The Valiant Ones - Roy Chiao (1975) - Shing Mun Reservoir, Tsuen Wan

I'm a big fan of King Hu films no matter on where they were made. Some were made solely in Hong Kong (e.g. The Valiant Ones, The Fate of Lee Khan) others in Taiwan (e.g. Dragon Inn) and some were split between the two (e.g Come Drink With Me, A Touch of Zen).

The Valiant Ones was made, pretty much, back-to-back with The Fate of Lee Khan in 1972. Although The Fate of Lee Khan was released the next year in 1973, for some reason The Valiant Ones had to wait until 1975 to see the light of day.

Chaplin Chang was working for King Hu at the time, in the production company offices in Yau Yat Chuen in Kowloon. I met him a few years ago and he told me that these two films had been agreed to be funded by Raymond Chow. Raymond had said he would fund both films and in return Golden Harvest would take full control of The Fate of Lee Khan once complete whereas The Valiant Ones would remain the property of King Hu Productions. Raymond was a renowned skinflint and delayed the funding for months on some pretext or another and it wasn't until he needed to borrow Chaplin for his own production of Bruce Lee's The Way of the Dragon, that Chaplin was able to get Raymond to sign the contracts and issue the first stage of the funding.

It's most likely that because The Valiant Ones remained the property of King Hu that there was a much bigger delay in getting it into the cinemas as opposed to The Fate of Lee Khan that slipped easily into the well-oiled machinery of the Golden Harvest engine.

Anyway, seeing as this is a locations blog, we may as well start off with the major location used in The Valiant Ones: Shing Mun Reservoir. In fact, Shing Mun Reservoir has been a popular location for countryside filming in Hong Kong for many years - particularly throughout the 70s and 80s. A good place to see examples is Andi's Movie Tours blog. Other than the water level in the reservoir, really not much changes here and to top it all off it is quite easy to get to if you are on a nostalgia trip. Shing Mun is definitely in the top five of outdoor filming locations in Hong Kong.

In this film it is the camp of the so-called "Valiant Ones" as well as acting as the location for the two major battle scenes. Most of the filming was done at the north end of the reservoir where there is a large collection of the silver barked trees that you can see below. The reservoir still has a large number of these and it wouldn't surprise me if they were the exact same trees in many cases. You can see on Andi's blog that the rocks haven't really changed much, the only thing is that looks different is the covering of grass that is obvious in the screenshots below.