Posted on by Lone Crane

Wuxia Excerpts #2: Sixth Month Frostfall by Sima Ziyan

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.

The Oldrain forum 旧雨楼 back in 2003

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.

Read more
Posted on by Lone Crane · 1 Comment

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.

Read more
Posted on by Lone Crane · 1 Comment

The Origins of the Tang Sect in Wuxia Fiction

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:

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

Read more
Posted on by Lone Crane

An Excerpt from The Golden Boat Bloodbath by Long Chengfeng

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.

Read more
Posted on by Lone Crane

A Great Opening Chapter—Wolong Sheng’s Heavenly Sword, Supreme Sabre

It’s true for any genre: when writing a novel you need a strong opening, something that piques the reader’s interest and keeps it and makes them want to read the next chapter. Well you won’t a much better example of such a chapter than Wolong Sheng’s 1965 novel Heavenly Sword, Supreme Sabre《天劍絕刀》.

Wolong Sheng 臥龍生 was a master at crafty interesting, intricate plots that kept the reader turning pages. There’s a reason he was called the “Mount Tai and Northern Dipper of Taiwan Wuxia” (台灣武俠泰斗) and was one of the “Three Swordsmen” 三劍客 of the Taiwan wuxia literary circle, along with Sima Ling 司馬翎 and Zhuge Qingyun 諸葛青雲. He is criticized for not taking his work seriously enough and allowing other authors to publish their work under his name, but I feel is strong points are too often overlooked in favor of repeating these same criticisms. It’s true his novels tend to suffer from having the “head of a tiger and the tail of a snake”, starting strong but then petering out by the end. But that’s true of many wuxia novels by many different authors, a product in part of the long serialization process (novels typically ran in newspapers for two to four years), and in Wolong Sheng’s case, also because he often wrote multiples novels for different newspapers at once. During his prime years, at one point he was concurrently writing Flying Swallow Startles the Dragon《飛燕驚龍》for Great China Evening News, Jade Hairpin Oath《玉釵盟》for Central Daily News, Red Snow, Black Frost《絳雪玄霜》for Sin Chew Daily, and Heavenly Whirlwind《天香飆》for Public Opinion Daily. Writing daily installments for all of those novels, it’s easy to see why he might have issues with consistancy. Keep in mind too that unlike Jin Yong 金庸, who spent years revising his entire body of work, Wolong Sheng’s novels that we have today still use the original text he published in the newspapers. He (and this is true for almost all wuxia authors) never revised his work.

Despite all that, Wolong Sheng still managed to produce some good work, great at times, and the first chapter of Heavenly Sword, Supreme Sabre is about a good an opening to a story as one could ask for.

But rather than just vaguely telling you why, I took the liberty of translating the first chapter so you can see for yourself. That chapter follows below. Afterward, I will discuss why I think this chapter is so effective.

Read more
Posted on by Lone Crane

Wuxia Excerpts #1: Ninefold Flute by Dongfang Yu

I’m currently reading Ninefold Flute《九轉簫》by Dongfang Yu 東方玉. I’ve had a few of his novels for years but never got around to reading them. He’s one of those authors who was really popular during his time but then later ignored or slighted by critics. I’ve seen comments by readers and critics that are kind of dismissive; I get the impression that his work is kind of generic and mediocre. But I am researching for my Writer’s Guide to Wuxia and I knew that Dongfang Yu wrote about “palaces” 宮, one of the many organizations commonly seen in wuxia fiction, so I decided to read one of his books. Another reason I had stayed away is I heard he liked to use disguises for his characters, and that is my most hated trope. It’s so lazy. You think it’s one character, than tada! Turns out it was someone else, but they had a mask on or makeup that was so lifelike it looked exactly like the other person. It’s really common in wuxia, but I was trying to avoid it.

So I decided on Ninefold Flute, which was published from April 20, 1967 to April 23, 1969 in China Times newspaper. Dongfang Yu was a mainstay of this paper for most of his career. This was the same paper in which Gu Long first published Horizon, Bright Moon, Sabre《天涯‧明月‧刀》 in 1974. But it only ran for 45 installments before it was pulled from the paper, apparently because of reader complaints due to how different the writing style was. This was the first and only time such a thing happened to Gu Long, and it was a heavy blow to him. The last installment ran on June 8, 1974. Two days later, on June 10, 1974, Dongfang Yu’s novel Seven Steps Startle the Dragon《七步驚龍》began. According to Gu Long’s student Ding Qing, it was another famous author along with reader complaints that caused the novel to be pulled. Given that Dongfang Yu’s novel started just two days later, the assumption is that Dongfang Yu was the author who pressured the editor to pull Gu Long’s novel.

Anyway, back to Ninefold Flute. The title of the novel references the nine rounds of refinement used in making certain Daoist elixirs of immortality, but it also references nine tunes played on the flute in question. This is a vertical flute 簫 (xiao) as opposed to a transverse flute 笛 (di). 簫 can also refer to panpipes, but that’s not the instrument in question here.

It’s pretty good so far. The excerpt I have translated below is a scene from chapter 1. Let me give you the setup before this scene.

Read more
Posted on by Lone Crane

Outside of Time — Er Gen’s New Xianxia Webnovel

Today Er Gen began his new xianxia novel called Outside of Time《光阴之外》. You could also translate it as Beyond Time. The description of the novel, such as it is, is this:

Heaven and Earth is the guesthouse for all living things. Time is the sojourner of since time immemorial.

The difference between life and death is like the difference between waking and dreaming, diverse and confused and changing.

So then transcending life and death, transcending heaven and earth, what awaits us beyond time?

I also took the liberty to translate the first chapter, just so people can get an idea what it’s like. I don’t plan to translate any more of this novel, but who knows when (if?) anyone will translate it, so I thought I’d translate the first chapter anyway as a short teaser. Pretty interesting so far, actually.

Anyway, here it is:

Read more
Posted on by Lone Crane

The Original Opening of Legend of the Condor Heroes

It’s easy to forget that the Jin Yong novels we know nowadays are actually revised versions. From 1970 to 1980, Jin Yong revised his entire oeuvre. In 1999 he underwent another round of revisions, though the changes made here were relatively minor. The first round of revisions were major overhauls, some sections being completely rewritten.

The opening of Legend of the Condor Heroes is a good example of this. So I thought it would be interesting to compare the opening of the current edition with that of the original edition serialized in the Hong Kong Commercial Daily.

We start then, with the current edition, as translated by Anna Holmwood in the official English translation of Legend of the Condor Heroes, volume 1: A Hero Born.

Read more
Posted on by Lone Crane

Gu Long’s Early Writing Style

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