Until today it was safe to say that the market in Britain for Mandarin films about duty and suppressed desire in 18th-century China was a little on the limited side.
But after a weekend in which teenagers queued for the chance to hang on the words of lovelorn philosophising warrior mystics, Li Mu Bai and Yu Shu Lien, all that may be about to change.
The film that has persuaded thousands of cinema-goers to brush up on their history of the Han dynasties, is Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
The spectacular martial arts film with enough emotional depth for art house credibility took 10 times more at the box office in London on its opening weekend than the best-performing new US film, the Kim Basinger vehicle Bless the Child.
With ticket sales of £686,386 from just 88 screens in three days, Crouching Tiger is now well on the way to eclipsing the Oscar-winning Life Is Beautiful as the most successful foreign language film ever shown here.
What is even more surprising is that some of this subtle, feminist film's most vocal supporters have been in the tabloids, whose critics have competed to shower superlatives on its Hong Kong stars, Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh, whose doomed, unrealised love affair - think Brief Encounter with kick-boxing - is the movie's beating heart.
Crouching Tiger and its director Ang Lee are already the clever bets for the Oscars for best film and director.
Ang Lee has been unlucky to miss out before with his masterly adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense And Sensibility, The Ice Storm and The Wedding Banquet where he gave unusual depth to his female characters. He has in fact been credited with creating a whole new genre of intelligent karate film with Crouching Tiger.
With eye-popping fight sequences - most memorably a tree-top duel - Crouching Tiger is sure of a clutch of special effects awards. More im portantly iCrouching Tiger has become a boon for independent cinemas whose fight to keep foreign cinema alive here has at times been thankless.
The Duke of York in Brighton has seen nothing like it since it managed to get a print of the cult hit The Blair Witch Project a week before it went on general release.
Spokesman Dean Stewart said the film's great strength was that it had something for everyone. "It's a great martial arts film, it's got a love interest and it is beautiful to look at. I have not seen a film for a long time which had such a warm reaction from so many different people. It is great to see people who wouldn't normally go to a foreign language film having such a good time."
Next week the multiplexes will try to cash in, and Crouching Tiger is likely to be showing on up to five times as many screens across the country.
Subtitle Hits
1 Life Is Beautiful (Italy) £3.03m
2 Cyrano de Bergerac (France) £2.45m
3 Il Postino (Italy) £1.27m
4 Delicatessen (France) £1.26m
5 All About My Mother (Spain) £1.1m
6 Farewell My Concubine (China) £1.03m
7 Cinema Paradiso (Italy) £1.02m
