Starring Jet Li and with a transsexual theme, Swordsman II was a smash hit that launched a wave of martial arts films with gender-fluid characters

Brigitte Lin plays a man who castrates himself to gain unbeatable powers, falls in love with Jet Li’s male lead and has a fling with a female subordinate

Her transsexual sorceress role permeated Hong Kong culture, and Lin said the film’s success showed Hong Kong audiences to be more open-minded than was thought

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Brigitte Lin Ching-hsia in a still from Swordsman II (1992).

Published: 5:15am, 20 Jun 2021Updated: 5:15am, 20 Jun 2021

Directed by Ching Siu-tung and produced by Tsui Hark in 1992, Swordsman II is one of the most influential wuxia films of all time. The movie was a box-office smash, it redefined the career of Brigitte Lin Ching-hsia, and launched a wave of martial arts films featuring gender-fluid characters.

Lin’s role as a transsexual sorceress even permeated Hong Kong popular culture, with thinly disguised copies of her/him popping up in television shows and advertisements.

The film, a nominal sequel to 1990’s Swordsman, is a loose adaptation of a 1967 novel by venerable wuxia writer Louis Cha Leung-yung (aka Jin Yong), The Smiling, Proud Wanderer, which was originally serialised in Chinese-language Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao.

“[Swordsman II is] an even more unconstrained film than its prequel,” wrote a local critic in 1992. “Bravura and exaggeration would be modest words to describe its animation and comic-strip swordplay and kung fu sequences.”

“The film was a great hit and spawned a host of imitators who went to further derangement, to the point that Hong Kong cinema today is studded with gravity-defying and literally explosive swordsmen. But it is Lin’s Asia the Invincible (Dongfan Bubai) who really put people on their knees,” the critic wrote.

The story features Jet Li Lianjie as Ling, a wandering swordsman who, with his compatriot “Kiddo” (former Miss Hong Kong Michelle Reis), comes to the aid of what’s left of the Sun and Moon sect, headed by Ying-ying (Rosamund Kwan Chi-lam), many of whose members have defected to follow Asia the Invincible (Lin), a man who has castrated himself to unlock the power of the secret Sunflower Scroll which will give him unbeatable powers.