My translation of Book 15 of Long Chengfeng’s Snowblade Vagabond series, The Tang Sect Crisis, is now complete. You can read it at the link below. Ebook downloads are also available on the page linked. Just click/tap the button below.
Today begins a new project that I hope to have completely translated in a month or so. It’s the fifteenth installment of Long Chengfeng’s Snowblade Vagabond series: The Tang Sect Crisis《唐門風暴》. Originally published in Wuxia World Magazine on November 20, 1978, issue #1012, this story deals with internecine strife within the Tang Sect, one of the most famous sects in wuxia fiction from Bai Yu to Liang Yusheng to Gu Long to Wen Rui’an. Here is Long Chengfeng’s contribution to Tang Sect lore, Snowblade Vagabond style!
Well I finally finished it, the first book in Long Chengfeng’s 50-book Snowblade Vagabond《雪刀浪子》 series. I’ve talked about Long Chengfeng before, and you can read a short description and context for the novel on the novel page, where you can also read the novel: https://wuxiawanderings.com/wuxia/long-chengfeng/snowblade-vagabond/
You can also download EPUB, MOBI, and PDF versions of the novel in one .zip file by clicking or tapping the button below:
It’s lychee1 season in Taiwan and the season is not a long one. I swear they’re only in season for like a week or two and then you can’t find them anymore, replaced by longans.2 Now longans are good, but they’re no lychee. Lychees have this floral flavor to them that is just unmatched. Longans are good, but they lack that floral note and have a lighter flavor. Those damn things seem to last the rest of the summer, while the superior lychee is here and gone.
The we bought recently are of the “glutinous rice ball” variety 糯米荔枝, so named because of their resemblance to sticky rice balls. These have seeds that are atrophies slivers, leaving more succulent flesh. Besides the normal “traditional” variety with its fullsize seed, there’s also the “jade purse” variety 玉荷包荔枝, which has a seed in between the size of the other two. They’re all good though.
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:
Read more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
The following paper by Meir Shahar reproduced below was originally included in the book Proceedings of the International Conference on Jin Yong’s Novels 金庸小說國際學術研討會論文集, 1999, Yuan-Liou Publishing. The book collects the papers presented at said conference. I have re-typeset it based on the original, except for fixing a few typos. All the footnotes are the same as in the original with the addition of two short notes I added for correction.
Martial-Arts Fiction and Martial-Arts Practice: The Concept of Qi in Jin Yong’s Novels1
Meir Shahar
Department of East Asian Studies
Tel Aviv University
In one of the climactic moments of Jin Yong’s 金庸 (1924-) Extraordinary Beings (Tianlong babu 天龍八部), Duan Yu 段譽, who is the novel’s principal protagonist, discovers inside a mysterious cave a jade statue of a divine maiden. Like Baoyu 寶玉, after which he has been fashioned, and with which his name resonates,2
Duan Yu is consumed by admiration to women, which he considers as superior to men. Perhaps for this reason, the discovery of the lifelike images touches the depths of his soul. Overcome with emotion, he kneels in front of it.
Inadvertently, Duan Yu’s romantic impulse transforms him into a martial-artist. This is because from his kneeling posture Duan Yu chances upon a tiny inscription on the maidens’ fee. It reads: “After kowtowing to me a thousand times, even if you experience a hundred deaths you will have no regrets.” All too happy to comply with the instruction and worship the lovely creature, Duan Yu prostrates himself on a small mat, which he finds spread in front of the statue. By the time he completes his prostrations, the mat is torn to shreds, revealing underneath it an ancient book, which endows Duan Yu with invincible powers. This sacred book contains the secret fighting methods of the “Free and Easy Sect” (Xiaoyao pai 逍遙派).3
In many ways this episode is characteristic of Jin Yong’s writing. Its plot is full of surprising turns, connecting as it does the veneration of beauty with hidden martial techniques. We find in it mysterious caves and sacred books, love and invincible fighting methods. Perhaps most significantly, the protagonist of this episode is, from the perspective of martial-arts fiction, an anti-hero: Duan Yu is, at least initially, much more interested in romance than in warfare.
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Today begins the translation of one of the most important novels in the entire wuxia genre: Soaring Swallows Startle Dragons《飛燕驚龍》by Wolong Sheng 臥龍生. I have avoided picking up a long project such as this for a long time, not wanting the commitment it requires. But I can’t put it off any longer, because to tell the truth, it’s pretty lonely being a wuxia fan. Even among Chinese readers the genre is pretty much dead, only really one active forum for it online, and that barely active. In English it’s even more barren.
And that’s simply because there hasn’t been much translated into English. What has been translated is almost entirely confined to two writers: Jin Yong and Gu Long. No surprise there as they are the most lauded and most popular. But that’s only two drops in a very large ocean. Though there are a few translations by other authors, mostly shorter pieces and teasers, still most of the major wuxia novels have yet to be touched.
This project will take care of one of them. (If you don’t care about me babbling on about the history of wuxia, you can skip to the Soaring Swallows novel page here.)
Soaring Swallows Startle Dragons is one of the most influential novels in all of wuxia. The tropes it established or employed set the tone for how wuxia fiction was to be written for decades, and Wolong Sheng for a time was one of the biggest names in the genre, second only to Jin Yong, and even surpassing Jin Yong in Taiwan (on account of Jin Yong being banned there).
Let me give you a quick rundown of the history of wuxia. And I mean lickety-split.
There’s a book called The Question of Reception: Martial Arts Fiction in English Translation (1997) which is a collection of papers presented at a conference on translation. Included among these papers is a sample translation of about half of chapter 1 of Jin Yong’s Legend of the Condor Heroes, which the translators (John Minford and Sharon Lai) called Eagles and Heroes. At this time, John Minford had already translated two of the three volumes of Jin Yong’s The Deer and the Cauldron, and many of the papers collected in the book deal with that translation, either directly or indirectly. Eagles and Heroes was to be translated next, but for whatever reason it never came to fruition.
I first stumbled upon this book years ago when I was a graduate student at National Cheng Kung University. The recent official publication of Legend of the Condor Heroes made me think of this excerpt by John Minford and Sharon Lai, and I wanted to compare them. So I finally made it down to the library at NCKU after all these years to get the book, not being able to find it anywhere else. And I have taken the liberty to re-typeset the translation and present it here.
What follows is the entirety of the excerpt included in The Question of Reception, about half of chapter 1, about 10,500 words. I have kept the text as is, leaving the spellings and punctuations as they are in the original text. The one exception to this is the footnotes, which are just unnumbered paragraphs as the bottom of the page in the book. Here I have converted them to numbered footnotes. Other than that the text is the same as it appears in the book.
Before the transltion there is a title page on which is the following description:
This extract from the first chapter of Louis Cha’s novel Shediao yingxiong zhuan (1957-59) is the fruit of discussions held during 1996, in a Martial Arts fiction translation workshop funded by a grant from the Hong Kong University Grants Committee. Other members of the workshop, who contributed ideas and drafts, were Chan Oi-sum, Ko Ka-ling, and Tong Man. The complete translation will be published by Oxford University Press (Hong Kong).
Here it is, an early translation of the first chapter of Legend of the Condor Heroes:
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