Trawling through old archived posts of the old Oldrain (Chinese language) wuxia forum, posts from around 2003-2004, and I got in the mood to check out Sima Ziyan 司馬紫煙, who I have not read much from. Because back then, in the early days of online wuxia fandom, Sima Ziyan had his own subforum on Oldrain. Aside from his, there was also a subforum for Huang Yi 黃易, Huanzhu Louzhu 還珠樓主, Yun Zhongyue 雲中岳, Sima Ling 司馬翎, and one shared between Wen Rui’an 溫瑞安 and Gu Long 古龍.
That was it.
There was a general subforum for posting about any author, but there was no dedicated Jin Yong 金庸 subforum, no Liang Yusheng 梁羽生 subforum. Later on, Oldrain would add subforums for them, but here, in 2003, there were only a few dedicated subforums, indicating which authors had a cult following at the time. It was refreshing to see healthy and varied discussion of an entire genre, wuxia, and not just endless circlejerking over Jin Yong, which is just about all you see on the English side of the internet.
Sima Ling’s dedicated forum makes sense because he was championed by wuxia scholar/researcher Ye Hongsheng 葉洪生, who was also a moderator of the forum at the time. The cult followings of Yun Zhongyue and Sima Ziyan though, are more surprising because these two authors have not garnered much attention outside these dedicated fandoms. Yun Zhongyue is far and away my favorite wuxia author. I will be posting more about him soon. And he did at least warrant a section in Ye Hongsheng & Lin Baochun’s 林保淳 book on the development of wuxia fiction in Taiwan. But Sima Ziyan did not, though he was later included in Lin Baochun’s solely authored history book on the same topic in 2022.
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