I’ve begun what hopefully will be a long translation project: the famous wuxia/xianxia novel Sword Xia of the Shu Mountains. Take a look at the novel page here: https://wuxiawanderings.com/sword-xia/. It’s also linked in the menu up top.

This is a long novel, 4.1 million Chinese characters in 309 chapters (plus 20 “sequel” chapters). I’m working on an essay about the novel and its influence on xianxia cultivation webnovels. I also need to make a bio page for the author, Huanzhu Louzhu.

Why this novel? Because it’s just too important, not only to the wuxia genre, where it inspired pretty much everyone, including Jin Yong, but also to the xianxia genre, as it was this novel that combined the Daoist quest for transcendence with Buddhist heavenly tribulations and the wheel of samsara reincarnation cycle. It’s got most of the major tropes in current xianxia cultivation novels, and it contributed to many tropes in the wuxia novels of the 50s, 60s, and 70s as well. To put this novel’s importance into perspective, it’s pretty much on a par with Lord of the Rings for the epic fantasy genre.

I’m looking forward to using this novel to explain many of the tropes of both wuxia and xianxia, and also some of the real-life Daoist practices with regard to the quest for transcendence. I don’t know if this novel will be suitable to modern readers’ tastes, but let’s just take it one chapter at a time. You can jump right to chapter 1 here: https://wuxiawanderings.com/sword-xia/sx-chapter-1/.