Kwai Chang Caine (Chinese: 虔官昌; pinyin: Qián Guānchāng) is a fictional character and the protagonist of the ABC 1972–1975 action-adventure western television series Kung Fu.

In late 19th-century China, Kwai Chang Caine was the orphaned son of an American man and a Chinese woman.

Although it was his intention to find his brother Danny in a way that would escape notice, the demands of his training as a priest in addition to his sense of social responsibility, which was instilled within him during his childhood, forced Caine to repeatedly come into the open to fight for justice.

Although taking a student of mixed parentage into the order was unprecedented, the head monk Master Kan (Philip Ahn) sagely noted, "There is a first for everything," and welcomed Caine.

Following his induction into the order, Caine then lived in the temple until adulthood, mastering many of the fighting forms and lessons taught by the Shaolin monks (Crane, Snake, Praying Mantis, Tiger, and Dragon).

While they were talking together in the street, the Emperor's nephew and his entourage came along and an altercation ensued when a guard tried to push Po aside and was sent sprawling by the blind Shaolin.

He then escaped to the American Old West and in the first-season episode "Dark Angel" discovered from his grandfather Henry Caine (Dean Jagger) that he had a half-brother named Daniel.

The monk's reply was, "You are more than a handful of rice" (the price placed on Caine's head by the Imperial government being $10,000 alive, $5,000 dead).

Upon graduation, he attained the rank of Shaolin Master and exited the temple via a special corridor designed as a last test.

Barring the exit was a cauldron filled with hot coals, whose rim bore dragon and tiger figures on its underside, directly across from each other.

By lifting the cauldron with his forearms and moving it aside, the graduate branded himself with the figures; the burns and the scars they left behind served to indicate his new status.

As Caine explained to his brother in the fourth-to-last episode of the series, "Full Circle", the Shaolin life "is not one of restriction".

In the first episode, "King of the Mountain", Lara Parker plays a widowed ranch owner with whom Caine finds employment.

There are scenes of passionate kissing, after which Su Yen is shown waking on the sleeping mat and reaching out for Kwai Chang, only to find that he is not there.

It turns out that Su Yen, however, seeks to trade Caine to the Emperor in exchange for her father who is imprisoned in China.

It is because she truly loves him that Mayli ultimately rejects a devastated Caine, knowing her lifestyle and ways would eventually destroy him and all that he stands for.

The third season episode, "The Forbidden Kingdom", depicts Caine's first days on the run after killing the Emperor's nephew.

In his efforts to flee China and escape the Emperor's men, Caine meets Po Li, played by Adele Yoshioka.

In the waning days of her relationship with David Carradine, Barbara Hershey appeared in a season three two-part episode, "Besieged".

She played the role of Nan Chi, a half-Chinese, half-Caucasian woman who wanted to become a disciple of the Shaolin.

The character was called Kwai Chang Caine in the Ed Spielman and Howard Friedlander's original feature movie script, and it was written that way in Caine's wanted poster[9] that appeared in the series from the pilot onwards and until Kung Fu: The Movie.

However, in s3e04 episode A Small Beheading, Captain Brandywine Gage (played by William Shatner) presents Caine with a scroll written in Chinese.

However, in the series, Caine attended the Shaolin Temple in Henan province, where the priests likely spoke Mandarin.