Today begins the translation of one of the most important novels in the entire wuxia genre: Soaring Swallows Startle Dragons《飛燕驚龍》by Wolong Sheng 臥龍生. I have avoided picking up a long project such as this for a long time, not wanting the commitment it requires. But I can’t put it off any longer, because to tell the truth, it’s pretty lonely being a wuxia fan. Even among Chinese readers the genre is pretty much dead, only really one active forum for it online, and that barely active. In English it’s even more barren.

And that’s simply because there hasn’t been much translated into English. What has been translated is almost entirely confined to two writers: Jin Yong and Gu Long. No surprise there as they are the most lauded and most popular. But that’s only two drops in a very large ocean. Though there are a few translations by other authors, mostly shorter pieces and teasers, still most of the major wuxia novels have yet to be touched.

This project will take care of one of them. (If you don’t care about me babbling on about the history of wuxia, you can skip to the Soaring Swallows novel page here.)

Soaring Swallows Startle Dragons is one of the most influential novels in all of wuxia. The tropes it established or employed set the tone for how wuxia fiction was to be written for decades, and Wolong Sheng for a time was one of the biggest names in the genre, second only to Jin Yong, and even surpassing Jin Yong in Taiwan (on account of Jin Yong being banned there).

Let me give you a quick rundown of the history of wuxia. And I mean lickety-split.

A Very Brief History of Wuxia Fiction

Xia-like (read: chivalrous) fiction has been around at least since the Tang dynasty. The only question of whether it existed prior to that is if the pieces written qualify as fiction, because there was definitly xia literature, which goes back to the Shiji during the Han dynasty, there in the form of biographies of wandering xia and assassin-retainers. Mentio of xia goes back even further to the writings of Han Fei.

During the Tang we see xia behavior mixing with extraordinary tales—urban legends really—or fiction under the literary conceit of being urban legends. I’m talking stories where chivalrous acts (or sometimes just extraordinary acts) are carried out by people who seem to have magical abilities. Tales such as Nie Yinniang.

This continued into the Song dynasty; these tales were written in Literary Chinese. They continued in drama through the Yuan and began in vernacular literature on into the Ming dynasty. Here we had short stories and we began to see novels, such as Water Margin. Chivalrous novels really picked up in the Qing with such works as Green Peony, A Tale of Lovers and Heroes, and Three Xia and Five Sworn Brothers.

None of this so far is technically wuxia. Because “wuxia” was not a term applied to these stories yet, though the term was in use already.

Wuxia was first used to classify a work of fiction in 1914, but it still was not really a genre yet. The modern genre of wuxia is generally agreed to have started with Xiang Kairan’s Legend of Marvelous Xia of the Jianghu《江湖奇俠傳》in 1923. Earlier fiction could have been classed as wuxia, but much of that fiction dealt with xia helping out the imperial court, saving the nation, etc. Marvelous Xia brought the xia into the jianghu, and made the jianghu the central site of the action. This was also the beginning of what later came to be known as Old School wuxia fiction.

Other major Old School writers included Huanzhu Louzhu, Wang Dulu, Baiyu, Zheng Zhengyin, and Zhu Zhenmu. Huanzhu Louzhu’s Sword Xia of the Shu Mountains (1932) became by far the most influential wuxia novel of all time. It was also the father of what would become the current xianxia genre, featuring flying transcendents (immortals), sword kinesis, tribulations, miracle elixirs, magic items, and it many other little things that authors would continuously borrow from for decades. It’s comparable in influence to The Lord of the Rings.

Wang Dulu is probably the most familiar Old School author in the West, due to the adaptation of his novel into the 2000 Ang Lee film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which combined storylines from a couple of Wang’s novels. He was a romance author as well, and his wuxia novels have a strong emphasis on tragic romance.

This “Old School” period ran to the end of the Republican period, until 1949 when civil war between the Communist Part and the Kuomingtang led to the latter fleeing to Taiwan. Once the Communists took over, wuxia fiction was banned in China, and it would stay that way till China opened up again, in 1979-1980.

In the meantime, wuxia fiction continued to be published in Hong Kong and Taiwan. In 1954, a martial arts exhibition match between Chen Kefu and Wu Gongyi in Macau created a craze for martial arts, and Liang Yusheng, then working at the New Evening Post, was asked to write a wuxia novel to capitalize on the fight’s popularity. And so the New School was born.

The next year, 1955, Jin Yong began his first novel, The Book and the Sword.

Wuxia Fiction in Taiwan

While Liang Yusheng and Jin Yong were writing in Hong Kong, wuxia fiction was also being published in Taiwan. It hadn’t really stopped in either place; the difference between Old and New School wuxia was something scholars added later, and the early New School writers really just picked up where the Old School left off, still using many of the same tropes and writing techniques. It would not be until Gu Long created his signature style in the mid to late 1960s that wuxia fiction would really be “new” again.

When the Kuomingtang fled to Taiwan in 1949, many people moved with them. Wolong Sheng was in the army at the time and accepted a place in the KMT’s Army Training Command and moved to Taiwan in 1948 under the command of Sun Li-jen. Anyway, long story short, in 1955 Sun Li-jen got in trouble and everyone who had worked under him was implicated as well. Since Wolong Sheng (real name Niu Heting) had been under Sun’s command, that meant him to.

Wolong Sheng was discharged to avoid the incident and now found himself in need of a job. He thought to be a pedicab driver, but you needed an ID to do that, and Wolong Sheng had just been discharged, so the army had not yet issued him and ID. All he could do was wait to be issued an ID, unable to work.

While he waited, he read wuxia novels. He liked some of what he read but was dissatisfied with some others and decided to try his hand at writing his own. In 1957 his first novel, Reclusive Xia, began serializing in Tainan’s Cheng Kung Evening News. This novel followed the Old School writers’ style, especially Huanzhu Louzhu and Wang Dulu, with long paragraphs and long chapter titles. He wrote the first 10 volumes (in those days wuxia novels were published in book form as small cheap booklets of about 75 pgs. each), then stopped due to an illness. The newspaper also shut down. Huang Yushu later ghostwrote the rest of the novel, published in those slim booklets.

At that time he made 10 yuan (元) per newspaper installment, or 300元 per month. His salary as a second lieutenant had been 150元.

Wolong Sheng moved to Taichung and decided to write fulltime. His second novel, Graceful Beauty Sword Rocks the Jianghu, began on July 1, 1957 in Taichung’s People’s Voice Daily News. This novel used the old trope of revenge but was better written and better plotted than his first novel, and it became popular. But still he didn’t finish it, writing only 13 volumes (the booklets were published soon after they appeared in the newspaper) before stopping, again due to illness. This too was later finished by a ghostwriter.

To put this in somewhat more familar context, during this time when Wolong Sheng was writing Graceful Beauty Sword, Jin Yong was working on Legend of the Condor Heroes (it began January 1, 1957).

Next, Wolong Sheng moved to Taipei, where he roomed with fellow wuxia author Banxia Louzhu 伴霞樓主. Banxia Louzhu took a sampling of their books to the editor of the Great China Evening News and told him to pick whoever’s he liked. The editor chose Wolong Sheng, and on August 16, 1958, Soaring Swallows Startle Dragons began.

It was even more popular, and Wolong Sheng actually finished it this time. It became so popular, in fact, that he was asked to write a novel for the Central Daily News. This was a big deal because this was the official newspaper of the Kuomingtang, and this was the first time a wuxia novel would appear in it. The novel he wrote for them was Jade Hairpin Oath (1960), and it made Wolong Sheng a household name, with people lining up at bulletin boards to read it, and there are stories of people patroning breakfast stands just to read the newspaper so they could read Jade Hairpin Oath. Now Wolong Sheng was the biggest name in wuxia fiction in Taiwan.

Now on to the translation!

The importance of Soaring Swallows Startle Dragons is touched on more on the novel page where you can find the chapter parts I’m translating. The chapters are quite long (chapter 1 is nearly 14,000 English words), as usual for wuxia fiction during this period, so I am breaking them up into smaller parts. One part will be posted daily. Each part is roughly the length of a contemporary webnovel chapter, averging somewhere between 2,500-3,100 Chinese characters, about 2,000-2,500 English words.

The novel page also has a glossary with the names of the characters that appear and who they are. I also tried to help figure out how to pronounce them. I will be adding to this in the days to come. I’d like to add martial arts styles and other terms as well.

I also have a Discord if you want to chat about Soaring Swallows or anything else wuxia.