Hong Kong’s “Great Wuxia Era”
by Lin Yao
1
On May 20, 1959, many events probably transpired in the world. But for Hong Kong, there were two events worth remembering. At the time these were minor events; aside from those involved, probably no one else took notice. Like the seed of a garden balsam or a soybean seed, even though you plant it in the ground, if it doesn’t sprout, no one will know it will have flame-red blossoms or countless bean pods.
The first event was that Jin Yong began publication of Ming Pao. Jin Yong was thirty-six years old, his eleventh year after moving south to Hong Kong. Once Ming Pao had made a name for itself, many rumors went around, some saying that Jin Yong had received funding from the USA’s Central Intelligence Agency to start the company, and there were rumors that Jin Yong was being secretly backed by Taiwan’s Nationalist Party. In his later years, Jin Yong was interviewd by Bai Yansong for China Central Television and said, “I put most of the royalty money I received, about 80,000 yuan, plus 20,000 from Shen Baoxin, toward starting Ming Pao. If we had had backing, we wouldn’t have needed to work so hard.
At that time, Jin Yong had already written The Book and the Sword, Sword Stained with Royal Blood, and Legend of the Condor Heroes, the latter being especially popular with a large readership. In 1958, it was made into a film by Hong Kong’s Emei Film Group and remained a trendy Cantonese wuxia film till 1970. And because of this, Jin Yong had acquired a substantial amount in royalties, so he had some capital. In those days, the cost of running a newspaper was low, and having worked in the newspaper business for many years, Jin Yong didn’t want to work for anyone else anymore and naturally decided to “run his own business”.
During the 1960s of the twentieth century, Hong Kong’s left wing newspapers Ta Kung Pao, Wen Wei Po, New Evening Post, Ching Po Daily, and Hong Kong Commercial Daily were flourishing, taking up 30% of the Hong Kong newspaper business. Hong Kong also had a number of private newspapers partial to Taiwan’s Nationalist Party, such as The Kung Sheung Daily News. In addition, some of Hong Kong’s centralist papers were also partial to Taiwan, the most well-known being Overseas China Daily News and Sing Tao Daily.
In this crowded newspaper environment, Ming Pao’s trifling 100,000 yuan cost was no more than eking out a living in a narrow space. In its inaugural introduction, Jin Yong made known Ming Pao’s position: to uphold “impartiality and decency”, insisting on not taking the side of either the Left or the Right. Ming Pao was established on the north corner of Chun Yeung Street (it later moved to the building above Greater China Restaurant). To save costs, everyone took on multiple duties. Jin Yong appointed himself president and editor-in-chief; his wife, Zhu Mei, ran the local Hong Kong news section. Pan Yuesheng was editor (later he became the editor-in-chief), and the business department relied solely on Shen Baoxin and Dai Maosheng. From top to bottom there were only five people, so in those days, Ming Pao was just a tabloid.1
Ridiculers will say Jin Yong went from being the editor of a major paper to selling tabloids. Put more elegantly, Jin Yong made a magnificent about-face and started his own company. But no matter how you look at it, the future was uncertain and was not at all optimistic.
Jin Yong felt that Ming Pao’s small quarto size was suitable for Hongkongers’ newspaper reading preference and its content layout focused on eye-catching, salatious content, wittingly or unwittingly catering to readers, its literary quality rather low, the main draw being Return of the Condor Heroes. This novel was clearly well received by readers.
The prequel, Legend of the Condor Heroes, had been serialized in Hong Kong Commerical Daily and finished on May 19, 1959. The two novels link up seamlessly, showing that Jin Yong had already made plans for Return of the Condor Heroes.
When Legend of the Condor Heroes concluded, Jin Yong wrote a public notice: “I’ve written Sword Stained with Royal Blood and Legend of the Condor Heroes for this paper, three and a half years altogether. I’m indebted to the readers’ unceasing letters, comments, and discussions, which have given me a lot of encouragement. I’m naturally very grateful… My friendly relationship with my colleagues at Commercial Daily and with its readers is not a shallow one; I ought to continue writing a new work, but becaue I’ve recently been busy with other work, I just don’t have the time, so I must bid temporary farewell with all you readers. When I have time I will once again meet you all in this newspaper.”
The day after this notice ran, Jin Yong’s Ming Pao began publication, with Return of the Condor Heroes appearing as the lead article on the third page with the goal of attracting readers to buy the paper.
Despite Jin Yong’s careful calculations, Ming Pao printed 8,000 copies that day but didn’t sell out; it’s unknown what became of the extra copies. Chen Changfeng in his Comprehensive Review of the Hong Kong Newspaper Business, said that many years later, Jin Yong wanted to spend the high sum of 200,000 to put out a special edition of the first issue of Ming Pao, but it never happened.
The second event was more minor. On this day, a young Hong Kong couple tied the knot and would remain together the rest of their lives. That day the couple just happened to pass by a newspaper stand and bought the first issue of Ming Pao. As if it were an imperceptible matter of fate, at the end of 1959, this young twenty-four-year-old man received an invitation from Ming Pao requesting a manuscript submission, and from that moment on he began a sixty-year long friendship with Jin Yong.
That young man had two years ago moved from the interior to Hong Kong and went by the name Ni Kuang.
That day in Hong Kong, something very major for the development of Hong Kong wuxia fiction occurred.
Two months before Ming Pao began publication, on a day in March of 1959, the proprietor of Hong Kong’s Blue Book magazine, Luo Bin, went to Johnston Road in Wan Chai to see Hong Kong Rice Merchant’s Association secretary, Zhou Shuhua.
Zhou Shuhua was a bit surprised to see Luo Bin. Luo Bin said, I have a good idea I want to talk to you about.
Luo Bin was from Kaiping, Guangdong, born in 1923 in Macau. After graduating middle school, he majored in mechanical engineering at the Hong Kong Far East Flying & Technical School in preparation for becoming an airplane mechanic. But unexpectedly, after graduating, on December 8, 1941, Japanese troops launched a surprise attack on Hong Kong, and British Forces Overseas Hong Kong surrendered, and Hong Kong fell into enemy hands. His father was in Shanghai, so Luo Bin escaped to Shanghai. Luo Bin had always been independent, never relying on his father. He got work at Shanghai’s The Standard newspaper. There he got to know famous musician Liang Yueyin, and in their spare time they collaborated to put out some music which surprisingly sold well, and they made a considerable amount of money. The profitability of his first publishing venture piqued Luo Bin’s interest and gave him confidence in his later publishing ventures.
Not long after the war, Luo Bin decided to leave the newspaper office and start his own business, but what kind? He admitted that there were not many prospects in China science and technology, so it would be a waste of effort to copy foreign inventions, plus he didn’t have much capital. If he went into publishing, foreigners can’t read Chinese, so there would be little opportunity there, but there were many foreign articles that could be translated.
At this time, Luo Bin met a friend around the same age as him called Feng Baoshan. They talked and got along well; Luo Bin told him that he had once published music and made some money. Feng Baoshan said, If you’re interested in publishing, let’s start a publishing company together. Not long after, the two of them put together a publishing organization called “Global Publishing”, which they established on Nanjing Street in Shanghai; Luo Bin handled the publishing.
Global Publishing’s first periodical was Blue Book, 32K size, which began on July 25, 1946 and ran until May 1, 1949, publishing 26 issues, the publication date for each issue never standardized. Blue Book hired famous detective fiction author Sun Liaohong to be editor-in-chief. It was named Blue Book “because those two words carried an air of mystery, so taking it as a title indicated that the contents included horror, thrills, mystery, and wonder.” As the inaugural manifesto clearly stated: “Blue Book doesn’t discuss state affairs, doesn’t talk about democracy, what’s the point? We talk about ghosts, we talk about xia, we talk about detectives, all fictional characters. These stories are imaginary, but when people are suffering they like to fantasize, dispense with nonsense, discard their worries. Open this and walk into your own little world.”
Blue Book’s main contributors were Sun Liaohong, Zheng Dike, Cheng Xiaoqing, Shangguan Mu, Seng Lin, Liu Zhengxun, etc. Huanzhu Louzhu’s wuxia novel Nine Xia of Guanzhong also ran for several issues in this publication. Like the inaugural manifesto declared, it mainly focused on detective fiction and thrillers, a large proportion devoted to translations of Western detective fiction by authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Ellery Queen. There was also true crime, adventure stories, solve-the-mystery illustrations, and five-minute crack the case columns.
Blue Book was an immediate success. As a result, Global Publishing presented one after another the periodicals Spring & Autumn, West Point, and Happy, which were also successful.
In May of 1949, just when Global Publishing’s ventures in Shanghai were at their peak, Luo Bin went south to Hong Kong to avoid the civil war, carrying with him two gold bars and a box of old manuscripts and magazines, but he couldn’t find work in Hong Kong. Luo Bin did what he knew best, and once again established Global Publishing and resumed publication of Blue Book. He couldn’t afford to hire anyone, so he edited it himself and enlisted another author who had gone south with him, Fang Longxiang, to contribute manuscripts. One person editing, the other writing, they also included the old manuscripts from Shanghai that Luo Bin had taken with him and compiled the first issue and put it out on newsstands, and they were immediately on solid footing.
Blue Book continued in the same style as it had in Shanghai, 32K size, thin booklets, all translations of western detective stories, occasionally including the works of local Hong Kong writers Ximen Mu and Tian Zhennan. Ximen Mu was Liang Mushu, a translator and writer. Han Zhennan was a private detective in Hong Kong, well-experienced in handling cases. He put his cases into his writing, which attracted readers. However, in all fairness, Blue Book pandered too much to the market. The quality of its stories was low, the translations clumsy, translators arbitrarily altering the original text. It was clear from the cover that it was designed to draw readers, mostly using foreign artists, concepts, everyone a beauty with slender waists, fair faces and made-up eyebrows, with a smile to overthrow a city.
After Blue Book, Luo Bin put out many other publications under the Global Publishing brand, with various content that catered to readers and sold well. Roughly speaking, there was Global Fiction, Global Library, Blue Book, West Point, Black & White, Mini, New TV, etc. These periodicals pretty much accompanied the youth of Hong Kong as they matured through the 50s and 60s of the twentieth century.
From the 60s to the 80s, Global Publishing published 45,000 characters of fiction a day per publication, so they needed an astonishing number of authors. Luo Bin liked to use new authors. That year, when author Yi Da wrote his first novel, Little Lover, he was only a middle school student. According to Yi Da, Pan Liudai recommended he submit a manuscript to Luo Bin. When he sent it off he was unsure, not expecting Luo Bin would actually use it. Celebrated Japanese translator Dongfang Yi was also discovered by Luo Bin; they happened to meet on a Star Ferry boat. Luo Bin struck up a conversation and invited him to translate Japanese for “Global”. Zheng Hui, famous in Hong Kong and called Ba Jin’s successor, also published Autumn Comes to the Crepe Myrtle Garden with them as well.
Global Publishing already had so many magazines, but Luo Bin was not yet satisfied. He had a plan to publish a magazine solely dedicated to wuxia fiction—Wuxia World.
At that time, wuxia fiction was mostly serialized in major newspaper supplements. The most famous authors of course were Jin Yong nad Liang Yusheng. A skilled manager, Luo Bin immediately thought: to set up an independent magazine to contend with Jin Yong and Liang Yusheng’s wuxia fiction! This was also his Way of “vertical and horizontal coalition”: since Jin Yong and Liang Yusheng wrote so well, then I’ll unite the other wuxia authors and publish them all in one magazine, so readers can see many different works. That’s called beating to death the old masters with a flurry of fists!
Before the initial publication of Wuxia World, there were three magazines specializing in publishing wuxia fiction: I’m a Mountain Man (Chen Jin) established Martial Arts Magazine and King of Martial Arts Fiction in 1950, and Qiu Xianglin in 1951 set up Fiction World. Contributing authors were all Cantonese journalists who had come to Hong Kong in 1949. They were in a new publishing location, but the group of authors didn’t disperse. I’m a Mountain Man, Praying to Buddha Mountain Man, Big Enclosure Courage, Wang Xiangqin, Mao Liaosheng (Jin Feng), Cuiwen Louzhu (Gao Tiangao), etc., were all colleagues or members of the same profession. This group of authors wrote stories in Cantonese about Guangdong’s Hung Hei-gun, Fong Sai-yuk, Wong Fei-hung, and other folk heroes, and were later dubbed “Guangdong Wuxia”. They flourished in Hong Kong, which led to a series of wuxia films. With Northern School wuxia, armed escort carts rattled, while with Southern School wuxia, fists flew; the styles of the Northern and Southern schools were quite distinct.
During this period of time there was no name for it, until the rise of Jin Yong and Liang Yusheng, when “New School” wuxia fiction entered the annals of history, and these authors were classified as “Old School”. Perhaps I’m a Mountain Man and the others were none too happy after muddling about in the jianghu for so long for history to define them as “Old School”.
Wuxia fiction originally didn’t have any “New School” or “Old School”. These divisions were created later by scholars as convenient designations for conducting research. During the Republican period, when Zheng Zhengyin, Bai Yu, Wang Dulu, Zhu Zhenmu, and others, were active, they too were once regarded as “New School”, but as time progressed, they were regarded as even older than “Old School”.
In order to start an independent wuxia fiction magazine, you need an editor-in-chief who can keep the “heroes of the martial world” under control. Luo Bin’s eyes landed on Zhou Shuhua, and so Luo Bin paid him a visit in order to invite him to become editor-in-chief of Wuxia World.
Who was Zhou Shuhua? Why did Luo Bin take a fancy to him?
2
Zhou Shuhua was born in 1909. His ancestral home was Nanhai, Guangdong, but several generations previously the family had moved to Guangzhou and engaged in the sandalwood trade. Zhou Shuhua graduated from Guangdong Zhongshan University’s Department of Economics. His Chinese was rather good, and he was also fluent in English. After graduation he got a job in the telegraph office. In 1948, he went to Hong Kong to avoid the civil war and worked as a secretary with the Hong Kong Rice Merchant’s Association. His secretarial work did not require fixed hours, so when he was not in the office, Zhou Shuhua hid away at home and wrote, mainly wuxia fiction and horse racing analysis report forms.
Zhou Shuhua used the pen name Ti Feng (蹄風) when writing wuxia fiction. The origin of “horse hooves raising the wind” was from “horse betting”. He usually wrote horse racing forms under the pen name “Brother-in-law”. At the beginning of the 1960s, Ming Pao conducted a “Ming Pao Cup Inside Story Contest” using the seasonal results of horse race critics to determine the winner. “Brother-in-law” stuck with the unpopular horse race “Magpie Group” and left the competition in the dust, becoming the winner of the first contest, showing how knowledgable he was with “horse betting”, and how successful his horse race form writing was. Because he liked betting on horses, Ti Feng got to know many Hong Kong martial arts masters, for example Hong Kong White Crane’s master, Wu Zhaozhong, and famed Taijiquan master, Dong Yingjie, both of whom he wrote about in his fiction. Ti Feng’s fiction sold well in Southeast Asia, his reputation there even surpassing that in Hong Kong.
In Hong Kong, Jin Yong and Liang Yusheng had the most wuxia fiction adapted to film; in Taiwan, Wolong Sheng and Zhuge Qingyun had the most. In fact, in those days, much of Ti Feng’s wuxia fiction was also adapted to wuxia films. From 1961 to 1963, there were over ten wuxia films adapted from Ti Feng’s wuxia fiction, not less than Liang Yusheng during the same period. The first one adapted in 1961 was directed by Lo Wei and starring Lin Dai, was Meng Lisi, Maid of the Jungle. During the same period, Tian Shan Gibbon Girl was also shot, starring a young Xiao Fangfang.
The majority of Ti Feng’s wuxia fiction was interconnected, forming a major series of over ten novels set in the early Qing dynasty, from Kangxi to Qianlong. A series of connected stories was the norm for Hong Kong wuxia fiction at the time; most representative of this is Liang Yusheng’s “Tianshan series”, which spanned over twenty books, from the early Ming dynasty to the mid and late Qing dynasty. Jin Yong also had his “Legend of the Condor Heroes Trilogy”. Ti Feng’s novel series, taken in chronological order by story events, Tian Shan Gibbon Girl descibes Meng Lisi’s upbringing by apes, and her rise to fame with the Heavenly Dragon School of Ganden Monastery in Tibet, including plotlines featuring leftovers of the Ming dynasty rising up against the Qing. Meng Lisi, Maid of the Jungle is about Meng Lisi and Gan Fengchi, Lü Siniang, and the other Eight Xia of Jiangnan, and how after helping Yongzheng ascend the throne, Yongzheng sold them out, while Meng Lisi was drugged and raped by Yongzheng and became his consort, forming an unhappy union. The Sword of the Palace is about the xia lovers Sima Changying and Wang Xuelian and their plot to assassinate Yongzheng. Thirteen Swords of the Martial World is about the Flying Phoenix Princess, the daughter of the Fourteenth Uncle of Qianlong. She falls in love with Sima Changying and falsely claims she lost her virginity to him in order to force Sima Changying to leave Wang Xuelian. Dragon and Tiger Go South is about Sima Changying and a group of xia who at a big gathering in Jiangnan on a leitai platform annihilate the evildoing Flying Phoenix Princess.
There’s a large number of characters Ti Feng writes about in his fiction. Aside from the Eight Xia of Jiangnan and their deep connection with Yongzheng, Feng Daode and Zhou Riqing from the late Qing novel The Sacred Dynasty’s Tripods Flourish, Verdant for Ten Thousand Years are also used, as well as historical martial arts internal arts master Wang Zhengnan. Even more special, Zhuo Yihang and Jade Raksha from Liang Yusheng’s Legend of the White Haired Maiden appear in Swordsman of Milarepa Pond. Ti Feng gave them a daughter, Zhuo Yingxia. Similarly, the names Twin Hawks of Tianshan and Bai Zhen from Jin Yong’s The Book and the Sword appear in Ti Feng’s fiction, their identity similar. Ti Feng’s fiction became the gathering place for Qing dynasty wuxia characters, and though he did take advantage of the popularity of Jin Yong and Liang Yusheng, yet there is can also be evidence of Ti Feng’s power of imagination.
The standing of Ti Feng’s fiction is not based on other writers’ characters. He also created his own unique characters. The most famous is his “Gibbon Girl Meng Lisi”, from which he clealry took inspiration from “Tarzan of the Apes”. Meng Lisi’s most astonishing story is that though she is a xia, she is drugged and raped by Yongzheng, then is willing to become his consort. It was exceptional and daring to make the female protagonist become a captive of the main villain considering that wuxia fiction at that time made clear distinctions between good and evil and the two could not co-exist.
Ti Feng’s fiction has another exceedingly unusual character, the Mongolian Buddhist Female Bodhisattva Sha Haluo, who appears in many of Ti Feng’s novels, and is a rather major character. A female living Buddha, she has a relationship with Wang Chunming of the Eight Xia of Jiangnan, with whom she has an illegitimate daughter, Wang Xuelian, who becomes the main love interest of the key figure, Sima Changying. Sima Changying himself has numerous tangles with the villainess Flying Phoenix Princess. There’s nothing new about a villain female lead falling in love with the male lead, but Flying Phoenix Princess is different in that she doesn’t change her ways and turn over a new leaf for the sake of her love for Sima Changying but still slaughters the good guy xia.
Ti Feng possessed the hardened heart that a modern author needs, daring to allow important good guy charcters to be killed. Good guys like Gan Fengchi and Lü Siniang both die by Flying Phoenix’s sword, making it so that Flying Phoenix makes a deep impression wth the reader. This is something many wuxia novelists at that time could not do.
In Luo Bin’s eyes, among Hong Kong wuxia authors, 1959’s Ti Feng rivaled Jin Yong and Liang Yusheng.
How Luo Bin persuaded Ti Feng is not known at this point, but on April 1, 1959, Wuxia World began publication, and on the first page was printed “Luo Ji, publisher” (whether Luo Ji was Luo Bin’s alias or a misprint is an open question), “Ti Feng, editor-in-chief”. The first issue was 16K size, 55 pages, the cover advertising Ti Feng’s Iron Palm, Mighty Wind, Jin Feng’s Tiger Xia Captures the Dragon, Shi Chong’s Random Talks on Wuxia Film, etc.
If you count it up, 1959 was a grand year for wuxia fiction in Hong Kong. In March of 1959, Jin Yong’s Legend of the Condor Heroes was close to finishing in Hong Kong Commercial Daily. Before that in 1957, Zhang Menghuan’s Descending Sword, Flying Dragon, serialized in Wuxia Fiction Weekly, enjoyed a wide readership. Zhang Menghuan had excellent prose, his novels brilliantly written. Who could anticipate that with the publication of Legend of the Condor Heroes, Hong Kong was rocked, and a fierce battle between it and Zhang Menghuan’s Descending Sword, Flying Dragon ensued, dubbed the “Dragon and Eagle Battle”. On January 1, 1959, Liang Yusheng began serializing his representative work, Tale of the Wandering Xia in Ta Kung Pao·Forest of Fiction. The number of readers of wuxia fiction gradually increased, becoming a major leisure activity for Hongkongers.
According to Hong Kong Commercial Daily reporter Yu Jiangqiang’s article, once Jin Yong founded Ming Pao he naturally no longer wrote wuxia fiction for Hong Kong Commercial Daily. When Legend of the Condor Heroes finished on May 19, 1959, Hong Kong Commercial Daily wanted to ask Liang Yusheng to help pick up the slack, but he had Tale of the Wandering Xia to deal with and didn’t have the time. So Hong Kong Commercial Daily editor-in-chief Zhang Xuekong, supplement editor Li Shawei, and editing director Zhang Chuji hastily got together to discuss the situation and decided to have their own editor Li Qinhan take over, and they posted an ad in the paper similar to when Luo Fu presented Liang Yusheng to the public with Dragons and Tigers Vie in the Capital.
Li Qinhan was a sports editor and had no fiction writing experience. The editors all got together to help him “cross the bridge” (Cantonese, means to think up ideas). Zhang first came up with the book’s title, Legend of the Loyal Red Xia, and Li Shawei gave him the pen name Yang Jianhao.
Li Qinhan imitated Jin Yong’s writing style and narration technique, and he wrote for two years, completing two books, Legend of the Loyal Red Xia and The Mandarin Duck Xia Oath. These were later published as standalone volumes. Jin Yong really approved of his writing and suggested to Hong Kong Commercial Daily that they release Li Qinhan from his other duties to allow him to focus on writing wuxia fiction. Unfortunately, Li Qinhan had to deal with too many other duties and never wrote wuxia fiction again, but he didn’t stop writing. He wrote a lot of essays, film reviews, and other fiction, plus horse and dog racing reports, once writing a column called Gangster Dog; he was a versatile writer.
Aside from publishing the first issue of Ming Pao on May 20, 1959, Jin Yong also began serializing on that day Return of the Condor Heroes. Before that, on February 9, he began Fox Volant of the Snowy Mountain for New Evening Post in order to give face to the boss of the paper’s parent publication, Ta Kung Pao. That novel finished on June 18 with an open-ended ending.
Ta Kung Pao’s editor Zhou Yurui held a family reuninon banquet and invited Jin Yong and Liang Yusheng to attend. There, Jin Yong and Liang Yusheng discussed the ending of Fox Volant of the Snowy Mountain, and everyone thought it was novel, but not everyone approved of it.
In fact, this proves that the novel really “startled a flock of seagulls and egrets”. The narrative technique was like that of Rashomon, but the ending Jin Yong said was drawn from a Mark Twain story set in the middle ages. A princess is in love with a warrior, but the warrior loves her palace maid. The king has the warrior choose between two doors. Behind one door is his beloved palace maid; if he should open this door, he will be married to the palace maid. Behind the other door is a hungry lion. If he opens this door, he will be eaten by the lion. The princess knows the secret of which lies behind each door, so how should she give a hint to the warrior? Of course the two stories have different meanings. Of Jin Yong’s fifteen works, this one is not remarkable and ranked toward the bottom, but it has its own style.2
The organizer of the reunion banquet, Zhou Yurui, might be unfamiliar to mainland readers, but in those days in Hong Kong, Zhou Yurui was listed by Ta Kung Pao among the ranks of “Tang Song Jin Liang”, one of the “Four Vigorous Pens”, and he also wrote wuxia fiction.
Jin and Liang is familiar to us. “Tang” refers to the pen name “Man of Tang”, Yan Qingshu, and “Song” refers to “Song Qiao”, Zhou Yurui.
Mainland readers are mostly familar with Song Qiao from Diary of an Aide-de-camp, which was popular for a while. I recall that it had “restricted publication” printed on the back cover. Zhou Yurui had been a reporter stationed in Nanjing and had close contact with Chiang Kaishek and was very familiar with the officials and inside stories surrounding Chiang’s regime, and he wrote Diary of an Aide-de-camp under the pen name “Song Qiao”. The book later on became very popular; it’s written in a humorous style, and the Vice Minister of the Ministry of Culture at the time, Zhou Yang, once received Zhou Yurui and praised the book, but Zhou Yurui himself was not pleased with it because it had been a newspaper serial and so had been too carelessly written.
The success of Diary of an Aide-de-camp encouraged New Evening Post editor-in-chief Luo Fu, who had Yan Qingshu write the grandiose Spring Dream of Jinling. The influence of Spring Dream of Jinling far outstripped Diary of an Aide-de-camp. I remember when I was little, I was chatting with someone and I said that Chiang Kai-shek was originally called “Zheng Sanfazi” and those who overheard me were impressed. My source for it was that novel, but actually, Yan Qingshu never even stepped foot in Chiang’s home.
Yan Qingshu’s pen name “Man of Tang” went with “Song Qiao”, as Tang and Song were both dynasties, and the “Liang” in Chen Wentong’s pen name “Liang Yusheng” is a name of a dynasty, as is the Jin in Jin Yong. The four of them set each other off nicely.
Jin and Liang, writing wuxia fiction, rapidly burst into the limelight. Zhou Yurui saw this and was itching to have a go at it himself and serialized the wuxia novel Record of the Dragon Slayer Abroad in New Evening Post under the name “Tian Mufeng”.
The news that Tian Mufeng was Zhou Yurui came from Jin Yong in his article “On Decision and Indecision”, in which he said: “He once used ‘Tian Mufeng’ as a pen name for a wuxia novel he wrote for New Evening Post called something like Legend of Heroes in a Foreign Land. He was interested in foreign countries, so he moved the setting for his wuxia novel from China to a foreign country. The characters’ personalities in the novel are not clearly drawn, and the story lacks a climax, and the male and female xia get married at the drop of a hat. And so someone at the newspaper office quipped sarcastically behind his back, ‘This novel ought to be called Record of a Xia’s Marriage.’ I just raised a few simple suggestions with Zhou Yurui: ‘Too much dialogue, the plot’s not exciting enough, and there’s no central character or story’, but I never discussed with him how to remedy it or improve it. Now that I think about it, I can’t help but feel guilty. Though this playful writing doesn’t really have much value, so it doesn’t matter much that he tried his hand at it and failed.”
Jin Yong mentioned in the article that the title was Legend of Heroes in a Foreign Land. Later, Hong Kong’s Weiqing Books published it as a physical book under the title Record of the Dragon Slayer Abroad.
Weiqing Books published Record of the Dragon Slayer Abroad so long ago you can’t find it on the market anymore, but my good friend Zhao Yueli is a collector of wuxia novels, and he has one in his collection from Hong Kong’s Guangming Publishing called Record of the Dragon Slayer Abroad, same title, same contents, but under the name “Tian Feng”. Evidently, Tian Mufeng and Tian Feng are the same person.
Due to a lot of reasons, Brother Yueli admits he was never able to track down the New Evening Post of that period to verify it. I don’t know if Jin Yong’s “something like” is accurate or if the titles were just changed later when it was published as a book. But given the contents, “the male and female xia get married at the drop of a hat”, and even “this novel ought to be called Record of a Xia’s Marriage” is not really an exaggeration.
Record of the Dragon Slayer Abroad is set during the Yuan dynasty, and relates how Fan Zhongyan’s descendent Fan Wenxuan, by fate, acknowledges Wudang’s Yellow Skirt Daoist as his master and learns martial arts, and the love between the fellow sectmates. In accordance with tradtional wuxia novel convention, as the romance develops, various heroes gradually form around the protagonist to resist the foreign invaders and overthrow the brutal Yuan imperial regime, during which time there is romance between the male and female xia and finally there is a happy ending. But the author broke with convention in that throughout the entire novel there is no secret martial arts manual, no adventures, no hidden treasure, and no revenge, nor an extraordinarily powerful villain, and there is no great martial world gathering. Perhaps this is why readers had little interest in it.
This was the only wuxia novel Zhou Yurui wrote in his writing career. Later on he left Hong Kong and went to America and published an autobiographical book Decision and Indecision, and his friend of old, Jin Yong, responded with the article “On Decision and Indecision”, which led to a series of written polemics by the various Hong Kong newspaper cliques, which the parties concerned probably didn’t expect.
Zhou Yurui died from an illness in London on March 26, 1980 at the age of 65 after a legendary life.
Thinking back, the gathering back then with the Ta Kung Pao colleagues gathered in Zhou Yurui’s living room discussing whether or not Hu Fei struck with his sabre was probably the last happy time, a setting sun in the west wind.
Within the development of the history of wuxia fiction in Hong Kong, because its “twin stars” Jin Yong and Liang Yusheng shone too brightly, other authors and their works lack corresponding records and data. The lives of many authors are not well known. In recent years, wuxia fans have undertaken extensive collecting of information and aside from Jin Yong, Liang Yusheng, Ti Feng, Mou Songting, Zhang Menghuan, etc., they have also discovered information about Yang Jianhao, Tang Fei, Sun Hanbing, Lin Meng, Meng Ying, Liang Feng, Gao Feng, Peng Haoyi, Chamberlord of Official Creek, San Fasheng, Shang Qing, Master of Shelter, He Jianqi, Dongfang Lizhu, Master of Gathering Documents, Master of the Twin Fish, Tong Gengjin, etc. Given the quantity of wuxia published in Hong Kong, and judging by the names of authors in advertisements, we’re still a far way off from understanding Hong Kong wuxia fiction, lacking a piece of the puzzle in the history of Chinese wuxia fiction. It’s a major shortcoming.
Hong Kong’s “New School” wuxia fiction authors were different from the many wuxia authors in Taiwan who wrote solely wuxia. There were not many Hong Kong wuxia authors who only wrote wuxia; of the authors just mentioned above, most of them wrote in multiple genres.
In the developmental history of Chinese wuxia fiction, it is generally acknowledged that female authors entered the ranks of wuxia writers after the turn of the century. Some of the female authors who came out of “Mainland Neo Wuxia” were Cang Yue, Bu Feiyan, Sheng Yan, Murong Wuyan, Shen Yingying, Chu Xidao, etc., but Hong Kong only has Zheng Feng, and Taiwan only Di Yi. However, during the 60s and 70s in Hong Kong, there was another female author who entered martial arts circles, sword in hand.
Liang Feng, real name Liang Huizhu, who also wrote under the name Duanmu Hong, was born in 1925 in Zhongshan, Guangdong. A senior Hong Kong female author, she wrote many literary novels such as Wedding Dress, Old Friend Through Hard Times, A Thousand Blue Petals, A String of Little Dreams, Meeting at Heaven Mountain, etc. She also wrote a number of special columns. Unless new data is discovered, she could be the only female wuxia novelist in Hong Kong at the time. Though she only wrote two of them, Marvelous True-Hearted Xia and Brave-Sworded Wandering Xia, but they fill the blank space for women authors of “New School” wuxia fiction. Liang Feng’s two novels can be read on their own, but the latter is a sequel to the former. Marvelous True-Hearted Xia tells of the conflicts between Soaring Mountain Swallow Li Hongxia and Zhou Tianxiao and Wang Batian. Brave-Sworded Wandering Xia is a story about Soaring Mountain Swallow’s disciple.
Ni Kuang, in a literary sketch he wrote on Liang Feng, said that Liang Feng was pretty, with a vivacious, candid personality and was really hospitable, so much so that one could drink and horse around in her bedroom. Liang Feng always kept on writing, and though she was candid, she was also low-key and never promoted. It’s a shame her wuxia novels are out of print, making it difficult to get a taste of the literary grace of her works’ glint and flash of cold-bladed steel.
There’s also Record of Icy, Frosty Sword Light and Legend of the Armored Cavalry Heroes by Sun Hanbing, real name Zhang Yiyang. Of course, this name will not be unfamiliar to readers, but he is more well known by the name Chang Cheh. That’s right, it’s Hong Kong director Chang Cheh, the great master of wuxia cinema.
Chang Cheh himself said, “Not one of the Qing court and Taiping Heavenly Kingdom characters I wrote in Legend of the Armored Cavalry Heroes were made up, not just every named major character on both sides, even the most insignificant soldier was based on someone real.” In that case, this wuxia novel ought to be called an historical work, but unforunately Chang Cheh insisted on playing up the notion that “wuxia is useless”; even if the xia has exceptional ability, he’s still no match for foreign guns and foreign-made cannons. One may well say that it is a “wuxia novel that negates wuxia”. The sentiment is commendable, and on second thought even laudable, but whether readers would accept it is a matter of personal taste.
…to be continued in Part 2. Read the original Chinese article here.
Notes
- This refers to the size of the printed paper, smaller than a broadsheet. It doesn’t mean one of those “rumor” or “gossip” papers.
- This is actually not a short story by Mark Twain, but one by Frank R. Stockton called “The Lady, or the Tiger?” It was originally published in The Century Magazine, November 1882.