General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Beijing Opera Blues

Beijing Opera Blues, released as Peking Opera Blues and originally titled Do ma daan (刀馬旦), is a 1986 Hong Kong action comedy directed and produced by Tsui Hark, set in 1913 during the early years of the Chinese Republic and following three women whose paths cross through a Peking opera troupe and a revolutionary plot.¹^•² The Chinese title names the daomadan, a traditional female role type in Peking opera associated with warrior women.³

Key fact	Detail
Original title	刀馬旦 (Do ma daan), the name of a female warrior role type in Peking opera³
Director / producer	Tsui Hark, for Cinema City Company and his own Film Workshop Company¹^•³
Screenplay	Raymond To (To Kwok-wai), a playwright³^•²
Principal cast	Brigitte Lin (Tsao Wan), Sally Yeh (Bai Niu), Cherie Chung (Sheung Hung), Mark Cheng (Ling Pak Hoi)¹
Setting	1913, the second year of the Chinese Republic, amid post-1911 Revolution political turmoil²
Running time	Reported as 104, 105, or 106 minutes depending on the source¹^•⁴
Recognition	Six Hong Kong Film Awards nominations⁴

Spoilers

Story and setting

The film follows three women in 1913 Beijing (then often romanized as Peiping), the second year of the Chinese Republic, when the country was contested by military factions after the 1911 Revolution.²^•⁵ Tsao Wan (Brigitte Lin) is a general's daughter who secretly joins a guerrilla movement seeking to depose her own father.⁴ She crosses paths with Bai Niu (Sally Yeh), daughter of the opera troupe's director who wants to perform in plays whose female roles are otherwise played by men, and Sheung Hung (Cherie Chung), a fleeing courtesan and musician after money.⁴^•⁶ A mission to steal a valuable document from a soldier's vault draws the three together.⁷

The story is fictional but set against the real events of 1913, and the political scheming functions largely as the backdrop for a caper built on disguise, chance, and shifting alliances.²^•⁶ A 2016 monograph by Tan See Kam, a scholar of Sinophone cinema, describes the film as part historical drama, part thriller, and part comedy, revolving around three primary settings: a European-style mansion, a theater called Kwok Wo Building, and the streets of Peiping.⁸

Gender and performance

The film's engagement with Peking opera conventions is central to its comedy and politics. Traditional dan, the female roles of Peking opera, were played by men until the twentieth century, and the film uses a historically male-dominated troupe while casting Brigitte Lin in male dress.³^•⁹ The three heroines have different relationships to performance: Tsao Wan uses male clothing politically, Bai Niu wants literal access to the stage, and Sheung Hung survives by playing social roles as circumstances change.⁹ The film was Lin's first gender-neutral role, and Sally Yeh played a "butch" Beijing opera performer.²

Film scholar David Bordwell notes one of Tsui's typical gender reversals in the film: masculine women are matched by feminized men, including the flouncing Peking opera actors and a local official who wants to marry the troupe's star actor, and that in the opera troupe's world all the male roles were performed by females.¹⁰

Production

Tsui Hark directed and produced the film as a collaboration between Cinema City, the energetic production environment of 1980s Hong Kong, and his own Film Workshop, working from Raymond To's screenplay.⁹^•³ Poon Hang-sang photographed the film and David Wu edited it, both credited with importance to the velocity of Tsui's staging; James Wong composed the opera-infused score.⁹^•¹¹ The cast paired three distinct star images, Brigitte Lin, Sally Yeh, and Cherie Chung, which the script plays against rather than flattening into a single ensemble type.⁹

Tsui was born in Vietnam in 1951, began shooting experimental Super-8 films at 13, moved to Hong Kong at 15, and studied film at Southern Methodist University in Dallas from 1969 and at the University of Texas at Austin from 1970 to 1975 before working on media projects in New York's Chinatown.³ According to him, one reason for making films like Peking Opera Blues was to demonstrate, in an era when the Hong Kong comedy scene belonged largely to men, that skilled female performers could headline successful comic films, and he traced the film's origins to a Peking opera sequence from his earlier Shanghai Blues (1984).⁹ He has also described the film in interviews as "poking fun at the Chinese, satirizing their ignorance of democracy."³

Reception and legacy

The film received six Hong Kong Film Awards nominations.⁴ Quentin Tarantino referred to it as one of the greatest films ever made in an interview for the Rolling Thunder Video Collection.¹² On Rotten Tomatoes it holds an 80% Tomatometer from 10 critics and an 87% audience score.⁷ Film academic Stephen Teo praised Tsui's mise-en-scène and the exuberance of the action, writing that the sensory elements seemed perfectly designed.² The film's reception by domestic critics at the time was hostile, according to author Grady Hendrix, who argues they missed the subtler social critiques beneath the crowd-pleasing surface.¹³

Tan See Kam's 2016 study calls the film a career highpoint for Tsui as producer and director in the 1980s and, citing another scholar, "a cornerstone of the Hong Kong New Wave cinema," of which Tsui is a significant progenitor; the book reads the film through Peking opera role-types, Canto-pop songs, and the "three-women" films of Chinese-language cinema.⁸

Restoration

A 4K restoration of the film, jointly presented by the Shanghai International Film Festival and the Italian jeweler Bulgari and carried out by L'Immagine Ritrovata in Bologna, premiered at Bologna's Il Cinema Ritrovato on June 23, with encore screenings on June 26 and July 2.¹¹ The restoration team scanned the original film elements at 4K, spent 150 hours on frame-by-frame digital restoration and another 50 hours manually removing scratches, blemishes, and flicker, and rebuilt the soundtrack in Dolby Atmos from the 5.1-channel mix preserved by Fortune Star.¹¹ The restored edition has also been released on home video, including a Region 1 release from Shout! Factory and an Australian 4K Ultra HD import.¹³^•¹⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Action and adventure films (individual works) › Action comedies › Action comedies, 1970s to 1990s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

Notice something wrong?