KwanTeo Film Archive · Topic
The Tale of Heroes from Chaoshan
潮汕英豪传Amateur short films shot by high-school students in Tangpu Village, Jieyang, with the most basic equipment — uploaded to Bilibili in 2012, they unexpectedly ignited the "Chaoxue" subculture. A decade later, these "ancient-artifact-resolution" images are still being documented, remixed, and pilgrimaged to, frame by frame.
About the Topic
In the era before short-video platforms, when Youku and Tudou still ruled the Chinese internet, a high-school student in Tangpu Village named Huang Lanjia chased an actor's dream by dragging his classmates and friends in front of a camera. The equipment was crude, the acting raw, and the videos were met with harsh criticism online; some friends quit under the pressure, but he kept going. Between 2011 and 2013, the group shot nearly twenty short films.
In 2012, netizens re-uploaded their work to Bilibili. A user known as "Meinan" (Bilibili UID 179111) organized the films into a compilation titled "The Tale of Heroes from Chaoshan: The Complete Collection," and "Chaoxue" — the "study" of these films — was born. The word "study" is not entirely a joke: fans document the series like a discipline, tracing who played multiple roles across films, which line comes from which episode, and how the characters' logic holds together — a practice reminiscent of Touhou Project's "zeroth-setting research."
The research grew into a colorful character genealogy: Huang Lanjia, nicknamed "Big Head," appears in over a dozen entries; "Wei-ge" was played by two different actors over time; "Shui-ya" wields the move "Hugua Suilu Sha" — "so mighty that none under heaven dare defy it"; and the unpredictable "Spider Pig" left behind catchphrases like "Di ah, how are you supposed to drink like that?" and the Chaoshanese exclamation "Ri ni mao." Even the owner of the ice shop in the films earned the nickname "Liang Qichao," after the famed essayist's studio name, "The Ice-Drinking Room."
The ice shop — Bingxin — is the stage at the heart of it all. The four-minute dialogue scene in The Incident at Beach No.3 (4:06–6:29) is by far the most remixed footage of the series: it has been rebuilt in cyberpunk style, crossed over with other meme franchises, and spawned a whole family of derivative works. An annual collaborative music MAD event, the Chaoshan Heroes Festival, has run for seven consecutive years, alongside five editions of the community's own "Spring Festival Gala."
The subculture's path was not smooth: early on, "Chaoxue" was labelled part of the "Zhonghua Yinmeng" phenomenon and faded with platform moderation; after 2018, as other meme communities collapsed, Chaoxue revived and some of its memes broke out to the wider internet. Unlike many toxic online subcultures, its remix culture stays close to the original works — documentation, homage, and extension rather than attack.
Since 2019, fans have made "pilgrimages" to Tangpu Village, where the once-shabby village has become a new socialist countryside. The ice shop from the films has moved and been renamed, yet remains an indispensable stop on the route. Asked whether he would ever remake the series, Huang Lanjia replied: "I really can't recreate the effect of the old days anymore, so maybe it's better to let it be a thing of the past — maybe the best memories are right there."
These shorts are grassroots comedies of Chaoshan "Young and Dangerous" tales, and a gentle, distinctive strand in the history of Chinese internet subculture — from a village to Bilibili, from obscurity to being studied as a kind of knowledge. Open any of the works below, and you may begin to understand why people fall for footage of such "ancient-artifact" quality.