ABSTRACT
The contemporary martial-arts genre can be traced back historically to such texts as the section on assassins in Sima Qian’s Shiji (The historical records), late imperial vernacular fiction about outlaws such as the Ming dynasty classic Shuihu zhuan (The water margin), as well as a broad range of novels published in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China in at the end of the early twentieth century.3 During the latter half of the century, meanwhile, the genre of the martial-arts film has developed in several different directions. In the 1960s, for instance, when martial-arts works were forbidden in mainland China, the expatriate director King Hu (1931-1997) developed a groundbreaking model of martial-arts narratives by combining subtle historical reconstruction (an obsession with Ming history and the politics of identity/ loyalty) and splendid sets and costumes in his films Dragon Gate Inn (1968) and A Touch of Zen (1971). By contrast, another prominent director, Chang Cheh (1923-2002), developed a different mode featuring the exhibition of bloody masculinity and tragic
brotherhood, as in his The One-Armed Swordsman (1967) and The Heroic Ones (1970).
