Explainer | Played by Jet Li and Jackie Chan, who was Wong Fei-hung for real? Tracing the life of the martial arts legend

For a man whose story has featured in 100 films, surprisingly little is known about Wong Fei-hung, the most famous exponent of the southern style of kung fu

He was born around 1847 in Guangdong province, taught martial arts to the military, and was married four times. His last wife died in Hong Kong in 1982

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Jet Li as Wong Fei-hung in Once Upon a Time in China 2 (1992), directed by Tsui Hark.

Published: 5:15am, 7 Feb 2021Updated: 5:34am, 7 Feb 2021

Wong Fei-hung is the most famous of all the exponents of southern-style Chinese martial arts, and his exploits have passed into legend. There have been around 100 films about him, 77 of which feature actor Kwan Tak-hing, who became synonymous with Wong during the 1950s and 1960s.

Radio plays, pulp novels, newspaper story serialisations, and television series have been devoted to his life. At one point, no less than seven newspapers were running serialised novels about Wong at the same time.

The martial arts master became known to international audiences in the 1990s when he was played by Jet Li Lianjie in Tsui Hark’s supremely successful Once Upon a Time in China film series.

In spite of his status as a folk hero, very little is known about Wong and his life. Indeed, much of Wong’s history has been coloured by the fictional exploits attributed to him. As a line in American director John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance goes, “When the legend becomes the fact, print the legend,” and this has certainly occurred in Wong’s case.

“Wong Fei-hung was much revered in his lifetime, but little is actually known about him,” said Woshi Shanren, who wrote novels about the martial artist in the 1940s and 1950s. Even the sole photograph purported to be of him turned out to be a picture of one of his sons.