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Hong Kong’s “Great Wuxia Era” — Part 2

Hong Kong’s “Great Wuxia Era”

by Lin Yao

3

Luo Bin’s founding of Wuxia World was the first magazine specializing in wuxia fiction. It was a weekly and readers could read more words at a time, much more satisfying than what readers got with what was published in newspaper supplements. For a time, Wuxia World was a bestseller, every week publishing over 10,000 copies, and it was available all over Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore.

Luo Bin was a businessman. He took the wuxia fiction that had been published in the other magazines under the “Global” banner: West Point and Blue Book, and reprinted them in Wuxia World. Aside from printing old manuscripts, new manuscripts shifted to this battlefield, simultaneously serialized in the magazine and published as standalone volumes by Global Publishing and Wulin Publishing, each thin volume around 70-80 pages. These are still being sought after by wuxia fans and collectors today.

Besides Wuxia World, on October 5, 1959, Luo Bin also founded Hong Kong Daily News. In addition to publishing Hong Kong news, it mainly focused on horse racing and sports forms.

Ti Feng’s wuxia fiction and horse racing reports were well-written, but he was also a skilled calligrapher. The masthead of Hong Kong Daily News was written in his calligaphy, and he wrote horse racing forms for the paper as well.

Luo Bin had his “business sense”: “Every day I had to publish periodicals and the Hong Kong Daily News; some of them were no cost, like when it came to printing I could use the leftover paper from the newspaper. Hong Kong Daily News was a bit narrower, so there was more leftover paper. Typesetting and printing after all has personnel and machinery, you do what you can. Publishing so much, some would make a lot of money, some not so much, but still it’s something.”

The publication of Wuxia World made Ming Pao’s proprietor, Jin Yong, want to have a go at it himself. Jin Yong, possessing a mind for business, naturally wasn’t going to let Luo Bin have a monopoly. Once Ming Pao had been in operation for over half a year, on Janurary 11, 1960, he started publishing the magazine Wuxia and History. In order to attract readers, Jin Yong wrote another wuxia novel—he gave 1959’s Fox Volant of the Snowy Mountain a prequel, The Young Flying Fox, to compete with Wuxia World.

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Hong Kong’s “Great Wuxia Era” — Part 1

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”.

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Writing Fast and Writing Well

Writing Fast and Writing Well

by Wen Rui’an

Writing is a pleasure. The inverse of that sentence is: if you find writing to be a chore, then please stop writing at once. Forced work will never be a success, and the craft of writing cannot be carried out casually; you have to write your best in order to see results.

I can write 3,500 characters an hour. Among Chinese authors, I’m naturally not the fastest, but I’m already fast enough to be considered a “swift pen”. Some doubt that word count, but actually there’s really no need to:

  1. Writing fast does not mean writing well. If you write fast but slipshod, then fast is not a good thing.
  2. This kind of speed requires focus, plus some practice, and then anyone can do it. When I write I am often unfocused, so much of the time I can’t reach even half of that speed.
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Taiwan Wuxia Fiction Clichés

Taiwan Wuxia Fiction Clichés

by Jin Yong

For the last six months I’ve been reading a lot of wuxia novels. Recently there hasn’t been much wuxia novel output from Hong Kong authors, but on the Taiwan side it’s been surging like a storm, works emerging one after another. I read this kind of fiction exceptionally quickly, reading two books a night, each book between ten and twenty volumes. So the reason i can read these so fast is very simple, it’s because the novels’ plots are all pretty much the same, the stories formulaic, rarely seeing something new when flipping through them.

The following plots can be found in the great majority of Taiwan wuxia novels:

  1. A “dashing” young xia’s parents are killed by an enemy, so he is forced to roam the jianghu and undergo many adventures.
  2. Lots and lots of lady xia love him, among them will definitely be a licentious girl with the nickname of “Peach Blossom Something-or-other”, and there will be a lady xia disguised as a guy. This xia will certainly be drugged with an aphrodisiac and won’t be able to help himself from getting involved with one of the lady xia, “making a serious mistake”.
  3. The backbone of the story will be vying for a secret manual of the martial world or some rare jianghu treasure.
  4. This young xia will definitely obtain a secret martial arts manual left behind by an extraordinary person from a previous generation, and he will train until his martial arts is unmatched under the heavens, and the manual left behind will definitely have the words “left for one who is fated to receive it”.
  5. The young xia will definitely incur the favor of a senior who will help him open up his Conception and Governing vessels, get through a life-or-death training trial that will increase his strength one-, two-, or threefold.
  6. The xia’s antagonist will definitely be a master of a heretical school, some Demon Lord, Divine Lord, Ancestor, or old woman, all written the same, their appearance as grotesque as their martial arts, but with unexceptional personalities.
  7. Masters from prominent schools like Wudang, Shaolin, Kunlun, Kongtong, etc., will, when faced with the young xia, become completely worthless mediocrities.

The plots are mostly the same, and the language used to write them is also clichéd, stuff like “if it’s a blessing it’s not a disaster, if it’s a disaster you can’t avoid it”, “felt like ghosts were everywhere”, “a rare bud of the martial world”, none of them used by Hong Kong wuxia novelists. Wuxia fiction has been all the rage for less than ten years, but on the Taiwan side it seems to be even more popular than in Hong Kong. But in ten years for so many clichés and formulas to have already become so deeply rooted is really astounding.

Ming Pao, April 25, 1963

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Jin Yong—On the Critical Standards of Wuxia Fiction

On the Critical Standards of Wuxia Fiction

by Jin Yong

This article by Mr. Jin Yong was published in 1957 in Hong Kong’s New Evening Post and was later lost. In 2015, Jin Yong Jianghu Forum1 poster “Emulating Lei Feng” found and copied the text of the article so that it could once again see the light of day. As everyone knows, although Mr. Jin Yong is a grandmaster of wuxia, he rarely wrote about his theories of wuxia literature. This article may be called a rare find and is extremely precious.

Recently someone published and article in the paper that was critical of wuxia fiction which led to a lot of debate. For the seventh anniversary of The New Evening Post, the editor asked me to write an article about wuxia fiction, so I am going to express my views on the subject.

If you take wuxia fiction as unadulterated entertainment to pass the time, then there is only one standard that has to be met: “does it interest the reader or not?” But clearly, the recent discussions have been treating wuxia fiction as a part of the national literature. For my part, I too hope wuxia fiction can be qualified to be considered “literature” and have been striving to write wuxia with that in mind, though I have not been successful at it so far.

When it comes to critiquing the good and bad of wuxia fiction, I think there are four main standards:

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Martial Arts Manuals — A Discussion of Wuxia Fiction Tropes

The jianghu world in wuxia novels is a “martial” world. Martial arts is not only what heroes and lady xia rely on (for protection) as they roam the jianghu, the requirement for chivalrous deeds (acting as a xia), is the final standard for settling disputes and getting satisfaction through seeking vengeance. In fact, the “wu” in wuxia, referring to martial arts, supports the entire framework. Liang Yusheng once said, “‘Xia’ is the soul, ‘wu’ is the body; ‘xia’ is the goal, and ‘wu’ is the means.”1 Even so, as for the characteristics of the wuxia genre, “wu” is the key therein.2 It’s hard for us to imagine a major character in a wuxia novel with little or no martial arts ability, even though Jin Yong wrote a character in The Deer and the Cauldron, Wei Xiaobao, who relied entirely on his eloquence, quick wit, and ability to adapt to circumstances in order to freely navigate the imperial court and the jianghu, “creating a marvelous, unprecedented wuxia novel”.3 However, we’ll leave aside discussions of the desire to “subvert”,4 as that is not a conventional practice in wuxia fiction. And Jin Yong still could not escape conferring a modicum of martial arts on Wei Xiaobao, from the “Art of the Hundred Flights” and “Art of Escape” to his dagger and precious vest, all are aimed at keeping this distinguishing wuxia quality in mind. It could be said that Jin Yong is acknowledging martial arts.

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How Much Money Did Wuxia Writers Make?

A Discussion of Taiwanese Wuxia Author Pay

by Gu Xueyi

During the 60s and 70s over 400 wuxia authors emerged in Taiwan. To a large degree this was because the barrier to entry to become a wuxia author was very low, and one could receive abundant remuneration in return. In other words, many authors chose to write wuxia novels not because of some lofty ideal but because they could live a good life. As Zhuge Qingyun once said of himself, “Even though there’s no literary inquisition in this generation… writing books is still just a way to make a living.”

But how much money could a wuxia author make? This is a big topic. For example, Jin Yong, who ascended to the ranks of “billionaires” partly because of his wuxia novels, still the most important reason was because of the market value of his newspaper, Ming Pao. Or Gu Long, the money he earned from film and TV adaptations far exceeded the money he made from his novels. But that’s not the focus of this discussion. What I’m more interested in is manuscript submission payment because that is what the vast majority of wuxia authors relied on to make their living. After all, Jin Yong is just one person, and so is Gu Long. Their success is very difficult to duplicate; few authors were lucky enough to see their work adapted to film or TV, much less be like Jin Yong and use a newspaper empire to earn a nearly astronomical income.

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“Xia” Becoming More and More Complicated — On Zheng Feng and Valley of Life and Death

Hong Kong resident and wuxia novelist Zheng Feng is from a political family. Her father is our well-known former President of the Control Yuan Chen Li-an, and her grandfather was the second Vice-President Chen Cheng, but she did not follow them down the path of politics but instead followed after her brothers in her youth by beginning to read wuxia novels before creating her own wuxia world, to the point that she has been honored by Ni Kuang as the female piece of the puzzle the wuxia world has long been looking for.

Now she is not only a wuxia novelist, but also the mother of five children, writing novel after novel while raising her kids. Her newest novel, Valley of Life and Death, follows up her previous novel, Legend of the Marvellous Peak and the Strange Stone, which used the early Tang dynasty as an historical backdrop. This new novel takes place in the later Tang, when military governors vied for control in a fractured, waning empire.

“I used historical records as a foundation to construct a chronological table and was shocked: a lot of people during that time were killed by assassins. The military governors vied for each other’s territory, were poisoned and stabbed to death everywhere. The biggest of such incidents was when Li Shidao sent people to kill Wu Yuanheng in the street.”

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Sima Ziyan Dares Not Overstep His Bounds

Within wuxia literay circles, there are two famous authors who used to be roommates when they were students; they would stay up late every night, drinking and chatting. But once they graduated they didn’t communicate with each other. Later, when they were both popular among wuxia literary circles, they never helped promote each other but relied completely on their own talents to make their way in the world.

Those two wuxia authors were Sima Ziyan, original name Zhang Zuchuan, and Dugu Hong, original name Li Bingkun. At Tamkang University, Sima Ziyan was two grades higher than Dugu Hong. Sima Ziyan went on to enroll in the literature department and majored in Chinese literature.

After graduating, Sima Ziyan and his classmates had to perform mandatory military service. He was sent to the communications unit to work as a telegraphic dispatch. Because there was no war on at the time his days were mostly idle aside from hectic training exercises.

It was boring on duty when there were no telegrams to receive or dispatch, so Sima Ziyan took the opportunity during this downtime to write. He had already been submitting manuscripts to newspapers and magazines to earn a little money when he was in university, so his finances were a bit more comfortable than his classmates, and he usually had money to buy liquor.

What he was writing at that time was not wuxia, but typical youth literature. There was one story from those early publications he was particularly proud of, a story published in the Min Tsu Evening News called “Green Light”.

The story takes place in the green light district of Baodou in Wanhua District in Taipei and depicts a young prostitute leading a miserable life in that dark corner of town, as well as roving unruly hoodlums. The characters are vividly rendered, the plot is heartfelt and moving. His teacher, the famous author Xie Bingying, read the story and praised it highly. She felt it was a society novel of a kind rarely come by.

The well-established Spring & Autumn Publishing had published some of Sima Ziyan’s literary writings, though they mostly published wuxia novels. One day, Sima Ziyan returned home to Taipei on leave and dropped by Spring & Autumn’s offices to pick up his royalty money. The publishng house’s boss, Lü Qinshu, ran into him and it was like meeting one’s savior. He grabbed him and said he had something important to discuss with him.

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On “Innovation” and “Diversity” — Gu Long

One day I was on a TV production set in Taiwan watching a rehearsal. Most of the people rehearsing were friends of mine, most of them excellent actors.

One of them was not only an excellent actor, he was also an outstanding screenwriter and director who had directed an incredible, unconventional and moving film that had won accolades at many film festivals.

Someone like that is without a doubt an intelligent person, a literary master. He suddenly said to me, “I’ve never read a wuxia novel. You should lend me one you think is the best so I can see what wuxia novels, after all, are all about.”

I laughed.

All I could do was laugh, because I knew what he meant.

He thought that wuxia novels were not worth reading, and that he only wanted to read one now because he was my friend and was a bit curious.

He thought people who read wuxia novels were not on the same level as people like him, definitely not high-level intellectuals with an eye on the new and original.

Thouigh he said he wanted to read one, his mind was already made up that wuxia novels were not worth anything.

Yet he had never read a wuxia novel, and didn’t even know what wuxia novels wrote about.

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