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Martial-Arts Fiction and Martial-Arts Practice: The Concept of Qi in Jin Yong’s Novels

The following paper by Meir Shahar reproduced below was originally included in the book Proceedings of the International Conference on Jin Yong’s Novels 金庸小說國際學術研討會論文集, 1999, Yuan-Liou Publishing. The book collects the papers presented at said conference. I have re-typeset it based on the original, except for fixing a few typos. All the footnotes are the same as in the original with the addition of two short notes I added for correction.

Martial-Arts Fiction and Martial-Arts Practice: The Concept of Qi in Jin Yong’s Novels1

Meir Shahar
Department of East Asian Studies
Tel Aviv University

I. Introduction

In one of the climactic moments of Jin Yong’s 金庸 (1924-) Extraordinary Beings (Tianlong babu 天龍八部), Duan Yu 段譽, who is the novel’s principal protagonist, discovers inside a mysterious cave a jade statue of a divine maiden. Like Baoyu 寶玉, after which he has been fashioned, and with which his name resonates,2

Duan Yu is consumed by admiration to women, which he considers as superior to men. Perhaps for this reason, the discovery of the lifelike images touches the depths of his soul. Overcome with emotion, he kneels in front of it.

Inadvertently, Duan Yu’s romantic impulse transforms him into a martial-artist. This is because from his kneeling posture Duan Yu chances upon a tiny inscription on the maidens’ fee. It reads: “After kowtowing to me a thousand times, even if you experience a hundred deaths you will have no regrets.” All too happy to comply with the instruction and worship the lovely creature, Duan Yu prostrates himself on a small mat, which he finds spread in front of the statue. By the time he completes his prostrations, the mat is torn to shreds, revealing underneath it an ancient book, which endows Duan Yu with invincible powers. This sacred book contains the secret fighting methods of the “Free and Easy Sect” (Xiaoyao pai 逍遙派).3

In many ways this episode is characteristic of Jin Yong’s writing. Its plot is full of surprising turns, connecting as it does the veneration of beauty with hidden martial techniques. We find in it mysterious caves and sacred books, love and invincible fighting methods. Perhaps most significantly, the protagonist of this episode is, from the perspective of martial-arts fiction, an anti-hero: Duan Yu is, at least initially, much more interested in romance than in warfare.

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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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Xiao Se on Wuxia, Xianxia, and Fantasy

Xiao Se 蕭瑟, real name Wu Ming 武鳴 is/was a wuxia author in Taiwan during the 1960s. His first novel was《落星追魂》(Falling Star Soulseeker) in 1963, and he became well known with his other 1963 novel,《碧眼金鵬》(Blue-eyed Golden Peng-bird). He ghostwrote several times for Zhuge Qingyun and Wolong Sheng. His writing style has been described as easy and smooth.1 In 2003, Xiao Se ended his 30-year retirement and published a new wuxia novel,《霸王神槍》(The Divine Spear of the Hegemon King). From June 2008 to June 2009, he published his first sword transcendent 劍仙 (xianxia 仙俠) novel,《仙劍神刀》(Transcendent Sword, Divine Sabre). At the end of this ten-volume light novel, Xiao Se wrote an afterword in which he talked about about the sword transcendent genre and its relation to wuxia and western fantasy. I have translated that afterword in full below:

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Yi Rong’s Recognition, Ghostwriting, and Rise to Prominence

Yi Rong’s “Recognition”, “Ghostwriting”, and “Rise to Prominence”

by Hu Zhengqun

Sword of the King is the work that made Yi Rong famous in Taiwan wuxia literary circles and was his first work after establishing himself as an author writing under his own name. It was published in 1965.

if you want to talk about Sword of the King or its author, Yi Rong, then you must first go back to the source and start by talking about Wolong Sheng.

Starting in 1959, Wolong Sheng’s wuxia novels were popular at home and abroad, and he became the grandmaster of the martial world par excellence, which lasted for a long time. At his peak he was serializing five different novels in five different daily and evening newspapers every day in Taiwan. He was truly at the height of his popularity.

Among these five works, one was Heavenly Whirlwind, published in Public Opinion Daily News. When it was in the middle of serialization, Public Opinion announced that the publication was shutting down. Wolong Sheng at the time was the “leader of the pack” of the martial world, so the paper shutting down lightened the interest and pressure on his writing, and so he stopped writing it. But the publisher that was already putting out monthly booklet installments of the work still hoped it could continue, so they pressed him closely.

In order to deal with the publisher and allow the booklets to continue being released, Wolong Sheng found someone to “grasp the knife” and ghostwrite it for him. That person was Yi Rong.

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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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Wolong Sheng and Jade Hairpin Oath

Wolong Sheng and Jade Hairpin Oath

by Hu Zhengqun

On March 23, 1997 at around 9:00 pm I returned home in the dreary, heavy spring rain. Outside the door I heard the telephone ringing and quickly opened the door and picked it up.

“Uncle Hu… Dad left us at 8 o’clock… I don’t know what to do…”

It was Wolong Sheng’s child calling. The call I’d been dreading for years really arrived.

I told this sad news to Wolong Sheng’s good friend and wuxia author Yu Donglou and “Ox Bro” Li Feimeng. (Mr. Li Feimeng also passed away in 1997, Yu Donglou in 2003).

Ox Bro, Wolong Sheng, and I were friends for almost forty years, as close as brothers. When we talked on the phone I was so sad I could barely get the words out, but Li Feimeng understood, and choking back sobs, urged me not to be too sad.

I hung up the phone and sat despondently under the lamplight. It was pitch-black outside my window and utterly silent.

Lost in thought, I asked myself, “Is Wolong (we used to call him that) really gone?”

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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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Gu Long—On Wuxia

“On Wuxia”

by Gu Long

I’ve heard that Ni Kuang is getting ready to write A History of Chinese Wuxia Fiction1, and for a wuxia author this is really something worth being happy and excited about.

Wuxia fiction has been around for a long time, and it is has not been taken seriously for a long time as well. Now that someone is finally coming out to write a systematic account of this kind of fiction, it will have a place in the annals of fiction history. This undertaking is a grand event in the history of wuxia fiction; all authors of wuxia fiction ought to work together for this worthy project.

So I too can’t just stand back and watch the hunt and not join in. It’s just too bad I’m not as daring as Brother Ni Kuang, nor do I have his ability. I’m just offering my humble views on wuxia fiction based on my impressions and the little bit I’ve learned by writing it, but it’s not a formal account or serious criticism.

If it can be of interest to you, Gentle Readers, and can pave the way for Ni Kuang’s work, then I will be quite satisfied.

1

Regarding the origin of wuxia fiction, there are numerous arguments—since the Grand Historian’s Biographies of Wandering Xia, China has had wuxia fiction—of course that’s the most grand one, but not many accept that argument. Because wuxia stories are legends, if you insist on placing them on a par with the Grand Historian’s serious biographies, then you’re rather fooling yourself a bit.

It’s in the fictional records of men of the Tang dynasty that we first get stories closer to wuxia fiction.

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