In Search of Bruce Lee's Last Filming Location

I was recently made aware that one of the extras on the Enter the Clones of Bruce Lee documentary is a small location video tour called Bruce's Hong Kong. The snippet I was sent included the footage of Ching Chung Koon followed by Bruce's fight against Sammo at the beginning of Enter the Dragon and basically saying that the fight scene was shot in a "still unidentified location". 

If only Frank Djeng - the creator of the otherwise informative film - had got in touch. I know my blog stuff here is a bit niche, but the location of the fight has been public knowledge since 2009 when I was first able to track it down. In fact, it was one of my first big location scoops and was what sent me down the path of finding all the other places that make up these (now numbering in the thousands) location pages for Hong Kong-shot movies.

In fact, my old (granted, now deleted) historical blog even had a page called Bruce Lee's Hong Kong on which I detailed a significant number of Lee-related Hong Kong sites. It certainly seems to have been useful to a large number of people coming to Hong Kong and wanting a consolidated list of places to visit. It also formed the basis for some walking tours that I have decided to reinstate here (see the right hand side bar of the blog). Even before that I had written an article for Time Out in 2011 that identified the site. So I am a bit confused as to why it still seems to remain a mystery. Especially since some other information I have documented publicly (such as the appearance of the original Jumbo back in 2011) did make it into that little 'documentaryette'. Well, anyway, regardless of the reasons, it seems like a good idea to revive an old deleted post, from blog v.2 (when I was using Wordpress) in 2009, that detailed the events surrounding the location's eventual discovery. 

Bruce Lee's mysterious last filming location

The Background

Back in 2008/9, I was co-hosting a Bruce Lee "Hong Kong locations" page on Facebook that became quite popular. I honestly can't remember how it came about but it was basically just posts about a variety of locations in Hong Kong, linked (however tenuously) to Bruce. At the time my knowledge of many of these locations, and Bruce's life, was as tenuous as some of the links to the great man himself, but somehow I had developed a reputation as someone with knowledge on the Hong Kong side of things. In reality, there was nothing original on that page, I had just gone and found as much stuff as I could from other sources, and dumped it online with the view that no one else seemed to be posting about it and I assumed there were like-minded people who would appreciate a readily accessible store of consolidated information.

Sometime around April/May of 2009, I got a message on Facebook from John Little explaining that he was about to start filming a "locations" documentary and wanted to hire me as a local guide. The crew were due in Hong Kong in the first week of August and, unfortunately, due to the recent arrival of my youngest son, this meant I had to say no. I was disappointed of course, but still got to meet John and his crew (which included Andy Kimura and - it turns out - Johnny-Mike Walker the Arkansas millionaire who owns/owned Lee's old Merc and Marcy Trainer) a couple of times.

The original release cover art of John Little's documentary

Nevermind. John still needed some help with a particular location and would I be able to help him track it down so they could film there during August? It seems that John had most of the locations that he wanted to cover for the documentary (in part, a small thanks to the aforementioned Facebook page) but one was eluding him. I said sure, not really appreciating the mammoth task I had just agreed to.

The scene in question? The initial fight between Bruce and Sammo. In the film, it supposedly takes place in the "Shaolin" monastery where Lee is a monk. The problem was that this was a movie and the "monastery" was just a local temple used for an establishing shot only and the fight itself was filmed somewhere completely unknown (at the time).

Could I find this place in time for John's arrival? erm...

Bruce V Sammo

This opening sequence in Enter the Dragon, as Bruce goes toe-to-toe with Sammo, is a significant one - at least to me and many other Lee fans. For many, it was the first time they had seen Bruce. This was certainly the case for fans of my generation who grew up in the 70s and 80s, at a time when access to movies was quite limited. Before the digital age and on-demand video streaming, watching a film usually involved a significant amount of money or effort and perhaps some illegality. My introduction to Bruce was when Enter the Dragon was shown on UK television sometime around 1984/85, which also happened the be the last time the film was shown on TV with the nunchaku scene still included. I know it was around then because on Live Aid day (13th July 1985) I was at my mates watching the concert when we got bored (probably Phil Collins was on haha) and decided watch my friend's copy of Enter the Dragon, taped off the TV a few weeks (or months) prior, instead.

I'm sure my experience isn't unique. Bruce was basically unknown outside of Hong Kong prior to Enter the Dragon's posthumous release, so this scene had a huge impact on viewers around the world. Perhaps more poignantly though, general wisdom indicates that this scene - shot at the very end of production of Enter the Dragon, and added almost as an afterthought - was the last movie footage ever shot by Bruce prior to his death in July 1973. This scene, despite being the first one in the film (more-or-less), was the last to be shot, in April 1973, and was done with a local crew after the US one had already gone home. Bruce believed, rightly, that the film needed a more explosive opening and introduced himself to the audience in the best possible way: ripped to the bone and kicking Sammo's butt.

John Little had (rather optimistically in hindsight) hoped I could do some research and have the place ready for him when he arrived with his film crew in the first (or maybe it was the second) week of August 2009, but it didn't quite work out that way. July rolled by and I was having no luck tracking this place down whatsoever. This was back at a time when my geolocating skills were still fairly rudimentary, as were the available resources (no online aerial maps back then or 3D GoogleEarth) and my knowledge of Hong Kong as a whole was still fairly limited.  I say this latter part because most seasoned hikers would already have known the location just by looking at a key element of the area that appears in the background. More on that later.

August 2009

Along came August 2009 and John's crew arrived and I had nothing to give them. I was bitterly disappointed, perhaps even more so than John, because I really felt I had let him down. John, being slightly more on the ball, had almost immediately recorded interviews with both Yuen Wah (Bruce's acrobatic double on the film) and Stephen Tung Wei (who played "Lao" but is also now a well- established HK film director) and neither knew or could remember where the filming had taken place. Tung Wei mentioned that he thought it was filmed in a place called "The Rose Garden", but this turned out to be a red herring.

Considering that Yuen Wah was the stuntman who performed the various flips in that very scene (yes, youngsters and new Lee fans, Bruce did neither the "kip up" nor the tumble and flip at the end) the fact that he couldn't remember either didn't really bode too well for success.

The only other person who might know was Sammo Hung himself and John had tried desperately to get a hold of him for an interview, without success. The problem was that Sammo had, just that week, been rushed to Baptist Hospital in Kowloon Tong following what was thought to be a heart attack on the set of Ip Man 2. Thankfully, Sammo made a full recovery but long after John and crew had already left. As it turned out, given the amount of filming Sammo has done in this very location over the years, he would probably have been able to identify it straight away. Such is life.

The days ticked by and John did filming at various locations in HK and Macau; Tai Tam Bay, the Muslim Cemetery, Ching Chun Koon, Tsing Shan Monastery, King Yin Lei, Woodland Crest in Sheung Shui, Camões Garden in Macau, as well as some non-film related places such as Bruce's old schools and hangouts. He also conducted several more interviews with such people as Chaplin Chang and Ip Chun. By the end of the week he had a whole bunch of locations, not all were film-related, but nothing regarding this famous fight scene. John and crew left for Italy where they were going to capture the various places used in Way of the Dragon and I promised to keep him up to date in case I found anything useful.

Now, you have to bear in mind that Enter The Dragon was filmed in 1973, and in 2009 that was still almost 40 years previously. Everything changes over time, particularly in Hong Kong, and the only reliable (and even this isn't true 100% of the time) thing that can be compared is the ridge lines of hills and mountains in the background. So this is how it was for the next few weeks: looking at page after page of pictures of HK hillsides and mountains from as many different sources as I could find. My eyes seemed to be going square with all the staring at the screen and eventually decided to change tack and start looking at other parts of the film scene in the hope that they might reveal some previously unnoticed detail.

Some Progress - late August 2009

I started playing around with some image-stitching software (the now defunct "Photosynth") and created a panorama that had some background detail that had alluded me previously. The image I created is below. It's still on my computer 15 years later.

Something about the ridgeline on the left hand side, behind the standing monk, looked familiar. There was a vague resemblance to a screencap that I had for Way of the Dragon, the location of which I already knew, so I started investigating the general area around Sheung Shui.

Remember, this was before Google had introduced Streetview to Hong Kong, and for aerial imagery I had to go to the local mapping office and use their terminals to examine old black and white photos. If I wanted to take an image home, it cost me $120 and took several days to get printed. For on-the-ground images I trawled through pages and pages of local Chinese hiking blogs. It was mind numbing. Really.

First Success - Crest Hill

Sheung Shui is relatively flat for the most part, but has hills either side of it, and logic (taking into consideration the environment that is visible in the film) dictated to me that the west part was a more likely spot, so it really wasn't long before I had some candidates to investigate. This as aided by the presence of the hill in the background of many of the Sammo-shots during the fight. You can see it in the screencap below. The most likely candidate, a small hill called Tai Shek Mo (Crest Hill), didn't seem to have any pictures online, at least none that I could find, and so a 'quick' trip up to the area was called for (it was quick, relatively speaking, because I was still living in Tai Po at the time). Note the oddly shaped "peak" - it looks like it's had a chunked chopped off the side.

So I hopped on the train and jumped in a cab and told the driver to take me to the village next to the hillside - a place called Ho Sheung Heung (the Ho is ponounced like "haw/hor"). It wasn't until the cab was driving along Castle Peak Road about to turn into the village road that I knew I had the right place because I had the perfect view of the hill from the back of the cab. Here is basically what I saw.

Crest Hill/Tai Shek Mo seen from Castle Peak Road, courtesy of...Streetview

So this is when I started to get excited because as far as I was concerned it was a perfect match. I arrived at the village and headed into the (now redeveloped) village hall and got chatting to a local villager who had basically lived there from birth and, after showing him a contact sheet with all the film grabs on, he confirmed that the area was indeed around here - in fact in the wooded area behind the village (it was the village's so-called "fung shui" wood). He told me he used to play there when he was younger, but the area was now completely overgrown and full of snakes and generally inaccessible.

The old village hall in Ho Sheung Heung (since demolished and redeveloped)

Anyway, I ate some noodles at the small cafe inside the hall, thanked the guy and went for a wander to get my bearings. I walked the complete perimeter of the wood and couldn't find a single place to get in. There were some pathways cut but they only went in fairly shallow and all led to graves. I ended by walking up to a decent vantage point on nearby Crest Hill and took some photos. Of course, at this point it was quite clear that the area I was interested in was fairly large and it would be hard to pinpoint the exact spot, but anyway it was a start. Here are some of the photos I took that day.

Looking north up Tai Shek Mo (Crest Hill)

Looking south from the same location. The green area in the middle was my focus.
Hill C is relatively free of vegetation (centre frame).

"Roy's Hill" (Kidney Hill), seen from Crest Hill

I took this latter picture because the hill you can see in the foreground can also be seen on the film - behind Roy Chiao as he sits presiding over the fight - and it provides a handy reference for seeing which way the set was laid out. This hill is west of the main site so we know that Roy was facing east for the filming. I only found out more recently that this small hill is actually called "Kidney Hill" and was the location for a scene from another film that I posted about not so long ago.

Roy's Hill (Kidney Hill) in the background

It was quite obvious from my own camera angles that the area I was after was further south - somewhere in amongst the trees, but on that day this was the closest I could get. On a positive note, it was nice to finally know I was in the approximate area of where the filming took place and, of course, it was even better knowing that the place hadn't been buried under a shopping mall...yet. However, locating the actual spot was going to prove a bit more difficult.

Narrowing down the location

Whittling down the specific location was more difficult than I anticipated, and on republishing this article, I have also had the chance to revise my original conclusion, simply because I am a bit better at this stuff now than I was back then. First, I got a 1976 aerial view of the general area from the mapping office - remember, this was before the images were online. I would have loved one from 1973, but it appears that the available imagery (in good enough resolution for this area) for the 70s started in 1976. 

As you can see below, the area was more sparse back in the 70's and had multiple open areas as well as tracks leading to them, but you can makeout what is essentially a finger of raised land that runs along the centre of the image from left to right. This is the wooded area behind the village and it consists of three small hillocks.

In the image below I've marked out the village (populated by one of the original "Five Great Clans", the Hau's) in yellow. It's a little larger these days thanks to the small house policy. Crest Hill (Tai Shek Mo) is located to the north, and if you look carefull you can make out a Regimental Emblem made from white stone just to the left of my red arrow (Lo Wu Military Camp can be see on the far right next to my direction arrow).

To the west and north, directly behind the village is the area in question. It is a finger of land (outlined in red above) that extends down from Crest Hill and has three small hills, marked A, B and C ( in first image above). They are namelss as far as I know because they are not particularly tall, but are essentially part of the village's "fung shui wood" and so will "probably" never be built on (haha, never say never in Hong Kong).

The small hillocks A,B and C may be a bit difficult to make out on the black and white picture, but thanks to the Home Affairs Dept, we also have a contour map showing each hill. In the picture below, the close contours of Tai Shek Mo can be seen at the top (north) of the road, and the more widely spaced contour lines - indicating a rather more gentle slope - of the three small hills as well as Ho Sheung Heung village below the road (south).

September 2009

With this new geographical information it was possible to put the Enter screen images under some better scrutiny and work out more or less where Bruce and Sammo were. Having said that, this didn't stop me from going on another field trip, this time with a couple of buddies, Eddy and fellow Tai Po resident and massive Lee fan, and Adnan, who it turned out was a former fashion model for Karl Lagerfeld. Adnan was now a photographer with a big interest in Bruce and was hoping to try and get some "Bruce" atmosphere for an upcoming shoot. Sadly it wasn't to be.

Armed with some rather nasty looking hand scythes, Eddy and myself bushwhacked up to what we thought was the top of hill A (no handy smartphone GPS back in those days either) and it was quite obvious by this point that finding the location with the subsequent tree and vegetation growth was going to be a tough ask. No snakes to be scared off but the place was swarming in mosquitoes. We did get to a small clearing at the top, but it was nothing like what we envisaged and so left disappointed and faces covered in mosquito bites.

Back to the desktop research.

It was at this point in the search that I dismissed the notion of Hill A being the place in question and instead moved on to Hill B and found some convincing evidence (to me at least) that this was the place we were after. But Hill B was even more inaccessible than Hill A and remains so to this day.

However, now that I am relooking at this post - in part thanks to Stripey Rambles for highlighting my blog on his Youtube channel - I can see several clues that indicate Hill B is incorrect and in fact Hill A is the correct location after all.

So after going back and looking at various screencaps in detail, I can see things that I just never considered previously, or at least that I wasn't able to due to technological limitations etc. First off is the very opening shot of the tatami arena. On the far left you can see a small hill (red arrow). This hill, located close to the border in Ping Hang, can only be seen from Hill A. If the crew were on Hill B, Kidney Hill (the hill behind Roy Chiao) blocks the view.

Next up, and this was just me being stupid. No excuse. Bruce stands and goes to the left so that his subsequent close ups show the area immediately south/southwest. If we were on Hill B, then the background would be occupied by Hill A, however, what we see is a background that is lower, and contains a pond. No sign of Hill A simply because they are filming on it. If you look at my black and white aerial images above, you'll see there were ponds to the south.

Also, I suddenly realised that the pathway that leads off at an angle in the image below is the one I have marked on the cropped aerial below.

It's a fairly wide path and shows up quite obviously on the old aerial, even in 1976, so it was probably a fairly well-beaten path, literally. This is no surprise given the number of films that have been shot around here over the years. Not long after I originally posted this article, Andi, from the excellent Hong Kong Movie Tours blog (he specialises in photographing angle-perfect recreations of his favourite movie scenes. Well worth checking out) sent me a message to congratualte me and mentioned a whole bunch of other movies that filmed in this location, such as: The Lady Hermit (1971), The Water Margin (1972), The Blood Brothers (1973), and All Men Are Brothers (1975). Sammo Hung even went back there in 1978 to film The Odd Couple and Yuen Woo Ping filmed a scene for Snake in the Eagle's Shadow. Now you know why Sammo would have solved this mystery many years ago had he been well enough.

Anyway, just to round off this part of the post, here is a more detailed look at the specific location. In case the above has been a bit confusing, I've marked Hill A in the aerial image below and blown it up.

And now we can transpose the relative positions of the characters from the film onto the aerial image. The key is as follows: orange dot - Head monk (Roy Chiao) seating location. The black arrow shows the path taken by Braithewaite (Geoffrey Weeks) and Lee's servant (Ho Lee-yan). The green dot is Bruce and the purple dot is Sammo, where they are initially sitting, and the lines represent the colourful garb worn by the various members of the audience. Hopefully this will give you some geographical context the next time you watch the film.

 

Epilogue

John did contact me after I had finally found the location and asked me to take some footage of the place. Unfortunately, his request included some technical specifications for which I was not prepared for because all I had (back then, in 2010 I think) was my trusty Sony Handycam. So I just said I will do what I can and leave it to him whether he could use the footage. This is a roundabout way of saying the poor quality footage John subsequently included in Tracking the Dragon was indeed shot by me. So please don't blame him for my crappy camerawork. Yes, I did return to the location, but the best I could do, unhindered by nature, was to scale Hill C - the northernmost hillock of the three - and these photos were taken from that trip.

Crest Hill/Tai Shek Mo

This image is looking south, but I was focussing on Hill B

when in hindsight I should have been concentrating on the
area on the left a bit more (Hill A).

Crest Hill/Tai Shek Mo's very unique peak

So why did this place stop being used a a film location? 

The 1980s was a pivotal decade for Hong Kong with the general creation of the so-called "New Towns". Hong Kong's expanding population was housed by creating large urban centres where previously there had been village clusters or market towns e.g Tai Po, Tuen Mun, Shatin etc. Fanling and Sheung Shui were expanded and new infrastructure was put in place across formerly bucolic locations, such as here in Ho Sheung Heung. Just look at the picture above and you can see they stuck an electricty pylon right on the hill. Such is life. HK cinema moved on. Period-set films - needing locations unspoilt by modern anachronisms - were more or less out of vogue by the 1990s and by the 2000s were being filmed in mainland China anyway. So places like this in Ho Sheung Heung simply stopped being used and were taken back over by nature. Given Hong Kong's climate (sub-tropical in case you didn't know), it doesn't take very long for vegetation to completely take over a place, just a few months.

On the plus side though, this location hasn't been destroyed by redevelopment, despite the nearby monstrocity of the "Northern Metropolis" which has already destroyed a large section of Pak Shek Au. So there is still hope for Lee fans if they want to come and visit and try to at least get near the site. These small hills are now home to a large number of traditional graves, so I have no doubt that one day, someone will accidentally leave a josstick burning and start a fire that will reveal the clearing where Bruce and Sammo were filmed. If that happens, believe me, if I am still around I will be the first one up there.