ENG-1988 — Page 23

STATE OF THE ARTS

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them. The Chinese civil war, which by 1962 had quadrupled Hong Kong's postwar population, had brought in many talented people from the North, ranging from Beijing, Nanjing, Shanghai and Guangdong province, including many artistes who helped swell the ranks of local performers. A thriving Cantonese opera was giving regular shows, with such exciting stars as Ma Tse-tsang, who broke tradition by introducing a 'tremolo' in certain notes, widely criticised by the purists but a delight to the less fastidious. Later, there was his equally famous namesake, Sun Ma Tse-tsang. Then there was Hung Sin-nui, with her magnificent array of operatic dresses. She began impersonating male roles at the age of 15 to become a leading lady of the local stage, as did Pak Suet-sin, whose hair styles were legendary and widely discussed among the audience. These were years when Father Sheridan, a Jesuit teacher at Wah Yan College, was translating popular Chinese opera into English, with actors of the eminence of the barrister Patrick Yu playing many a princely role, complete with swaying pheasant tail feathers, on the City Hall stage.

The influx of new blood from China cannot be too strongly emphasised. In the years since the Tai Ping rebellion in 1851, a growing exodus of people from China began. Thousands emigrated to the United States and Australia and thousands more crossed to Europe in the Chinese Labour Corps in World War I and as students in the post-war years. The growth of travel and education under the Kuomintang which occurred between the wars, coupled with a growing national consciousness and patriotism, led to an increased appreciation of the arts and in the achievements of Chinese civilisation. Student groups living in Britain, Europe and the United States saw for the first time the diversity of European civilisation and its cultural achievements in fields such as music, art, drama, ballet, opera, as well as the vigorous growth of the film industry.

A Cantonese film company was launched in Hong Kong in the early 1930s, and from those years have come legendary names like Chan Wan-sheung and Butterfly Wu. Twenty years later there were at least three companies using mostly American equipment, with some of the directors trained in the United States, and most of the stars from Beijing and Shanghai. The language of the films in those years was Mandarin, with Cantonese dubbing for the local audiences. Well remembered was Lin Dai, the darling of the silver screen in the 1950s, before her tragic death.

The Mandarin emphasis was to change dramatically with the arrival of newcomers such as Run Run Shaw and Raymond Chow, who would turn to Cantonese films as a local audience developed to replace the closed markets of China, then under a straitjacket of political censorship. This would receive a significant boost when television at first shyly peeped, and then triumphantly burst on to the scene, dominated as it was by TVB in the mid-1960s with its colour broadcasts and a winning entertainment formula which squared millions of eyes nightly. It wasn't art, of course, much less culture, but it did have the effect of producing actors, singers, producers, directors, musicians and technicians in growing numbers and widening the horizons of many viewers to the potential of the stage and screen. Moreover, in the early years of the 1950s, Hong Kong was cut off politically from China as a source of cultural influence and it perforce developed its own special genre neither completely Chinese nor Western, but a mixture of both. This was assisted by a surge in education with an international perspective based on the use of English as the medium of instruction. While insular colonial attitudes may have largely motivated this direction, as English became accepted as the medium of international communication, the move proved enlightened.

The language was not just the written variety seen in books, newspapers and a variety of cultural journals and magazines, but in the new media the spoken word became paramount -