Forgive the crappy graphic, I will fix it when I get back home. Anyway, my translation of Ximen Ding’s fourth book in his Amazing Hawk Constables series, The Bloody Bridal Chamber, is complete! You can read it here at Wuxia Wanderings, or download the ebook file. If you click the ebook download link, the download will begin immediately. It’s an epub file. If you’re using a Kindle I recommend using Send to Kindle to send it to your device.
This is a short novel, about 50,000 words in English. If you like whodunnit murder mysteries mixed with your wuxia, give it a shot!
I’m away from home at the moment and away from my main PC to make graphics and such, but I have still been working. I’m starting to post chapters to a book in the Amazing Hawk Constables wuxia murder mystery series by Hong Kong author Ximen Ding. Well it’s not Venomous Schemes like I said in my previous post, but The Bloody Bridal Chamber is another book in the same series, book 4 to be exact, first published in issue #1129 of Wuxia World magazine on February 16, 1981.
I’m just posting as I translate it, three chapters up right now. Almost done with the fourth. Proper title card graphic and ebook (if ready to be made by then) and such will have to wait till I get back home in a month or so.
With the new year, Wuxia Wanderings enters its seventh year, which may prove to be the last, I don’t know. 2023 was a bad year for me, no energy, mental health deteriorating. But despite only publishing 19 posts las year, the views continued to climb. This is a very niche site, and most pageviews occur only on a handful of the more popular posts, such as the article about the flame stick, the translation list, and the Romance of the Three Kingdoms buyer’s guide. 2023 saw 45,222 views total, up from 35,859 in 2022. The site averages around 100 views a day, give or take.
This year, in effort to expand my reach and because I like layout and design, I plan to focus most of my wuxia attention on a wuxia magazine, to feature original fiction, articles on wuxia and xianxia, chapter summaries of novels, and maybe some translations of some public domain works.
I envision the magazine for readers and writers of wuxia, xianxia, or any other Chinese historical (real or made up) fiction, though with emphasis on wuxia. The articles will be about things that people looking to write their own fiction might need to know, and also things that readers and writers alike will be interested in. It’s my attempt to present the genre of wuxia as I know it to a wider audience.
At first I’ll just be writing everything myself as I can’t afford to pay contributors. But if the magazine picks up some traction then hopefully in the future I will be able to afford to pay others to contribute (so this will not be a free publication). I would like the magazine to be a home for original wuxia fiction.
This is just a quick mockup to give an idea of what I have planned. Nothing here is final. I take inspiration from wuxia and Western pulp fiction magazines.
In conjuction with the magazine, I plan to focus this year on my own original fiction, and also on a “crash course” guide to writing wuxia fiction. I just want to get more information out there so that more people who maybe only know wuxia through film and TV can be better equipped to write their own. I’ve talked about such a guide before. It will have practical information that anyone writing wuxia, xianxia, etc. would need to know. Like terms of address, the Chinese time system, major wuxia tropes, weapons, character archtypes, and so on. A quick start guide, if you will.
Venomous Schemes by Ximen Ding
As far as other projects go, I do want to finish the Nangong Xue novel translation I’m about halfway done on. Before that though I’m going to do a Ximen Ding translation of one of his Twin Amazing Hawk Constables novels: Venomous Schemes. That should be starting this month. I just want to get the second chapter translated before I begin, and it’s a pretty long chapter. This is a whodunnit wuxia mystery, but with a different vibe from such series as Wen Rui’an’s Four Great Constables or Gu Long’s Chu Liuxiang or Lu Xiaofeng series. That translation will start in probably a week or so.
That’s all I have planned for 2024 at the moment. It’s enough. The magazine and my own fiction writing will take up the bulk of my time, I suspect. I’d like to do another Snowblade Vagabond novel if I can muster the energy for it, cause those are fun to translate. I’ve got a Yun Zhongyue novella that I’m just about halfway done translating, but I don’t know if I will finish it. I also have some novel excerpts I did years ago that I’d like to finish editing so that I can post. I have a some other excerpts and half-finished story translations that have never seen the light of day. I’d like to get those out eventually. But I don’t know. If this year goes how last year went, then this might be the last year of Wuxia Wanderings altogether. But the above is what I’d like to get done this year if I can.
Comments are always welcome. Everyone is also welcome to the Discord server.
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”.
During the 1980s, wuxia fiction was on the decline, but it still had a large audience in the Hong Kong pulp magazines, particularly《武俠世界》 Wuxia World, and Ximen Ding 西門丁 was one of its most important authors. He was Wuxia World’s in-house author, having signed a contract in 1980 to furnish the magazine a piece of fiction each issue (it was a weekly) totaling 25,000 to 30,000 words. He soon began writing much more, including his own novel series, the best known of which is the《雙鷹神捕》Amazing Twin Hawk Constables series, which spanned 30 novels from 1980 to 1982. Yeah, 30 novels in two years! Plus all the other stories he wrote during that time.
He also wrote Republican era martial arts stories, stoies set during contemporary times, and horror stories. Later, Ximen Ding had a popular assassin series that spanned more than 20 novels. He also wrote under many different pen names; often more than one of his works appeared at the same time in Wuxia World magazine.
Together with Huang Ying and Long Chengfeng, Ximen Ding was known as the Three Swordsmen. These three, along with Wen Rui’an, dominated wuxia fiction in the 1980s. Wen Rui’am had his Four Constable series and was experimenting with new styles and forms of writing, Long Chengfeng had his Snowblade Vagabond series, his style imitating Gu Long, and Huang Ying, after taking over for Gu Long with his horror wuxia series, began his own series featuring assassin-turned-xia Shen Shengyi.
