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Have Sword, Will Travel Novel Teaser

When it comes to wuxia in the English-language community, film and TV are definitely more popular media than novels. No surprise given that there are relatively very few wuxia novels translated to English. But there are more and more people trying their hand at writing wuxia in novel form, or short stories, etc. So then how are they learning how to write wuxia novels?

Unfortunately, it seems for the most part that wuxia film and TV are the teachers. You can easily watch Shaw Bros. movies or wuxia TV (or now online) dramas, and many people grew up watching some Jin Yong adaptation or another. But after all, a Jin Yong adaptation is just an adaptation—it’s not Jin Yong. If you’ve only seen Jin Yong dramas and movies then you have never experienced what in my opinion is the best thing about Jin Yong: his fight scenes.

On the screen you see the actors swing a sabre or thrust a sword, but you don’t get the details about the martial art being used and how it stacks up against the martial art it is being wielded against. You see characters touch each other rapidly and then someone can’t move, but you don’t get the details of which acupoints are being sealed and what’s going on internally in the body. With Jin Yong, and any other wuxia author, you do. These details, along with the detailed descriptions of characters’ appearances, thoughts, etc., are the essence of wuxia novels, in my opinion.

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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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The Winner — Ni Kuang

The Winner

by Ni Kuang

He stood proudly on the mountain top, sword lightly gleaming off the rocks. The sun was setting, sunlight reflecting off the tip of the blade, shooting out rays of dazzling light.

About two staves away, on a large, flat boulder, stood four men, all facing him, watching him, faces red with anger. Sweat rained down the foreheads of two middle-aged men. They looked really nervous, but he, standing there with his sword, was the opposite.

Directly below the boulder, for as far as the eye could see, people lay on the rocks, in the trees, seventeen or eighteen in all, all clearly dead, blood dripping from their bodies. In the distance several vultures circled in the sky.

He was only in around thirty or so, a cold, detached look to go with the pride on his face. His sword had been soaked with blood for sure, because now a drop of it trailed down the glittering blade toward the tip. Just as the drop of blood was about to drip off, he suddenly swung the sword up and the drop of blood whizzed off and splashed down on the face of an elderly man among the four.

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