In our article about Li Minwei, "The Father of Hong Kong Film," we noted that his "Zhuangzi Tests his Wife" is often referred to as the first Chinese film shown outside of Asia. This is true depending on, to paraphrase a recent U.S. president, what your definition of "Chinese" is. "Zhuangzi," made in 1913, was the first motion picture wholly invested and made by Chinese people. But the first Chinese film exhibited outside of Asia was an earlier production, 1909's "Tou Shaoya" 偷烧鸭 (Stealing a Roast Duck).
This comedy short was the first movie actually filmed in Hong Kong, and when it was later taken to the U.S. by Benjamin Brodsky and exhibited there, became the first Chinese film to be shown outside of Asia. However, because the Asia Film and Theater Co. was an enterprise wholly owned by the Russian-American Brodsky, this and the other films made by his Asia Film studio in Shanghai and Hong Kong are considered to have been American productions, and the Li brothers' 1913 "Zhuangzi Tests his Wife" as the first Hong Kong movie.
Brodsky established the Asia Film and Theater Company in Shanghai in 1909, made two shorts there, then moved his operations to Hong Kong that same year, where he made this film and one other, both of which he took with him when he moved permanently to the U.S. He exhibited these two films at theaters in the Chinatowns of Los Angeles and San Francisco (where he eventually settled), so these were actually the first Chinese movies shown outside of Asia, although Chinese and Hong Kong historians do not generally recognize them as such.
"Stealing a Roast Duck" was patterned on the American comedy shorts which were very popular at that time. A dark, skinny thief (Liang Shaopo) cases a street stall from which a comical fat man (Huang Zhongwen) is selling roast ducks. He finally succeeds in pilfering a duck while the merchant is distracted, but much to his surprise a policeman (Li Beihai) has been watching him, and apprehends the thief.
So "Zhuangzi," as the defender of the one-sided feudal tradition of widows' maintaining life-long chastity, with widowers free to take as many more wives as they could afford, was the trailblazer for colonial Hong Kong's "ethics films." "Stealing a Roast Duck," on the other hand, was the primogenitor of Hong Kong's long tradition of "cops and robbers" movies, a more long-lived and, at least internationally, considerably more successful tradition.
The First Chinese Director
For someone who was the first Chinese to direct a film, remarkably little is recorded about the life of Liang Shaopo 梁少坡, especially the years before and after his movie career. The only picture of him we found was the grainy photo shown here. He was a Cantonese, born somewhere in Southeast Asia, then raised and educated in Hong Kong. He was fond of theater from childhood, and in youth joined Hong Kong's first dramatic society formed to perform modern plays. In 1909, he joined the Asia Film and Theater Company, and made his movie debut as director and principal lead in the comedy short "Stealing a Roast Duck." This was the first time a Chinese had directed a motion picture. There is a gap in the record until 1923, when he joined the brothers Li Minwei and Li Beihai to form the Minxin Film Studio, and later acted in Hong Kong's first feature-length movie, "Yanzhi" 胭脂 (Rouge). But just when it seemed that Minxin and the Hong Kong movie industry was about to take off, the Guangdong-Hong Kong general strike of 1925-26 devastated it. Liang Shaopo moved to the city of Guangzhou, where he established the Zuanshi (Diamond) Film Company, and when before long a wave of Hong Kong filmmakers migrated to Hong Kong, that city's film industry flourished for a time.
In 1930, with the Hong Kong film industry resurrected under Li Beihai's guidance, Liang Shaopo moved to the Lianhua (United Photoplay Service) studio's newly-established Hong Kong branch as a writer. In 1932, he wrote two notable films for Lianhua, one of which he directed. He retired from the film world in 1933, and no further data could be found.
