Abstract: Based on the cultural tradition of Shanghai films and the battle field of the gaming between the East and the West, Hong Kong films have always been rooted in traditional Chinese culture, blending the elements of film types, making innovations in both form and content, and revealing a social and cultural landscape with distinctive local characteristics. To review Hong Kong films from the 1930s to the return of Hong Hong to the motherland in 1997 in the perspective of Lin Niantong’s aesthetic theory of “Mirror Tour”, we can find that the cultural ecological system and stance of the “big concentric circle” of Chinese culture had always nourished the cultural landscape and spiritual temperament of Hong Kong films, and the proposal of the image and notion of “tour” distinguishes Hong Kong films with its unique identity from western films. Since Hong Kong’s return, Hong Kong films, instilled with state consciousness and local identity, have adopted the strategy of nostalgic realism and integrated individual and collective memory into the inter-textual creation of history and reality, thus regenerating a cultural memory with a community nature.

Key words: Hong Kong films, traditional Chinese culture, Chinese films, Mirror Tour Theory, cultural memory