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The Bloody Bridal Chamber translation project

I’m away from home at the moment and away from my main PC to make graphics and such, but I have still been working. I’m starting to post chapters to a book in the Amazing Hawk Constables wuxia murder mystery series by Hong Kong author Ximen Ding. Well it’s not Venomous Schemes like I said in my previous post, but The Bloody Bridal Chamber is another book in the same series, book 4 to be exact, first published in issue #1129 of Wuxia World magazine on February 16, 1981.

I’m just posting as I translate it, three chapters up right now. Almost done with the fourth. Proper title card graphic and ebook (if ready to be made by then) and such will have to wait till I get back home in a month or so.

Start reading here
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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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“Wuxia Flavor” — Ximen Ding on What it Takes to Write Wuxia

During the 1980s, wuxia fiction was on the decline, but it still had a large audience in the Hong Kong pulp magazines, particularly《武俠世界》 Wuxia World, and Ximen Ding 西門丁 was one of its most important authors. He was Wuxia World’s in-house author, having signed a contract in 1980 to furnish the magazine a piece of fiction each issue (it was a weekly) totaling 25,000 to 30,000 words. He soon began writing much more, including his own novel series, the best known of which is the《雙鷹神捕》Amazing Twin Hawk Constables series, which spanned 30 novels from 1980 to 1982. Yeah, 30 novels in two years! Plus all the other stories he wrote during that time.

He also wrote Republican era martial arts stories, stoies set during contemporary times, and horror stories. Later, Ximen Ding had a popular assassin series that spanned more than 20 novels. He also wrote under many different pen names; often more than one of his works appeared at the same time in Wuxia World magazine.

Together with Huang Ying and Long Chengfeng, Ximen Ding was known as the Three Swordsmen. These three, along with Wen Rui’an, dominated wuxia fiction in the 1980s. Wen Rui’am had his Four Constable series and was experimenting with new styles and forms of writing, Long Chengfeng had his Snowblade Vagabond series, his style imitating Gu Long, and Huang Ying, after taking over for Gu Long with his horror wuxia series, began his own series featuring assassin-turned-xia Shen Shengyi.

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