It’s lychee¹ season in Taiwan and the season is not a long one. I swear they’re only in season for like a week or two and then you can’t find them anymore, replaced by longans.² Now longans are good, but they’re no lychee. Lychees have this floral flavor to them that is just unmatched. Longans are good, but they lack that floral note and have a lighter flavor. Those damn things seem to last the rest of the summer, while the superior lychee is here and gone.

The we bought recently are of the “glutinous rice ball” variety 糯米《nuòmǐ》荔枝《lìzhī》, so named because of their resemblance to sticky rice balls. These have seeds that are atrophies slivers, leaving more succulent flesh. Besides the normal “traditional” variety with its fullsize seed, there’s also the “jade purse” variety 玉荷包荔枝《yù hébāo lìzhī》, which has a seed in between the size of the other two. They’re all good though.

Since it’s lychee season (actually the season is over now I think, I think the last batch was the last of the season) it’s a good time to read Ma Boyong’s 马伯庸 new novel The Litchi Road《長安的荔枝》 (lit. Changan’s Lychees, or The Lychees of Chang’an). This is a much shorter novel than his previous ones, only about 230 pages in the Taiwan edition. It’s apparently already being optioned for a film.

Ma Boyong is the “it guy” right now when it comes to historical fiction. His work is often adapted to serial dramas, such as The Longest Day in Chang’an《長安十二時辰》 and Luoyang《風起洛陽》 which are both excellent. Really good attention to historical detail in those dramas and the color grading is more like a film, much nicer than the cheaper looking serial drama aesthetic. Both of those are highly recommended. Even more recently there’s The Wind Blows From Longxi《風起隴西》 which is set during the Three Kingdoms period. I haven’t seen that one yet. I have read The Longest Day in Chang’an novel and I highly recommend that too to anyone who can read Chinese.

The Litchi Road is about a low-ranking official, Li Shande (Lee Shan-duh; MC: Lee Dzyen-dok)³ who is charged with delivering fresh lychees to Precious Consort Yang (Yang Guifei), for her birthday. Problem is, lychees are not grown in the capital of Chang’an (Chahng-ahn, but in the deep south of Lingnan, some 5,000 li away. So how can he keep them from spoiling? Oh yeah, also the story takes place at the cusp of the An Lushan (An Loo-shan; MC: An Look-shen) rebellion, so he has to deal with that too.

I haven’t read it yet, but I like Mo Boyong’s writing so I’m excited to get started on it. The Taiwan edition I purchased is a limited edition with a (printed) signature from the author and a folded map of the route taken from Guangzhou (Gwahng-Joe) in the deep south of the Tang empire to the capital in Chang’an, which is present-day Xi’an (Shee–ahn).

The anecdote of lychees being rushed delivered to Precious Consort Yang is based on a purportedly true story, a very short anecdote in the《唐國史補》(Supplement to the History of the Tang) by Tang dynasty scholar Li Zhao 李肇 (Lee Jow). It goes like this:

楊貴妃生於蜀，好食荔枝。南海所生，尤勝蜀者，故每歲飛馳以進。然方暑而熟，經宿則敗，後人皆不知之。
Precious Consort Yang was born in Shu and was fond of eating lychees. Those grown in Nanhai were far superior to those in Shu. Therefore, every year they would be rushed delivered and presented to her. But ripening just in the heat of summer, they spoiled after one night. Later generations are all unaware of this.⁴

There is an edited MTL translation underway for The Litchi Road. You can take a look at it here: https://www.novelupdates.com/series/the-litchi-road/.

New Free Poetry Book

Just last month there was also the release of a new translation of all of Li He’s 李賀 (Lee Huh) poetry called The Poetry of Li He by Robert Ashmore. I’ve been waiting for this book to come out for literally years, but it was delayed multiple times for some reason. Finally it’s out. Previously there was a collection of most of Li He’s poetry translated by J.D. Frodsham called Goddesses, Ghosts, and Demons: The Collected Poems of Li He that was published in 1970, reprinted in 1983.

This new volume is a bilingual edition, featuring the Chinese text on the left-hand page and the English translation and notes on the facing page. I’m thinkin about writing a more detailed reivew of this book later. For now it’s enough to say the book is out and also, it’s free! The ebook version of this book, as well as other poetry collections in this series, is available to download from the publisher’s website in PDF or EPUB formats for free. You can download it here: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781501504716/html?lang=en

There are other collections available for free there as well, including:
The Poetry of Du Fu
The Poetry of Meng Haoran
The Poetry and Prose of Wang Wei
The Poetry of Ruan Ji and Xi Kang

Sword Xia of the Shu Mountains

Recently I’ve been reading more of Sword Xia of the Shu Mountains by Huanzhu Louzhu, dare I say the grandfather of the modern xianxia genre. This novel began serializing in 1932 and really set a lot of tropes that are used today, including primal infants (this term is badly translated as “nascent soul” in the webnovel community), golen elixirs (golden cores), tribulations, miraculous drugs, magical treasures, etc. There’s a lingzhi mushroom man that is cultivating, trying to become human so it can then cultivate to transcendence (immortality).

I have translated a few of the beginning chapters, but this is a really long novel and I do not plan to translate it all. I have been thinking of maybe translating some sections of it here and there, picking out some of the more important story arcs. The novel is structured in loose episodic story arcs, somewhat similar to Water Margin, so it would not disrupt things too much to translate little chunks of it here and there. The arc I’m on now is one of the main ones, where one of the main protagonists, Li Yingqiong (Lee Eeng-Chyohng) begins her path toward cultivation and eventually becoming the biggest badass of the novel. In this arc she meets a “divine eagle” named Buddha Slave 佛奴. This bird was most likely the inspiration for Jin Yong’s divine eagle in Return of the Condor Heroes.⁵ In an earlier chapter I also saw mention of an *Eight Dragon Subduing Palms 降龍八掌. This must be Jin Yong’s inspiration for his *Eighteen Dragon Subduing Palms 降龍十八掌. Just pointing that out to all those out there who think Jin Yong invented wuxia (yes I have seen people make that claim).

Sword Xia of the Shu Mountains is a wuxia novel. At the time there was no genre of fiction called “xianxia”. Rather, novels that would now be classified as xianxia were merely one style of wuxia fiction. After all, the genre was still in the formative process. But then in the 1960s that more fantastic style of wuxia died out in accord with reader trends and focused on more “realistic” (hah!) martial arts. Anyway there were no more flying swords chopping heads off, no more sword transcendents riding on a beam of sword light and shooting off into the air. Though wuxia fiction did retain the miraculous medicines that Sword Xia popularized, as well as the trope of finding a martial arts manual in a cave.

But, aside from the prose, which is a concoction of classical Chinese and vernacular Chinese and therefore somewhat “archaic” in feel at times, it’s surprising how not dated Sword Xia is. Just about everything that’s in modern cultivation novels is present here. The big difference is the power scaling nowadays is even higher: Sword Xia stays earthbound. And also there is more emphasis on xia behavior. That is, on chivalrous deeds. They are actually an requirement for cultivation in Sword Xia. Otherwise, you have to do like the bad guys do and cheat by using magical treasures and miracle elixirs or stealing others’ essence to speed up your cultivation. But then you run into the problem of how to surive the tribulation, which is more severe the more evil deeds you’ve done. Another difference is the sects and schools in Sword Xia have a much looser organization than modern cultivation novels or even wuxia fiction. More on that some other time.

The future of this site

Moving forward, I’m going to be taking a more casual approach to this blog. Before I have focused mainly on longform content, but it takes so much time and energy. I don’t want to stop in entirely, but I think some shorter posts are in order for the forseeable future (I say as I approach 2,000 words on this post, haha!).

Also I have refrained from posting much other than wuxia content for obvious reasons. But I want to post about more subjects from here on out, such as medieval Chinese poetry, xianxia, translation, and other cultural and historical notes. Maybe do some reviews? I’d like to review some English language wuxia fiction, but to be honest, I haven’t seen any I like yet. I’m thinking of doing a column every weekend posting a translation of a Chinese poem and talking about it.

But I’d like to post more short notes, like here’s what this term means, here’s an excerpt from something I liked. Like today’s topic on lychees. Maybe talk about color words, xianxia terminology (the translation of which has become a pet peeve of mine since studying Daoism for a while now) or Daoist terminology and concepts in general. I don’t know. But more on the “wanderings” side of Wuxia Wanderings.

I’m working on a book, working title An Introduction to Wuxia Fiction. Maybe I can post some excerpts of that work in process. I am also considering translating the late Qing dynasty “xianxia” novel Seven Swords, Thirteen Xia. If I do it will be as a book. not posted on this site. There’s still so many classic Chinese novels that have never been translated to English. I just think maybe focusing on one of those would be a better use of time than posting wuxia novel translations on here that nobody reads anyway. At least there’s value in for scholarly use. I like scholarship a lot and spend a lot of free time reading monographs and papers. It’d be nice to contribute something to it.

I don’t know, we’ll see. But I do plan to make this blog more casual and more personal. It’s always been just me, but I’ve been focused on just providing information. I will now, in addition to that, post some more of things that are personal to me. Poetry, for example.

1. aka litchi chinensis. In Chinese it’s 荔枝 which in Mandarin is pronounced lìzhī (lee-jer), in Cantonese lai6 zi1 (lie-zee) and in Hokkien nāi-tsi (nigh-jee). In medieval Chinese it was something like lee-chee (lejH-tsye in Baxter’s transcription). So medieval Chinese can easily account for the LEE-chee pronunciation, while Cantonese and Hokkien can account for the LIE-chee pronunciation. Turns out Mandarin is the strangest.
2. 龍眼 lóngyǎn, which means “dragon eye”.
3. The pronunciations in parentheses are my attempt to help though who have no Chinese pronunce Mandarin. Just say the words phoentically as you would any other English word. To aid with this, some portions are in bold to emphasize the pronunciation of that part. So “Tseye” is a “ts” sound with the tongue pressed against the roof of your mouth, followed by the common English word “eye”. The bold “ah” in “Yahng” is like ahhhhhh I can finally pronounce these names, and the “oh” in “tohng” is like ohhhhh I get it. Each syllable of the given name is separated by a hyphen. Note that “Shyah” is ONE syllable. It’s “sh” and “yah” together as one syllable. It’s NOT “Shee-yah”. So “wuxia” is more like “ooh-shyah” (NOT “woo-shuh”; though some speakers do put a faint “w’ consonant sound on “wu”.) “MC” means Medival Chinese. The pronunciation given is modified from Baxter’s transcription. No one actually knows how Medieval Chinese was really pronounced, but we do know which words rhymed with eath other, and through reconstructions done by scholars both East and West we now have an educated guess what it might have sounded like. In any case, reading medieval poetry or prose with these pronunciations preserves rhyme schemes and onomatopoeia. Mandarin didn’t exist back then (circa 3th-10th centuries CE)
4. Nanhai 南海, which means “South Sea” refers to the area of Guangzhou in Lingnan. Shu 蜀 refers to the area of central and western Sichuan. For more on this and the lychee, see Paul W Kroll (2012) ZHANG JIULING AND THE LYCHEE, Tang Studies, 2012:30, 9-22, DOI: 10.1179/0737503412Z.0000000001.
5. Though it’s possible Jin Yong took inspiration from Wolong Sheng as well, as his first novel also features a divine eagle.