August 2008 - South American Sexy Girls

Trip to Sepang Gold Coast

On the 30th of August 2008, I gathered members of my extended family and headed down to Sepang Gold Coast in Bagan Lalang. I haven't been there before so the only directions I got from my friend was left, right, right, right, left. There were no real landmarks, so thats all I had. Fortunately, there were some new signboards, so I manged to follow them all the way. It was a bloody 2 hour journey. Anyway, when we reached there we expected a really outskirt kind of beach but instead the beach was developed and very beautiful. There were also a lot of hotels and beach side stalls. The only thing missing was the boat rides. Other than that, the beach was amazingly clean and the water was not as salty as Port Dickson. The sand a very fine and it was so flat and soft that we loved playing beach football on it. The was a villa estate under construction on the beach and I heard that they were going for rm600k to rm1 mill each. The ones that I saw were right on the water, built on stilts. It looked amazing. I'll definitely go back there when I feel like heading to the beach in the near future.

Photos, photos, photos....

Welcome to Sepang Gold Coast!

The beach...

It was one of those days that I felt like a poser...

I dunno what to say...

The whole gang...

Working life...

I'm in the 4th month of my full-time working life now and things have changed. I guess I feel a bit more responsible for whatever I do, in regards to work. Working life isn't as easy as I thought it would be. I struggled a lot to allocate time for my social life, but I feel that its going down the drain. On the slightly more positive side, working life gave me my freedom, financially and socially. I'm accountable for myself now, so I don't need anyone's approval to do what I want. Working life also pressures me to learn more about my job and improve on my knowledge of my area of work.

I love working with software applications and systems. The environment is so dynamic that a new challenge presents itself everyday and I feel like I want to find out and solve it immediately. My teammate are amazing, they give me the support and morale boost that I need to get by everyday. My gang of friends at work, I couldn't have asked for a better group. They are the best. So, I'm glad I made the right choice of job. We'll see where the future takes me. :-)

The Macha Gang!

Dynamite-Packed Heat Wave: Fanny Fan

Dynamite-Packed Heat Wave! I couldn't have said it better myself. Fanny Fan is hands-down my favorite Hong Kong bomb shell, and I'll be posting more about her in coming weeks. This stunning centerfold appeared in Southern Screen No. 31 (September 1960), accompanied by the following English text.

Dynamite-Packed Heat Wave: Fanny Fan

Original name: Fan Wai-chuan
Native of: Shanghai
Has appeared in: "The Pink Murder", "Les Belles", "Kiss Me Again" and "The Wrong Man".

Thousands of cameras were focused on that dynamite-laden package clad in a bikini — Fanny Fan — at the recent photographic contest sponsored by Sing Tao Man Po of Hong Kong.

One look at Fanny and it is enough to know why she is the centre of attraction of the thousands of eager shutterbugs taking part in the contest.

Nature's generous gifts to her has destined her to climb the ladder of success and take her place among the galaxy of Hong Kong film stars.

Her Mandarin film debut in "The Pink Murder" was an immediate success. She not only captured the hearts of countless men in Hong Kong but also those in Taiwan.

Fanny is also a wonderful dancer. That was the reason why Shaw Studio picked her for the Eastman-colored film "Les Belles", which was shot partly in Japan.

Since then Fanny has been given a chance to go straight dramatic. She shares star billing in the film "Kiss Me Again".

Wish List: HTC Touch Diamond

Been eyeing this PDA phone for quite awhile now. Thought I would rather buy iPhone 3G, but now that I think of it, until iPhone has a local carrier here in Malaysia I wouldn't want to take the risk.

Why would I want to buy this phone?

The Diamond has a attractive display and comes with a dedicated 64MB chipset.
The Diamond has a better design, more compact body and lighter weight, as compared to most other PDA phones.
Diamond's TouchFLO 3D technology, better graphics on the interface.
Similarly Diamond's Touch-sensitive scroll wheel is very useful.
Diamond comes with a Standard miniUSB slot which offers flexibility.
The Diamond has good video playback performance.

In Malaysia, the price should be around RM2200.

Anyone wanna sponsor one for me? :)

What is a choice?

Well, I was watching the Matrix Trilogy again after a very long time (one of my top 10 favourite movies of all time) and a question from the movie stuck to my mind. What is a choice? A choice is a judgment between different paths Everyone wants choices but hate to decide on which ones to take. After watching the movie, I realize that there are 2 types of people, one that decides to take the choice that other people expect them to take and one that takes a leap of faith to gamble on a choice that other people might frown upon. I guess the message that I got from the movie was to 'dare to be different'. Why should I follow the path that society had bestowed upon me? Why should I be normal? I want to do things unexpectedly, just for myself and not for the amusement of others. Its time to live for myself and those who are important to me and stop caring for the ones who are not.

We can truly be ourselves only when we dare to be different

The Little Angel: Grace Ting Ning

Here's another Shaw Brothers pinup: this centerfold of Grace Ting Ning appeared in Southern Screen No. 30 (August 1960), accompanied by the following English text.

The Little Angel: Grace Ting Ning

Original name: Tang Chin-hsin
Native of: Wusih, Kiangsu Province
Starred in: "Little Angel", "Enchanted Melody", "Rendezvous in the South Seas", "My Daughter, My Daughter", and "Kiss Me Again".

Her first starring role was in the Shaw film "The Little Angel". Since then that name has stuck with her and Grace Ting Ning is often known as the "Angel of the Screen".

She was a discovery of director Li Han-hsiang. Her screen performance to date has clearly shown that his confidence in her was amply justified.

Ting Ning is one of the best known ambassadress of good will from Hong Kong. For three years in a row she had attended the Pacific Festival in San Francisco, bringing with her to the city with the Golden Gates the good-will of the people of Hong Kong.

Her first meeting with the public as an actress was however not on the screen, but on stage. During the Standard–Sing Tao Fat Choy Drive she appeared in the Shaw stage production "Sorrows of the Forbidden City" which was performed to raise funds for the drive.

Since then Ting Ning has starred in a number of films. Her latest ones being "My Daughter, My Daughter", and "Kiss Me Again".

When she is not emoting before the camera, Ting Ning is at her books. She is one of the few movie stars in the world who is combining her studies with a screen career.

Bollywood-Hong Kong

Thanks to the encouragement of Todd over at Die, Danger, Die, Die, Kill! I've recently started sampling some classic Bollywood films from the 1950s and 60s. One that I really liked is Howrah Bridge (1958), which according to the Enclyclopaedia of Indian Cinema "was one of the first to assimilate the Hong Kong cinema's influence". I don't know how true that is, but it definitely piqued my curiosity about a possible Bollywood–Hong Kong connection.

I never knew that Calcutta — where Howrah Bridge was set — had a thriving Chinatown of about 50,000 residents at one time. It's very likely that Hong Kong movies were being imported and screened there. I'd love to know if they were popular with Indian audiences.

Another connection shows up in the 1960 movie Singapore, made by Howrah Bridge's director Shakti Samanta. Starring in the film is Maria Menado, one of the stars of the Cathay-Keris Studio. Like the Shaw Brothers, the Cathay Organization made Malay movies in addition to Chinese movies, and many of these Malay movies were directed by filmmakers recruited from India.

Yet another link appears out of left field in the People's Republic of China, where Indian films were very popular during the 1950s. One movie in particular, Awara (1951) aka The Tramp, was a huge hit and reputedly one of Mao Tse-Tung's favorite films. Even today, Chinese who grew up during the 50s fondly remember the film and its theme song "Awara Hoon" ("I'm a Tramp").

More recently, Peter Chan recruited Bollywood choreographer and director Farah Khan to work on Perhaps Love (2005), his attempt to revive the Chinese musical. But instead of tapping the delightful Hong Kong musicals of the 50s and 60s, he channels Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera, and the result is a dour lead-weight-of-a-film. Where's the joy? I wish Chan had instead followed in the footsteps of Hong Kong's dancing diva Grace Chang and Bollywood's "Cabaret Queen" Helen, seen below performing the very catchy "Mera Naam Chin Chin Chu" ("My Name is Chin Chin Chu") from Howrah Bridge.

Further Reading
Article about Calcutta's Chinatown
Article mentioning popularity of Indian movies in China

Category III: The Old School

Deejay over at The Chinese Mirror has been posting recently about some of the earliest Chinese feature films, and it's quite interesting to see that they are not so different from contemporary Hong Kong films. Take for example Women Skeletons (1922), the first Chinese detective film. It features a gang of prostitutes called the Ten Sisters who prowl Shanghai and lure unsuspecting men with easy sex before robbing them. More than seventy years later, a film like Six Devil Women (1996) proves that movie prostitutes are still as sexy and dangerous as they were back in the old days.

Or how about Yan Ruisheng (1921), the first Chinese true-crime film. It was based on a sensational case from the previous year, involving one of Shanghai's top courtesans who was murdered by her client, a respectable and prominent man about town. Fast forward to the 90s, and audiences are still fascinated by the exploits of real-life murderers, such as Dr. Lamb (1992).

Another early true-crime film, Zhang Xinsheng (1922), reputedly featured autopsy scenes so graphic that audiences left the theater. Take that, Dr. Lamb! Long before there was even a Category III rating, Chinese filmmakers were already catering to the "vulgar" tastes of the public and pushing the boundaries of acceptability.

Further Reading
Categorize Me: A History of Hong Kong’s Category III Genre

Hong Kong Leftist Noir

As promised, here's a look at a film that actress Shi Hui made for the left-wing Great Wall Motion Picture Company. These images are taken from lobby cards for The Young Heiress (1959).

According to a synopsis from the Hong Kong Film Archive's online catalog, Shi Hui plays the illegitimate daughter of a rich man. Before his death, he acknowledges her as the inheritor of his estate. The rich man's wife, aided by a group of thugs, tries to prevent Shi Hui's character from claiming her inheritance. In the end, she triumphs over the greedy wife and, desiring only the recognition as her father's daughter, donates the money to an orphanage.

The Young Heiress seems fairly typical of the crime films popular in Hong Kong cinema in the late 50s and early 60s. I've never seen the film, but I suspect that there is nothing that would mark the film as leftist beyond a generalized class consciousness. However, it would be interesting to compare it with the crime movies that the apolitical yet right-leaning Shaw Brothers was making at the time.

Here is a flyer for The Young Heiress. Notice how various images from the film stills are creatively used in the design.

Shi Hui: Revolutionary Princess of Hong Kong Cinema

One of the interesting tidbits from Paul Pickowicz's article "Three Readings of Hong Kong Nocturne" was about the involvement of Hong Kong's leftist film workers in the anti-British demonstrations of 1967. Prominent among them were Fu Qi and Shi Hui, husband-and-wife stars of the Great Wall Motion Picture Company. After a confrontation between Great Wall film workers and police, the authorities searched the couple's home and accused Fu Qi of orchestrating the riots. Both Fu Qi and Shi Hui were subsequently placed under arrest for more than a year.

According to Hong Kong film scholar Law Kar, Shi Hui played "an interesting role in the ideological landscape of postwar cinema. Embodying a middle-class persona without celebrating middle-class values, she provided song-and-dance entertainment in films that walked a tightrope between leftist politics and Hong Kong's increasingly materialistic lifestyle."

I'll post an example, in a few days, of the kind of films that Shi Hui was making at Great Wall.

Further Reading

An Age of Idealism: Great Wall & Feng Huang Days
Hong Kong Cinema: A Cross-Cultural View by Law Kar and Frank Bren

Treasures from the People's Republic of YouTube

Here are some truly rare treasures that I recently discovered on YouTube. None of these films are available on VCD or DVD, and it's very likely that they never will be.

Grace Chang in Girl with a Thousand Guises (1959)
As this clip delightfully shows, Girl with a Thousand Guises was a vehicle for the singing and dancing talents of Grace Chang. In the film she plays two roles, one of which is an aspiring actress. Evidently, the story features many parallels with Grace's real life, like auditioning for the movies behind her family's back.

Chung Ching in Songs of the Peach Blossom River (1956)
This is the film that established Chung Ching as a major star and set the trend for Hong Kong musicals in the late 50s. "Silver Voice" Yao Lee provides Chung Ching's singing voice, as she would do in many subsequent films.

Jeanette Lin Tsui in Girl in Disguise (1956)
This remake of a popular 1936 Shanghai film was Lin Tsui's third film. She plays a young lady forced to disguise herself as a man because her father, ashamed of not producing a male heir, has been lying been to gramps about her sex ever since she was born.

Grace Ting Ning in Mischievous Girl (1959)
This is Ting Ning's third film. With this one exception, she worked exclusively with Shaw Brothers from 1958 until her retirement in 1963. Her singing voice is provided here by the ubiquitous Yao Lee.

Hong Kong Nocturne, Hong Kong Riots

One of the most interesting essays in the new book China Forever: The Shaw Brothers and Diasporic Cinema is Paul Pickowicz's "Three Readings of Hong Kong Nocturne". As a historian of 20th-century China, particularly the People's Republic of China, Pickowicz brings a fresh perspective to the study of Hong Kong cinema. In this essay he looks at Hong Kong Nocturne in light of the Cultural Revolution-inspired Hong Kong Riots of 1967. From a leftist point of view at that time, the film is "a veritable 'sugar-coated bullet' that numbs the minds of the masses". Watch for yourself...

Hong Kong Nocturne, 1967

When the film's three charming leading ladies encourage the audience to "hold your head high and strive on / let no barrier stop your advance", I'm pretty certain they weren't talking about protest marches and police barricades. Nope, there is no world revolution in the mythical Hong Kong of Shaw Brothers, just a "lover's paradise" without "blemishes" (read "social problems").

Just months after the release of the film during the lunar New Year season, this is what was really going on in the "Lover's Paradise"...

Hong Kong Leftist Riots, 1967

Although I've outgrown my Mao cap and even developed a sweet tooth for sugar-coated bullets, I still got a big kick out of reading Pickowicz's article.

Arise ye workers, singers, and dancers! Let the world ring with revolution and Shaw Brothers musicals!

Further Reading

"Remaking Hong Kong: The 1967 People's Revolution"

Battle of the Chinese Movie Queens

I wasn't trying, but I dug up some dirt about actress Chen Yumei, who I blogged about the other day. In my previous post I had reported that she was first runner-up to Hu Die for the title of China's "Movie Queen" in a 1933 newspaper contest. Well, it seems that the rivalry between Miss Chen and Miss Hu carried over the following year. Surprisingly, the story was picked up by U.S. newspapers. According to an article in The Ogden Standard Examiner (May 27, 1934):

Warlords and bandits may ravage the back country, and the Japanese may be consolidating their conquest of the border provinces — but amid all of these distractions, China has found the time and energy to get all wrought up about a row between two movie actresses....

The trouble all started when one of the newspapers in Shanghai conducted a straw ballot for the title of "Movie Queen of 1934" — thus proving that the ways of the press agent are not entirely unknown in the ancient land of the dragon.

At the conclusion of this campaign the title was awarded to Miss Cheng [Chen Yumei], who in private life is Mrs. Shao Tsui-ong, wife of the managing director of the Unique Film Co.

Immediately the storm arose. Most of the other newspapers in Shanghai jumped into the argument with both feet, denouncing the vote as a fraud and asserting stoutly that the title ought to have gone to Miss Wu [Hu Die]. They pointed out that a picture, "Two Sisters," starring Miss Wu [and produced by Mingxing Film Company], played to full houses at the Strand Theater for two months, every seat being sold at every performance — an all-time high record for movie attendance in China.

Although Chen Yumei was undoubtedly a popular actress, it does seem unlikely that she could have beat Hu Die for the title of "Movie Queen". Furthermore, it turns out that her second-best win in the 1933 contest (which placed her ahead of Ruan Lingyu) was generally regarded a result of Runje Shaw's manipulation. So, you can imagine the outrage when she was announced the winner of the 1934 contest.

I don't know how the ensuing "row" was resolved, but nowadays Hu Die is firmly enshrined as "Movie Queen" in the firmament of Chinese cinema, while Chen Yumei seems to be dismissed as a mistress turned movie star. In fact, it's said that when Hu Die left Runje Shaw's Unique Film Company in 1928 and signed on with rival Mingxing Film Company, Runje decided to take Chen Yumei as his second wife and make her the top star of his studio. In this way, the notoriously stingy Runje could "save on actors' pay and prevent their pay from somersaulting once they became big stars" (Chung).

Whether or not this is true is beyond me, but it's obvious that the rivalry between Unique and Mingxing played out in the annual battle of the Chinese "Movie Queens".

Further Reading

"The Industrial Evolution of a Fraternal Enterprise: The Shaw Brothers and the Shaw Organization" by Stephanie Chung Po-yin in The Shaw Screen: A Preliminary Study
"Shanghai's Unique Film Productions and Hong Kong's Early Cinema" by Zhou Chengren in The Shaw Screen: A Preliminary Study

A Dedicated Performer: Pat Ting Hung

This centerfold of Pat Ting Hung appeared in Southern Screen No. 92 (October 1965), accompanied by the following English text.

A Dedicated Performer: Pat Ting Hung

Pat Ting Hung is a rarity among dramatic actresses in Hong Kong filmdom in that she is both versatile and a sure fire box-office draw. In a comparatively short period she has essayed both costume and contemporary roles with equal ease to establish the dominant position she holds today.

Since her debut in "The Other Woman" some eight years ago, Pat has sky-rocketed to stardom and is in constant demand for all kinds of parts. Among her box-office successes may be numbered such films as "An Appointment with Death," "The Fair Sex," "The Revenge of a Swordswoman," "Dream of the Red Chamber," "Comedy of Mismatches" and "The Butterfly Chalice." Those who saw her sensitive portrayal of a pretty and scheming maid in the Lin Dai movie "Last Woman of Shang" are unlikely to forget how Pat almost stole the show from the late four-time Asian film queen. Pat is currently engaged in shooting "Downhill They Ride," "Blue and Black" and "Princess With the Magic Fan."

Although she has little time which she can claim as her own, there is one thing Pat never neglects: replying to her fan mail. This is perhaps one of the main factors behind her immense popularity. Born in China's Hunan province, Pat's real name is Wang Chan-hua. Hunan girls are said to be romantic and this is what Pat has to say on the subject: "Though marriage is important, the thing which means the most to me right now is my film career. Why, I haven't even got a steady beau!" Unromantic? Hardly. It merely reflects Pat Ting Hung's fierce dedication to her calling as an actress.

Unit 731... and you thought the Nazi was the worst...

Unit 731 (731 部隊, Nana-san-ichi butai?) was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that undertook lethal human experimentation during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and World War II. It was responsible for some of the most notorious war crimes carried out by Japanese personnel. Officially known by the Imperial Japanese Army as the Kempeitai Political Department and Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory, it was initially set up under the Kempeitai military police of the Empire of Japan to develop weapons of mass destruction for potential use against Chinese, and possibly Soviet forces.

Unit 731 was based in the Pingfang district of the city of Harbin in the puppet state of Manchukuo.
Shiro Ishii, commander of Unit 731More than ten thousand people, from which around 600 every year were provided by the kempeitai, were subjects of the experimentation conducted by Unit 731. These were both civilian and military of Chinese, Korean, Mongolian, and Russian origin. Some American and European Allied prisoners of war also died at the hands of Unit 731. In addition, the use of biological weapons researched in Unit 731's bioweapons and chemical weapons programs resulted in tens of thousands of military and civilian deaths in China – possibly as many as 200,000 casualties by some estimates.
Unit 731 was the headquarters of many subsidiary units used by the Japanese to research biological warfare; other units included Unit 516 (Qiqihar), Unit 543 (Hailar), Unit 773 (Songo unit), Unit 100 (Changchun), Unit Ei 1644 (Nanjing), Unit 1855 (Beijing), Unit 8604 (Guangzhou), Unit 200 (Manchuria) and Unit 9420 (Singapore).
Many of the scientists involved in Unit 731 went on to prominent careers in post-war politics, academia, business, and medicine. Some were arrested by Soviet forces and tried at the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials; others, who surrendered to the Americans, were granted amnesty in exchange for access to the data collected by them.
Because of their brutality, Unit 731's actions have now been declared by the United Nations to have been crimes against humanity.

A special project code-named Maruta used human beings for experiments. Test subjects were gathered from the surrounding population and were sometimes referred to euphemistically as "logs" (丸太, maruta?). This term originated as a joke on the part of the staff due to the fact that the official cover story for the facility given to the local authorities was that it was a lumber mill. The test subjects were selected to give a wide cross section of the population, and included common criminals, captured bandits and anti-Japanese partisans, political prisoners, and also people rounded up by the secret police for alleged "suspicious activities" and included infants, the elderly, and pregnant women.

Vivisection

Prisoners of war were subjected to vivisection without anesthesia. Vivisections were performed on prisoners after infecting them with various diseases. Scientists performed invasive surgery on prisoners, removing organs to study the effects of disease on the human body. These were conducted while the patients were alive because it was feared that the decomposition process would affect the results. The infected and vivisected prisoners included men, women, children, and infants.Vivisections were also performed on pregnant women, sometimes impregnated by doctors, and the fetus removed. Prisoners had limbs amputated in order to study blood loss. Those limbs that were removed were sometimes re-attached to the opposite sides of the body. Some prisoners' limbs were frozen and amputated, while others had limbs frozen then thawed to study the effects of the resultant untreated gangrene and rotting. Some prisoners had their stomachs surgically removed and the esophagus reattached to the intestines. Parts of the brain, lungs, liver, etc. were removed from some prisoners. In 2007, Doctor Ken Yuasa testified to the Japan Times that "I was afraid during my first vivisection, but the second time around, it was much easier. By the third time, I was willing to do it." He believes at least 1,000 persons, including surgeons, were involved in vivisections over mainland China.

Weapons testing

Human targets were used to test grenades positioned at various distances and in different positions.

Flame throwers were tested on humans.

Humans were tied to stakes and used as targets to test germ-releasing bombs, chemical weapons and explosive bombs.

Germ warfare attacks

Other experiments

Prisoners were subjected to other experiments such as:
being hung upside down to see how long it would take for them to choke to death.

having air injected into their arteries to determine the time until the onset of embolism.

having horse urine injected into their kidneys.

being deprived of food and water to determine the length of time until death.

being placed into high-pressure chambers until death. being exposed to extreme temperatures and developed frostbite to determine how long humans could survive with such an affliction, and to determine the effects of rotting and gangrene on human flesh.

having experiments performed upon prisoners to determine the relationship between temperature, burns, and human survival.

being placed into centrifuges and spun until dead.

having animal blood injected and the effects studied.

being exposed to lethal doses of x-ray radiation.

having various chemical weapons tested on prisoners inside gas chambers.

being injected with sea water to determine if it could be a substitute for saline.

The History of the Middle Finger

Before the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the French, anticipating victory over the English, proposed to cut off the middle finger of all captured English soldiers. Without the middle finger it would be impossible to draw the renowned English longbow and therefore they would be incapable of fighting in the future. This famous English longbow was made of the native English Yew tree, and the act of drawing the longbow was known as “plucking the yew” (or “pluck yew”).

Much to the bewilderment of the French, the English won a major upset and began mocking the French by waving their middle fingers at the defeated French, saying, See, we can still pluck yew! Since ‘pluck yew’ is rather difficult to say, the difficult consonant cluster at the beginning has gradually changed to a labiodentals fricative F’, and thus the words often used in conjunction with the one-finger-salute! It is also because of the pheasant feathers on the arrows used with the longbow that the symbolic gesture is known as “giving the bird.”

IT IS STILL AN APPROPRIATE SALUTE TO THE FRENCH TODAY!

And yew thought yew knew every plucking thing...

China Forever: New Book about the Shaw Brothers

I'm currently making my way through China Forever, a newly published collection of academic essays about the Shaw Brothers. It's the usual mixed bag of the fascinating and the unreadable. I must say that I'm a little mystified as to why the book's editor Poshek Fu acknowledges the Hong Kong Film Archive's pioneering The Shaw Screen: A Preliminary Study as one of "two important Chinese-language anthologies on the Shaw Brothers" yet fails to mention that there is also an English-language edition that was concurrently published. I guess that would contradict his claim that China Forever is "the first critical study in English to explore and assess the social history and cultural apparatus of the Shaw Brothers Studio." Oh well...

Anyway, there's some great stuff in the book, and I'll be riffing on some of my favorite articles in the next few weeks.

Chen Yumei: 1933 Movie Queen, First Runner-Up

I love eBay. Although it lacks the permanence of a traditional archive, I cherish the chance encounters I'm afforded in its fluid and neverlasting virtual repository of Chinese movie ephemera. I've learned so much from following the lead of some star photo or movie flyer that I've seen listed. For example, take this photograph of Chen Yumei, which just went up for auction the other day. Even though I'm pretty familiar with the major stars of early Chinese cinema, I had no idea who she was. Of course, this evident gap in my knowledge only made me determined to find out about her.

A Google book search revealed that the answer lurked within a few books in my personal library. It turns out that Chen Yumei is none other than the wife of Renji Shaw, the eldest of the Shaw brothers. In 1925 Renji Shaw founded Tianyi Film Company (also known as Unique Film Company), the first incarnation of the production arm of the Shaw Brothers movie empire. Chen Yumei was one of the studio's first stars (along with movie queen Hu Die) and made some thirty-odd films from 1926 until her retirement in 1934. It seems that her film debut was Tang Bohu Woos Qiuxiang* (唐伯虎點秋香), the first (?) silver screen adaptation of the legendary "flirting scholar" Tang Bohu. If you're like me, you may be more familiar with this story from later versions, such as the Shaw Brothers' huangmei opera film The Three Smiles (1969) or Stephen Chow's hilarious and irreverent Flirting Scholar (1993).

Anyway, I'd love to know more about Chen Yumei. She was evidently quite popular. According to Michael Chang's "The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful: Movie Actresses and Public Discourse in Shanghai, 1920s-1930s", Chen was the first runner-up in a 1933 contest sponsored by Mingxing Daily to determine China's "Movie Queen". (Hu Die took the crown and Ruan Lingyu came in third.) As far as I know, none of her films have survived, but there are some intriguing titles in her filmography, like a 1928 film called King Boxer (拳大王) and a Chinese version (亞森羅賓) of Arsène Lupin, the famous fictional French thief.

Further Reading

Chen Yumei filmography in English
Chen Yumei filmography in Chinese
Hong Kong Cinema: A Cross-Cultural View by Law Kar and Frank Bren
"The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful: Movie Actresses and Public Discourse in Shanghai, 1920s-1930s" by Michael G. Chang in Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943 edited by Yingjin Zhang

*A big thanks to Deejay at The Chinese Mirror for correcting the English translation of Chen Yumei's first film!

South American Sexy Girls