Before Hong Kongs mightiest film studio mastered the art of the kung fu film, Shaw Brothers hit box office gold with a very different kind of martial arts cinema, one that channelled the blood-soaked widescreen violence of Japanese samurai epics and Italian spaghetti westerns into a uniquely Chinese form: the wuxia pian. With their enthralling tales drawn from historical myth and legend of sword-wielding (and often gravity-defying) noble heroes, the wuxia films housed in this next instalment of Arrow Videos best-selling Shawscope series demonstrate the sweeping stylistic evolution of the genre, from the righteous stoicism of the late-60s Mandarin period, right through to the wild-and-weird anarchism of the early-80s Cantonese explosion. The iconic One-Armed Swordsman trilogy, directed between 1967 and 1971 by wuxia cinema godfather Chang Cheh, made household names of stars Jimmy Wang Yu and David Chiang and set the gory template for many of the films to come. Contrary to Cha