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 13-part series, "Huangjiang Nüxia," 《荒江女侠》(Huangjiang Heroine) becoming one of the first 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 Kengran 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. 
[right, Xu Qinfang with Zheng Xiaoqiu in 1933 publicity still]
In 1935, she moved over to the Xinmin studio, and 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.
Xu Qinfang died February 8, 1985. Not much information is available concerning her early years other than what is given above, but Chinese sources describe her as having been a "heroine" off-screen as well as on from her quick actions during the student demonstrations of 1925.
