young students who had started Changcheng decided to return to China and move the company, renamed the Changcheng (Great Wall) Film Company, and bringing with it all its film equipment.  They set up operations in temporary quarters in Shanghai while a permanent studio was under construction, and moved into it in 1925.

1926: "The Tragedy of Liang and Zhu"

    In an earlier post, we discussed the literary genre known as "Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies," classical-style stories of romance between a poor scholar and a beauty, often a tale ending tragically.  One of the most beloved stories in this genre has been that of a scholar named Liang Shanbo and his love, Zhu Yingtai, sometimes titled "The Butterfly Lovers."  This story has been filmed repeatedly, at least 17 times, including theatrical releases, TV movies and miniseries, and there have probably been countless dramatic and operatic stage versions.  The first motion picture version was in 1926, and it was notable in Chinese film history:  in addition to being the first motion picture version of the classic, it was one of the earliest successes for the fledgling Tianyi film studio, the Shanghai forerunner of the legendary Shaw Brothers Hong Kong empire; also, it was one of the first lead roles for 18-year-old Hu Die, who in a few years would be number one at the box office for the Mingxing (Star) company, China's dominant film studio.
    Also noteworthy is the fact that while this classic Chinese tale was set during the Eastern Jin Dynasty (317-420 A.D.), the actors were dressed in the styles of the mid-1920s, a common practice until the following year.

1927: "Romance of the West Chamber" and Ancient Costume Movies

    In its first 20 years, Chinese movie themes main trends were contemporary social issues and love stories in modern dress, with even the Tianyi studio's 1926 version of the classic "Butterfly Lovers" costuming the actors in the fashions of the mid-1920s to relate a story set in the past.  But toward the end of the decade Chinese audiences were starting to tire of  modern dress films with limited themes, so around 1927 a vigorous upsurge of "ancient costume movies" swept through the film community.  Unfortunately, most of the ancient costume movies from those years are lost, and the earliest of these we can see today is 1927's "Xi Xiang Ji" 西厢记 (Romance of the West Chamber), directed by Hou Yao.

Observing "the ancients" filming "the ancients"

    On April 6, 2001, the 25th International Hong Kong Film Festival had a lively session.  In the exhibition list for the "China's Movie Classics" unit of the program, the first-named film was a 1927 Xinmin Film Company production, director Hou Yao's "Romance of the West Chamber."   Because it was a silent, the sponsor took a different approach by bringing in a prominent Hong Kong organist to provide a musical background for this silent classical love story.  The festival program described this showing as "observing the ancients viewing the ancients." 
     In a search of the literature regarding this movie, I found it interesting that there was surprisingly little written about it by Chinese scholars.  In fact, the only in-depth study of this particular film I came up with was by an American scholar (referenced at the end of this post).  The lack of Chinese studies is surprising, as "Romance" is perhaps the sole surviving representative of a time when Chinese movies were in the midst of an "ancient costume movement."