Word: chan
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...first 100 or so pieces produced by Shanghai, only 12 passed the modest quality standards, which required the watches to neither gain nor lose more than 120 seconds a day. But these unreliable prototypes, Chan explains, provided the basis for the mass-produced A581 - launched in July 1958 and adorning many Chinese wrists until its discontinuation in 1967. Millions of A581s were made, which means that today they are relatively easy to pick up in Shanghai curio stores from about $15 (variations in dial color and casing style will affect the price). Chan is also a fan of the A623...
...Chan snapped up his A623 in an online auction for just under $150 - underscoring the fact that early communist-era Chinese mechanical watches are within the financial reach of almost anyone. "Even many rare models can still be found for [around] $75," Chan says. To be sure, some pieces occasionally fetch impressive sums (a 1955 Shanghai Watch sold at auction for over $15,700 in 1996), but for the moment no one is talking about the investment value - only the pleasure of getting your hands on a quaint piece of revolutionary history...
...kill each other when it's over," says Jackie Chan as the Drunken Master Lu Yan to Jet Li's Silent Monk in the new Asian-American fantasy film The Forbidden Kingdom. But when these honored veterans of Hong Kong martial-arts movies get into fighting mode, it's an open question as to whether they'll survive till the end of the shoot. (Chan ends each of his films with gruesome outtakes of the injuries he suffered doing his stunts.) For all the safety precautions taken, the two stars still have to give every fiber of their disciplined, battered...
...that their careers have outlasted those of Western action stars? Chan has been in nearly 100 films since he did bit parts as a child actor. Li's been making movies nonstop for 26 years. Shouldn't their bodies, let alone their audiences, have given up by now? Steven Seagal made fewer than 20 features. Jean-Claude Van Damme had about a decade's worth of wide releases. Arnold Schwarzenegger managed 20 years of action stardom, and he's considered the gold standard...
Then there's the work. Contrast Chan's and Li's homemade, our-pain-for-your-gain, almost literally death-defying feats with those of Hollywood action stars from the same generation. Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris--they all looked fit and muscular, and some had martial-arts backgrounds. But when it came time to do the heavy lifting, especially as they reached midcareer, the doubles were usually called...