The world knows him as Jackie Chan. The official record gives his birth name as Chan Kong-Sang. His Chinese fans know him by the stage name Shing Long - "Becoming the Dragon".

But in 2001 Jackie Chan discovered from his father that his real name is Fang Shilong and that the parents he thought he knew had kept secret a past filled with espionage, murder and drug running. Their 'real' story, in fact reached back to the brutal oppression of China's Cultural Revolution, into the streets of Imperial Hong Kong and even to Australia's capital city of Canberra.

Yet more astonishing is Jackie's emotionally charged reaction to his father's revelation that he has two half-brothers, victimized under China's oppressive rule and whom he has never met. Traces of a Dragon is a complex story of one Chinese family, but it mirrors the fates of countless other Chinese scarred by war, poverty and separation throughout the 20th century.