Introduction
Wong Fei-hung 黃飛鴻 (1850–1925) was the legendary late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century martial artist from Guangdong Province who has inspired a prolific film series in Hong Kong, with more than 100 movies featuring the real-life martial artist since October 1949. Past scholarship by prominent Hong Kong film scholars such as Yu Mo-wan 余慕雲, Law Kar 羅卡, and Ng Ho 吳昊 has focused on these martial arts (wuxia 武俠) films as a genre, analysing their stylistic and thematic evolution (Yu M. 1980; Law Kar, Ng, and Cheuk 1997). Early Wong Fei-hung films mainly targeted Cantonese-speaking audiences in Hong Kong, South China, and the Chinese diasporic communities in Southeast Asia. Some of these films were also dubbed in other Chinese dialects, including Hoklo (taiyu 台語) in Taiwan (Yeung 2024: 234). For example, How Wong Fei-hung Vanquished the Bully at a Long Dyke (Huang Feihong zhangdi jianba 黃飛鴻長堤殲霸, 1955) was advertised in Min Sheng Daily News 民聲日報 in August 1955 as an “auth...