On 3 February 1962, a small newspaper strip appeared in Hong Kong featuring a rangy older man in an old-style traditional gown, a bowler-ish cap, and a facial expression that hovered somewhere between mild dignity and total confusion. His name was Old Master Q (老夫子). The artist behind him was Alfonso Wong Kar-Hei — a refugee from Tianjin who had crossed into Hong Kong six years earlier, in 1956, in his early 30s, with a family to feed and not much else.
Sixty-four years later, Old Master Q is still being published — the oldest continuously running comic series in Asia, more than 18,000 individual strips deep, translated across South-East Asia, and quietly responsible for teaching three generations of Hong Kongers to see themselves the way an outsider first saw them, then loved them, then couldn't stop drawing them.
A refugee from Tianjin who signed his son's name
Alfonso Wong Kar-Hei was born on 27 May 1923 in Tianjin, on the northern Chinese coast. He was already a working artist when the political and economic upheavals of the mid-20th century pushed his family south. In 1956 they crossed into Hong Kong, where Wong — like so many Cantonese-adjacent migrants of that era — had to start over, take teaching work, and figure out how to turn his art into rent.
In 1962 he sold his first Old Master Q strip to a Hong Kong newspaper. In one of the most unusual creative decisions in comics history, he chose not to sign the strip with his own name. Instead he used the name of his eldest son, Joseph Wong Chak (王澤). The theory is generous — a father giving his son a gift — but the practical result is that most Hongkongers grew up thinking "Wong Chak" was the artist. He wasn't. Alfonso Wong drew every original Old Master Q strip himself, for decades.
Three characters, one entire Hong Kong
The genius of Old Master Q is that the entire series runs on essentially three characters. Old Master Q is the tall, thin, slightly out-of-time everyman in a traditional Chinese long gown. Big Potato (大番薯) is his short, round, endlessly hungry best friend, drawn to look almost exactly like a sweet potato with legs. Mr Chin (秦先生) is the polite, bookish "ordinary Joe" of the trio — the one who most resembles the reader.
The three of them wander through Cantonese Hong Kong — tram stops, wet markets, cha chaan tengs, cinema queues, bus stops. Nothing much happens by the standards of modern comics. Old Master Q trips on something. Big Potato tries to eat something. Mr Chin reacts. And in that space, Wong recorded, panel by panel, a Hong Kong that was still figuring out what it was.
📰 The strip that ran quiet politics
At a time when publishing controversial politics in Hong Kong could cost you a printing press, Old Master Q worked in the corner of the eye. Wong used the three characters to satirise everyday life under British administration — corner-cutting officials, hopeless bureaucracy, the awkward daily comedy of colonial Hong Kong. The strip never named names. It didn't need to. Every Cantonese reader knew exactly which cha chaan teng, which minibus, which uncle was being lampooned.
Why the Cantonese diaspora carried Old Master Q with them
If you grew up in a Cantonese household in North America, Australia, the UK, Singapore or Malaysia in the 1970s, 80s or 90s, chances are your parents had a stack of Old Master Q collections. The strip was pocket-sized, portable, and made minimal use of dialogue — a Cantonese kid raised abroad could follow the visual gags perfectly even if their reading was rusty. For a lot of overseas Cantonese kids, Old Master Q was their first sustained encounter with Hong Kong humour, Hong Kong street signs, and Hong Kong body language.
Our post on the Cantonese diaspora and its history is really the same story from a different angle: how does a language, a look, a sense of humour move across oceans and stay recognisable? Old Master Q was one of the great vehicles for that transmission.
The son who kept the pen moving
In 1995, Alfonso Wong formally passed the creative reins to Joseph Wong Chak — the same son whose name he had been signing on the strip for over 30 years. Joseph had grown up inside the strip. He knew Old Master Q, Big Potato and Mr Chin the way a jazz musician knows a standard: he could improvise inside them without breaking their integrity. The strip continued. The family business held. Alfonso Wong lived quietly, moved to California, and died there on 1 January 2017 at age 93. He is remembered in Hong Kong as one of the most influential visual storytellers the city ever had.
The Cantonese word Old Master Q made everyone know
The comic is packed with Hong Kong slang, but one term more than any other travelled with the strip into Cantonese diaspora vocabulary — the affectionate nickname for the main character himself:
老夫子
lou5 fu1 zi2 — Jyutping romanisation
Meaning: Literally "Old Master" — an affectionate way of teasing an older man who acts more formally than the moment requires.
Explanation: Before the comic, the term was a slightly stiff, slightly sarcastic address for a scholar or elder. After Wong put it on that lanky gowned character, it became a punchline: to call someone "老夫子" is to say they're out of step with the era but you love them anyway.
Why Old Master Q still matters
Long after the golden era of Hong Kong newsprint faded, long after Cantopop hit its 1990s peak and slowed down, long after the neon signs came off the buildings, Old Master Q is still on newsstands. New generations pick him up not because the humour is fresh — most of it dates to a Hong Kong that no longer exists — but because he functions like a cultural passport. He tells you what a Cantonese joke used to feel like. He shows you how Cantonese people carried themselves before the internet flattened everyone's body language. And he does it panel by panel, in silence, with a wink.
Streetwear does something similar for the current generation. If Old Master Q was how our parents wore Cantonese identity on paper, brands like ours are how the next wave wears it on cotton. Our Black Logo tee is the same idea in a different medium: a Cantonese punchline you can carry with you.
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