Posted on by Lone Crane

Soaring Dragon of the Hinterlands (1)

This is the first entry in my first readthrough series. Hopefully it’s not too rough. I’m still trying to figure out how to write up one of these, how much detail to put in, how to write commentary, etc. I’ll do my best. I have not read ahead in the novel at the time of writing so as to keep my reactions spoiler-free.

Soaring Dragon of the Hinterlands《八荒飛龍記》was written by Wolong Sheng 臥龍生 and published in 1971. It can be considered one of his later works in that it features a lot of shorter paragraphs and a lot of dialogue, which is characteristic of his later work. Gu Long had just become really popular and wuxia authors began to copy his style, which was short paragraphs and a lot of dialogue. You could say the meta had changed. Wolong Sheng was good friends with Gu Long and his style changed seemingly in an attempt to play to the trend as well.

While he was writing this novel, Wolong Sheng was also writing Legendary Heroes of China《神州豪俠傳》, Flying Bell《飛鈴》, and I think one other novel all at the same time, serialized in different newspapers. Soaring Dragon is one of his shorter novels. The copy I have is in two volumes and a total of 443 pages, 17 chapters. The first three chapters are covered in this first part of our readthrough.

My goal with these readthroughs is to provide some examples of wuxia novels for those who are interested in the genre but can’t read Chinese. After all, there are many wuxia novels out there and most will never be translated into English. At least with plot summaries one can get an idea for the structure, tropes, and various writing styles of wuxia novels.

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Posted on by Lone Crane

Armed Escort Banner — Wolong Sheng

Wolong Sheng was, during the golden age of wuxia (1960s), the premier author in Taiwan. He was a pioneer in the genre of wuxia, being the first to formulate the “Nine Schools of the Martial Fraternity”, establishing the basic organization of the martial world that would become one of the most used tropes in wuxia. At his best, Wolong Sheng was unsurpassed, but his quality is very uneven, and his works suffer the same failings as other wuxia novels serialized in newspapers at the time: too much filler, fight scenes that go on and on but end up nowhere, and his stories tend to start out great but end poorly (tiger head, snake tail as the saying goes). But he was good at coming up with exciting plots, and the women in his novels, though usually not the protagonist, tended to be more capable than the rather passive male MC.

He also deconstructed the genre even as he was helping to define it, by having the sects normally associated as good guys show a more sinister side, while his “bad guys” often acted in the right more than one would expect. In this way, Wolong Sheng showed his characters to be more realistic, exposing hypocrisy of the self-righteous, as well as so called “honor among thieves”. Unfortunately he was always in it for the money only, and he lent his name out to other writers to capitalize on his popularity. As a result, there are hundreds of novels bearing his name, but he only wrote about thirty or so himself. Armed Escort Banner is supposedly one he wrote himself, though there has been one scholar at least who has raised doubts. Later in this series I will come back to Wolong Sheng and talk more about what is one of my favorite wuxia novels.

The excerpt below is from chapter two of Armed Escort Banner. It’s about half of the chapter, which I translated and published on a wuxia forum I used to run back in 2012.

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