He is Hong Kong's most bankable movie star, has starred in more than seventy films, and his net worth sits comfortably above HK$5 billion. He also takes the MTR, shops at Giordano, cuts his own hair, and once told a journalist that his most expensive possession was a Nokia phone from 2007. In 2018 he announced that 99% of that fortune would be given away.
Meet 發哥 — Fat Gor — the farmer's son from Lamma Island who became the most Cantonese movie star alive, and never let the Rolls-Royce get anywhere near his personality.
The Lamma Island beginning
Chow Yun-fat (周潤發) was born on 18 May 1955 in a village on Lamma Island — the small island forty minutes by ferry from Central that most tourists only see from the top deck of the Star Ferry. His mother was a cleaner and vegetable farmer; his father worked on a Shell oil tanker and died when Yun-fat was a teenager. The family moved to Kowloon when Yun-fat was ten.
He left school at seventeen to help support the household — bellboy, postman, taxi driver, camera salesman. In 1973 he saw a newspaper advert for the TVB actor training class and signed up on a whim. He later said he had no artistic ambition at all — he just wanted the HK$500 monthly stipend.
The Bund made him a legend. A Better Tomorrow made him a God.
His TV breakthrough came in 1980 with the 25-episode TVB drama 《上海灘》 — The Bund — where he played the mobster-poet Hui Man-keung (許文強). Overnight, every tailor in Hong Kong was selling long white scarves and black trench coats. The theme song became a Cantopop standard. He was 25.
Then in 1986, after a run of flop films that nearly ended his career, he put on a trench coat for the second time. A Better Tomorrow (《英雄本色》), directed by John Woo, cast Chow as Mark Gor — a counterfeiter in sunglasses with a toothpick, who lights a cigarette with a US$100 bill in one scene and reshapes Hong Kong masculinity in another. The film grossed HK$34 million, became the highest-earning Hong Kong film ever at that point, and launched the entire "heroic bloodshed" genre.
🎬 The toothpick that defined a generation
John Woo originally wrote Mark Gor without a toothpick. Chow improvised it on set because he had just quit smoking and needed something to put in his mouth. The toothpick became so iconic that Hong Kong school boys were suspended from the mid-1980s onwards for walking around with toothpicks and squinting at teachers. Every one of them wanted to be 發哥.
Hollywood, the Oscars, and a quiet retreat
In 2000 Chow starred in Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a film that won four Academy Awards including Best Foreign Language Film. He had learned Mandarin phonetically for the role — his first language is Cantonese and he grew up speaking it exclusively. He went on to star in Hollywood films including Anna and the King, Bulletproof Monk and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, before quietly stepping back from Hollywood to make Chinese-language films again.
🎬 The MTR superstar
Hong Kongers have countless 發哥-on-the-MTR stories. He is routinely spotted on the East Rail Line in a plain t-shirt, headphones in, nobody fussing. He is a lifelong hiker — famous for walking the hills around Clear Water Bay and taking selfies with every stranger who asks. He uses an old Nokia because, in his own words, "a smartphone is a leash".
🎬 HK$5.6 billion given away
In December 2018 Chow announced he and his wife Jasmine Tan (who he married in 1986) would donate approximately HK$5.6 billion — 99% of their net worth — to charity. "Making the money is not that difficult. What is difficult is deciding what you don't need," he told reporters. He has publicly stated his monthly personal spending is around HK$800.
🎬 The man who refused to be a brand
Through the 1990s, every Hong Kong brand on earth wanted Chow Yun-fat as a face. He turned down almost all of them. He eventually fronted a long-running campaign in the 1980s and later a Suncity ad, but has mostly refused the celebrity endorsement circuit. The reason, per his own interviews: he does not want strangers associating him with things he does not actually use.
A Cantonese word 發哥 made famous
If one Cantonese word belongs to 發哥, it is 發達 — "to strike it rich". The character 發 is the same one in his nickname, and in the Hong Kong idea of 恭喜發財 (gung1 hei2 faat3 coi4) that gets yelled at every Lunar New Year.
發達
faat3 daat6 — Jyutping romanisation
Meaning: To get rich. To hit the jackpot.
Explanation: The dream fuel of every 1980s Hong Kong migrant and the punchline of every gambling film 發哥 ever made. Note that Chow himself used the word in interviews about his wealth and gave the money away — a very Cantonese moral.
If 發哥's gambler-film era is your love language, the 賭神 God of Gamblers Hoodie is a direct nod — a tribute to the Macau casino film era 發哥 co-defined with Chow Sing Chi.
And for the quieter message about being Cantonese and proud of it — the trench coat worn plainly — the 廣東仔 CANTONESE GUY Oversized T-shirt says the whole thing in three characters.
Why 發哥 still matters
Hong Kong has produced many bigger box-office stars in dollar terms. It has produced few bigger moral examples. 發哥's power is not the trench coat or the Mark Gor swagger — it is that the man under all of that insisted on remaining the Lamma Island kid who grew up poor, took the ferry to town, and refuses to pretend otherwise.
That is a very Cantonese kind of success — Andy Lau has it too, and so does Deanie Ip. The money is not the point. The grind is. The fact that the kid from the village still gets on the MTR is the whole story.
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