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.