General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20268 min read

The Red Detachment of Women (红色娘子军)

The Red Detachment of Women (红色娘子军) is a 1961 Chinese color feature film directed by Xie Jin, written by Liang Xin, and produced by the Tianma Film Studio in Shanghai. Set on Hainan Island in 1930, it follows the enslaved maidservant Wu Qionghua (吴琼花) as she escapes the landlord Nan Batian (南霸天), joins the Red Army's all-women detachment, and grows from a vengeful fugitive into a Communist Party representative. The film won the first Hundred Flowers Award for Best Feature Film in 1962 and became the basis for the 1964 ballet that was later designated one of the eight "model plays" (eight politically sanctioned performances during China's Cultural Revolution) of the Cultural Revolution.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Production	Tianma Film Studio; director Xie Jin; screenplay Liang Xin; cinematography Shen Xilin; 115 minutes, color, 1.33:1¹^•²
Cast	Zhu Xijuan (Wu Qionghua), Wang Xingang (Hong Changqing), Xiang Mei, Chen Qiang (Nan Batian)¹
Setting	Hainan Island, 1930, during the struggles of the Soviet area; the story draws on the real women's company of the Red Army²^•³
Awards	1st Hundred Flowers Awards (1962): Best Feature Film, Best Director, Best Actress; Bandung Prize, 3rd Afro-Asian Film Festival (1964)⁴^•⁵
Reported reach	About 600 million cinema admissions in China, according to a Hainan Daily retrospective⁵
Legacy	1964 ballet adaptation, one of the eight "model plays"; filmed in 1971; 4K restoration screened in the 2020s²^•⁶

Spoilers

Story

Qionghua is a maidservant on the Hainan estate of the landlord Nan Batian. She repeatedly tries to escape, is caught each time, and is finally thrown into a water prison. Hong Changqing, a Communist Party representative of the Women's Detachment disguised as a wealthy overseas Chinese merchant, rescues her on the pretext of buying her as a servant and guides her into the women's army. On her first mission Qionghua meets Nan Batian and, unable to control her hatred, fires her pistol at him against orders. Hong later leads the detachment, again disguised as merchants, deep into Nan's stronghold and captures him, and he helps Qionghua overcome her desire for private revenge. In a rearguard battle at Fenjie Ridge, Hong covers the detachment's withdrawal, is wounded and captured, and is killed by the enemy; Qionghua succeeds him as the detachment's Party representative.¹^•⁷

The narrative arc is the one Liang Xin designed as "female slave, female soldier, Communist vanguard fighter": private grievance is redirected into class struggle, and the film ends with Qionghua leading the detachment to liberate Yelin Village and punish Nan Batian.⁸^•⁵

Historical basis

The story is drawn from a real unit. On 1 May 1931, the Women's Special Task Company of the Third Regiment, Second Independent Division of the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, was founded in Qionghai, Hainan, the first women's revolutionary armed force led by the Chinese Communist Party. Its more than one hundred fighters had an average age under twenty. A National Defense University professor cited in the CCTV centenary series noted that while many Red Army units had women soldiers, Hainan was the only place to organize them into an independent, full-strength combat company.³

Creation of the screenplay

From Hainan to Shanghai. Liang Xin, a professional writer in the political department of the Central-South Military Region, encountered the unit's history while in Hainan in 1958, finding records of the women's revolutionary armed force in the military history of the Qiongyu Column. He spent more than three months investigating, interviewing surviving women soldiers, and living in the villages and tropical mountains where they had fought, then wrote the first draft in four days and nights under the title Qiongdao Yingxionghua (琼岛英雄花, roughly "Heroes of Qiong Island").⁸^•⁹

The script then nearly died in the drawer. Under the rules of the time, scripts by army personnel had to be submitted first to the August First Film Studio, which judged it promising but passed it on without result. Leaders of the Guangzhou Military Region's cultural department had forty copies printed and mailed to studios around the country, including Changchun, Beijing, and Shanghai's Tianma, Haiyan, and Jiangnan studios; some were returned and most went unanswered. In early 1959 the Tianma editor Shen Ji read the script and recommended it to Xie Jin, who had become known for Woman Basketball Player No. 5 and was looking for a new subject. Xie read it overnight, asked the studio head Chen Liting to approve the project the next morning, and invited Liang Xin to Shanghai to revise it. Xie found Qiongdao Yingxionghua too literary a title, and the two men agreed to rename the film The Red Detachment of Women. The revised script was finalized in June 1959.⁸^•¹⁰

Location work. In the winter of 1958 Xie Jin traveled alone to Hainan to choose locations. Although the story is set in Qionghai, filming sites spread across Qiongzhong, Lingshui, Tongshi, and other places; he stayed half a year, lodging with residents of Yinggen Town in Qiongzhong, hiring guides to scout locations by day and revising the script by night, and spent the 1959 Spring Festival alone in Yinggen.¹¹

Casting and music

The "fiery big eyes." The script describes Qionghua as an eighteen-year-old slave girl with "black, bright, fiery big eyes" burning with hatred. Xie Jin searched for a year for an actress with those eyes, visiting studios and troupes across the country without success. At the Shanghai Theatre Academy, where he went to see the student production of the play In the Days of Peace, he noticed a third-year student, Zhu Xijuan, arguing with a male classmate without backing down, and recognized the eyes he wanted. He observed her for more than a month, watching her in class and at the piano, before casting her; Liang Xin confirmed the choice at first sight. Zhu went on to win the first Hundred Flowers Award for Best Actress.¹⁰^•¹¹^•¹²

In the summer of 1959 Xie took the principal cast back to Hainan for a month of living with the locals, led by Feng Zengmin, the historical company's former commander. Zhu Xijuan recalled keeping a rifle with her around the clock at Xie's insistence, and being warned to keep her distance from Chen Qiang off screen so that their characters' enmity would not soften.¹¹

Huang Zhun's score. Xie Jin engaged the composer Huang Zhun, whose song for Woman Basketball Player No. 5 had been popular. Against the argument that a revolutionary subject could simply use historical songs, she insisted on writing new revolutionary songs with the character of this film and of Hainan. After hearing the music of a Qiong opera version of the story staged for the tenth anniversary of the People's Republic, she collected Hainan folk songs and produced The Detachment Company Song (娘子军连歌), with lyrics by Liang Xin, and The Wanquan River Runs Clear (万泉河水清又清), both of which spread across the country.¹¹^•¹³

Reception and awards

The film was released nationally in 1961 (some sources date the release to 1960) and, in the words of a Hainan Daily retrospective, created a strong response and recorded about 600 million admissions.⁵ At the first Hundred Flowers Awards, voted by readers of Popular Cinema, it won Best Feature Film, with Xie Jin taking Best Director and Zhu Xijuan Best Actress.⁴^•¹³ It also received the Bandung Prize at the third Afro-Asian Film Festival in 1964, and in 1995 it was named among the ten outstanding Chinese films of the cinema's first ninety years.⁵^•¹³

Critics have read the film in different registers. The Harvard Film Archive called it a "rousing potboiler that quickly became a classic" and quoted the critic Tony Rayns's description of Xie Jin as a "poet of the libido" who made of it a "sexy tropical-gothic."¹⁴ A 2010 study in The Journal of Chinese Language and Literature analyzed the film's gender politics, arguing that Qionghua's growth into a hero is also a process of absorbing the Party's class ideology under male guidance, with romantic feeling between the leads rendered invisible and presented only as revolutionary comradeship.¹⁵

Adaptations

The film's success produced a chain of versions across media. A 1957 reportage by Liu Wenshao and a 1959 Qiong opera version preceded the film; after it came the 1964 ballet created by the National Ballet of China from Liang Xin's screenplay, with choreography by Li Chengxiang, Jiang Zuhui, and Wang Xixian and music by Wu Zuqiang, Du Mingxin, and colleagues. The ballet became one of the eight "model plays" of the Cultural Revolution and was itself filmed in 1971 by the Beijing Film Studio under Pan Wenzhan and Fu Jie.¹⁶^•¹⁷^•¹⁸ Later versions include a 1992 restaging by the National Ballet of China and a Peking opera adaptation.¹⁹

The film itself has returned to circulation through restoration: a 4K restoration was shown in touring exhibitions of restored classics alongside other red-classical films, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam programmed the film in 2025, describing it as "a monument of Chinese revolutionary cinema."⁶^•²

References

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