Knife. Horse. Actress. That’s a blunt, character by character, translation of Daomadan, the Chinese title of Peking Opera Blues—which is also the clearest possible key to a film where performance is a weapon, gender is a disguise, and survival depends on how convincingly you can play your part.
The term daomadan names a specific kind of dan, or female role, in Peking Opera: the woman warrior, a performer asked to do everything at once—act, sing, and fight with precision. Tsui Hark takes that tradition seriously, then turns it outward. His heroines don’t “become” warriors out of aspiration; they’re forced into virtuosity by a world that won’t forgive hesitation.
Released in 1986, Peking Opera Blues remains one of the major achievements of 80s cinema: a film that braids screwball comedy into political spy thriller, martial-arts choreography into a backstage musical. It’s not just energetic; it’s formally intelligent—keen about gender, skeptical about power, and unusually alert to the way history becomes theater.
The story is set in 1913, in the wake of the revolution that toppled the Qing dynasty and installed the young Republic of China. The regime is new, the situation is chaotic and the streets feel like they’re being rehearsed rather than governed. Yuan Shikai, the strongman who brokered the transition, maneuvers toward dictatorship by negotiating a foreign loan he plans to divert to pay his private army: politics as paperwork, backed by guns.
Into that volatility steps Cherie Chung as Sheung Hung: a jewel thief and wandering musician whose comic ingenuity keeps the film’s pulse quick. We meet her casing a warlord’s mansion with the wary focus of someone who’s learned to read danger in glances and footsteps. When the warlord’s soldiers mutiny over unpaid wages, she slips through the chaos and exits with jewelry—loot that, through a chain of accidents and misunderstandings, ends up at the theater of a Peking Opera company..
Sheung Hung begins as a political outsider: not immoral, just uninterested in martyrdom. And the film doesn’t scold her for it, as Star Wars chides Han Solo. Instead, she becomes a kind of viewpoint character—recognizably pragmatic in a way that would have resonated with many people in 1980s Hong Kong: get paid, stay alive, don’t get absorbed into someone else’s cause. Chung’s performance is both dexterous and volatile—scrambling through ventilation ducts, wedging herself into trunks, ricocheting from lie to lie as bullets and misunderstandings close in. Her eventual shift—from self-interest to solidarity—doesn’t arrive with a lecture; it arrives as a consequence of friendship, proximity, and a growing inability to pretend neutrality is safe.
By contrast, Brigitte Lin plays Tsao Wan, a revolutionary agent operating with calm intensity. She’s the daughter of a general entangled in Yuan Shikai’s rise—pulled between family bonds and fierce loyalty to the republic she’s sworn to protect. Educated abroad as a doctor, Tsao Wan cross-dresses to move through spaces where authority is coded male: she borrows the silhouette of power in order to fight it. Lin gives her an austere physical control as she commands soldiers, organizes revolutionary cells, stoically endure torture.
This androgynous role marked a turning point in Lin’s career. A Taiwanese actress already famous as the ethereally feminine star of romance movies, as one of the two Lins alongside Jackie Chan’s future wife, Her collaboration with Tsui Hark repositioned Lin as an absolute icon embodying complex gender ambiguity. Peking Opera Blues established her as “the most beautiful woman in Hong Kong and Taiwan” precisely because of her ability to move fluidly between feminine grace and masculine intensity. This duality would later reach apotheosis in Swordsman II with Lin’s legendary portrayal of Asia the Invincible.
Our last protagonist is Sally Yeh as Bai Niu, daughter of an opera troupe owner and a would-be performer barred from the stage. Her father clings to Qing-era values, including the old prohibition against women performing—an edict that forced female roles to be played by men. I’ll note that rejecting imperial values, and allowing women to perform was part of the modernizing agenda of the new Republic. Yeh plays Bai Niu with a vivid mix of yearning and irritation—the particular urgency of someone told that their talent is irrelevant because tradition says so. (It’s no surprise the performance earned her a Hong Kong Film Award nomination.)
That Tsui Hark centers three women—and makes their bond, not the angst of a lone male hero, the film’s emotional engine—was a real commercial risk in 1986. And it isn’t simply “representation” as ornamentation. The film’s setting inside Chinese opera culture lets Tsui show gender as something learned, worn, and weaponized: costume as ideology, makeup as identity, blocking as claiming space in society.
Tsui’s action filmmaking here also moves beyond the older Hong Kong tendency to treat set-pieces as punctuation marks. In Peking Opera Blues, action extends narrative logic; it doesn’t interrupt it. Tsui has said the film’s disregard for gravity is intentional: characters soar, bounce, and hang in the air because, in this universe, physics answers to feeling. If someone needs—urgently, irrationally—to fly, to escape, to rescue, to keep the country from collapsing, then they fly.
The result isn’t “fantasy” so much as stylization, tying cinematic motion directly to the codified movement of Peking Opera, effectively blurring the line between the diegetic stage performance and the “real” world of the narrative.
That’s reinforced by the craft behind the camera. Action choreographer Tony Ching Siu-tung was trained at a renowned Peking Opera school, and you can feel it in the way bodies move through space: not merely striking, but phrased—motions that belong to rich visual language.
The editing is equally bracing. Tsui has described the film as “120 minutes of content squeezed into 90,” and you can sense that compression in the way scenes cut without warning—sometimes mid-action—so the story seems to sprint ahead of you, dragging you along by the sleeve. The rhythm is less like conventional continuity than like percussion: accents, collisions, sudden silences, then another burst.
And the tempo isn’t just editorial. Composer James Wong—one of Tsui’s long time collaborators—crafts a soundscape that modernizes tradition without parodying it. During the opening credits, traditional opera percussion locks in with a contemporary, driving synth line. An actor in full face paint stares directly into the camera and laughs—an image that feels like a dare. The film announces itself as a modernization project: not “respectful” in a stale museum sense, but respectful enough to believe that this form is worth gambling on.
Peking Opera Blues is a rare kind of wonder: a film you can analyze for years and still enjoy as visceral, immediate cinema. It’s willing to let slapstick coexist with torture, gunplay with opera, history with fantasy—and it makes those collisions feel like the point, not like a problem. By dressing 1986’s anxieties in 1913’s costumes, Tsui made a timeless film that stays current precisely because its world is unstable. It suggests that when history turns absurd, hope depends on performance: put on your makeup, hit your mark, and when the roof collapses—jump high enough that it seems you’re flying.
In our own moment, that performer’s spirit—resilient, adaptive, and stubbornly alive—is worth holding onto.
A new restoration of Peking Opera Blues is available on Blu-ray from Shout Studios, and it’s currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.
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