Hu Jinquan, better known as King Hu, was a Chinese film director and actor based in Hong Kong and Taiwan. He is best known for directing various wuxia films in the 1960s and 1970s, which brought Hong Kong and Taiwanese cinema to new technical and artistic heights. His films Come Drink with Me, Dragon Inn, and A Touch of Zen inaugurated a new generation of wuxia films in the late 1960s. Apart from being a film director, Hu was also a screenwriter and set designer.
Early life
Hu was born in Beijing to a well-established family originating from Handan, Hebei. His grandfather was the governor of Henan in the late Qing Dynasty. He emigrated to Hong Kong in 1949.
Career
After moving to Hong Kong, Hu worked in a variety of occupations, such as advertising consultant, artistic designer and producer for a number of media companies, as well as a part-time English tutor. In 1958, he joined the Shaw Brothers Studio as a set decorator, actor, scriptwriter and assistant director. He acted in the classic 1959 film The Kingdom and the Beauty. Under the influence of Taiwanese director Li Han-Hsiang, Hu embarked on a directorial career, helping him on the phenomenally successful The Love Eterne. Hu's first film as a full-fledged director was Sons of the Good Earth, a film set in the Second Sino-Japanese War, but he is better remembered for his next film, Come Drink with Me. Come Drink with Me was his first success and remains a classic of the wuxia genre, catapulting the then 20-year-old starlet Cheng Pei-pei to fame. Blending Japanese samurai film traditions with Western editing techniques and Chinese aesthetic philosophy borrowed from Chinese music and operatics, Hu began the trend of a new school of wuxia films and his perpetual use of a heroine as the central protagonist. Leaving the Shaw Brothers Studio in 1966, Hu travelled to Taiwan, where he made another wuxia movie, Dragon Inn. Dragon Inn broke box office records and became a phenomenal hit and cult classic, especially in Southeast Asia. This tense tale of highly skilled martial artists hidden in an inn was said to be the inspiration for Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Zhang Yimou's House ofFlying Daggers. In 2003, the award-winning Malaysian-born Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-liang made Goodbye, Dragon Inn, a tribute to Hu, in which all the action takes place during a closing cinema's last show of Dragon Inn. Chief among the films which exemplify Hu's blend of Chan Buddhism and unique Chinese aesthetics is A Touch of Zen, which won the Grand Prix de la Commission Superieur Technique in 1975 Cannes Film Festival, and which many regard as his masterpiece. Other films include Raining in the Mountain and Legend of the Mountain, which were loosely based on stories from Pu Songling's Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio. The reason was that the government of South Korea would help sponsor the budgeting should he produce at least two films in the area. Both are now considered classics. After releasing A Touch of Zen, Hu started his own production company and shot The Fate of Lee Khan and The Valiant Ones back to back on tight finances. The action choreography in both these films was the work of a young Sammo Hung. Though critically hailed, Hu's later films were less commercially successful than his first two films. After his late comedy masterpiece "All the King's Men", he moved to California in the early 1980s. Late in his life, he made a brief return from semi-retirement in The Swordsman and Painted Skin, but neither achieved the renown of those two, financially successful wuxia films. Hu spent the last decade of his life in Los Angeles. He died in Taipei of complications from angioplasty. He is buried in Whittier, California.
