Well I finally finished it, the first book in Long Chengfeng’s 50-book Snowblade Vagabond《雪刀浪子》 series. I’ve talked about Long Chengfeng before, and you can read a short description and context for the novel on the novel page, where you can also read the novel: https://wuxiawanderings.com/wuxia/long-chengfeng/snowblade-vagabond/
You can also download EPUB, MOBI, and PDF versions of the novel in one .zip file by clicking or tapping the button below:
Webnovel readers are perhaps more familiar with the Tang Sect through the fantasy series Douluo Dalu《斗罗大陆》(aka Soul Land) by Tang Jia San Shao (唐家三少), but it has its origins in wuxia fiction dating back to the Republican period (1912-1949) and since has become a common sect used by many wuxia authors, such as Liang Yusheng 梁羽生, Gu Long 古龍, and Wen Rui’an 溫瑞安.
Yet although the Tang Sect is common in wuxia fiction, it is actually ostensibly based on a real person. The original source is a martial arts manual anthology written by Wan Laisheng 萬籟聲 in 1926 called《武術匯宗》Collected Schools of Martial Arts, in which Wan Laisheng compiled information about many different martial arts techniques he had learned. In this book he mentions “Elder Sister Tang” of Sichuan:
Read more有操五毒神砂者，乃鐵砂以五毒煉過，三年可成。打於人身，即中其毒；遍體麻木，不能動彈；掛破體膚，終生膿血不止，無藥可醫。如四川唐大嫂即是！
There are those who use Miraculous Five Poisons Sand, which is iron sand refined with five poisons and takes three years to make. When it makes contact with a person’s body, that person is poisoned. Their whole body goes numb and they can’t move. If it breaks the skin, pus and blood will ooze nonstop. There is no antidote. Elder Sister Tang of Sichuan is one such user [of this poison sand]1
Last year I wrote a post about some authors who imitated Gu Long’s signature style. One of those authors was Long Chengfeng 龍乘風. I translated the full first chapter of his novel Snowblade Vagabond《雪刀浪子》 to illustrate his imitation of Gu Long’s writing style. That novel was first published in 1977 and was the first of what would eventually become a 50-novel series.
I’m currently reading the fifth book in the series, The Golden Boat Bloodbath《血洗黃金船》and wanted to share a short excerpt from it. I’ve heard it said that Long Chengfeng’s work captures the form of Gu Long’s work but lacks its spirit. I think that’s a pretty fair assessment. When Long Chengfeng wrote this series he was a young man clearly having fun, and he did a fine job copying many of the tropes and features and effects that made up Gu Long’s signature style. It’s just that his work often feels like it’s lacking something, a certain je ne sais quoi. Still, when Long Chengfeng is at the top of his game he is highly entertaining, and at times he even writes Gu Long so well you could be forgiven for thinking it really was a lost Gu Long novel.
The following excerpt from The Golden Boat Bloodbath is just a simple scene that really shows, in my opinion, how close Long Chengfeng can get to Gu Long. I could easily see this scene in a Gu Long novel. It has the same humor, the same easy, casual voice, and it features eccentric characters which became part of Gu Long’s stock-in-trade. Although I often do find the Snowblade Vagabond series a bit lacking in substance, there’s still enough of scenes like this that keep me reading the series.
If you like Gu Long, take a look at this.
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I’ve decided to take on a new, short translation project: the first novel in Hong Kong wuxia author Huang Ying’s 黃鷹 Shen Shengyi 沈勝衣 wuxia series, which ran from 1974 to around 1984. The series was adapted in 1979 into a TV drama in Hong Kong under the title Shen Shengyi (known in English as The Roving Swordsman). It adapted eight of the Shen Shengyi novels, including the first one, the one I’m going to translate here, The Silver Sword Grudge《銀劍恨》.
It’s a short novel, only two chapters, but they are long chapters. I will post it as I translate it, beginning with the first part below.
Huang Ying (1948-1991) is best known for continuing Gu Long’s Six Tales of Fright series of horror wuxia novels. The first one, Blood Parrot《血鸚鵡》, has a partial translation (see the translation list in the main menu. Only the first three chapters. Gu Long began the novel but only wrote the first four chapters. Huang Ying was selected to take over and continue beginning with chapter 5 and he finished the novel. The other five novels in the series were entirely written by Huang Ying.
Huang Ying was one of the main writers at Wuxia World Magazine《武俠世界》during the 70s and 80s, and along with Long Chengfeng 龍乘風 and Ximen Ding 西門丁, they were known as the Three New Swordsmen. They dominated Wuxia World Magazine during this time period. A number of Huang Ying’s novels were adapted to film and TV. His most famous novel series are Reincarnated《天蠶變》(lit. Silkworm Metamorphosis) and The Legend of Shen Shengyi.
His writing style was heavily influenced by Gu Long. I wrote a bit about Gu Long imitators in the past, but I didn’t give any examples of Huang Ying at the time. Now we can see what his writing is like. In this first part translated below, Huang Ying does a good job setting the mood, something Gu Long was very good at.
I guess I will just make a post for each part that I translate, and then consolidate them properly into a novel page like I did with Heartbroken Arrow, and then delete the posts so they don’t clog up the front page. So the next installments will be simple posts with just the chapter text and none of my blather.
And now here is The Silver Sword Grudge, the beginning of a series wherein an assassin becomes a xia…
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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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Gu Long began his writing career writing literary fiction, but he didn’t get anywhere with it. At the time he knew Feng Nuoni 馮娜妮, who was his classmate in middle school. In 1958 she married manhua artist and author Li Feimeng 李費蒙, and by hanging out with this couple, Gu Long was introduced to the literary circles of Taipei. There he met Zhuge Qingyun 諸葛青雲, one of the top wuxia authors of at the time. Wolong Sheng 臥龍生, Sima Ling 司馬翎, and Zhuge Qingyun were friends, and they all hung out together.
Zhuge Qingyun, Wolong Sheng, and Sima Ling were busy writing multiple novels at the same time and spending a lot of time hanging out and drinking and clubbing and playing mahjong, so there was limited time for writing! Gu Long would occasionally write some installments here and there for them when they were under pressure to meet deadlines (or too drunk to write).1
In 1960, Gu Long published his first novel,《蒼穹神劍》Divine Sword of the Cerulean Vault, though he dropped it before it was finished. He released seven novels in 1960 alone;2 some he ended up finishing, some he abandoned.3 Read more
From October 22, 1981 to May 21, 1982, Gu Long published what would be his final novel, The Sound of a Sabre Among the Windchimes《風鈴中的刀聲》in the United Daily News in Taiwan. But the last two chapters of the novel were ghostwritten by Yu Donglou 于東樓. It was not very much, only around 7,500 characters, so it’s curious he didn’t finish it himself. In a 2015 interview with Ding Qing 丁情, one of Gu Long’s “disciples”, Ding Qing said that at the time Gu Long was busy, so Ding Qing wrote a bit in his place, but then he got busy, and so Yu Donglou came in to finish the novel so that publication wouldn’t be interrupted.1 In that interview, Ding Qing also indicated that Gu Long dictated Windchimes while he copied down the dictation.
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When it comes to wuxia authors, there are two names that are often bandied about: Jin Yong and Gu Long. And with good reason, because it is these two authors who have received the most critical acclaim and the best reader response. Nowadays, wuxia is more or less a dead genre. There are still wuxia novels being published, but they are few and far beween. In the West, of course, it’s even worse. In the rare event you do find an article about wuxia in English, nine times out ten (and that’s a conservative estimate) it’s going to be about Jin Yong. Gu Long might get a namedrop. One article I saw not too long ago on the “history and politics” of wuxia didn’t even mention the Republican period or wuxia in Taiwan at all!1
But Gu Long had quite an influence and impact on the development of wuxia fiction as a genre. More than anyone else, Gu Long strove for change, for “breakthroughs” as he called them, trying to come up with a new way to write an old genre. Sometimes he was successful, sometimes not, but he kept trying to the end. He began writing his own wuxia novels in 1960 with Divine Sky Sword, at first imitating the major writers of his day, such as Jin Yong, Wolong Sheng, Sima Ling, and Zhuge Qingyun.
Gradually his style changed. With Cleansing Flowers, Refining the Sword in 1964, Gu Long was already experimenting with his fight scenes, moving away from the detailed descriptions of moves with flowery names that was (and remained) common in wuxia. By the 1970s, he had already found his own voice. At the same time, more and more of his novels were being adapted to film and TV, bringing him more readers. viewers, and notoriety. The rise of film and TV in Taiwan also led to more and more wuxia authors switching to screenwriting, which Gu Long dabbled in as well. And so wuxia as a genre of literature began to decline.
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Gu Long’s novels were adapted to film and into TV series many times. I compiled a list of nearly all of them. Some links go directly to Youtube where you can watch the film/series. Others go to MyDramaList, a database for Asian series and films. Some go to Wikipedia or Hong Kong Movie Database.
Many of these are available with English subtitles or dubbed in English, either via DVD or various streaming services. Some TV series have English subs you can find online. You will need to google these and/or check streaming services yourself. The novels are listed in chronological order by publication.
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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.
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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