Pan Lei (4 August 1926 – 22 July 2017), born Pan Rongsheng, came from Hepu in Guangdong and was born in Haiphong, Vietnam, as an only child; as a youth he wrote under the byname Xinxi. During the war with Japan he fled to Kunming with his sister and brother-in-law; in 1943 he enlisted, was posted to India and later fought along the China-India-Burma border, changing his name to Pan Lei and rising to lieutenant. After leaving the army he returned to Vietnam, but the Franco-Vietnamese War drove him, as an overseas student, to the National Jiangsu Medical College in Shanghai, where he began writing poetry, essays and short stories under the pen name Pan Lei. In May 1949 he moved to Taiwan and founded, at his own expense, Baodao Wenyi, the first literary monthly in post-war Taiwan, serving as its editor; his novels, including the Red River trilogy, The Narrow Valley and Crossing Blood, were bestsellers that built his reputation, and he won the Chinese Literary and Arts Award for three consecutive years from 1955 to 1957. He was later recruited as an editor in the production department of Central Pictures and lectured at the National Taiwan Academy of Arts; the first of his scripts to reach the screen was the Taiwanese-language film The Leper Woman (1957). He made his directing debut with On Mount Hehuan in 1958 and followed with The Golden Age (1959). In 1962 he directed Typhoon for Central Pictures; the film was entered in the 7th Asian Film Festival and caught the eye of Run Run Shaw, and he joined Shaw Brothers in 1963 as a director and screenwriter, making such films as The Lovers' Rock (1964, starring Cheng Pei-pei and Chiao Chuang under Run Run Shaw's production), Song of Orchid Island (1965), The Bandits (1966, written by King Hu), the detective film The Poison Rose (1966), A Time to Remember (1968) and Love Without End (1970). He left Shaw in 1971 for Taiwan and set up a production outfit, returned in 1975, and his last Shaw production was How to Make a Quick Buck (1977). In later life he studied ancient jade and published a memoir, A Life Without Regret.
A Vietnamese-Chinese writer who became a filmmaker, Pan Lei was a key literary and cinematic figure in 1950s and 1960s Taiwan. He founded the first post-war literary monthly in Taiwan and won the Chinese Literary and Arts Award three years running; at Shaw Brothers he directed films such as Typhoon, The Lovers' Rock and Song of Orchid Island, working across romance and martial-arts genres.
Achievements
- 1949 · Moved to Taiwan and founded the literary monthly Baodao Wenyi
- 1958 · Made his directing debut with On Mount Hehuan
- 1962 · Directed Typhoon, entered in the 7th Asian Film Festival
- 1963 · Joined Shaw Brothers as director and screenwriter