Paper Swordsmen

Paper Swordsmen
Jin Yong and the Modern Chinese
Martial Arts Novel

John Christopher Hamm

University of Hawai‘i Press

Honolulu
© 2005 University of Hawai‘i Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hamm, John Christopher.
Paper swordsmen : Jin Yong and the modern Chinese
martial arts novel / John Christopher Hamm.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8248-2763-5 (alk. paper)
1. Jin, Yong, 1924—Criticism and interpretation.
2. Martial arts fiction. I. Title: Jin Yong and the modern
Chinese martial arts novel. II. Title.
PL2848.Y8Z535 2005
895.1'352—dc22
2004017243

University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on

acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence
and durability of the Council on Library Resources.

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 Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments vii

A Note on Conventions xi

1 Introduction: The Literary and Historical Contexts of

New School Martial Arts Fiction 1

2 Local Heroes: Guangdong School Martial Arts Fiction and

the Colony of Hong Kong 32

3 The Marshes of Mount Liang Beyond the Sea: Jin Yong’s

Early Fiction and Postwar Hong Kong 49

4 National Passions: From The Eagle-Shooting Heroes to

The Giant Eagle and Its Companion 79

5 The Empire of the Text: Jin Yong and Ming Pao 114

6 Beyond the Rivers and Lakes: The Smiling, Proud Wanderer 137

7 Revision and Canonization: From Ming Pao to

The Collected Works of Jin Yong 168

8 Beyond Martial Arts Fiction: The Deer and the Cauldron 198

9 Coming Home: Jin Yong’s Fiction in Mainland China 227

10 Jin Yong at the Century’s End: The Wang Shuo Incident

and Its Implications 250

Notes 261
Select Glossary of Chinese Characters 301
Bibliography 311
Index 341

v
 Preface and Acknowledgments

T his study of Jin Yong’s martial arts fiction originates in my doctoral

dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley. I thank, above all,
my advisor, Hung-nien Samuel Cheung, who first encouraged me to make
an avocation a topic of more serious study, and who has lent his enthusi-
astic support to the project in its subsequent stages. Among my other
teachers and mentors at Berkeley, Lydia Liu was most directly involved
with this particular project, but I hope that Stephen West, David Johnson,
and David Keightley will not be embarrassed to have their contributions
to my broader education gratefully recognized as well. The research and
writing of the dissertation were generously supported by a Fulbright dis-
sertation fellowship, and by a dean’s dissertation fellowship and a regents’
predoctoral humanities fellowship from the University of California.
While conducting research in Hong Kong, I received invaluable assis-
tance from Ms. Emily Chan of Television Broadcasts Limited; Ms. Karen
Chan; Prof. Stephen Ching-kiu Chan; Mr. Fung Chi Cheung; Mr. K. K.
Cheung; Ms. Susanna Ho and the archival staff at Sing Pao; Mr. Keith Kam
of Ming Pao Holdings Ltd.; Mr. Lam Ling Hon; Mr. Lee Ki Wai; Mr. Liao
Futian and Ms. Zhang Xiufen; Mr. Simon Lun of the Hong Kong Daily
News Group; Prof. Eric K. W. Ma; Prof. John Minford; Mr. Ng Ho; Mr. Shen
Xicheng; Mr. Tse Pui Yin of Ming Pao Holdings Ltd.; and the staffs of the
Chinese Service Center at Chinese University, of Fung Ping Shan Library
at the University of Hong Kong, and of Ming Ho Publishing. In Beijing I
profited greatly from the comments and advice of Prof. Chen Pingyuan,
Prof. Wang Yichuan, Prof. Yan Jiayan, and Song Weijie. Prof. Lin Baochun,
Ms. Rose Shen, and Mr. Ye Hongsheng offered help and encouragement in
and from Taiwan. Yomi Braester, Andrea Goldman, Zev Handel, Andrew
Jones, Polly Rosenthal, Meir Shahar, David Shiretzki, and Paola Zamperini
are among the colleagues and friends who lent support of various kinds
during my days at Berkeley. At the University of Washington, the Junior
Faculty Development Program afforded precious opportunity for further

vii
 work on this project. Jeffery Kinkley generously devoted his time and
expertise to a reading of an early draft, and Theodore Huters and a second,
anonymous reader for Hawai‘i University Press made invaluable sugges-
tions, which I have done my best to incorporate. To all named I give my
heartfelt thanks, and to any whose contributions I have failed to mention
I offer my apologies. My deepest gratitude is owed to my parents, Charles
E. Hamm and Helen H. Hamm, and to my wife, Zhou Xue; to them this
book is dedicated.
Various portions of this work have been presented, as papers, at the
1998 Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies; the “Interna-
tional Conference on Jin Yong’s Novels,” Taipei, 1998; the Center for Chi-
nese Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1999; the “Beijing Inter-
national Conference on Jin Yong’s Fiction,” Peking University, 2000; the
“On the Edge, Over the Edge: Hong Kong Cinema and Popular Culture”
conference, University of Wisconsin, 2001; the “Chinese Popular Culture
Unveiled” conference, Columbia University, 2001; and the “Entertainment
China” conference, University of Oregon, 2003. My thanks to the confer-
ence organizers, panel chairs and commentators, colleagues, and audience
members who contributed queries and observations. Portions of chapter 2
were published in Twentieth-Century China 27.1 (November 2001): 71–96,
under the title “Local Heroes: Guangdong School wuxia Fiction and Hong
Kong’s Imagining of China.” Portions of chapter 3 were published in Mod-
ern Chinese Literature and Culture 11.1 (Spring 1999): 93–124, under the
title “The Marshes of Mount Liang Beyond the Sea: Jin Yong’s Early Mar-
tial Arts Fiction and Postwar Hong Kong.” I am grateful to the editors of
the two journals for allowing this material to be included here.
It is my hope that this study will both interest the general reader and
contribute to the scholarly conversation on modern Chinese literature
and culture by introducing information and perspectives on a topic that,
despite or because of a wealth of popular attention, has hitherto received
scant regard from the Western academy. At least some of this volume’s
limitations are evident to me even as I commit it to print. As a study of the
work of Jin Yong, it provides a point of entry into the genre of martial arts
fiction as a whole, yet by the same token offers a picture that is partial and
to some extent distorting, for if Jin Yong’s novels are recognized exemplars
of the genre they are also creatures sui generis, and the Jin Yong phenom-
enon impinges upon literary, critical, and political realms otherwise largely
untroubled (at least on the conscious level) by the presence of martial arts
fiction. The broader cultural history of the modern martial arts novel
remains to be written. Even as a study of Jin Yong’s own oeuvre, this vol-

viii Preface and Acknowledgments

ume makes no pretense of exhaustiveness. It discusses in some detail five
or six of the author’s dozen major works, necessarily omitting others
equally worthy of consideration, and addresses the chosen works from
those particular perspectives suggested by my own interests and preoccu-
pations. I believe that the argument made here can validly be extended,
not only to encompass the rest of Jin Yong’s novels but to engage larger
questions of literary history and interpretation as well; yet there are obvi-
ously many issues and potential approaches that lie outside the scope of
this study. In particular, and finally, I should make clear that the intended
focus of this study is Jin Yong’s work as a body of Chinese-language liter-
ary (meaning here simply written, as distinct from, e.g., visual or perfor-
mative) texts. At several points I mention the many adaptations of Jin
Yong’s novels into other media but do so primarily to note the adapta-
tions’ role in the “Jin Yong phenomenon” and their influence upon the
reception of the literary originals. A full account and analysis of Jin
Yong–related films, television serials, comic books, video games, et cetera,
and of the circulation of his novels as translated into Vietnamese, Indone-
sian, Korean, Japanese, German, English, and other languages, remains,
again, to be undertaken.

Preface and Acknowledgments ix

 A Note on Conventions

Jin Yong’s works: Page numbers provided for citations from Jin Yong’s works
refer to the Ming Ho Collected Works of Jin Yong (see my bibliography). The
English titles used (with one exception) are likewise those supplied in the
Ming Ho edition. English translations from the texts are my own unless
otherwise acknowledged.

Romanization of Chinese: Chinese names and terms are for the most part
romanized according to the conventions of Hanyu pinyin. Exceptions
include some names with conventional English spellings or familiar alter-
nate romanizations: for example, Hong Kong, not Xianggang; Taipei, not
Taibei; Li Teng-hui, not Li Denghui. In certain other cases where published
sources employ an alternate romanization, that spelling is given prece-
dence, and the Hanyu pinyin is provided in parentheses at the first occur-
rence: for example, Sing pao (Cheng bao), Ming Pao (Ming bao). Chinese
characters are provided in my glossary.

xi
 Chapter 1
Introduction

The Literary and Historical Contexts of

New School Martial Arts Fiction

I n Hong Kong and Taiwan, and in Chinese communi-

ties overseas, the latter half of the 1950s saw an explo-
sion in the popularity of wuxia xiaoshuo—“fiction of martial arts and
chivalry,” or “martial arts fiction” for short.1 Well into the 1970s, martial
arts novels were written, circulated, and read in quantities unseen since
the prewar heyday of the so-called Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School.
To distinguish it from its predecessors, the reemergent body of martial arts
fiction was quickly dubbed the New School. The works published in this
period, their imitators and successors, and their adaptations into film,
television drama, comic books, video games, and other media continue to
circulate to the present day, constituting an ubiquitous element in the
popular culture of Chinese communities around the globe.
Most prominent of all New School works are the novels of Jin Yong,
the pen name of Zha Liangyong or Louis Cha (1924– ), a native of Zhe-
jiang province who relocated to Hong Kong in 1948 and began publish-
ing fiction in the colony’s newspapers in 1955. Though advanced by pub-
lishers for promotional reasons, the slogan “Jin Yong’s martial arts fiction
—the common language of Chinese the world over” is embraced by
legions of fans as both the literal truth and an articulation of that which
they value in Jin Yong’s work. Jin Yong is by most accounts the single most
widely read of all twentieth-century writers in the Chinese language. Read-
ers’ polls rank him second only to Lu Xun in importance and appeal, and
his actual readership undoubtedly far surpasses that of the anointed father
of modern Chinese literature. Jin Yong’s work is lauded for its panoramic
and emotionally charged engagement with Chinese history; its seemingly
inexhaustible inventiveness and the dazzling complexity of its plotting; its

1
 range of vivid, multifaceted characters and psychologically adventurous
exploration of human relationships; its integration of a modern sensibil-
ity and Western literary techniques with the inherited material of the mar-
tial arts genre; its reinvention, through the rejection of Europeanized ele-
ments, of Chinese vernacular prose; its ability to wed a breadth of learning
and profound insights on life with the most crowd-pleasing action and
melodrama; and its effectiveness in accessibly introducing Chinese culture
and values to a socially, geographically, and generationally diverse reader-
ship, including such “disadvantaged” elements as the younger generations
of Chinese overseas. Various parties—some far from disinterested, as we
shall see—claim with increasing vigor and assurance not merely that Jin
Yong’s novels are the finest specimens of martial arts fiction but that they
transcend the genre to stand as fiction pure and simple, or even as Litera-
ture. His works have been adopted for college curricula, and they are the
subject of an ever-expanding body of commentarial and appreciative sec-
ondary literature; rumors persist of his being considered for the Nobel
Prize. It is thus not merely the size of Jin Yong’s readership that demands
the attention of students of Chinese literature, but, more significantly, the
challenges presented to literary history and theory by the claims made for
a body of work whose origins in China’s geographic periphery (Hong
Kong) and in the often despised ghetto of popular genre fiction would
seem to place it on the fringes of modern literature’s central tradition and
outside the scope of serious consideration.
Just as Jin Yong’s novels seem to have outstripped the genre from
which they were born, so likewise does the “Jin Yong phenomenon”
extend well beyond the novels themselves. Jin Yong /Zha Liangyong is
known not only as a writer of fiction but as a publisher and entrepreneur,
whose establishment of the daily newspaper Ming Pao (Ming bao in Hanyu
pinyin; English title Ming Pao Daily News) in 1959 laid the foundation for
a lucrative and influential print empire; as an editorialist and political
commentator, a voice for the people of Hong Kong, and an analyst of
mainland politics through the tumultuous 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s; as a
political player himself, a member of the draft committee responsible for
engineering Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty; as a spokesman
for and representative of “Chinese tradition,” whose learning and cultural
status have been recognized in honors, including his 1999 appointment as
dean of Humanities at Zhejiang University; and as a celebrity whose move-
ments and pronouncements receive enthusiastic attention in the media of
Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Chinese mainland, and beyond. The status of Jin

2 Chapter 1
Yong’s martial arts fiction has become inextricably interwoven with the
public personae of the author.2
Though not coterminous with the story of New School martial arts
fiction, the story of Jin Yong begins with its emergence; and the story of
New School martial arts fiction is often said to have begun with a match
between two rival boxing masters that was fought in Macau on January 17,
1954. Within days of the match, hoping to capitalize on the excitement it
had generated, the Hong Kong newspaper Xin wanbao began serializing
Longhu dou jinghua (Dragon and tiger vie in the capital), a novel of martial
adventure by Chen Wentong, writing under the pen name Liang Yusheng.
This serial’s immediate success spawned numerous imitators, including,
in the following year, Jin Yong’s maiden effort, Book and Sword, Gratitude
and Revenge. With Jin Yong and Liang Yusheng in its vanguard, New School
martial arts fiction rapidly conquered readerships in Hong Kong, Singa-
pore, and Southeast Asia; and in the years that followed, it extended its
domain to Taiwan, and ultimately to the Chinese mainland.
This oft-repeated account of the New School’s origins is clearly insuf-
ficient. The simple triumphalism of its narrative arc, which overrides the
complexities and particularities of martial arts fiction’s circulation and
reception, is matched by the naiveté of its vision of causality, which neg-
lects the multilayered literary and cultural contexts of postwar Hong Kong.
And yet to begin to understand these contexts, we could do worse than to
consider the match fought in Macau in January of 1954; for in the circum-
stances of this event and the discourses constructed around it, we can dis-
cern many of the elements that contributed to the shape and role of the
fiction whose appearance it helped, however adventitiously, to trigger.

Battle in Macau

On January 3, 1954, the Hong Kong media excitedly announced plans for
a match between the local martial artists Wu Gongyi and Chen Kefu.3 Wu
Gongyi, fifty-three at the time, was head of Hong Kong’s Jianquan Taiji
Association (Jianquan taiji she), founded by his father, Wu Jianquan, a
native of Hebei province in the north who had brought his family to the
colony from Shanghai at the outbreak of the war with Japan in 1937. Wu
Gongyi’s grandfather was Wu Quanyou (1834–1902), a prominent disci-
ple of the founder of Yang-style taiji quan, Yang Luchan (1799–1872).
Chen Kefu, thirty-five, was founder and head of the Taishan Fitness Acad-
emy (Taishan jianshen xueyuan) in Macau. Chen was known as an expo-

Introduction 3
 nent of White Crane Boxing (Baihe quan), which he had studied with the
eminent local master Wu Zhaozhong, but had trained in Western boxing
and Japanese judo as well. Chen was a native of Taishan in Guangdong
and spoke with the distinctive Taishan accent; his parents had emigrated
to Australia.
A match between the two boxing masters had been anticipated for
some time. In August of the previous year, Wu Gongyi had published an
open letter declaring his willingness to meet practitioners of any other
school “at any time and any place” for “mutual study” of the martial arts.
The invitation drew a response from Chen Kefu, which developed into a
simmering war of words; and the war of words was rumored to have nearly
erupted into violence at a New Year’s Eve banquet at a Hong Kong hotel,
attended by supporters of both parties. It was on the following day, New
Year’s Day of 1954, that the principals signed the agreement to hold a
match later that month.
The match’s sponsor, Macau’s Kangle Athletic Association (Kangle tiyu
hui), presented it not as a duel but as a “joint exhibition of the martial
arts” (guoshu heyan) staged for charitable purposes. Only a week earlier, on
Christmas night of 1953, a fire had broken out in the Shek Kip Mei area
of Kowloon. Fires were a chronic plague in Hong Kong’s squatter settle-
ments, dense tracts of hastily built wooden buildings, often without elec-
tricity or running water, housing the hundreds of thousands of refugees
who had thronged to the colony from the mainland in recent years. The
Christmas night fire was, however, of unprecedented scope—in the words
of the government’s Annual Report, “unquestionably the worst catastrophe
the Colony had ever suffered.”4 By the time it had burned itself out on
dawn of Boxing Day, some fifty-nine thousand people were left homeless
and stripped of their possessions. In the long run, the Shek Kip Mei fire was
to prove an impetus for a profound restructuring of relationships between
the colonial government and the territory’s Chinese population.5 In the
near term it drew an outpouring of relief efforts from the government;
from the Chinese mainland, the United States of America, and the Vati-
can; and from numerous local charitable organizations. The Chen-Wu
match was designed as a charitable endeavor, with proceeds to be divided
between a fund for Hong Kong fire victims and a hospital and foundation
in Macau. The contest between Chen and Wu was the centerpiece of a
show that would also include solo and group exhibitions of martial arts
by members of the principals’ respective schools, and vocal performances
by a number of the most popular stars of the local opera stage.
Tickets soon went on sale at various locations in Kowloon and Hong

4 Chapter 1
Kong island, with prices ranging from five Hong Kong dollars for general
admission to one hundred dollars for premium box seats. One of the ven-
dors was a hotel travel agency prepared to arrange transit visas for those
with out-of-territory papers. Arrangements were made for additional ferry
service between Hong Kong and Macau to handle the expected crowds.
Construction also began on the stage and on viewing stands for an audi-
ence of up to ten thousand. The match was to be fought on a platform
erected in the center of the swimming pool outside the Xinhuayuan Night-
club. Though variously referred to as a wutai, “(opera) stage,” or leitai, the
name for the platform on which challenge bouts between martial artists
were fought during the Ming and Qing dynasties, the stage was con-
structed on the model of a Western boxing ring, twenty feet square, with
ropes around the perimeter. Surrounding the raised ring was a platform at
water level to accommodate the fighters’ seconds, a panel of seven judges,
selected dignitaries and members of the media, and, it was reported, two
lifeguards, on hand in the event that one of the contestants was hurled into
the pool. The rules drawn up for the conduct of the bout also reflected the
conventions of Western boxing. There were to be six rounds of three min-
utes each, with a two-minute resting period between rounds. No gloves
were to be worn, and the range of allowable techniques was broad, though
eye gouges and strikes at the genitals were forbidden. Clinches would be
broken up by the referees. Victory would be determined by the panel of
judges on the basis of a detailed set of conditions—time against the ropes
or on the ground, number of blows landed and sustained, ability to pres-
ent oneself at the conclusion of the match, and so forth. Preparations were
made for live radio broadcasting and for filming the event.
As the date drew nearer, speculation raged in Hong Kong’s offices, tea-
houses and restaurants, martial arts circles and athletic clubhouses. In
interviews, the organizers and principals stressed that the aims of the exhi-
bition were charitable relief—Wu noting that a fortune-teller had warned
him of the need to build a positive karmic balance during a perilous
period in his horoscope—and the promotion of the Chinese martial arts.
Chen, in particular, voiced his hopes for the “demystification” of the tra-
dition and for its systematization along the lines of its Western and Japa-
nese analogues. But the organizers also found themselves denying rumors
that the match was fixed by secret agreement, or alternately that it would
be a duel to the death; that representatives of the two lineages had arrived
from abroad to consult on strategy and provide reinforcements; that the
fight would set off a blood feud between the schools, and perhaps erupt
into a general melee outside the ring. Speculation also took the form of

Introduction 5
 enthusiastic betting. Early odds in Macau were said to be even, with Chen’s
youthful vitality and varied and up-to-date training thought to balance
Wu’s years of experience. But Hong Kong punters tended to favor Wu, not-
ing that taiji quan relied on subtlety and depth of cultivation rather than
speed or brute strength. Wu was rumored to have mastered the art of
attacking vital points (dianmai) and rendering an opponent helpless with
a single touch.
The principals and their entourages settled into Macau hotels several
days before the match. Wu Gongyi then withdrew to a Buddhist mon-
astery to rest and gather his spirits, while Chen Kefu devoted himself to a
routine of early morning jogging and qigong exercises. Ferry traffic from
Hong Kong to Macau broke all records in the two days preceding the event,
and the streets of the Portuguese colony were filled with Hong Kongers
hailing one another and animatedly discussing the upcoming contest. The
visitors viewed with appreciation the martial arts classes that had sprung
up in parks and alleys in response to the excitement surrounding the
match. They swarmed into local restaurants and filled the hotels to capac-
ity; latecomers unable to find a room on the eve of the main event whiled
the night away in the Macau casinos.
Shortly after two in the afternoon of Sunday, January 17, the wife of
the governor of Macau cut a red ribbon to open the Joint Exhibition of
Martial Arts and Opera Star Benefit Recital. Vocal performances followed,
and then the exhibitions by members of Wu’s and Chen’s schools. Wu
Gongyi and Chen Kefu themselves took the stage shortly after four, Wu
wearing a traditional gray scholar’s gown over his combat attire of shirt,
loose trousers, and basketball sneakers, and Chen a white and blue West-
ern-style boxer’s warm-up robe. After massages by their seconds and
instructions from the chief referee, they doffed their outer garments. At the
sound of the bell, the fighters advanced to the center of the ring, exchanged
a salute, and began. Chen took the offensive and, after some inconclusive
exchanges, landed a strike to Wu’s face that sent him stumbling onto the
ropes. Wu immediately counterattacked and delivered a heavy blow to
Chen’s nose. Blood gushed forth; the judges rang the bell to end the first
round. The rest period was extended to allow Chen’s seconds to stanch the
bleeding, and when he took to the center of the ring to begin the second
round, his white shirt was spattered with crimson. The atmosphere on the
platform and in the stands was tense. The second round began with more
cautious sparring but quickly turned fierce: Chen drew blood from Wu’s
mouth and landed a blow to his belly, Wu again struck Chen in the nose,
and the two exchanged a flurry of kicks. The judges stopped the match.

6 Chapter 1
After hurried consultations and a secret ballot, they declared the contest
at an end, with no winner announced. The opera star Xin Mazai took the
stage to regale the crowd with a rendition of the aria “Of all sins, lust is
the chief” (“Wan e yin wei shou”); Fang Yanfen, slated to perform as well,
had apparently been overcome by the sight of blood and was unable to
appear; but the audience was already dispersing.
At a banquet attended by all parties some ten days after the event, the
head of the organizing committee expressed his satisfaction with the out-
come of the match: over one hundred thousand Hong Kong dollars had
been raised for charity, and the audience had been afforded an admirable
exhibition of the skills and spirit of the Chinese martial arts. In numerous
interviews, Wu and Chen repeated the organizer’s assessment, coyly
deferred questions about victory and defeat to the panel of judges, praised
their opponent’s performance, and dismissed reports of grudges or injuries
—Chen denying that his nose had been broken and explaining that a nose-
bleed was nothing at all remarkable by the standards of Western boxing,
and Wu going so far as to display his undamaged set of false teeth in order
to lay to rest rumors that he had lost a tooth in the match. Some published
comments also repeated the organizers’ praise of the match’s conduct;
others criticized its curtailment or the level of skill displayed. However
assessed, the match remained a central topic of conversation for weeks,
and those whose attendance enabled them to provide firsthand accounts
found themselves favored invitees for tea and dim sum. Most distressed by
the outcome were reportedly the legions of gamblers, whom the lack of a
winner or even a formally declared tie left with no clear standard for set-
tling sometimes astronomical wagers.
“From the unfinished fiasco,” opined the English-language Hong Kong
Standard, “there seem [sic] little chance the ancient form of Chinese sport
might revive in popularity.”6 But reports and anecdotes in the Chinese
press over the following year indicate an explosion of enthusiasm for the
study of various forms of the Chinese martial arts. Even more dramatic
and long lasting was the martial arts’ revival in the realm not so much of
practice as of imagination. Two days after the match, Hong Kong’s Xin wan-
bao, one of the newspapers that had offered the most detailed coverage of
the affair, published the following first-page announcement:

Since the bout between Wu and Chen, everyone in Hong Kong and Macau has
been discussing it with great enthusiasm, and the streets and alleys are filled
with talk of the martial arts. Tomorrow, in order to add to our readers’ pleas-
ure, this paper will begin serializing Mr. Liang Yusheng’s martial arts novel

Introduction 7
 Dragon and Tiger Vie in the Capital. The book narrates a taiji master’s struggles
against the masters of rival schools, and involves a quest for vengeance by a
master of the Martial Grove, a tale of love between young men and women of
the Rivers and Lakes, and various other plots, ending with a great battle in the
capital city. It is an extraordinarily exciting tale, and we respectfully commend
it to our readers’ attention.

The following day’s first installment of the text opens with a poem in ci
form written in response to verses composed by Chen’s master Wu Zhao-
zhong on the eve of the bout, and with direct references (omitted when
the novel was republished in book form) to the enthusiasm generated by
the event and the editor’s charge to the author to respond with a work of
fiction. As promised, the tale that ensues features among its main charac-
ters a venerable master of the taiji quan lineage. It is undeniable that New
School martial arts fiction, of which Liang Yusheng’s Dragon and Tiger
would soon come to be hailed as the forerunner, drew much of its imme-
diate inspiration from the match fought in Macau in January of 1954.
If we look beyond the simple fact of its occasioning the publication of
Liang Yusheng’s novel, what points of entry does the Chen-Wu match offer
for our understanding of the literary and social phenomenon of martial
arts fiction? We might consider, first of all, the light it sheds on the nature
and role of the martial arts in the social imagination of mid-century Hong
Kong. The excitement generated by the contest exceeded in intensity and
differed in kind from that inspired by other sporting events reported in
the territory’s Chinese-language newspapers. Like other contests, the bout
promised the drama of victory and defeat; like the horse races, it allowed
spectators to literally invest their excitement in the form of gambling; like
the football matches, it offered fans the opportunity for group identifica-
tion and loyalty. A key difference, however, is that a primary focus for
identification in this case was not so much one party or the other as the
medium of the contest itself—the Chinese martial arts. Both the princi-
pals in the contest, as reported in the newspapers, and the newspapers in
their own narratorial voices highlight an association between the physical
skills employed and a Chinese national identity. The association is explicit
in the term guoshu, literally “the national arts,” a term inherited from the
Republican era and enshrining that period’s project of reinventing martial
traditions in the service of nationalistic self-strengthening.7 Reporting on
the match maps the association in more detail through the evocation of
national history—tracing the contestants’ lineages back to the Yuan
(1260–1368) and Ming (1368–1644) dynasties—and through the presen-

8 Chapter 1
tation of the martial arts’ affinity with such other distinctively “Chinese”
cultural forms as the opera, medicine, and classical verse.
The “Chineseness” of the Chinese martial arts finds its definition not
only through reference to a native tradition but also through a complex
relationship with a Western “other,” a relationship of both distinction and
emulation. From one perspective, Chen in his white and blue boxer ’s
warm-up robe plays the young and vigorous West to the venerable China
of Wu in his gray scholar’s gown. From another, though, his proclaimed
desire to systematize and demystify the martial arts, and indeed the whole
staging of the match in accord with the protocols of Western boxing, rep-
resent the ambition to adapt the perceived strengths of Western moder-
nity and so realize China’s potential to stand as an equal. The interlock-
ing imperatives of self-confidence and inferiority implicit in this ambition
are a familiar pattern in Chinese encounters with Western modernity as a
whole; their manifestation in the particular cultural field of the martial
arts can again be traced to the Republican era, as we are reminded by the
Hong Kong Standard’s note that the Chen-Wu match was “the first since the
Chinese Nationalist Republic banned that form of fighting.”8
This remark in the English-language Standard foregrounds the role of
the Chinese Nationalist modernization project in shaping the fate of the
martial arts and making the Chen-Wu match an unprecedented occur-
rence but conveniently ignores the presence of another agent: the British
colonial government of Hong Kong. Although contemporary newspaper
accounts are silent on the question of why Macau was chosen as the venue
for the match, and though we must note that the organizing body and one
of the principals were based in the Portuguese colony, reports circulating
in Hong Kong to the present day aver that the British colonial government
would not permit a public contest of the Chinese martial arts to be staged
in its own territory. Whatever the truth of this claim or its concrete basis in
Hong Kong law, it is illuminating to note that a Western-style boxing tour-
nament organized for the charitable relief of fire victims was held in Hong
Kong only days before the Chen-Wu match in Macau, and that the English-
language press’s detailed and enthusiastic reporting of the former stands in
marked contrast to its dismissive, even mocking coverage of the latter.9 For
Hong Kong’s Chinese inhabitants, the institutions of colonial rule made
the paradoxes of the relationship between China and the West extraordi-
narily immediate and complex. The colonial presence unquestionably
played a role in the fact that a contest in the Chinese martial arts, held for
the benefit of Chinese refugees in Hong Kong, was staged in a boxing ring
in the middle of a swimming pool outside a nightclub across the water, in

Introduction 9
 the adjacent colony of Macau. And it made itself felt as well, as we shall
see, in the changing contexts and contents of martial arts fiction.
To read the Chen-Wu match simply as a result of tensions between
East and West or of the peculiar contours of colonialism in Hong Kong
would be to overlook yet another phenomenon it serves to dramatize: the
internal complexities of Chinese identities. Any temptation to imagine
“the Chinese” or even “the Hong Kong (and Macau) Chinese” as a homo-
geneous community is quickly dispelled by consideration of the match’s
two principals, who are distinguished by generation, by native place and
dialect, and by experiences of history and patterns of migration in which
both native place and generation play a part. Wu Gongyi was born in the
last decade of the Qing dynasty to a northern family that relocated to the
metropolis of Shanghai during the Republican era and then to the British
colony of Hong Kong with the outbreak of war with Japan; Chen Kefu
and his family exemplify the back-and-forth movements between China
proper, the immediately adjacent colonial territories, and the Chinese
communities abroad in which the natives of the southeastern littoral have
historically played so major a role. This work seeks to understand twenti-
eth-century martial arts fiction, and Jin Yong’s work in particular, in the
context of its reading communities, and a key to that understanding is con-
sideration of these communities’ synchronic and diachronic variations.
A further aspect of the contexts of New School martial arts fiction to
which the Chen-Wu match can alert us is the role of the press in articulat-
ing community and creating public discourse. Hong Kong’s Chinese
newspapers have been mentioned as sources for information on the
match and as the medium for the publication of Liang’s novel, but their
function is not merely that of neutral vehicles for the transmission of data
and texts. Beyond reporting the contest, they publicize it, fan the excite-
ment surrounding it, and articulate a range of responses and interpreta-
tions. They also concretize both our and their contemporary readership’s
perception of this particular event’s embedding in its social and historical
contexts, through the coexistence on the newspapers’ pages of coverage of
the match, reports on the daily trials, dramas, and amusements of Hong
Kong’s Chinese communities, and tidings from the broader stage of the
Cold War world. Benedict Anderson has outlined the role of the daily
newspaper in facilitating the imagining of national communities; Prasen-
jit Duara offers support for the possibility, previously intimated, that the
imagining of communities may not be the prerogative of the totalizing
and essentializing nation-state alone.10 One of my strategies for tracing
relationships between Jin Yong’s work and its readership communities is

10 Chapter 1
to consider the historically specific character and scope of the newspapers
and other media through which martial arts fiction has been circulated.
The relationship between the “fictional” and “factual” aspects of the
newspapers’ coverage is particularly germane to our concerns here. To char-
acterize Liang Yusheng’s Dragon and Tiger as a work of fiction or imagina-
tion inspired by the real-world events of the Chen-Wu match is less accu-
rate than to acknowledge it as simply an extension of the processes of
fantasy and mythmaking operant in the match throughout its planning,
conduct, and representation. In Xin wanbao’s coverage of the match, mat-
ter-of-fact reports of the membership of the organizing committee and
arrangements for ticket sales coexist with the melodramatic rhetoric of
“fight to the finish” (juezhan) and “battle of dragon and tiger” (longhu dou).
While the telescopic scale and attention-getting aims of headlines make
them especially prone to such dramatic flourishes, the news articles proper
are hardly immune; the first report on the upcoming match slips easily
into the vocabulary, rhythms, and reported dialogue of martial arts fiction
in relating the supposed confrontation between Chen’s and Wu’s parties at
the New Year’s Eve banquet.11 A pre-match article by Liang Yusheng him-
self, “A Page from the Secret History of taiji quan,” cites “unofficial histo-
ries and martial arts fiction” (baiguan yeshi, wuxia xiaoshuo) as the sources
of its information.12 If the practice of the Chinese martial arts inspired fic-
tional treatment, the tradition of martial arts fiction at least equally shaped
the perception of actual practice, as shown through the following brief
sketch of the fictional traditions antedating and informing the appearance
of the so-called New School in Hong Kong in the mid-1950s.13

The Tradition of Martial Arts Fiction

The term wuxia xiaoshuo made its appearance in China only in the first
decade of the twentieth century, adapted from Japanese usage.14 But liter-
ary production on the topic of xia—altruistic and independent individu-
als and the values they practice—dates at least to China’s Warring States
period (403–221 BC), and since its earliest recorded appearances, the term
xia has been frequently though not invariably associated with the energies
of wu, the “martial” or “military.” Among the most prominent early uses
of the term is in the “Wu du” (Five vermins) chapter of the writings attrib-
uted to the third century BC philosopher Hanfeizi:

The Confucians [Ru] with their learning [wen] bring confusion to the law; the
knights [xia] with their military prowess [wu] violate the prohibitions. Yet the

Introduction 11
 ruler treats both groups with respect, and so we have disorder. People who
deviate from the law should be treated as criminals, and yet the scholars actu-
ally attain posts in the government because of their literary accomplishments.
People who violate the prohibitions ought to be punished, and yet the bands
of knights are able to make a living by wielding their swords in a private
cause.15

Xia here denotes a class of people whose behavior is characterized by the

private and extralegal use of wu. It is the disruptive nature of their activities
(relative to an ideal of unassailable state control over society), together
with the neat complementarity of their “military prowess” with the Con-
fucians’ “learning,” that leads the philosopher to posit them as a category
both equivalent to and distinct from that of the scholars—there is no
implication that the xia resembled the Confucians in the sense of consti-
tuting a formal school or tradition of thought.
China’s first and greatest historian Sima Qian (145?–86? BC) cites
Hanfeizi’s dictum at the opening of the “Youxia lie zhuan” (Biographies of
the wandering knights) in his Shi ji (Records of the historian). Rather than
merely gnomic pronouncements, however, he offers extended accounts
of the lives and activities of individuals exemplifying the category; and
instead of simply condemning the youxia for their lawlessness, he articu-
lates and expresses admiration for the principles to which they devote
themselves. Sima Qian’s narrative material and conceptual framework
serve as a foundation for subsequent treatments of xia in the Chinese lit-
erary tradition.
As Ping-ti Ho has pointed out, while the phrase “wandering knights”
more or less accurately renders the literal meaning of the Chinese youxia,
in terms of the behavior imputed to them, the subjects of Sima Qian’s
chapter might better be described as “underworld stalwarts.”16 They are
local strongmen, exercising power outside the purview or at times in
direct defiance of established government authority, rendering private jus-
tice and offering protection to those who seek their aid. Sima Qian singles
out for praise the “knights of the common people,” who neither base their
power on wealth and connections nor abuse their authority by oppressing
the populace to gratify personal desires. While admitting their potentially
negative influence on society, he argues that

though their actions may not conform to perfect righteousness, yet they are
always true to their word. What they undertake they invariably fulfill; what
they have promised they invariably carry out. Without thinking of themselves

12 Chapter 1
 they hasten to the side of those who are in trouble, whether it means survival
or destruction, life or death. Yet they never boast of their accomplishments
but rather consider it a disgrace to brag of what they have done for others. So
there is much about them which is worthy of admiration, particularly when
trouble is something that comes to almost everyone some time.17

Sima Qian’s admiring treatment of the “wandering knights” reflects the

personal indignation against officially countenanced injustice and the
desire to immortalize the unsung, which motivate his history as a whole.
While the subjects of Sima Qian’s “Wandering Knights” chapter are in
some cases acknowledged to be directly or indirectly involved in murders
and other acts of violence, these acts are not highlighted in the narrative,
which centers instead on their reputations and acts of magnanimity. Deeds
of physical courage and prowess are central, however, to the accounts con-
tained in the same work’s “Cike lie zhuan” (Biographies of the assassin-
retainers), from Cao Mei’s winning back his lord’s lands through a brazen
hostage-taking at a peace ceremony to Jing Ke’s failed attempt to assassi-
nate the king of Qin on behalf of Prince Dan of Yan. As these examples
suggest, the role of “retainer” is no less important to these characters’
identities than are their deeds as “assassins.” Their biographies join the
celebration of valor and personal integrity with that of loyalty, specifically
loyalty to a zhi ji, one who recognizes and gives employment to an individ-
ual’s unique talents. “A man will die for one who understands him (shi wei
zhi ji zhe si), as a woman will make herself beautiful for one who delights
in her,” declares another of the assassins, Yu Rang.18 The importance
accorded to understanding and recognition by Sima Qian’s subjects res-
onates with the author’s own memorialization of them through his writ-
ings. “Some succeeded in carrying out their duty and some did not,” he
remarks in his closing evaluation. “But it is perfectly clear that they had all
determined upon the deed. They were not false to their intentions. Is it not
right then, then, that their names should be handed down to later ages?”19
The xia as a social phenomenon were deliberately repressed by the
emperors of the Former Han period (206 BC–AD 23). Official historians
subsequent to Sima Qian severely critiqued such unorthodox agents as the
“wandering knights” and “assassins” or simply declined to grant them for-
mal recognition in their records.20 Behaviors and attitudes associated with
the original xia have nonetheless been woven into Chinese history up
through the present day, influencing spheres of life ranging from personal
conduct through informal associations and secret societies to military
affairs and society-state relationships. The protean social and political his-

Introduction 13
 tory of the xia lies beyond the scope of this study. Of more immediate
interest is the continued production of literary material on xia-related
themes. This material increasingly takes on the character of a self-sustain-
ing tradition of narrative and thematic elements, even as it maintains a
reciprocal relationship with social realities, influencing and feeling the
influence of historical developments from a sometimes more and some-
times less attenuated remove.21 The evolving literary and symbolic system
of the xia blurs the distinctions Sima Qian seems to make between the acts,
social roles, and motivations of the “wandering knight” on the one hand
and the “assassin-retainer” on the other. The magnanimity, sense of public
justice, and disdain for governmental authority of the former mingle with
the latter’s valor, prowess, idiosyncratic bearing, fierce personal loyalty,
dedication to repaying debt and avenging injury, and thirst for a zhi ji’s
recognition, if not for fame.22 The crucial role of Sima Qian’s “assassins”
within the wuxia tradition manifests in fictional elaborations of their deeds
as early as the Six Dynasties(?) tale “Yan Danzi” (Prince Dan of Yan) and
as recent as the cinematic epics of Chen Kaige (Jing Ke ci Qin wang [The
emperor and the assassin], 1998) and Zhang Yimou (Yingxiong [Hero],
2002).23
Through the Six Dynasties (AD 222–589), Sui (581–618), and Tang
(618–906) periods, literary inventions on xia themes, inspired by the his-
torical records and such other works as the allegorical “Shuo jian” (Dis-
coursing on swords) attributed to the philosopher Zhuangzi, take both
poetic and prose forms. The verse presents the xia in a range of rather
diverse guises. Some consists of straightforward versifications of historical
material; much of it however elaborates more abstract and idealized
images that contribute greatly to the romanticization of the xia. At times
the subjects are sword-bearing, free-spending, and pleasure-loving rakes.
While such figures occasionally evoke a note of disapproval, more often
(as in the poems of Li Bo (701–762), who himself indulged a similar life-
style) they are admired for their dashing style, joie de vivre, and rejection
of convention. In other poems the xia becomes a figure for high princi-
ples, lofty ambitions, and the (usually frustrated) desire for recognition
and service worthy of one’s talents. One of the best-known crystallizations
of this complex of themes can be found in Jia Dao’s (779–843) “Jianke”
(The swordsman):

For ten years I have been polishing this sword;

Its frosty edge has never been put to the test.

14 Chapter 1
 Now I am holding it and showing it to you, sir:
Is there anyone suffering from injustice? 24

In prose, the importance of this period for the development of wuxia

fiction is twofold. First, the evolution of the Six Dynasties zhiguai into the
late Tang chuanqi marks the emergence of China’s first distinct and self-
conscious genre of fictional narrative from its cradle of anecdotes, fables,
biography, and unofficial history. Second, the Tang chuanqi tales expand
the body of imagery and narrative material associated with the xia, intro-
ducing and consolidating elements crucial to the subsequent history of
martial arts fiction. Foremost among these newly prominent elements are
the magical and the feminine. Both are shared by the chivalric tale with
other chuanqi subgenres such as the love story and the encounter with the
supernatural; both reflect that fascination with the extraordinary and the
inexplicable, enshrined in the name given to the genre as a whole (“tales
of the fabulous”). Within chivalric chuanqi, the female and the supernat-
ural frequently combine in the recurrent figure of the “swordswoman” or
“female xia” (xianü, nüxia). While the roots of this figure go back at least to
the story of the “Yue Maiden” (Yue nü) in the Wu Yue chunqiu (Spring and
autumn annals of Wu and Yue), a text purportedly from the first century
AD, it is in the ninth-century Tang tale that she achieves sudden promi-
nence. Two examples are the tales of “Nie Yinniang,” attributed to Pei Xing
(825–880), and of “Hongxian,” attributed to Yuan Jiao (late ninth cen-
tury). In the former, the daughter of a general is kidnapped by a nun and
trained in the arts of magic and assassination; entering the service of a
military governor, she employs miraculous transformations in defending
him against the equally magical assassins sent by a rival, then rides off on
a white donkey to an unknown destination. In the latter, the maidservant
of another military governor travels hundreds of miles in a single night
and penetrates the heavily guarded bedchamber of her master’s rival to
steal the horoscope from his bedside and so reveal his vulnerability; hav-
ing rendered this service, she reveals the karmic roots of her situation and
then disappears. These bald summaries convey nothing of the texts’ ele-
gance and masterful evocation of mystery but give at least some idea of
how these and similar tales inject the otherworldly and the erotic into
material partly inspired by Sima Qian’s assassins. The swordswomen can
be seen as effecting a fictional fusion of the figures of devoted knight and
beautiful woman that Sima Qian’s Yu Rang associates by mere analogy.25
By welcoming fantastic material and bringing to maturation alter-

Introduction 15
 natives to the form and aesthetics of historiographic narrative models,
chuanqi open the door to variant treatments of some of the historians’ cen-
tral concerns. This is the possibility exploited in one of the most famous of
the Tang tales, Du Guangting’s (850–933) “Qiuran ke zhuan” (The curly-
bearded stranger). One Li Jing calls on an arrogant official of the Sui
dynasty and attracts the notice of a beautiful serving girl in attendance
upon the grandee. The girl later presents herself to Li at his inn, demand-
ing that he elope with her and explaining that she has seen in him the
promise of greatness her master lacks. At another inn, later in their travels,
the pair encounters a bold-mannered stranger with a curly red beard, who,
learning of Li’s acquaintance with a man named Li Shimin, demands an
introduction. Having met Li Shimin, the stranger announces that he has
recognized a future emperor and must abandon his ambition of winning
the empire for himself. He turns his wealth over to Li Jing, that he might
support the fated sovereign in his rise to power, and departs the realm.
Ten years later Li Jing, now a high minister under the newly established
Tang dynasty, hears tidings of a coup in a kingdom in the southeastern
seas, and knows that the stranger has achieved his ambitions in another
land. The tale thus employs Li Jing as the focus for a series of recognition
scenes that indirectly narrate two parallel tales of dynastic founding. The
flamboyant xia simultaneously validates the mandate of the orthodox Son
of Heaven and realizes its mirror image in a fantastic, geographically dis-
tant realm.
Classical-language verse and prose on xia themes continued to be pro-
duced in the periods after the Tang; chivalric poetry enjoyed a patriotically
tinged revival during the Ming, and stories of xia and swordswomen appear
among the gems of such later zhiguai and chuanqi collections as Pu Song-
ling’s (1640–1715) Liaozhai zhiyi (Strange stories from the leisure studio).
But the most significant post-Tang contributions to wuxia literature were
made within the various vernacular genres that developed during the Song
(960–1279), Yuan (1260–1368), and Ming. Records of the Song capitals
make clear that heroic martial and military themes were a specialty of
some of the entertainment districts’ professional storytellers. Similar mate-
rial can be found in the surviving texts of Yuan dramas and appears in
abundance in the short stories (huaben) and full-length chaptered novels
(zhanghui xiaoshuo) of Ming vernacular fiction. The vernacular linguistic
register of these genres is accompanied by a prolix, exhaustive narrative
approach quite different from the concision and allusiveness of their clas-
sical-language predecessors, and also by an expanded interest in “lower”
mimetic modes, ranging from the melodramatic to the mock-heroic and

16 Chapter 1
burlesque. The intersection of these new narrative possibilities with the xia
tradition can be seen in a number of the huaben: “Zhao Taizu qian li song
Jingniang” (Zhao Taizu escorts Jingniang for a thousand li), for instance,
depicts the future founder of the Song dynasty as a quick-tempered brawler
whose zeal in defending a country maid from bandits drives the unfortu-
nate object of his chivalry to suicide; “Cheng Yuanyu diansi dai shang qian,
Shiyi niang Yungang zong tan xia” (Cheng Yuanyu pays the bill at an inn,
Lady Eleven discourses on chivalry at Cloud Peak) puts a swordswoman,
explicitly modeled on her Tang predecessors, at the service of a merchant
who pays her tab at a roadside tavern, and allows her to deliver Chinese
fiction’s first extended exposition of the history and principles of the xia.26
But the definitive expression of the vernacular transformation of the xia is
to be found in the novel Shuihu zhuan (The water margin), whose extant
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts, variously attributed to Shi Naian
or Luo Guanzhong, draw heavily on preexisting materials and possibly
earlier recensions.27
In its language, narrative rhetoric, structure, and distinctive elabora-
tion of the themes of martiality and chivalry, The Water Margin is both an
immediate inspiration for a large number of Qing (1644–1912) vernacular
novels and a proximate ancestor of much of the wuxia fiction of the twen-
tieth century. Its protagonists are not the solitary and mysterious paladins
of the Tang tales, who step forth to perform some astonishing deed and
then vanish simultaneously from the narrative and from human ken, but
hot-blooded “goodfellows” (haohan) who, driven from ordinary society by
injustice or by their own passions, forge bonds with fellow practitioners
of the martial arts and create an alternate society of their own. This alter-
nate society finds concrete form in the bandit stronghold at the Marshes
of Mount Liang (Liangshan po), and more generalized expression in the
landscape of the “Rivers and Lakes” (jianghu)—the complex of inns, high-
ways and waterways, deserted temples, bandits’ lairs, and stretches of
wilderness at the geographic and moral margins of settled society. As Chen
Pingyuan has pointed out, the world of the Rivers and Lakes constitutes
an activist alternative to the “hills and woods” (shanlin) of the traditional
Daoist or Confucian recluse, equally removed from the seats of power but
not content with quiet self-cultivation.28 The marginal terrain of the Rivers
and Lakes, the creation of an alternate sociopolitical system, and the ban-
dits’ chivalric imperative to “carry out the Way on Heaven’s behalf” (ti tian
xing dao) all harbor a potential threat to the established order, traditionally
conceptualized as comprehensive, hierarchic, and exclusively sanctioned
by divine authority. The tension between the orthodox order and the ban-

Introduction 17
 dits’ shadow society shapes the novel’s overall plot, which moves from the
picaresque, interlocking adventures of individual heroes, through the for-
mation and rise to power of the Mount Liang band, to the band’s capitu-
lation to imperial sovereignty and eventual destruction in campaigns
against other bandits, rebels, and foreign invaders. On the level of charac-
terization, this same tension informs the symbiotic relationship between
the leader Song Jiang, ever anxious to return to the imperial fold, and his
anarchic henchman and alter ego Li Kui.29
The ideological ambiguities lurking within the text have been played
out in the tortuous history of its reception and circulation. The novel has
been both cherished and reviled by readers, and several times banned by
the authorities. In a truncated commentarial edition that ends with a
nightmare vision of the fellowship’s execution prior to its surrender to the
court, Jin Shengtan (1610–1661) expressed his reverence for the novel’s
artistry, his love for the individual bandits’ spirits, and his scorn for the
ideology represented by the bandit leader Song Jiang. Direct sequels to the
work range from Chen Chen’s Shuihu houzhuan (Sequel to the Water Mar-
gin, 1664), which is inspired by “The Curly-Bearded Stranger” to allow the
band’s survivors to establish a utopian kingdom in the southern seas, to
Yu Wanchun’s Dangkou zhi (Quelling the bandits, 1853), which surpasses
Jin Shengtan in the ruthlessness with which it extirpates the goodfellows
of Mount Liang. These varied readings and rewritings reflect the continual
reassessment of the problems of outlawry and orthodoxy in the light of
contemporary politics. Chen Chen, a Ming loyalist opponent to Qing rule,
found in the novel an expression of Song resistance to the Mongol Yuan,
while the civic-minded Yu Wanchun saw it as an incitement to the banditry
and rebellion that threatened the survival of the state in which he lived. To
the hermeneutics of social order and dynastic struggle, the late-nineteenth
and twentieth centuries added those of class and political factionalism.
Late Qing and Republican reformers read The Water Margin variously as a
work of nationalistic patriotism, as an early expression of democratic aspi-
rations, and as an exemplar of the linguistic and literary genius of the com-
mon man. After 1949 the novel was lauded on the mainland as an expres-
sion of revolutionary consciousness and largely ignored on Taiwan on the
strength of the mainland’s favor. In the mid-1970s it served as a tool in the
internecine struggles of the Cultural Revolution; pointed attacks on Song
Jiang’s “capitulationalism” were supported by the issuing of an appropri-
ately revised edition of the text. The vicissitudes of The Water Margin’s
circulation and interpretation testify to the emotional power and political

18 Chapter 1
volatility of its portrayals of xia and haohan and of the landscape and
counter-society of the Rivers and Lakes.30
Martial arts fiction proliferated during the Qing dynasty, particularly
its final century. Most prominent were the vernacular novels modern
critics have labeled xiayi gongan xiaoshuo, “chivalric court-case fiction,” in
which xia characters and narrative elements merge with those from
another popular narrative tradition, that of stories of crime and punish-
ment. This mingling of thematic subgenres involves what the same critics
have viewed as a betrayal of the xia’s essential independence and the rebel-
lious ethos of The Water Margin, as it portrays paladins and outlaws who
recognize the orthodox authority invested in a righteous official and who
devote their prowess to hunting down bandits and insurgents. The best-
known example of the category is San xia wu yi (Three heroes and five gal-
lants), whose successive and variously titled recensions spring from the
work of the mid-nineteenth-century Beijing storyteller Shi Yukun. The
narrative techniques and basic ideological stance of this and other “chival-
ric court-case” novels are shared with other works of the period, such as
Shengchao ding sheng wannian qing (The sacred dynasty’s tripods flourish,
verdant for ten thousand years), which centers its swashbuckling tales on
the figure of the Qianlong emperor, and Jigong zhuan (The tale of Jigong),
which draws on the more fabulous reaches of the xia tradition in relating
the escapades and magical combats of a righteous monk.31 All the named
works’ links with professional storytelling, the opera stage, and commer-
cial publishing, no less than their sometimes unpolished prose and for-
mulaic plotting, testify to circulation below the most elite levels of soci-
ety. But the late Qing literati’s interest in xia is evident in the continuing
production and circulation of classical-language chivalric fiction, and in
the use of xia characters and themes in “literary” vernacular novels such as
Wenkang’s Ernü yingxiong zhuan (A tale of lovers and heroes, 1878).

Martial Arts Fiction in the Twentieth Century

The varieties of xia literature noted above maintained their popularity

through and beyond the 1911 revolution that abolished the imperial sys-
tem and established the Republic of China. They were joined by new cur-
rents as well, as certain progressive writers and thinkers looked to China’s
martial traditions as a possible source of national strength in the face
of the imminent disaster threatened by internal weakness and foreign
encroachment. Thus Liang Qichao’s Zhongguo zhi wushi dao (The way of

Introduction 19
 the warrior in China, 1904) simultaneously drew inspiration from Japan’s
veneration of bushido and sought a similar heritage of heroism and self-
sacrifice in the records of China’s Warring States period. In a more
expressly fictional mode, the revolutionary activist and later Guomindang
official Ye Xiaofeng’s (Ye Chucang, 1887–1946) novel Gushu hanqie ji (The
ancient garrison’s record of the winter eggplant, 1914) spins a tale of Ming
loyalist resistance to the Qing that implicitly assails the new Republic’s
president and would-be emperor Yuan Shikai. In its interweaving of
romance and martial adventure, its fictional improvisations on historical
settings and characters, and its use of history as a critical mirror of the pres-
ent, it both draws inspiration from the Water Margin sequels and adum-
brates some of the possibilities for modern martial arts fiction that were
to be later exploited by Jin Yong and others.
Xu Sinian and Liu Xiang’an see these and other politically progressive
deployments of xia material as characterizing the initial stage in the history
of martial arts fiction during the first half of the twentieth century.32 The
second stage was initiated by the explosive commercial and popular suc-
cess of the works of Buxiaosheng (Xiang Kairan, 1890–1957). In 1923 this
author, who had established his career as a novelist through a scandalous
exposé of Chinese students and sojourners in Japan, began serializing mar-
tial arts novels in two popular Shanghai fiction magazines. Jianghu qixia
zhuan (Marvelous gallants of the rivers and lakes) narrates the struggles
between rival schools of the martial arts in an earthy yet fantastic marginal
world of vagabonds and immortals. Jindai xiayi yingxiong zhuan (Chivalrous
heroes of modern times) assembles the purportedly factual adventures of
righteous and patriotic stalwarts from recent history. Among the most
prominent authors of the unprecedented boom that followed these works’
success were Gu Mingdao (1897–1944) and Zhao Huanting (1877–1951);
another of its effects was the inauguration of Chinese martial arts film with
the 1928 adaptation of Marvelous Gallants as Huoshao Hongliansi (The burn-
ing of Red Lotus Temple).
The third stage of Republican-era martial arts fiction, during the 1930s
and 1940s, was in many respects a direct continuation of the second. It
was differentiated by an overall decrease in the number of works produced
and by the forfeiture of the virtual hegemony over the world of popular
fiction the genre had enjoyed during the heyday of the 1920s. The center
of production shifted from beleaguered Shanghai to Beijing and Tianjin,
relatively stable under Japanese occupation. And authors in the now well-
established genre exhibited increasing maturity and diversity in their fic-
tional technique and treatment of received themes and narrative materials.

20 Chapter 1
Huanzhu Louzhu (Li Shoumin, 1902–1961) dominated the period with
his elegantly written and inexhaustibly imaginative epics of flying swords-
men, magical monsters, and Buddhist and Daoist adepts. Bai Yu (Gong
Zhuxin, 1899–1966) portrayed a world of martial artists that was both
tied to ordinary society and cannily reflective of its struggles and pitfalls.
And Wang Dulu (Wang Baoxiang, 1909–1977) achieved fame through the
exploration of the emotional and psychological facets of his characters’
vicissitudes; one of his tragic martial romances was the basis for Ang Lee’s
recent film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wohu canglong, 2000).
Implicit in Republican-era martial arts fiction is a certain nostalgia for
the (imagined) values and social forms of the Chinese past. “It was just
at the time when ‘wandering knights’ and ‘precious swords’ essentially
became antiques that martial arts fiction came into vogue throughout the
nation.”33 Nostalgia by definition represents not a seamless continuity
with the past but an evocation of the past from a position fundamentally
altered in some respect. Recent scholarship on the martial arts fiction of
the 1920s–1940s, and on Republican-era popular fiction in general, has
addressed its grounding in the evolving institutions of literary production,
its reflection of authors’ and readers’ encounters with rapid and some-
times catastrophic social and political change, and its exploitation of new
literary techniques.34 Such studies represent in part an attempt to reclaim
a “modernity” denied to popular Republican fiction first by contemporary
critics and later by an orthodox literary historiography that took these
critics’ polemics as gospel. Claims for a link between the xia tradition and
the project of national restoration recur in prefaces to martial arts novels
of the 1920s and beyond; but the aura of progressivism that may have
accompanied such claims in the first decade of the century quickly dissi-
pated in the face of the Literary Revolution’s vehement assertion of a very
different model for a forward-looking culture and its relegation of con-
temporary popular literature to the category of the “old.”
The intellectuals of the May Fourth generation demanded that litera-
ture be politically committed, defined correct commitment as the demol-
ishment of the moribund forms and values of inherited Chinese culture,
and articulated their iconoclastic project in terms of its distinction from
the paired specters of the ancient literary tradition and those forms of con-
temporary literature not dedicated to their own cause. They denigrated a
broad swath of offending contemporary literature as “Old School” (jiu-
pai), “Saturday School” (Libailiu pai, from the name of a prominent peri-
odical), or “Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School” (yuanyang hudie pai,
from its romantic imagery), and represented its sins as both ideological

Introduction 21
 and formal. Ideological error lay in its content, which purportedly bol-
stered “feudal” attitudes, and in the motivations of its authors and publish-
ers, who were charged with frivolity and money worship. Formal criticisms
in many cases reduce to similar ideological objections. In an influential cri-
tique of contemporary fiction published in 1922, for instance, Mao Dun
dismisses the use of the vernacular and imitation of Western rhetorical
devices as superficial window-dressing, and savages a “ledgerlike” (jizhang
shi) narrative technique devoid of the careful observation and thoughtful
analysis of experience that alone can produce living literature.35
During the heyday of the May Fourth movement, in the late 1910s and
early 1920s, attacks on “Old School” fiction focused on love stories and
social melodramas, genres seen as touching on issues central to the May
Fourth project but doing so from erroneous artistic and conceptual per-
spectives. By the 1930s, martial arts fiction received more sustained atten-
tion. A sense of national crisis fanned by Japanese imperialism joined with
a growing interest in Marxist visions of social revolution to produce a call
for “mass literature” that would mobilize the population at large. As intel-
lectuals addressed the problem of the gap between their ideals and the
cultural forms the masses actually enjoyed, the wuxia genre stood out as
egregiously offensive by reason both of its “escapist” content and of its
widespread dissemination through the media of film and comic books
(the craze initiated by The Burning of Red Lotus Temple was at its height) as
well as fiction. Mao Dun’s 1933 essay “Fengjian de xiao shimin wenyi”
(The feudalistic literature and arts of the urban petty bourgeois) character-
izes the genre’s pernicious effects on its audience as follows:

The more passive among them achieve a kind of vicarious satisfaction from the
page and the screen, while the more hot-blooded determine to leave their
homes and go off to the mountains to seek a master with whom they can study
the Way. These scenes of “abandoning the home to study the Way” may throw
a certain number of households into confusion, but society as a whole is sta-
bilized through the elimination of disruptive elements.36

The accusation that wuxia fiction drives impressionable youth to run off
to the wilderness in the hope of studying the martial arts with immortal
masters has dogged the genre throughout the twentieth century. Whatever
its basis in actual incidents, the charge epitomizes the objections held by
the May Fourth camp and its descendants. (Proper) literature is held to be
both mimetic of contemporary social reality and a catalyst for individual
agency and social change. Martial arts fiction’s sin is to combine affective

22 Chapter 1
power with a misrepresentation of the world and hence an asocial and
quixotic misdirection of the energies literature engenders.
Discussions of “revolutionary,” “mass,” and “proletarian” literature
during the 1930s were the direct progenitors of the principles laid down
by Mao Zedong in his 1942 “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and
Art,” and these talks in turn became the blueprint for artistic policy in the
People’s Republic of China after 1949. Certain aspects of the new ortho-
doxy—most notably its predilection for “national forms” and the ideal-
ized heroes and formulaic plots of “revolutionary romanticism”—brought
some of the literature of the new People’s Republic far closer to the discur-
sive norms of martial arts fiction than the determinedly progressive writ-
ings of the May Fourth era had been. But the restrictions on setting and
content and the demands that literature both hew to overarching ideolog-
ical dicta and serve the immediate needs of particular political campaigns
relegated martial arts fiction proper to the category of “poisonous weeds”
banned from the gardens of culture. The writing and publication of fiction
in the genre ceased, and copies of preliberation works gradually disap-
peared from the bookstalls of the mainland’s cities.

Geopolitics, Colonialism, and Cultural Identity

Enthusiasts of the martial arts fiction produced in Hong Kong and Taiwan
beginning in the 1950s soon dubbed these works New School martial arts
fiction (xinpai wuxia xiaoshuo), distinguishing them from Old School (jiu-
pai) works of the preliberation writers.37 As several recent critics have
pointed out, in content, themes, structure, and narrative technique, the
so-called New School works demonstrate continuous development from
their predecessors rather than any revolutionary break.38 The material and
economic conditions of the New School fiction’s production and distribu-
tion—through the commercial press of urban industrial societies—like-
wise mirror those of prewar martial arts fiction. “I suspect,” says Chen
Pingyuan, “that those who originally articulated the distinction between
New and Old martial arts fiction proceeded primarily from geographic
and political considerations, and not from the requirements of artistic
comprehension.” 39
Chen unfortunately declines to detail what he sees as the ramifica-
tions of these “geographic and political considerations” for postliberation
martial arts fiction. Numerous other mainland commentators, however,
have offered accounts of the rise of the New School in Hong Kong and Tai-
wan. Chen Mo, for instance, identifies the primary factors in the appear-

Introduction 23
 ance and success of the New School works as the irrepressible vitality of
the ancient tradition of martial arts fiction; the economic prosperity of the
postwar world, with the attendant triumph of commodification and the
entertainment ethos in the realm of culture; and the genre’s expression,
through the concepts of wu and xia, of “the unique cultural psychology of
the Chinese people (Zhonghua minzu)”:

The appearance of “New School martial arts fiction” overseas [i.e. in Hong
Kong and Taiwan] did not come about solely as a profound yearning for the
psychological heritage of wu and xia, for the mountains and rivers, the history
and geography of the ancestral homeland; it came about also as a kind of
temporary escape from modern commercial civilization, from cruel eco-
nomic struggles and the struggle for existence—as a unique form of revolt and
a profound feeling of unease.40

Although Chen Mo is writing for a popular rather than an academic

audience, the essentials of his account do not differ from those found in
other mainland histories of martial arts fiction.41 Inherent in these
accounts are certain simplifications that call for further examination. To
say that “Hong Kong and Taiwan, situated far across the seas, both pre-
serve the native cultural traditions of the mainland and feel the influence
of the great tides of global economy and culture,”42 omits certain salient
features of the geopolitical context of the New School martial arts fiction.
The nostalgia for the homeland undeniably felt by many postwar immi-
grants to Hong Kong and Taiwan was complicated by the fact that many
of them, unlike the economic migrants of earlier decades, were unwilling
refugees, driven from the mainland by their opposition to or fear of the
regime that assumed power in 1949. Some overseas commentators have in
fact alluded to this aspect of New School fiction.43 Until recently, though,
they, like their mainland peers, have largely declined to address the corol-
lary to the avoidance of Communist rule; the fact that postwar martial arts
fiction appeared, on the one hand, under the iron rule of the U.S.-backed
Nationalist government on Taiwan and, on the other, under the more lais-
sez-faire supervision of the British colonial government of Hong Kong.
Ma Kwok-ming is one of the first scholars to have undertaken a criti-
cal analysis of Jin Yong’s work in the context of its genesis in colonial Hong
Kong. He notes that almost all of the novels are set against the historical
background of Han Chinese oppression by the threat or reality of foreign
(non-Han) rule, and proceeds to read Jin Yong’s fiction as a site for the
negotiation of the problems of Hong Kong’s colonial identity. Pointing out

24 Chapter 1
that the red-blooded patriotism of such early classics as The Eagle-Shooting
Heroes is questioned, compromised, and ultimately subverted in later nov-
els, and positing an equivalence between the practice of the martial arts
and the discourse of traditional elite culture, he argues that the corpus of
Jin Yong’s works manifests the educated elite’s attempts to negotiate a strat-
egy for maintaining power in the face of the twin threats of Western impe-
rialist incursion and the newly mobilized energies of the lower classes. The
Hong Kong compromise is incarnate in the figure of Wei Xiaobao, protag-
onist of Jin Yong’s final novel, The Deer and the Cauldron, who embraces the
“bastardy” of colonialism in return for continued enjoyment of the privi-
leges of the patriarchal order.44 The Deer and the Cauldron’s refraction of the
Hong Kong experience is likewise the focus of an article by Lin Linghan,
who argues that the work both portrays and exemplifies the complex nego-
tiations between the political forces of colonialism and the economic and
ideological imperatives of commercial culture.45
Portions of Song Weijie’s analysis of Jin Yong’s work proceed from a
similar interest in the problems of colonialism, nationalism, and identity,
and from an assumption that history functions in the novels most funda-
mentally as an expression of contemporary concerns. He maintains how-
ever that “we cannot simply reduce Jin Yong’s fiction to a ‘national alle-
gory’ of Hong Kong’s situation.” Exploring the novels’ representations of
nationalism, of the problem of personal identity, and of the formation of
cultural and historical memory, and the evolution of these representations
through the corpus of Jin Yong’s fiction, he finds that these texts “call into
question and partially subvert any sort of narrow nationalist prejudice,
and reflect the problems encountered by colonial society and by the weak
nation-state in a broader sense.”46
My work follows the forenamed scholars in acknowledging the promi-
nence of scenarios of national crisis and themes of cultural identity in Jin
Yong’s fiction, and in believing that the prominence of this material
affords fruitful opportunities for considering the relationships between Jin
Yong’s work and the geographical, cultural, and political circumstances of
its circulation. It differs somewhat, however, in the parameters of its geo-
graphic and historical referents. Where Ma and Lin read Jin Yong as a spe-
cific figuration of postwar Hong Kong society, and Song reads him as illu-
minating the twentieth-century Chinese condition more broadly (or even
as exploring questions of identity common to “colonial societies and weak
nation-states” generally), this study seeks to ground its readings of Jin
Yong’s works in the shifting and expanding contexts of its production and
circulation. The shifts in the treatment of nationalism that Ma, Lin, and

Introduction 25
 Song have noted can be correlated not merely with successive attempts to
resolve the more or less static problem of Hong Kong’s colonial identity,
nor merely with the intrinsic complexity and protean nature of the general
problems of colonialism and national identity, but more precisely with
changes in the aspect of these problems as they are viewed from changing
historical and geographic perspectives. Jin Yong written and read in mid-
century Hong Kong may be quite different from Jin Yong read in the main-
land at century’s close.
Chapters 2 and 3 of this book therefore consider Jin Yong’s earliest
novels, Book and Sword and The Sword Stained with Royal Blood, against the
context of Hong Kong’s geopolitical situation in the years preceding and
following 1949 and against a form of martial arts fiction popular in Hong
Kong and neighboring areas during these years—Guangdong School mar-
tial arts fiction. While echoing certain aspects of Guangdong School fic-
tion, Jin Yong’s work rejects its provincial allegiances in favor of a nation-
alist ideal organized around an imagined convergence of Han ethnic
chauvinism, state sovereignty, and Chinese historical and cultural tradi-
tions. The choice of the Manchu conquest of the Han Ming dynasty as the
novels’ setting and central theme guarantees that the realization of this
nationalist ideal is doomed to failure; and in the resultant narratives of
political catastrophe and exile, we find that Jin Yong’s early work resonates
not only with the Hong Kong experience of life under colonial rule but
also, and perhaps more seminally, with the dislocation from the main-
land experienced by the colony’s refugee population.
The Eagle-Shooting Heroes and The Giant Eagle and Its Companion, the
novels that cemented Jin Yong’s authorial reputation and helped launch
his own publishing enterprises, present patriotic nationalism in its most
triumphal mode, as the protagonists achieve full realization of their status
as heroes through defense of the Han Song dynasty against the invading
Mongols. But the discrepancy between these heroes’ fictional victories and
the historical fact of the eventual Mongol conquest of the Song betrays a
certain speciousness to the patriotic apotheosis; and, as I demonstrate in
chapter 4, even these novels contain the emergent forms of elements that
in Jin Yong’s later work challenge the nationalist narrative. Song Weijie
identifies The Heaven Sword and the Dragon Sabre, with its weakening of the
presumed identity between ethnicity and national loyalty and its eleva-
tion of romantic gratification over political mission, as a milestone in the
rejection of the earlier novels’ patriotic vision.47 Taking a cue from Wu
Aiyi’s sketch of the development of Jin Yong’s protagonists,48 I focus on
the thread of “romantic reclusion” that ties The Giant Eagle and Its Com-

26 Chapter 1
panion (discussed in the latter part of chapter 4) to the author’s penulti-
mate novel, The Smiling, Proud Wanderer (discussed in chapter 6). I also
stress the thematic ties established between personal fulfillment and the
romantic vision, on the one hand, and the imagining of the Chinese cul-
tural tradition, on the other. As already suggested, the imagining of this
cultural tradition plays a role in even the earliest of Jin Yong’s novels. With
Eagle-Shooting Heroes, however, the culturalist imaginary begins to pull
away from the narrative of the nation-state; in this novel, the practice of
the martial arts and a discourse of textuality begin to merge with a myth-
ical geography parallel to but distinct from the political geography of state
nationalism. The Smiling, Proud Wanderer presents a fully realized vision of
apolitical culturalism, disjunct from geography and politics and distanc-
ing itself from the martial arts as well, while bearing away intact the dream
of romantic fulfillment.
The evolution within Jin Yong’s novels from a central concern with the
political vicissitudes of the Han Chinese and the Chinese nation to a vision
of Chineseness centered on cultural traditions inverts the “culturalism to
nationalism” shift that an earlier generation of Western sinologists posited
as a central trend in twentieth-century Chinese thought. The classic artic-
ulation of the “culturalism to nationalism” thesis in the works of Joseph
Levenson and others has been qualified and nuanced by recent scholars,
who have emphasized the coexistence and simultaneous availability of
both the culturalist and the nationalist paradigms, and the inability of a
single teleological model to account for a process whereby a multiplicity
of subjects and shifting subject-groupings constantly renegotiate their
affiliations, “national” and otherwise.49 The gravitation toward a cultural-
ist vision of Chinese identity in the developing body of Jin Yong’s fiction
echoes currents widely dispersed through the thought and self-imaginings
of twentieth-century Chinese populations. The displacement of the locus
of authority for this culturalist imaginary away from the geographic cen-
ter of the Chinese mainland resonates not merely with the geopolitical
circumstances of Jin Yong and his readers but more broadly with positions
enunciated by diasporic intellectuals such as Tu Wei-ming, who argues for
the “transformative potential of the periphery.”50 In chapters 5 and 7
herein, which analyze aspects of the circulation of Jin Yong’s fiction
through the author’s expanding publishing enterprises, I suggest parallels
between the culturalist vision expressed in the novels and the specific con-
texts of the novels’ changing audiences, the transnationalization of the
newspaper Ming Pao and its affiliates, and the explicit invocation of a
global Chinese culture in Ming Pao Monthly.

Introduction 27
 The culturalist vision of such late novels as The Smiling, Proud Wanderer
finds expression in a setting imagined not only as removed from the polit-
ical geography but also as disjunct from history and beyond the sullying
influence of realpolitik. With his final novel, The Deer and the Cauldron, Jin
Yong returns to a definite historical context and revisits the dynastic and
nationalistic problems so prominent in his earliest work; the now domi-
nant culturalist perspective, however, facilitates a radically altered response
to the familiar political dilemmas. The Deer and the Cauldron’s antiheroic
protagonist, Wei Xiaobao, has been widely interpreted as a figure of Hong
Kong identity. The scholars mentioned above have read this identity as a
hybridized response to the tension between (pan-ethnic) Chineseness and
British colonial domination. Without rejecting the possibility of such
interpretations, I take inspiration from Rey Chow’s understanding of Hong
Kong as poised “between [the] colonizers” of Great Britain and mainland
China itself, and her reminder of the repressions inherent in a monopo-
listic nativist response to foreign domination.51 Chapter 8 thus reads The
Deer and the Cauldron against the history of Jin Yong’s relations with the
mainland regime and the introduction of his works into the Chinese main-
land in the 1980s and 1990s, and explores the possibility of Wei Xiaobao’s
serving as a figure for the experience not only of British colonialism but
also of retrocession (huigui) to Chinese sovereignty.

Strategies of Reading and the Economy of Literature

The readings of Jin Yong’s novels proposed here so far are contextual in
the sense that they seek some part of the meaning of these works in the
historical and social circumstances of their production and circulation.52
They are broadly informed by Benedict Anderson’s remarks on the crucial
role that fiction can play in a community’s enunciating and confirming its
own existence. Fiction’s relationship to society, according to this under-
standing, is not merely reflexive but potentially creative as well; beyond
mirroring (often through transformation and displacement) social phe-
nomena and the structural relationships obtaining in a given time and
place, fiction can also play a role in conceiving and focusing still-emergent
possibilities. The guiding and predictive potential of a fictional vision
emerges with progressive strength in successive portions of this book. Early
sections consider Jin Yong’s novels’ expression of a Hong Kong identity
shaped by the events of the postwar decades. The central chapters explore
the contributory role of the novels, and of the journalistic and media com-

28 Chapter 1
plex through which they circulated, in articulating a culturalist and dias-
poric vision of Chinese identity. The chapter 8 reading of The Deer and the
Cauldron as (in part) a story of return to the geographic and political real-
ities of the Chinese mainland seems to impute to a text composed at the
end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s a foreknowledge of events
not set in motion in the political sphere until the signing of the Joint Dec-
laration by Britain and China in 1984. The point here is not to impute to
Jin Yong the prescience of a Nostradamus (or a Zhuge Liang) but merely
to suggest that the novel’s exploration of the themes of cultural and polit-
ical allegiance sketches out possibilities, some of which were in fact soon
to be realized. Given the widespread audience for Jin Yong’s work and the
author’s personal involvement in the negotiation of Hong Kong’s return
to mainland sovereignty, the question of how and to what extent the
vision expressed in the novel may have informed the discourse governing
the unfolding of the political process is both evident and intriguing; but
addressing the question lies beyond this book’s scope.
Tracing links between the contents of Jin Yong’s novels and the polit-
ical and social circumstances of their times, this study seeks to contex-
tualize its readings in another fashion as well: by keeping in focus the
materiality of reading, the changing physical forms and commercial and
institutional environments through which Jin Yong’s martial arts fiction
has circulated among its audiences. In part, this emphasis on the concrete
circumstances of publication and circulation serves to underpin the socio-
political readings discussed here. Interpreting Jin Yong’s early work as a lit-
erature of war and exile is much more convincing, even obvious, when the
original serialized texts are seen printed side by side with reports from
refugee camps and accounts of skirmishes across the Taiwan Straits. As
Anderson makes clear, moreover, it is only through the networks of pub-
lication and distribution that fiction can reach its audiences and allow
them to join in its imagining of a community. But the uses for a close
attention to the circumstances of the circulation of Jin Yong’s work are not
limited to a greater understanding of the novels’ political (in the narrow
sense) referents. Study of the material forms in which Jin Yong’s fiction
has been distributed, and an “intertextual” approach focused not on texts
cited within the novels but on texts in the company of which they circu-
lated, and which directly or implicitly shaped their reception, also sheds
light on the changing cultural status of Jin Yong’s work. The migration of
Jin Yong’s novels has been not only from Hong Kong to the Chinese dias-
pora and back to the Chinese mainland but also from commercial success

Introduction 29
 in a popular but little respected “sub”-literary genre to consideration as
one of the most accomplished and influential bodies of work in Chinese
of the latter half of the twentieth century.
My analysis of the shifting status of Jin Yong’s fiction is inspired in part
by the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who offers a model of the processes by
which authors and texts negotiate their positions within a field generated
by the constant rebalancing of the tension between values understood as
uniquely and properly “artistic” and those political and economic princi-
ples holding more widespread sway throughout the structure of society.53
Chapter 5 begins an exploration of the production of the meaning and
value of Jin Yong’s work by analyzing the early history of his newspaper,
Ming Pao. The association between Jin Yong’s fiction and his journalistic
enterprise was, in the first place, one of mutual commercial support, with
the fiction contributing to the paper’s financial viability and the paper
providing a primary medium for the distribution of the fiction to its audi-
ence. From the early days of Ming Pao’s existence, however, Jin Yong can
also be seen to deploy the paper as a forum for actively constructing an
aesthetic and a practice of reading for martial arts fiction. Chapter 7 con-
tinues the story of how the synergetic relationship between the content of
Jin Yong’s fiction, the growing power and expanse of his publishing enter-
prises, the social and cultural status of the author/publisher himself, and
his enunciation of a discourse concerning the novels’ nature and function,
carries these works from the pages of the daily newspaper’s fiction supple-
ment to the thirty-six volumes of the Collected Works of Jin Yong.
An oeuvre’s attainment of status within a given society’s cultural field
is not the result of individual agency, no matter how powerful the individ-
ual (the question one must ask, in any case, is how society confers this
power) or how many different roles (author, publisher, critic) combine in
his or her person. Chapter 9 reviews the role played in the elevation of Jin
Yong’s fiction by the academy, an institution that Bourdieu identifies as
instrumental in arbitrating the middle reaches of the cultural and literary
fields—the domain of “bourgeois consecration.”54 The chapter further
examines the impact on the status of Jin Yong’s fiction of the migration,
both of the works themselves and of the discourse on their nature and
meaning, to a new cultural terrain. Entering the Chinese mainland in the
1980s, Jin Yong’s work played both a contributory and an emblematic role
in the profound reconfiguration of the arts and their relationship to eco-
nomic and political life during the era of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms. It is in
this milieu—amidst the marketization of cultural life, the avant-garde’s
rejection of this process, and the political and cultural establishments’

30 Chapter 1
search for new validations of their authority—that Jin Yong’s fiction
received its most unqualified consecration. It is here too that an intersec-
tion becomes evident between Jin Yong’s articulation of a culturalist
response to the political problems of Chinese identity and the fortunes of
his work within the field of cultural production. The (cultural) Chineseness
transcending ethnic and political divisions, elaborated over the course of
the oeuvre’s development and enacted in its permeation of the Chinese-
literate world, is interwoven and at times seemingly identified with the
(Chinese) culture that bestows the aura of authenticity and purpose upon
a body of work confidently rooted in its mastery of the literary market-
place. But both the terms and the results of these negotiations remain in
flux. The final chapter, by way of a coda, presents a snapshot of a reveal-
ing moment in the recent history of the assessment and reception of Jin
Yong’s work.

Introduction 31
 Chapter 2
Local Heroes

Guangdong School Martial Arts Fiction

and the Colony of Hong Kong

S tandard accounts divide twentieth-century Chinese

martial arts fiction into Old School, produced in
Shanghai, Tianjin, and other urban centers before the war, and New
School, which emerged in Hong Kong and Taiwan during the 1950s and
1960s. As the very names “Old School” and “New School” make clear, this
narrative is one of regeneration, even revolution, but simultaneously one
of inheritance and continuity. The New School authors themselves pro-
claimed their indebtedness to their antebellum predecessors. Liang
Yusheng, the pen name chosen by the New School’s “founder,” Chen Wen-
tong, suggests that the author was born (sheng) of the Old School master
Bai Yu; the first chapter of Liang’s maiden work opens with a scene involv-
ing twelve coin darts, an homage to Bai Yu’s masterpiece Shier jinqian biao
(The dozen gold coin darts). Liang Yusheng’s contemporary Zhang Kuo-
qiang took the pen name Zhang Menghuan, implying a dream (meng) of
the inimitable Huanzhu Louzhu. The name “Jin Yong” makes no such
explicit declaration of influence, being derived instead from the last char-
acter in the author’s given name. But Jin Yong expressed in the fledgling
Ming Pao his indebtedness to his prewar models, offering on the same
page as his own latest work a feature entitled “Wuxia mingzhu jingxuan”
(Selections from the classics of martial arts fiction), which presented selec-
tions from Bai Yu, Huanzhu Louzhu, and other Old School authors, cho-
sen and introduced by Jin Yong himself.1
As noted in the preceding chapter, the Old/New School division
essentially denotes a shift in the production and circulation of martial arts
fiction away from the mainland to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and communities

32
overseas, in the aftermath of 1949. Yet if we examine the Hong Kong in
which New School fiction appeared—the Hong Kong of the celebrated
match between Wu Gongyi and Chen Kefu—we discover a body of litera-
ture, generally overlooked in the standard histories of martial arts fiction,
which complicates the temporal and geographic assumptions of the Old
School/New School narrative. These are texts relating the adventures of
heroes from the Guangdong region, produced and circulated also prima-
rily within this region and its cultural satellites. Ye Hongsheng, one of the
few scholars to discuss these works, terms them “Guangdong School mar-
tial arts fiction” (Guangpai wuxia xiaoshuo).2 In terms of temporal param-
eters, Guangdong School martial arts fiction both provides an example of
direct textual continuity between the late Qing and Old School periods
and bridges the Old School/New School chronological divide as well. The
second temporal bridge additionally brings to our attention the ways in
which the Guangzhou/Hong Kong axis disrupts the geopolitical bound-
ary between China proper and the Chinese “overseas.”
Ye Hongsheng’s contention that it was primarily with reference to
Guangdong School fiction that the work of Jin Yong, Liang Yusheng, and
their contemporaries struck their readers as something new throws the
New School authors’ project into sharper relief, highlighting the fact that
their appropriation and reinterpretation of materials, themes, and linguis-
tic practices associated with the martial arts fiction of prewar Shanghai
and Tianjin was not so much a seamless and reflexive inheritance as a con-
scious choice of one tradition over another. Their ignoring of a local strain
of martial arts fiction reflects not merely the authors’ personal histories
and preferences but—as the enthusiastic reception accorded their work tes-
tifies—widespread changes in Hong Kong society and culture in the years
following the end of the Pacific War and the establishment of the People’s
Republic of China. What had been in large part, for its Chinese residents,
an extension of local Cantonese culture now became a “lifeboat,” a locus
of indefinite exile from the Chinese homeland. And the New School
authors accordingly employed martial arts fiction less as a celebration of
local heroes and traditions than as a vehicle for exploring the authors’ and
readers’ relationship to this near-yet-suddenly-distant home.
This chapter establishes a background for appreciating Jin Yong’s ear-
liest work by chronicling its immediate predecessors and context. Sketch-
ing out Guangdong School fiction’s geographically and historically spe-
cific loyalties allows us to perceive anew the celebration of universalized,
mythicized Chinese identity that lies at the heart of New School fiction. I

Guangdong School Martial Arts Fiction 33

 begin by briefly reviewing the history of Guangdong School martial arts
fiction. This history is one of texts and shared thematic material, and for
this part of the story, the late Qing novel Shengchao ding sheng wannian qing
provides a useful point of access. But the story of Guangdong School mar-
tial arts fiction is also a story of the material’s circulation within a partic-
ular geographic and cultural sphere, in large part through the medium of
newspaper serialization. Our survey of Guangdong School texts and their
authors thus leads us to a consideration of the dynamics of newspaper
publishing in Guangzhou and Hong Kong in the decades leading up to the
war with Japan. The Japanese war, the Chinese Civil War, and their after-
math profoundly reshaped both the institutions of newspaper publishing
in Guangzhou and Hong Kong and the communities they served. The final
portion of this chapter will therefore review the fortunes of Hong Kong’s
newspaper industry and the role and character of serialized newspaper fic-
tion in the postwar years—closing with a glance at how a hero from the
Guangdong School of martial arts fiction fares in this altered world.

The Origins and Characteristics of Guangdong School

Martial Arts Fiction

A major source of material and inspiration for the body of twentieth-cen-

tury martial arts fiction that took the Pearl River region as its setting, and
found there its primary base of circulation as well, was the anonymous
late Qing (1893) vernacular novel Shengchao ding sheng wannian qing—lit-
erally, “The sacred dynasty’s tripods flourish, verdant for ten thousand
years,” but hereafter, for simplicity’s sake, Everlasting.3 Everlasting inter-
weaves stories of the Qianlong emperor’s incognito travels through the
southern regions of his empire with tales of the hotheaded disciples of
Zhishan, abbot of the southern branch of the Shaolin temple, the leg-
endary cradle of China’s martial arts traditions. The two bodies of mate-
rial may well have existed independently before being combined in this
novel; the narrative alternates between the emperor and the Shaolin dis-
ciples for dozens of chapters before stitching their tales together.4
The stories of the Shaolin disciples begin in the novel’s fourth chapter.
A synopsis of the opening incidents will make clear the extent to which
Guangdong allegiances motivate the plot and inform the sensibility of this
part of the novel’s material. Fang De, a merchant from Guangdong, runs
a silk emporium in Nanjing, and one day an aged salt-smuggler, caught in
a sudden storm, seeks shelter in his shop. “Hearing [the stranger] speak

34 Chapter 2
with a Guangdong accent, Fang De was stirred by affection for his old
home” (32). He treats the old wanderer, Miao Xian, as a brother, and in
time Miao Xian weds his daughter Cuihua to his benefactor. Miao Xian is
in fact a skilled martial artist, a comrade of southern Shaolin’s abbot Zhi-
shan. He transmits his arts to his daughter, and she in turn passes them
on to the son she bears to Fang De, Fang Shiyu. Fang Shiyu grows up head-
strong and ungovernable. His father takes him along on a business trip to
Hangzhou, hoping to teach him something of the ways of the world. But
in Hangzhou, Fang Shiyu encounters Lei the Tiger (Lei Laohu), a military
officer from the north who has erected a leitai and issued a humiliating
challenge to the heroes of Guangdong and the southlands. Enraged by the
insult, Fang Shiyu kills Lei (rather unheroically, using a weapon forbidden
by the rules of the match); and thus begins the first of a series of blood
feuds that embroil him and his companions.
The Qianlong emperor, meanwhile, journeys in disguise through the
southern regions of his realm. He indulges courtly tastes for scenery and
versification but also finds frequent opportunities to display a hair-trigger
temper and lethal skill in the martial arts. He exposes, overthrows, and as
often as not slaughters with his own hands malefactors ranging from venal
pawnshop clerks to corrupt magistrates and the overbearing offspring of
high-ranking ministers. While some of his deeds benefit those of his sub-
jects who suffer from local tyrants’ oppression, other exploits seem to be
motivated primarily by an uncompromising rage against any who might
slight his majesty or oppose his personal will. The emperor seems in fact
to be a character cut from the same cloth as Fang Shiyu and his comrades
—his pride, willfulness, and violence identical in kind with theirs.
As previously noted, fictional treatments of “goodfellows” (haohan)
material, from The Water Margin on, have confronted an inherent tension
between the ethos of sworn brothers who would “carry out the Way on
Heaven’s behalf” and the prerogatives of cosmically sanctioned imperial
authority. Where late Qing novels such as Three Heroes and Five Gallants
address the problem by enlisting the goodfellows as loyal champions of
an incorruptible official, Everlasting offers an even more intimate alliance,
conflating authority with brawling heroism in the emperor’s own person.
And if the “goodfellow” as a role or institution gains a certain luster from
this imperial sanction, the ideological repercussions for imperial author-
ity as such seem confused at best. Although frequently aided by omens
and agents from the courts of heaven, Qianlong appears to legitimate his
rule in part through simple tyranny and force majeure,5 and his embrace

Guangdong School Martial Arts Fiction 35

 of the heroic role does not necessarily elevate the position of other good-
fellows in the novel. When Qianlong discovers a bosom friend in the
young stalwart Zhou Riqing, the two follow the pattern of the heroes of
Three Kingdoms and The Water Margin by taking vows of mutual loyalty.
The relationship they swear to, however, is that of father and adopted
son, not elder and younger brothers—a difference that respects not merely
the disparity in their ages but the hierarchic inapproachability of the impe-
rial person as well. The other heroes in the novel’s world face the choice
between serving the emperor or opposing him. Those who swear fealty
receive honors and official position, but those who do not are eliminated.
Into the latter category fall Fang Shiyu and the other Guangdong heroes.
When their increasingly brazen exploits attract the emperor’s attention, he
sends his champions to subdue them. In the final chapters of Everlasting
the nun Wumei, the White Eyebrow Daoist (Baimei Daoren), and other
paladins loyal to the emperor kill Zhishan, Fang Shiyu, and the rest and
raze the southern Shaolin temple to the ground.
At some point in the 1930s, Fang Shiyu and his comrades achieved
textual liberation from the heavy hand of imperial authority. One Jiang
Diedie extracted and expanded their exploits from Everlasting, publishing
the result as the twenty-chapter novel Shaolin xiao yingxiong (Young heroes
from Shaolin) (hereafter Young Heroes).6 Whatever currency the Shaolin
material may have had prior to or outside of its incorporation into Ever-
lasting, Jiang Diedie’s work clearly takes the Qing novel as its direct textual
source. In many passages the two are identical, word for word. Jiang ends
the tale, however, with the settling of the Shaolin disciples’ feuds by the
nun Wumei, a scene that appears in chapter 18 of the seventy-six-chapter
Everlasting. The heroes’ later excesses and ultimate destruction at the hands
of the emperor’s champions are entirely absent from the new work. Thus
liberated from narrative retribution, and disassociated from the apparatus
of imperial and celestial orthodoxy trumpeted in Everlasting, Fang Shiyu
and his companions emerge as the masters of their diegetic universe. “It is
difficult to discern,” frets a modern mainland commentator, “by what stan-
dards the author intends to establish their image as heroes”; 7 and indeed,
in Young Heroes the bravos from Guangdong seem neither to require nor
to answer to any legitimation outside their own hubris, martial prowess,
and loyalty to their teacher and their native place. 8
Young Heroes’ direct textual links with Everlasting make it an interest-
ing case in the evolution of martial arts fiction—an Old School novel born
directly from the body of a late Qing work. But it represents neither the

36 Chapter 2
earliest reworking of Everlasting’s material nor the most proximate source
of the Guangdong School of martial arts fiction. Those distinctions belong
rather to the fiction of Deng Yugong, who in 1931 began serializing his
own versions of the legends of the Shaolin heroes—Zhishan san you Nan-
yue ji (An account of Zhishan’s three journeys to the south of Yue), Shao-
lin yingxiong xuezhan ji (An account of the Shaolin heroes’ battle to the
death), Huang Feihong zhengzhuan (The true story of Huang Feihong), and
others—in Guangdong newspapers. Deng was soon followed by a host of
imitators, including Zhai Gong (the pen name of Zhu Yuzhai), You Cao
(Wang Xiangqin), Nianfo Shanren (Xu Kairu), and Kong Dong (Yang
Daming). These authors wrote in a simple classical prose, a linguistic reg-
ister that coexisted with baihua vernacular as a medium for fiction and
anecdotes in prewar newspapers. Ye Hongsheng considers these authors’
works the first stage of Guangdong School martial arts fiction and sees the
emergence in 1938 of a second stage, when Gao Xiaofeng (Dai Zhaoyu)
began to publish stories of the Guangdong martial artist Huang Feihong.
Like Deng before him, Gao inspired a number of followers, including Cui-
wen Louzhu (Chen Guang) and Woshi Shanren (Chen Jin).
One characteristic of these latter authors’ prose is the introduction of
Cantonese vocabulary, particularly in passages of dialogue. This linguistic
practice fulfills, in a way, the promise of Everlasting and Young Heroes, whose
tales of the Guangdong heroes, albeit rendered in the linguistic register of
standard Mandarin, begin with Fang De’s and Miao Xian’s joyful recogni-
tion of their native Guangdong accents on each other’s tongues. In content
as well as in language, the Guangdong School novels are very much a local
literature. The protagonists’ heroism evidently consists in their resistance
to Manchu rule and their chivalric readiness to aid the oppressed. The for-
mer, however, often seems an expression more of southern cultural loyal-
ties than of dynastic patriotism, while the latter is more often than not
eclipsed by blood feuds and factional brawling. As one reads the endless
chronicles of these bravos’ feuds with rival clans and schools, it is difficult
to escape the impression that the sworn brothers’ heroic status rests in
large measure simply on their identity as local celebrities. The authors’ very
pen names often announce the same local identification. The best known
of Deng Yugong’s many pseudonyms, borrowed as well by Gao Xiaofeng,
was Zhongyi Xiangren—freely translated, “A Loyal Son of the Old Sod.”
The names “Nianfo Shanren” (or nian Foshan ren, “One Who Remembers
Foshan”) and “Woshi Shanren” (“I’m a Native of [Fo]shan”) both declare
allegiance to the town outside Guangzhou that was home to the hero

Guangdong School Martial Arts Fiction 37

 Huang Feihong. The later Guangdong School author Huang Jian styled
himself Daquan Didan, which in local slang means something along the
lines of “The Guangzhou Godfather.”9

Newspapers, Fiction, and Martial Arts in the

Guangzhou–Hong Kong Cultural Sphere

Guangdong School martial art fiction’s natural field of circulation was the
Guangdong cultural and linguistic sphere, a sphere that included the Brit-
ish colony of Hong Kong and the Cantonese-speaking segments of Chinese
communities overseas. Within this sphere or network, Guangdong School
fiction circulated through the medium of newspapers and the commercial
press. Since the nineteenth century, the press has been an essential element
in the formation of transnational Chinese networks in general, and has
played a particularly intimate role in the cultural linkage between Hong
Kong and Guangzhou. Newspapers and books from Guangzhou circu-
lated widely within the British colony’s Chinese communities, while Hong
Kong’s xiaobao (“little papers,” akin to a tabloid press) published fiction,
scandal, and political commentary forbidden by the Guangdong govern-
ment, and were sold in Guangzhou at inflated prices.10
Many of the authors of Guangdong School martial arts fiction were
journalists directly involved in the press’s movements back and forth
across the Guangdong–Hong Kong border. The genre’s founder, Deng
Yugong, a native of Foshan, ran several xiaobao in Guangzhou during the
1930s. When government pressure forced him to close his scandalous
Yugong bao in 1936, he removed to Hong Kong and founded the tabloid
Shisui.11 With him came the Nanhai native He Wenfa, who had left high
school to work in the newspapers with Deng. He Wenfa found work with
Hong Kong’s Tanhai deng, and then in 1939 founded his own paper, Sing
pao (Cheng bao).12 Sing pao was to become one of Hong Kong’s best-
selling papers; among its attractions was its serialized fiction, and it pub-
lished Guangdong School martial arts novels by Deng (under the pen
name Zhongyi Xiangren), You Cao, and others, into the 1960s.
One of Gao Xiaofeng’s successors in the Guangdong School, and the
author from this group best known today, was Woshi Shanren.13 His tales
of southern Shaolin heroes appeared in such newspapers as Guangdong
shangbao after the war and were soon reprinted in book form.14 With the
liberation of the mainland in 1949, the author migrated to Hong Kong,
where in 1952 he joined other Guangzhou newspapermen in establishing
the Huanqiu bao. He continued to publish Guangdong School tales in

38 Chapter 2
newspapers, magazines, and books until his death during the 1960s.15 A
passage from the preface to his Hong quan dashi Tieqiao San (Hong-style
grandmaster “Iron Bridge the Third”) reminds us that it was not only the
authors and texts of Guangdong School fiction that traversed the Guang-
zhou–Hong Kong border but the martial arts traditions that inspired the
fiction as well:

In the third generation, the arts of [the southern Shaolin abbot Zhishan’s dis-
ciple] Hong Xiguan were transmitted to Tieqiao San (“Iron Bridge the Third”).
On the basis of this boxing style, Tieqiao San created “Iron Thread” boxing
and transmitted it to “Grindstone” Song, Lin Fucheng, his grandnephew Liang
Baoshan, and others. Lin Fucheng transmitted it to Huang Feihong; Huang
Feihong transmitted it to Lin Shirong; and Lin Shirong transmitted it to his
nephew Lin Zu and to his disciples Deng Fang, Liang Yongheng, Liu Zhan,
Zhao Jiao, Zhu Yuzhai, Hu Yunfei, Deng Laoyi, and others. These gentlemen
are all renowned boxing masters of present-day Hong Kong and Kowloon,
with legions of disciples, and moreover serve as martial arts consultants to this
publication. It is their pleasure to offer their services to our esteemed readers,
and their solemn duty to make available their arts of medicine and bone set-
ting, for which they richly deserve our gratitude.
Master Liang Yongheng has opened a clinic on Des Voeux Road, and
when the practice of medicine affords him leisure, he transmits the martial arts
to his disciples, patiently guiding them along the path, like the life-giving
breezes and rains of spring. And amidst his myriad concerns, Master Liang
has found time to recount to me the legends of his grand master, Tieqiao San.
I in turn have taken up my brush and set them down as a novel, serializing
them in this publication for the enjoyment of our readers.16

Woshi Shanren here notes his debt to Master Liang Yongheng, a stu-
dent of the historical Huang Feihong’s disciple Lin Shirong, for the story
of “Iron Bridge the Third.” Another of the students of Lin Shirong men-
tioned in this passage, Zhu Yuzhai, was a crucial figure in the tradition of
Guangdong School martial arts fiction and in the further dissemination of
this material in various popular culture media. Born in Nanhai, Zhu came
with his mother to Hong Kong at the age of seventeen; there he studied
martial arts with Lin Shirong (who had established a school in the colony
sometime around the early 1920s) and medicine with a master Zhang,
and in time opened a clinic of his own.17 In addition to editing manuals
of Lin’s boxing techniques, Zhu penned classical-language anecdotes and
tales concerning local martial arts figures.18 His Huang Feihong biezhuan

Guangdong School Martial Arts Fiction 39

 (The unofficial history of Huang Feihong) is not only regarded as one of
the more historically reliable works of the Guangdong School but was also
responsible for the elevation of its protagonist to the status of folk hero;
Zhu’s tales were a primary inspiration both for storytellers’ radio broad-
casts and for one of the milestones of Hong Kong cinema, the phenome-
nally successful series of some eighty Huang Feihong movies during the
1950s and 1960s and their updated sequels in the 1980s and 1990s.19

Isle of Refuge: The Sino-Japanese War, the Civil War,

and the People’s Republic

The examples of Woshi Shanren and Zhu Yuzhai testify to the cultural
continuity between Hong Kong and Guangdong, as well as to the degree
to which concrete association with the local community and with local
culture in the form of southern martial arts lineages and their living prac-
titioners was a hallmark of Guangdong School martial arts fiction. While
Hong Kong and Guangzhou shared a deep level of cultural continuity,
however, they were also divided by the demarcation of political authority
between the colony and the Chinese mainland. This political boundary
played a role in the careers of some of the legendary martial artists of the
Guangdong region. Lin Shirong is said to have come to Hong Kong in part
in response to an invitation, in part to avoid the consequences of a melee
in Guangzhou in which he killed several opponents. The historical Huang
Feihong is reported to have made one trip to Hong Kong and, after wound-
ing several opponents in a brawl over his disciples’ turf, to have found it
prudent never to return.20
The Chinese population’s ability to move freely back and forth across
the political border between the mainland and the colony also played a
crucial role in the development of the Hong Kong press. A tradition of uti-
lizing the shelter of the colony’s foreign law to promulgate views on main-
land affairs can be traced to the founder of Hong Kong’s Chinese press,
Wang Tao (1828–1897), who fled from Shanghai to Hong Kong in 1862,
under suspicion of involvement with the Taiping rebellion, and in 1874
founded the seminal Chinese-language daily Xunhuan ribao. Though pri-
marily commercial in orientation, Xunhuan ribao included periodic edito-
rials critical of the Chinese court and supportive of various reforms. The
practice of “over-the-border” critique expanded with the 1899 establish-
ment of Sun Yatsen’s revolutionary Zhongguo ribao. This publication was
followed by other revolutionary newspapers and then, in the years follow-
ing the founding of the Republic, by papers supporting various factions in

40 Chapter 2
the Byzantine politics of Guangdong province.21 In their strategic utiliza-
tion of the immunity Hong Kong afforded vis-à-vis mainland affairs, these
propagandists and publishers established the second essential element of
the colony’s press: a focus not on the local community that spanned the
Hong Kong–Guangdong border but on the Chinese nation as a whole,
upon which the British-ruled territory offered a privileged vantage point
for often self-conscious reflection.
Japan’s full-scale invasion of China in 1937 propelled waves of refu-
gees to Hong Kong. The tide increased with the fall of Guangzhou in Octo-
ber 1938. Hong Kong’s new inhabitants were quite different in origin and
outlook from the Guangdong locals who had hitherto made up the vast
majority of its Chinese population. They hailed not only from the nearest
mainland counties but from Shanghai and regions even farther afield, and
they saw Hong Kong not as an economically useful extension of their
native province but as an isle of refuge and exile in a time of national cri-
sis. Literary history notes the period of the Sino-Japanese War for the first
wave of the so-called South-bound Authors (Nanlai zuojia), mainland
writers, many previously based in Shanghai, who arrived hopefully to ride
out the war or pursue their political and artistic agendas in what they saw
as Hong Kong’s safe harbor.22 The first seeds of the colony’s later indus-
trial development were sewn in the economic realm, with several Shang-
hai textile concerns establishing factories in the colony. And linking the
artistic and commercial realms were the “culture industries” of film pro-
duction and newspaper publishing, both of which were invigorated by the
influx of talent, technology, capital, and an urgent sense of mission.
During the war period, many mainland newspapers transferred oper-
ations to Hong Kong or established branches there, employing the
expanded pool of journalistic and literary talent from Guangzhou, Shang-
hai, and elsewhere. Shanghai’s Libao, founded in 1935, commenced pub-
lication in Hong Kong in April 1938, with its literary supplement “Yanlin”
(Forest of words), edited by the most prominent of the South-bound
Authors, Mao Dun (1896–1981). The patriotic Dagong bao, which had first
appeared in Tianjin in 1902 and established its Shanghai branch in 1936,
published its first Hong Kong edition in August 1938. And another south-
comer, the poet Dai Wangshu (1905–1950), edited the “Xingzuo” (Con-
stellation) supplement of the new newspaper Xingdao ribao.23
Hong Kong’s Xingdao ribao began publication on August 1, 1938, an
extension of the commercial empire of Hu Wenhu (1882–1954), who had
already amassed a fortune with his patent medicines and his newspapers
in Southeast Asia.24 Its appearance can serve to mark the settling of Hong

Guangdong School Martial Arts Fiction 41

 Kong’s newspapers ever more clearly into two distinct camps: the “Guang-
dong–Hong Kong papers,” run by local newspapermen, attentive to local
matters, and often employing Cantonese-flavored prose; and the “outland
papers” (waisheng baozhi), established by entrepreneurs from the mainland
or overseas, more interested in national than in local affairs, and dedicated
to the linguistic purity of the national language (guoyu). If Sing pao was the
most successful of the former group, Xingdao ribao was the standard-bearer
for the latter.25 Xingdao ribao accepted manuscripts from many of Hong
Kong’s literary sojourners and passionately voiced the patriotic national-
ism and anti-Japanese fervor of the time. For the émigrés, anti-Japanese
patriotism was one element of a broader “Central Plains syndrome” (da
zhongyuan xingtai), a mainland-oriented “centralizing nationalist ideology”
in which a “modernizing project of state-building, linguistic unity, and
antiimperialist autonomy” was linked with a “contempt [for] all cultures
in the periphery of the mainland.”26 This contempt was most famously
expressed in Mao Dun’s condemnation of Hong Kong as a “cultural
desert.”27 Both aspects of the “Central Plains syndrome” are evident in the
essay heading Xingdao ribao’s first literary supplement, which casts Hong
Kong as an “island harbor” whose lights are a poor substitute for the veiled
stars of the “heavenly” motherland:

For days on end the skies have been overcast, and by night not a single star is
to be seen. Yet on the shores all about the harbor shine a hundred thousand
lamps, almost as if the myriad stars were there arrayed. At present, under these
somber skies, those who truly wish to gaze upon the stars can only take these
lanterns as a temporary surrogate.
These dreary overcast skies cannot drag on forever. They will either burst
into a yet more dreadful tempest or dawn into a radiant day of peace. If the
great storm does arise, then not only will the stars in the heavens be gone for-
ever, but even the lamps that have taken their place in this island harbor will
be extinguished. And if one day these clouds should finally break, and the
clear light shine forth, then the night-time scene will be more radiant than
before. Not only will the twinkling stars appear but the even more glorious
moon as well; and on that day, the light of these few harbor lamps will seem
as nothing at all.
Constellation now entrusts itself to this island harbor. Needless to say, both
editors and readers long for an early end to these overcast skies. Bright day-
light would of course be best, yet even the violent storm would also serve—it
would bring relief, at least, from the present state of affairs. But if by some ill
chance we must continue to struggle on beneath these overcast skies, then the

42 Chapter 2
 editors’ only wish is that Constellation might loyally serve its readers in taking
the place of the stars of heaven, and join the lamps that ring the harbor in the
task of casting a glimmer of light.28

The tempest, longed for and dreaded, eventually arrived; the Pacific War
broke out in December 1941, and Hong Kong surrendered to the Japanese
on Christmas Day.

Postwar Hong Kong’s Newspapers and Newspaper Fiction

By the time of the colony’s liberation in August 1945, the population,

winnowed by flight and death, had shrunk to little over 500,000. After the
Japanese surrender, though, former residents quickly returned, and by the
end of 1946 the population was estimated to have reached the prewar fig-
ure of 1,600,000. The intensification of the civil war on the mainland and
the victorious Communist armies’ drive toward the south soon brought
new tides of refugees. In the spring of 1950, some months after the found-
ing of the Peoples’ Republic, population was estimated at over 2,300,000.
Stabilization of the situation on the mainland encouraged migration out-
ward, so that at the end of 1952, population stood at approximately
2,250,000. In subsequent years, however, natural increase and the influx
of immigrants both legal and illegal continued to swell the population, to
2,500,000 by 1956 and nearly 3,000,000 by 1960. 29
Hong Kong’s newspapers recovered rapidly after the war, invigorated
by yet another influx of talent in desperate need of work, by the entrepre-
neurial opportunities offered by a chaotic but growing economy, and by
Hong Kong’s new importance as a harbor of relatively free speech poised
between the forces of the left and the right. The major Chinese-language
dailies before the war had been Huazi ribao (established 1864), Xunhuan
ribao (1874), Huaqiao ribao (1925), and Gongshang ribao (1925); among the
many newspapers making their appearance late in the 1930s were Xingdao
ribao (1938), the Hong Kong edition of Dagong bao (1938), and He Wen-
fa’s Sing pao (1939). Huaqiao ribao was the only one of these to continue
publication under the straitened material conditions and heavy-handed
censorship of the Japanese occupation.30 But with the exception of Huazi
ribao, which failed to make a successful recovery, the others resumed pub-
lication within several years of the Japanese surrender, joined not only by
lesser prewar papers but by a host of new publications as well. Among the
more widely circulated dailies established in the 1940s and early 1950s
were Xinsheng wanbao (established 1945), Honglü ribao (1947), Wenhui bao

Guangdong School Martial Arts Fiction 43

 (1948), Chaoran bao (1949), Xianggang shibao (1949), Xin wanbao (1950),
and Xianggang shangbao (1952). Between 1945 and 1950, a total of 155
periodicals and newspapers, Chinese and English, old and new, registered
with the Hong Kong government; one tally puts the total of Chinese-
language dailies at 14 in 1946 and 30 in 1956.31 Many of the newspapers
had unambiguous political affiliations. Dagong bao declared in its Novem-
ber 10, 1948, editorial its allegiance to the Communist cause and there-
after served as the Chinese Communist Party’s flagship newspaper in Hong
Kong. Xin wanbao was its sister evening paper, and Wenhui bao (established
in Hong Kong after being shut down by the Nationalists in Shanghai) was
another mainstay of the left. Taiwan’s Nationalist government supported
Xianggang shibao as its spokesman in the colony, while major commercial
newspapers including Huaqiao ribao and Xingdao ribao tended to be sym-
pathetic to Taiwan and its allies.32
The paper with the greatest circulation in postwar Hong Kong, how-
ever, was the nonaligned Sing pao. The paper was founded in 1939, as
noted, by He Wenfa, a veteran of the Guangzhou and Hong Kong news-
paper worlds. He Wenfa and much of his staff spent the years of the occu-
pation in the enclave of Macau but were the first to recommence publica-
tion of their paper after the Japanese surrender, putting the first issue on
the stands October 7, 1945. In the years that followed, Sing pao became
the best-selling Chinese daily and maintained this position well into the
1970s. It appealed to its readers by eschewing political controversy in favor
of bountiful and varied fiction and entertainment supplements (fukan).
Of the four pages it published daily in the 1940s and early 1950s, the sec-
ond was devoted to the mixed columns and amusements of “Tantian” and
the third to the serialized fiction of “Shuodi” (the names literally mean
“chatting of the heavens” and “speaking of the earth,” respectively;
together they make up a common phrase for “talking about everything
under the sun”). In the 1950s the paper began offering more serious news
reporting in addition to its supplements; it strove to maintain allegiance
to “the Chinese people” and “the national interest” while carefully avoid-
ing ties to factions on either the left or the right.33
Literary and entertainment-oriented supplements had long been a fea-
ture of Hong Kong’s newspapers, and serialized fiction a draw since the
early 1930s. 34 In the years immediately after the war, though all of the
major dailies had supplements of one sort or another, few devoted as
much space to serialized fiction as did Sing pao. Even in the more enter-
tainment-oriented evening papers (Xinsheng wanbao, Xin wanbao, etc.), seri-

44 Chapter 2
alized novels claimed a fairly modest space alongside shorter fiction, anec-
dotes, columns, word games, and various other pieces. From the beginning
of the 1950s on, however, serialized fiction became more and more promi-
nent. The expansion was due in part to the overall growth in the size of
the newspapers, from four pages daily to six and eight, or from eight to
twelve and sixteen. Even allowing for this across-the-board growth, how-
ever, serialized fiction appears to have claimed an increasingly important
role, occupying a greater portion of some supplements and, in other cases,
warranting an entirely new section of its own. Such expansions were invari-
ably heralded by dramatic front-page notices, illustrating the importance
attributed to serialized fiction’s appeal in the increasingly competitive
newspaper business. On May 5, 1951, Dagong bao introduced the new
“Xiaoshuo tiandi” (World of fiction), running one short story and four
serialized novels, to accompany its existing “Da gongyuan” (Public gar-
dens) supplement. On April 4, 1953, Xianggang shangbao expanded its
supplements, creating the paired “Tanfeng” (Chatting of the breeze) and
“Shuoyue” (Speaking of the moon), the latter devoted to serialized fic-
tion. And on October 5, 1956, Xingdao ribao added its own fiction supple-
ment, entitled, like Dagong bao’s, “Xiaoshuo tiandi.”
A notice run during the first four days of Xianggang shangbao’s “Shuo-
yue” (April 4–7, 1953) suggests some of the conventions of the day’s seri-
alized fiction and provides some insights into the conditions of its produc-
tion. The two new supplements’ parallel titles, “Tanfeng” and “Shuoyue,”
carry romantic or mildly erotic implications, but “Shuoyue” could also be
construed as “Fiction month”:

A Call for One-Month Fiction

This supplement is entitled “Shuoyue,” and as the name makes clear, it refers
to novels that are completed in one month’s time. With the exception of the
items Zhuo Wenjun, Xiaoshuo mi, and Laopo huangdi,35 all other items will com-
plete their publication within one month, and from here on, a number of
exciting new novels will be offered for our readers’ pleasure on the first of
every month. We hope that our readers will continue to demonstrate their
concern for this newspaper, and offer criticism on any of “Shuoyue’s” features.
Please let us know which items or what kinds of fiction you most enjoy, and
we will unceasingly strive for improvement.
Accordingly, this paper respectfully requests manuscripts for one-month
fiction from any of our readers, as follows:
1. Content: All manner of romance, horror, detective, martial arts, family

Guangdong School Martial Arts Fiction 45

 melodrama, society tales; content of any sort is acceptable. What’s most
important is that it be novel and interesting. As to language and style,
classical is also acceptable [i.e., in addition to the vernacular (baihua)
register now the norm for most serialized fiction; classical prose was
more common in the immediate postwar years], preferably simple and
succinct.
2. Manuscripts should be suitable for publication in one month’s time
(thirty-one days in May), with 800–1000 characters published per day.
3. Please submit only complete manuscripts. If we find them suitable we
will offer remuneration.
4. Remuneration will be 200–300 Hong Kong dollars per manuscript (if the
work is discovered to be plagiarized, no remuneration will be tendered).
5. Submitted manuscripts should clearly indicate an address for communi-
cation, so that we may return the manuscript or send remuneration.
6. Manuscripts may be submitted at any time, beginning today. Indicate
“Shuoyue editorial office” on the envelope.

As this notice suggests, martial arts fiction, before leaping into promi-
nence with the success of Liang Yusheng’s and Jin Yong’s works, was only
one genre among many in Hong Kong newspapers’ fiction supplements.
From the early days of its postwar publication, Sing pao included tales by
the Guangdong School authors Deng Yugong and You Cao. On October
28, 1947, Gongshang ribao began running anecdotes about Huang Feihong
and other Guangdong heroes by Zhu Yuzhai; after about two weeks the
series moved to the evening paper, Gongshang wanbao, where this author’s
pieces had appeared some ten years before. Martial arts fiction remained
absent from most other papers’ supplements, however, until the young
Xianggang shangbao included the genre in its new “Shuoyue.” The first
month’s selection of stories included Leizhu Louzhu’s Fang Shiyu xia Nan-
yang (Fang Shiyu journeys to the South Seas). This tale’s successors in the
months that followed included work that would later be thought of as
New School, such as Mou Songting’s Zhenben Shandong xiangma quan-
zhuan (The complete and authentic tale of the highwaymen of Shandong)
(serialized October 1, 1953, through December 31, 1955; herafter referred
to as Highwaymen of Shandong).36 The notion of “new” martial arts fiction
did not become current, however, until the appearance in Xin wanbao in
1954 of Liang Yusheng’s first novel and Jin Yong’s on the same pages a year
later. The enthusiasm with which readers greeted these works inspired
other authors and editors to imitation, and by the end of the 1950s nearly

46 Chapter 2
all fiction supplements included one or (often) several works of martial
arts fiction.
Fang Shiyu Journeys to the South Seas, the martial arts tale presented in
the first month of Xianggang shangbao’s “Shuoyue” (April 4–30, 1953),
deploys as its protagonist the quintessential hero of the Guangdong
School. A lackluster piece of fiction in many ways, it is notable for some
curious twists it offers on the standard Guangdong material—twists that
indirectly presage the “new” martial arts fiction soon to emerge. The
novella begins with a retelling of the famous episode of Fang Shiyu’s duel
with Lei the Tiger on the Hangzhou leitai. After the duel, in this version,
the old merchant Fang De hustles his quarrelsome son off to Singapore,
where Fang De has an overseas business venture that has run into trouble.
The trouble turns out to be another Tiger, the Black Tiger of Singapore
(Xingzhou heihu), whom Fang Shiyu eventually slaughters in another
duel, rescuing the family business and vindicating his countrymen’s honor.
While the plot is little different from that of Fang Shiyu’s original adven-
ture, shifts have taken place on other levels, including one in the identity
of Fang Shiyu’s “countrymen.” They are still fellow Guangdong natives, to
be sure, speaking Cantonese and hosting Fang De at the Guangdong Guild-
hall; here in this foreign land, however, they are also, and more simply,
Chinese. The Black Tiger is not a rival from another province but is a black-
skinned “Canningren,” 37 whose interests the local government favors over
those of the Chinese merchants. “Because of the affair of Fang Shiyu’s kill-
ing the Black Tiger of Singapore with a single blow,” the story’s final line
informs us, “the Canningren never again dared to look down on the Chi-
nese.” Fang Shiyu’s martial prowess has become the tool and symbol not
merely of local pride but of Chinese identity in the face of alien races and
governments. The hero’s geographic and cultural displacement, further-
more, have become intertwined with a strange temporal disjunction. Arriv-
ing in Singapore, Fang Shiyu drinks coffee and English tea, eats toast and
jam, rides buses, receives a message by telephone. In a strange presenti-
ment of the match between Wu Gongyi and Chen Kefu, his duel with the
Black Tiger takes place in a roped-off ring, with a bell sounding to begin
the rounds and the seconds waiting in the corners. The Black Tiger himself
is a “heavyweight champion,” employing Western boxing and wrestling
moves against Fang Shiyu’s Chinese martial arts. Fang Shiyu Journeys to the
South Seas offers no narrative justification for this mix of cultural and
chronological disjunctions. As we shall see in the next chapter, such dis-
junctions are typical of a “fiction of displacement” quite popular at this

Guangdong School Martial Arts Fiction 47

 time. In the case of this story, regardless of the lack of causal explanation,
their general significance is clear: the Guangdong hero has entered a new
locale, a new political environment, a new historical era, and consequently
a new relationship with something identified as Chinese culture. Chapter
3 will argue that it is precisely these new circumstances that inform the
martial arts fiction of Jin Yong and his contemporaries. The “newness” of
their New School fiction, however, lies in its abandoning the Guangdong
heroes in favor of quite different characters and quite different strategies
for responding to the altered world.

48 Chapter 2
 Chapter 3
The Marshes of Mount Liang
Beyond the Sea

Jin Yong’s Early Fiction and

Postwar Hong Kong

A s dramatic as the growth of Hong Kong’s Chinese

population in the postwar years was the shift in this
population’s relationship with the Chinese mainland. Throughout the
colony’s previous history, its Chinese residents had largely hailed from
Guangzhou and adjoining areas, and their movement back and forth
across the border had been relatively unrestricted. Hong Kong had accord-
ingly served as a haven of economic opportunity or temporary political
refuge for a population whose familial and cultural roots remained else-
where. During the upheavals of the 1930s and 1940s these “locals” were
joined by an increasing number of “outlanders” (waishengren), refugees
from more varied and distant regions. And the expectations of the post-
war refugees, whether “local” or “outlander,” were perforce quite different
from what they had been in the past. In the words of the colonial govern-
ment’s 1952 report, “the situation in China has so changed within the last
two or three years that the surplus population of these unfortunate people
cannot now be expected, as it was previously, to leave Hong Kong.”1 They
had fled not a foreign invader but a new regime, formed by their own coun-
trymen, under which they felt they could not live; and for all the rhetoric
of return-and-repossession from the Nationalist government on Taiwan,
the chances for change in the mainland’s political situation seemed dim-
mer with each passing month and year. Strict new border controls insti-
tuted by both Chinese, anxious to stem the outflow of human resources,
and British, fearful of the refugee burden and wary of subversive elements,
made the sense of separation a concrete reality in the realm of immigra-

49
 tion policy. In the economic realm, likewise, the resumption of Hong
Kong’s prewar role as entrepôt was thwarted by United Nation sanctions
on trade with China imposed with the outbreak of the Korean War, and
then by China’s isolationist policies in the succeeding decades. Hong Kong
had become not the “railway station” of a people in transit but a “lifeboat”
in which an exile population might find itself drifting indefinitely.2
A consciousness of exile informs Jin Yong’s early works and New
School martial arts fiction more generally, and constitutes a crucial ele-
ment in the New School’s differentiation from the Guangdong School tra-
dition. The exilic consciousness emerges most clearly when Jin Yong’s first
novels are read in the specific context of their newspaper serialization.
Such a reading gives us access not only to the social and historical circum-
stances of the community in which the novels first circulated but also to
the other texts, fictional and nonfictional, with which Jin Yong’s work
coexisted and in relation to which it defined itself. Comparison with these
texts—in particular with the body of fantastic narratives I dub “comedies
of displacement”—reveals the extent to which the vision of New School
martial arts fiction is shaped by precisely those forces it alludes to
obliquely or elides altogether: the contemporary political situation on
the mainland, local Cantonese culture, the refugee experience, and Hong
Kong’s coloniality.
The culture of postwar Hong Kong, both literary and cinematic, has
been criticized as dominated by mainland intellectuals and accordingly
dismissive of local culture and concerns.3 In the newspaper world, the
numerically greater and more enduring presence of mainlanders deep-
ened the distinction between “local” papers—focused on Hong Kong and
Guangzhou matters, employing Cantonese prose, published by local news-
papermen, and appealing to a readership largely composed of the work-
ing class—and “outland” papers, which were oriented toward mainland
politics and affairs, written in standard Mandarin, managed by newcomers
to Hong Kong, and read by a larger portion of the educated émigré popu-
lation. While the latter publications’ “Central Plains syndrome” appears
hegemonic and marginalizing from the perspective of the indigenous
Hong Kong identity that was to crystallize in later decades, it was not alien
to the interests of that substantial portion of the population which was
itself made up of recent refugees. The distinction between “mainland” and
“local” orientation was, in any case, far from absolute. Our review in this
chapter of a daily newspaper’s contents will illustrate the intersection of a
broad range of topics and presentational styles on the pages of what is

50 Chapter 3
generally classified an “outland” or mainland-oriented publication, the
Xin wanbao.
This review will further serve to ground our reading of Jin Yong’s ear-
liest work not only against its social and historical background but also in
the mutually implicated contexts of textual medium and reading practice.
The fiction published in the Hong Kong newspaper supplements of the
1950s and 1960s was interwoven with the daily life of its readers in at least
two important respects. The first was that of the rhythms and contexts of
reading. Although many fiction supplements included each day one or
two anecdotes or short stories complete in a single installment,4 by far the
majority of fiction published in the 1950s and 1960s and well into the
1970s was serialized, appearing in consecutive installments of from sev-
eral hundred to over a thousand characters each over a period of days,
weeks, months, or even years. A devoted reader therefore consumed a tale
in a long series of small chunks distributed among the daily patterns of
work, school, socializing, and home life. In one obvious sense the reader’s
experience of the story was quite fragmented. In another, though, the
story’s extension over time and periodic insertion into the reader’s life
allowed it to gather to itself some of the depth and continuity of a life’s
repetitions and gradual change—or, conversely, serve as a point of refer-
ence and token of continuity amidst the uncertainties of existence.5 As has
been noted of the genre of serialized television melodrama, “the structur-
ing gaps of the text . . . mark the point of the intersection between the hori-
zon represented within the text and the horizon brought to the text by the
reader.” 6
A second sense in which serialized fiction was tightly implicated with
Hong Kong life was that of its immediate textual environment. The fiction
supplement constituted but one part of a daily newspaper, coexisting with
advertisements, entertainment listings and reviews, advice columns, the
sports page, commercial and shipping news, police reports, wire-service
accounts of international affairs, and a variety of other features. While not
every reader can be assumed to have studied the entire paper from cover
to cover, readers who paid attention to only the fiction supplement, or to
only one particular serial, were most likely very few. And whatever a given
reader’s habits, the text of a novel de facto shared its material existence not
only with the daily building blocks of a half dozen other pieces of fiction
but with the newspaper’s other textual components as well—the variety of
texts that reported and facilitated, narrated and constructed the lives of
the newspaper’s community of readers.7

Early Fiction and Postwar Hong Kong 51

 A Day in the Life of Hong Kong:
The Xin wanbao of February 8, 1955

The first installment of Jin Yong’s first novel, Shujian enchou lu (titled by
Ming Ho in English Book and Sword, Gratitude and Revenge and hereafter
referred to as Book and Sword), appeared in the Xin wanbao of February 8,
1955. The day’s issue runs to its usual length of six pages and sells for the
standard price of one hao, one-tenth of a Hong Kong dollar. Prominently
displayed in the upper right-hand corner of the first page, next to the mast-
head, is a notice with the double headline: “Crossword Puzzle Contest
with Movie Ticket Prizes! A New Martial Arts Novel Makes its Debut!” The
notice directs readers to the entertainment section, on page 3, for the con-
test with its prize of tickets to Zhonglian Studio’s new Cantonese-language
film Guxing xuelei (An orphan’s tragedy); as to the martial arts novel, it
declares:

Starting today “Tianfang yetan” [(The Arabian nights), the paper’s fiction sup-
plement] adds two new serials. The first is Mr. Jin Yong’s martial arts novel
Book and Sword, the second Ms. Bei Jia’s spy novel Ta si zai di er ci (She died the
second time). Both are thrilling works, full of fascinating twists and turns.
Read them and see for yourself! We hope you will give them your attention!8

Apart from this notice and several commercial advertisements, the first
page is largely devoted to major news stories. The main topic is the Amer-
ican-supported withdrawal of Guomindang troops from the Dachen
islands off Zhejiang province and the resulting intensification of the stand-
off between the Communist and Nationalist governments. Articles drawn
from the Reuters and Associated Press wire services report events on the
islands and the major powers’ responses; the matter is also the subject of
the day’s page-one editorial. Other first-page items are a regular feature col-
lecting anecdotes and news concerning world leaders and celebrities, and
a wire service photograph (the only photo on the page) of Indian acrobats.
The bottom third of the second page is occupied by the sports section,
the rest by a “Tianxia shi” (World affairs) section, running feature articles
on international events. These articles include further “behind the scenes”
analysis of the situation in Taiwan and a piece on and photo of the young
Shah of Iran and his wife. Also presented here is an installment of a his-
torical novel on the leaders of the Second World War and their diplomatic
and strategic maneuverings, entitled Xin Sanguo yanyi (New romance of
the three kingdoms) and signed with the punning pen name Luo Guanxi.

52 Chapter 3
 The third page offers movie ads and the entertainment section, “Xin
leyuan” (New elysium). Here, besides the crossword-puzzle contest, are
news and photos of local and Hollywood movie stars, a review of the Ital-
ian costume epic Theodora, Slave Empress (discussing in a serious tone the
film’s treatment of history and the themes of love and power), and an arti-
cle on Mendelssohn’s piano compositions to be broadcast that evening on
the English radio channel.
Local news and advertisements appear on page 4. The news includes
developments in an extortion trial; the release of a government report on
the gradual decline in applications for resident identification cards; a gam-
bling case, the seizure of a load of smuggled cigarettes, a report of gun-
shots, a domestic quarrel. Interspersed with these are consumer tips, the
weather, some bits of financial news, and the radio broadcast schedules.
The “Jiating” (Home) section occupies the bottom third of the fifth
page, with items such as recipes, tips on buying toys, a story for children,
and a piece on the wife’s situation when her husband loses his job. The
rest of the page features the popular “Xiawu chazuo” (Afternoon tea).
Here appear a variety of columns, cartoons, and feature articles of general
interest. The main piece today is an article on “Women and Dogs”; the
approach of Hong Kong’s annual dog show occasions a discussion, amply
illustrated with photographs of movie stars and swimsuit-clad models
nuzzling their pets, of whether the female sex has a particular affinity
for animals. Among the other features is the regular “Dajia tan” (Open
forum), which prints anecdotes, riddles, and comments submitted by
readers, together with the editor’s replies to readers’ letters. The half-
dozen or so items offered on this date include one reader’s “Most Unfor-
gettable Day”:

The day that my shanty [muwu, the flimsy wooden dwellings of the refugee
settlements] was destroyed by fire, even my patched cotton quilt was burned,
and I was forced to spend the night out on the street, clenching my teeth and
holding back my tears against the battering of the frigid wind: that was my
most unforgettable day. —Yang Mei

Finally, page 6, sporting a selection of advertisements, begins the fic-

tion supplement “The Arabian Nights.” Eight pieces are presented, includ-
ing the first installments of the new novels by Jin Yong and Bei Jia. The
column “Dushi xiao jingtou” (Little scenes of the city) offers one-day
anecdotes of Hong Kong life; today’s is on playing the horses. In its fifty-
sixth installment is Xia Yi’s Xianggang xiaojie riji (Diary of a Hong Kong

Early Fiction and Postwar Hong Kong 53

 miss), a contemporary romance narrated in the first person.9 Also adopt-
ing the narrative strategy of the diary, and making colorful use of Can-
tonese for its dialogue passages, is part 319 of Shigougong ziji (The personal
diary of Shigougong), a tragicomic account of the vicissitudes of Hong
Kong life signed by Shigougong, a pseudonym of the prolific San Su.10
Veteran historical novelist Hu An contributes installment 117 of Tianguo
yingxiong (Heroes of the Heavenly Kingdom), a tale set during the Taiping
Rebellion.11 Tang Ren’s epic fictionalization of Chiang Kaishek’s career,
Jinling chunmeng (Fleeting dreams in Nanjing), is in its third year with
installment 864.12 And rounding out today’s “Arabian Nights” is part 15
of Yumian hu (The jade-faced fox), an illustrated novel (three panels with
accompanying text) of romantic intrigue in contemporary Hong Kong.
The international struggles of the Cold War era, and the tensions
between the Nationalist and Communist governments in particular, dom-
inate the news. The dominance is evident not only in the subjects of the
front-page reports but in their provenance (international wire services) as
well. Within the pages of the newspaper, however, the Chinese nation’s
struggles on a global stage play themselves out against a decidedly local
fabric woven of advertisements, police reports, readers’ reminiscences,
sports coverage, and weather bulletins. While such items offer neither com-
prehensive coverage nor detailed analysis of Hong Kong affairs, and while
the Xin wanbao’s textual potluck offers no more of an integrated account
of the world than does the daily newspaper of any other time and place,
the materials made available here allow the possibility of contemplating
Hong Kong’s place in a multilevel narrative of personal and political
events.
Another striking aspect of the newspaper’s textual materiality—previ-
ously noted in our discussion of the Chen-Wu match—is the haziness of
the boundaries between information and entertainment, fabrication and
reported fact. The two types of material do not merely coexist on the news-
paper’s pages but actually seem to seep into one another. Particularly
striking in this regard are Tang Ren’s fictionalization of China’s contempo-
rary history, sandwiched between the modern romances and historical
fantasies of “The Arabian Nights” supplement, and the world-affairs sec-
tion’s presentation of a traditional-style novelization of the events of the
Second World War.13 But there are equivalent slippages as well between
The Jade-Faced Fox or Diary of a Hong Kong Miss and the melodramas
reported in the local news, while the rambling first-person narrative of The
Personal Diary of Shigougong seems as close to reportage as to fiction.
It is within this jigsaw puzzle of fiction and fact, of world events and

54 Chapter 3
local ephemera, of the recollected past and the still-unresolved present
that Jin Yong’s Book and Sword makes its debut; and it is in this context
that we must seek to understand the novel’s contemporary impact and the
particular slice of representational terrain to which it stakes its claim.

Book and Sword: The Empire and the Borderlands

Book and Sword, set during the reign of the Qianlong emperor, relates the
adventures of the Red Flower Society (Honghuahui), a secret brotherhood
devoted to aiding the oppressed and resisting the Manchu invaders. Early
in the tale the band escorts the young hero Chen Jialuo from the north-
western wilderness, where he has been in training, back to the Chinese
heartland so that he may assume leadership of the Society after the for-
mer chief ’s mysterious demise. Battling to free a brother of the Society
captured by the Qing soldiery, the Society joins forces with a Muslim tribe
whose sacred Koran has been seized by the Manchus. The captured brother
turns out to hold the key to a potent weapon in the struggle against Qing
rule. He knows of proof that Qianlong is not the late Yongzheng emperor’s
son, but a Han Chinese by birth, Chen Jialuo’s own brother, substituted as
an infant for a daughter born to the former emperor. After various adven-
tures, the Red Flower Society captures the emperor. They confront him
with the proof of his origins and exact his promise to declare his true birth,
expel the Manchus and eradicate their customs, and reinstate a native Han
dynasty. The emperor delays taking action, though, and then demands
that Chen Jialuo surrender to him his beloved, the beautiful Princess Fra-
grance (Xiangxiang gongzhu), daughter of the Muslim chieftain. Chen Jia-
luo, torn between love and duty, finally agrees. But the princess soon learns
that Qianlong intends to betray the Red Flower Society, and she kills her-
self in order to warn her beloved. Chen Jialuo and his comrades fight free
of the emperor’s ambush, pay their final respects at the princess’s grave,
and flee for the wilderness beyond the northwest passes.
The preceding summary does little justice to the eight-hundred-page
Book and Sword; it gives no hint of the varied pleasures of language,
imagery, and narrative spectacle offered by the work, and, even in terms
of plot alone, elides the multiple subplots, individually complex and dizzy-
ingly interwoven, into which the narrative irrepressibly expands. But as the
warp to the subplots’ woof, and as the central enunciation of themes on
which the sub-narratives play variations, the tale of Chen Jialuo and the
Qianlong emperor provides a valid first point of approach to the novel’s
reimagining of the material of martial arts fiction.

Early Fiction and Postwar Hong Kong 55

 As the summary makes clear, Book and Sword utilizes a number of sit-
uations and images familiar from martial arts fiction in the Guangdong
School tradition. One of the Guangdong School’s essential premises, the
enmity between Han and Manchu, is enshrined in the Red Flower Society’s
anti-Manchu mission. The Society’s very name evokes the Red Flower
Pavilion, at which, according to Guangdong School tales and secret-society
lore, the survivors of the razing of the Shaolin temple pledged their con-
tinued resistance to the Qing.14 Although the brothers of Book and Sword’s
Red Flower Society are not themselves Shaolin disciples, the late Yu Wan-
ting, the Society’s founder and Chen Jialuo’s godfather, once served as a
novice at the southern Shaolin temple. The need to unravel the mystery of
Yu’s departure from Shaolin takes Chen and his comrades to the temple
at a crucial point in the plot. And even a version of the archetypal tale of
the temple’s destruction finds its way into Jin Yong’s work: during the cli-
mactic battle, as the Red Flower Society strives to fight its way free of the
emperor’s ambush, the Shaolin monks come to their rescue, reporting as
they do so that the emperor’s troops have burned their monastery to the
ground. The figure of the Qianlong emperor provides yet another link with
the Guangdong School tradition. Although the villainous and cowardly
ruler of Book and Sword is a far cry from the swaggering autarch of Everlast-
ing, in scenes portraying Qianlong disguised as a merchant and dallying
with the courtesans of Hangzhou, Jin Yong draws on the earlier novel, or
at least on the legends on which it too was based.
Yet the differences between Book and Sword and a typical Guangdong
School yarn are vast. One of the most basic is Jin Yong’s recentering and
revitalization of the theme of Han-Manchu struggle. Guangdong School
fiction carries but dim echoes of the role this ethnic distinction played in
the revolutionary politics of the early part of the century; it employs the
antagonism, on the one hand, as a celebration of southern allegiances and,
on the other, as a sort of Manichean paradigm, allowing the distribution
of characters into clearly defined camps of good and evil, engaged in end-
less battle. The feuds waged against this background often develop into
personal or interschool rivalries that neither directly challenge the fact of
Manchu rule nor question the terms of the defining paradigm. Jin Yong’s
novel, in contrast, re-foregrounds the struggle between Manchu and Han,
posing as the key element of its plot a crisis that could bring about a rad-
ical resolution of the question of dynastic authority. This foregrounding
of dynastic crisis constitutes one of the most obvious links between the
content of Book and Sword and its immediate textual and sociopolitical
environments. On a certain level this yarn of a turning point in the exer-

56 Chapter 3
cise of imperial authority cannot help but resonate with the recent change
of regime on the mainland, which had so profoundly affected the lives of
Hong Kong’s residents, new and old, and the still perilous military and
political aftershocks that were reported on the front page of each day’s
paper. Of course the fact that the dynastic struggle in Book and Sword is
waged between two different ethnic groups, one of which is portrayed as
a foreign interloper, raises the possibility of associations with the Chinese
nation’s struggles against imperialist aggression, or more immediately
with Hong Kong’s own status as a British colony. The political and cultural
implications of Hong Kong’s colonial status are unquestionably relevant
to an understanding of Jin Yong’s work. We cannot overlook the fact, none-
theless, that for readers in Hong Kong in the 1950s, one of the first asso-
ciations invoked by Book and Sword’s tale of dynastic struggle might be the
recent civil war.
Setting the question of specific political resonances aside temporarily,
we may take note of another significant aspect of Book and Sword’s por-
trayal of the Han-Manchu conflict: the fact that it personalizes this conflict
in the relationship between Chen Jialuo and the Qianlong emperor. This
personalization of the Han-Manchu struggle is one aspect of the overall
reorientation of the novel toward emotional and psychological drama,
which is almost universally cited as one of Jin Yong’s major contributions
to New School martial arts fiction. Jin Yong’s works replace simple blood
feuds and power struggles with plots revolving around complex and con-
flicted relationships; focus on protagonists’ moral and psychological
responses to these conflicts of loyalty; display an interest in romantic melo-
drama at least as great as that in martial conflict as such; and interweave
the martial with the psychological, utilizing even martial training and bat-
tle as vehicles for the exploration of identity and relationship. All of these
features are present in Book and Sword, if in some respects less developed
than in the author’s later work. Scenes of battle and adventure abound, but
a good part of the novel’s immediate appeal to its readers seems to have
rested on the tragic romance between Chen Jialuo and Princess Fragrance,
Chen’s conflicting attractions to Fragrance and to her sister Huo Qingtong,
the struggle for Fragrance’s affections between Chen and his imperial
brother, and the myriad similar romances, rivalries, and crises of loyalty
played out among the novel’s supporting characters.15
What is most significant for the present argument is the way in which
the novel’s interest in personal melodrama and psychological exploration
encompasses even the theme of dynastic struggle. Major portions of the
narrative are devoted to the revelation (both to the reader and to the char-

Early Fiction and Postwar Hong Kong 57

 acters) of Qianlong and Chen Jiaoluo’s relationship, and to the brothers’
encounters in a succession of shifting guises and circumstances—first
incognito, then with the emperor a captive of the rebel leader, finally with
Qianlong reinstated to the power and privilege of the Forbidden City. The
brothers’ rivalry for the affections of the Muslim Princess Fragrance both
heightens the conflict between them and further motivates the narrative’s
focus on their emotional (rather than merely political or martial) lives.
The novel places the fate of the empire in question, yet presents the polit-
ical as subsumed by the personal; the crisis is experienced, solutions
sought, failure confronted, on the level of interpersonal loyalties, moral
choice, and psychological experience.
Still another element of Book and Sword’s foregrounding of the strug-
gle for dynastic control is a geographic imaginary rather different from that
of Guangdong School fiction. The novel’s geography is, first of all, much
larger in scope, encompassing not merely the Guangdong heroes’ haunts
in Guangzhou and Fujian, but a China vast in scale, ranging from the
southeastern seaboard to the land beyond the northwestern passes, and
varied in environment, incorporating the roadways and taverns of the tra-
ditional Rivers and Lakes, the palaces of Beijing, the bustling cities of the
lower Yangtze, the scenic wonders of West Lake and Haining, the desola-
tion of the Central Asian deserts. The conflation of the struggle for China
with the representation of the Chinese landscape finds expression in a
variant title under which the book has circulated: Shujian jiangshan, liter-
ally “Book and sword, river and mountain,” jiangshan being a conventional
metonymy for the empire.16 In addition to being expanded in scope, the
novel’s geography also exhibits different conceptual demarcations. Guang-
dong School fiction’s primary geographic allegiances are to local cultural
and linguistic centers; in the background looms a more general conscious-
ness of cultural differences between north and south China (differences
easily made to dovetail with the Manchu-Han feud). While the North-
South division and certain regional allegiances still appear in Book and
Sword, perhaps the most significant of this novel’s geographic conceptual-
izations is the opposition between the interior and the borderlands.
The lush landscapes of the interior constitute both the emotional
heartland of the Han Chinese and the locus of dynastic authority, while
in the sere wastelands beyond the passes roam the culturally alien and
politically marginalized nomad tribes. These two geographic domains and
their associated peoples define the interlocking plot lines, political and
romantic, that embroil the novel’s protagonist, Chen Jialuo. The political

58 Chapter 3
crisis lies in the fact that a people from beyond the borders, the Manchu,
has seized possession of the Chinese heartland. The novel opens with two
secondary characters, Li Yuanzhi, the daughter of a military commander
in the northwest, and her tutor, Lu Feiqing. Lu is a former member of an
anti-Manchu brotherhood, who “fled to the far-off borderlands” when his
band was destroyed and eventually found concealment in his position as
a tutor (10). When Li’s father is rewarded with a coveted post back in Zhe-
jiang province for his successes against the Muslim tribes of the region,
the young girl, who has “lived since childhood in the border regions of
the northwest,” is overjoyed at the prospect of seeing the “fair mountains
and clear waters of the South,” and her old tutor, “long absent from the
interior,” is equally pleased to accompany her (20). Returning to the
heartland after years of exile, Lu Feiqing is moved to recite a lament by Xin
Jiaxuan (Xin Qiji, 1140–1207), the Southern Song poet and hero of resist-
ance against the Jin invaders. “This lyric,” muses Lu, “is like an inscription
of my own heart’s feelings. He in his day was the same as I, with the flour-
ishing realm of China fallen to barbarians before his very eyes” (21). When
the barbarians enter the passes and seize control of the heartland, Han
Chinese loyalists such as Lu or Chen Jialuo find themselves driven out to
the borderlands. In this respect, the border regions share a certain range
of significance with the Rivers and Lakes, the traditional realm of exile and
inversion.
Lu and his young disciple soon encounter both the Red Flower Soci-
ety, escorting their new leader back from beyond the passes for his destined
confrontation with Qianlong, and a band of Muslim tribesmen, seeking
the sacred Koran seized from them by the Qing. Thus it is that these lesser
characters lead us toward the primary strands of the tale; and thus it is
that the stage is set for Chen Jialuo’s own meeting with the Muslim tribe.
His romantic entanglement with the chieftain’s two daughters (he eventu-
ally settles his heart on the younger, Princess Fragrance) echoes in the
romantic mode the male Han protagonists’ displacement from the center
and search for allies in the borderlands that we have seen in the political
sphere. When the emperor becomes infatuated with Princess Fragrance
and seeks to win her affections away from his brother, the inversion of
heartland and borderlands becomes extreme; Qianlong has a replica of
the Princess’s home, complete with sand dunes and camels, constructed
within the confines of the Forbidden City itself. When Chen Jialuo meets
with Princess Fragrance one final time to inform her that he must leave
her for the sake of the nation, it is only fitting that their tryst be at the

Early Fiction and Postwar Hong Kong 59

 Great Wall, a symbol both of China’s grandeur and of the boundaries
between the lands within and the lands without on which its existence
depends.
The dialectic between the empire’s center and its borders, and between
the peoples of these two locales, also enters into the novel’s treatment of
the martial arts. The martial arts play a more limited role in Book and Sword
than in Jin Yong’s later fiction. As we shall see in the following chapter, the
later novels devote considerable narrative attention to the gradual and
often tortuous process of the protagonist’s training, employing the martial
arts as the medium for a bildungsroman of emotional and moral growth.
In Book and Sword, descriptions of combat constitute an important part of
the narrative, and expertise in the martial arts is crucial to both the iden-
tities of individual characters and the relationships between them. But the
protagonists’ martial development as such is not a major part of the story;
they enter the tale with their basic skills already perfected.17
The primary instance of a breakthrough in martial ability in the
course of the narrative occurs when Chen Jialuo, Princess Fragrance, and
Huo Qingtong, pursued by a horde of wolves and a band of determined
foemen, take refuge in an ancient city hidden in the depths of the western
deserts. They soon find themselves trapped in this necropolis together
with the skeletons of its ancient inhabitants. Among the bones of what
was once the Muslim damsel Mamir they find an account, written in her
dying blood, of how she and her comrades sacrificed their loves and lives
to free their people from the foreign (non-Muslim) tyrant who held sway
over the citadel. Mamir’s narrative brings Chen Jialuo to the realization
that his romantic entanglement with the two sisters has distracted him
from his mission of expelling the Manchus, and he vows to emulate this
Muslim heroine and set his personal affairs aside until the grand enter-
prise has been achieved. Chen Jialuo and the others learn from Mamir’s
testament that the map which has brought them to the hidden city was
originally from her hand. They learn too that instrumental in Mamir and
her companions’ struggle was a Chinese book from which her lover Ali
divined a mysterious martial skill that allowed him to defeat the tyrant’s
minions. Seeking this lover’s remains, Chen Jialuo discovers a second text,
written in ancient Chinese characters on bamboo strips:

Chen Jialuo’s heart leapt; but then he saw that the first line was: “In the north-
ern darkness is a fish, the name of which is Kun.” Looking it over, he saw that
the strips all contained the [ancient philosophical work] Zhuangzi. He had

60 Chapter 3
 thought at first that it might be some wondrous text, but this Zhuangzi was
something he had learned by heart as a child. He couldn’t help feeling a bit
disappointed. “What’s that?” asked Princess Fragrance. “It’s one of our ancient
Chinese books,” said Chen Jialuo. “These bamboo strips are antiques, but
they’re of no use to us. Only an antiquarian would be interested in them.” He
tossed them to the ground, and the bamboo strips scattered. They saw then
that one in the middle looked different from the rest; each character was
marked with a tiny circle, and there were several words in an ancient Muslim
script as well. Chen Jialuo picked it up and saw that it was the section “Bao
Ding Carves the Ox” from the third book of the Zhuangzi. He pointed to the
Muslim script and asked Princess Fragrance, “What does this say?” She
answered, “‘Herein may be found the secret to destroying the foe.’” Chen Jia-
luo was puzzled: “What does that mean?” he asked. Huo Qingtong said,
“Mamir’s testament says that Ali found a Chinese book and used it to figure
out how to defeat the enemy with his bare hands. Maybe it was these bamboo
strips that he found.” “Zhuangzi preaches renouncing desire and obeying
Heaven,” said Chen Jialuo. “It has nothing to do with the martial arts.” (720)

Under the sisters’ continued questioning, however, Chen experiences

a revelation. “He knew the Zhuangzi by heart, and it had seemed to him
that there was nothing novel about it; but now, prodded by someone who
had never read the book at all, he felt as if a window had been thrown
open to the light.” He divines the principles embodied by Zhuangzi’s peer-
less butcher and their relevance to martial practice and realizes further
that the postures of the fallen Muslim warriors hold the key to the tech-
niques they used against their foe. Imitating the skeletons’ poses, he him-
self masters the esoteric martial techniques and later uses them to defeat
his most formidable opponent.
Densely interwoven in this episode are several themes central both to
Book and Sword and to the subsequent corpus of Jin Yong’s work. Chen Jia-
luo’s derivation of fighting techniques from a written text which is not per
se a martial arts manual posits a deep resonance between the practice of
the martial arts and the communicative functions of a literary text. The lit-
erary text is further located—by the repeated reminders that this is “a Chi-
nese book” (literally Hanren de shu, “a book of the Han Chinese”), by the
specific identity of the text as one of the recognized classics of the Chinese
literary tradition, and by its physical configuration as an article of recog-
nizable, even emblematic antiquity (bamboo strips)—within the matrix
of a Chinese cultural tradition, of which textuality and antiquity are mutu-

Early Fiction and Postwar Hong Kong 61

 ally implicated signifiers. An ancient Chinese cultural heritage constitutes
the root of which the martial arts and the literary tradition are flowers,
and for which they both serve as vehicles of transmission.
The picture presented is more complex, though, than a simple fusion
of the martial arts, textuality, and the Han Chinese cultural heritage. We
may note, first of all, that the text is a necessary but not a sufficient source
of Chen’s realization. Although he divines the principles from the read and
remembered words of the text, in order to fully realize his new techniques
he must additionally resort to visual and somatic cues—examining the
postures of the long-dead warriors and mimicking their motions with his
own body. We may note too that the Han Chinese tradition remains inert
until stimulated by non-Han factors. Chen Jiaoluo’s very familiarity with
the literary tradition allows him to dismiss the Zhuangzi as a known quan-
tity. It is only the unexpected rediscovery of the text in the unfamiliar envi-
ronment of the deserts beyond the passes, the annotations in a foreign
script, and the promptings of his non-Han comrades—“illiterate” at least
in the sense of being completely untutored in the Han Chinese linguistic
and literary canons—that stir him to a realization of this Chinese text’s
potential. It is significant too, given the novel’s representation of a world
in which patriarchy rules as firmly in the Rivers and Lakes as it does in the
court, that the unlettered non-Han who prompt the scholarly Chinese
hero’s realizations are also females. Finally, we must note that the Zhuangzi
is only one of the two texts appearing in this episode. The ancient Chinese
text offers Chen Jialuo the key to the development of martial prowess; but
it is the testament of the Muslim woman, written in her own blood, that
moves him to redevote himself to the duty of political struggle. Political
aims and martial prowess may be yoked together in Chen Jialuo’s dedica-
tion of his powers to the anti-Manchu cause; but the fact that his twin real-
izations are sparked by two separate texts—one Chinese, male-authored,
and philosophical; the other non-Han, female-authored, and narrative in
character—implies the potential dissociation of martial ability, as such,
from any particular ideological commitment.
Our examination of this episode allows us to refine the earlier discus-
sion of Han and non-Han peoples and their placement within the novel’s
fictional geography. Given that the Manchus, a people from the empire’s
periphery, have usurped control of the heartland from the Han Chinese
and sent the Han heroes into exile beyond the passes, the borderlands and
the deserts beyond clearly serve as the territory of dispossession and dis-
placement. The scene in the lost city, however, makes it clear that this

62 Chapter 3
displacement can paradoxically lead to a reinvigoration of the central tra-
dition. The ancient Han text inscribed on the bamboo of the verdant
heartland yields its secret fruits only when reencountered in the desert
wastes. And its mystery is glossed in a “Muslim script”: for if the Manchus
embody the outlands’ dispossessive aspect, the Muslim tribes here repre-
sent their fructifying potential.
The fact that the two sisters and their long-departed predecessor, the
Muslim damsel Mamir, are instrumental in Chen Jialuo’s rediscovery of
his mission and mastery of his martial skills alerts us to the circumstance
that the borderlands’ antithetical possibilites vis-à-vis the male Han pro-
tagonist—threatening on the one hand, regenerative on the other—are
further differentiated in terms of gender. While the Muslims are portrayed
as dauntless warriors led by a patriarchal chieftain, the most prominent
Muslim characters are female, the chief ’s two daughters. The exotic and
erotic allure of this non-Han people is epitomized in the love feast that
Chen Jialuo encounters when he seeks out the tribe, at which the Muslim
maidens take the initiative in choosing their romantic partners (chapter
14). The most prominent representative of the Manchus (even if his parent-
age is in fact Han), and Chen Jialuo’s chief foe, is a male, the emperor. The
only notable female presence among the Manchu characters is the cold
and scheming dowager empress, asexual by reason of her age, a “mother”
who is revealed as having no biological relationship with her supposed
son, but who succeeds in turning Qianlong against his natal brother when
he wavers over assenting to Chen Jialuo’s plans.
The dialectic of heartland and borderlands—the “Central Plains syn-
drome [which] represent[s] a hierarchy of cultural differentiation derived
from geographic, territorial, and cultural boundaries between the main-
land core and the outlying periphery”18 —structures the central elements
of Book and Sword’s plot and themes. It shapes the contours of its narrative
as well, in a fairly obvious fashion: the story moves from the border
regions into the heart of the empire, at the beginning of the novel, and
makes a final exit with the heroes’ westward ride on the last page. To a cer-
tain extent the lands encircling China’s central plains are conterminous
with the Rivers and Lakes, both as a terrain of political exile and conten-
tion and as the discursive home ground of the martial arts novel’s narra-
tive activity. But with the novel’s conclusion—the characters’ departure
from the field of discourse—the lands beyond the passes become border-
lands in an even more radical sense. They mark the regions into which the
narrative does not enter, into which the protagonists fade once their loves

Early Fiction and Postwar Hong Kong 63

 have ended in tragedy and their dreams of national salvation, in betrayal.
What is it that lies outside the geographical scope of the empire’s Rivers
and Lakes and beyond the martial arts novel’s narrative range? How do
these invisible regions shape the terrain, both diegetic and discursive, on
display in the novel’s text? Jin Yong’s second work of martial arts fiction,
Bixue jian, offers clues for further exploration of these questions.

Beyond the Borders: Royal Blood

Bixue jian (titled in English as The Sword Stained with Royal Blood and here-
after referred to as Royal Blood) was serialized in Xianggang shangbao from
January 1 through December 31, 1956. It is set at the time of the Ming
dynasty’s fall before an uprising led by Li Zicheng and the invasion of the
Manchu Qing. The narrative is organized around the adventures of Yuan
Chengzhi, the fictional son of Yuan Chonghuan (1584–1630), an histor-
ical Ming general distinguished for his successes against the Manchus but
executed by the Chongzhen emperor at the urging of opposed factions at
court. The novel’s young Yuan Chengzhi, raised in exile by his father’s
loyal followers, becomes the pupil of the martial arts master Mu Renqing.
In addition to learning the arts of his master’s Huashan School, he stud-
ies the Secret Scroll of the Golden Serpent (Jinshe miji), a manual of esoteric
martial arts he discovers with the remains of the mysterious Jinshe Lang-
jun (Young Lord of the Golden Serpent). Yuan Chengzhi descends from his
master’s mountain lair and joins forces with the rebel leader Li Zicheng,
intending to avenge his father by assassinating the emperor. In his travels
he befriends a wayward and oddly beguiling young scholar, Wen Qing. He
eventually discovers that Wen Qing is in fact a young woman, Wen Qing-
qing, the daughter of none other than the Young Lord of the Golden Ser-
pent, between whom and the villainous elders of the Wen clan stands a
history of bitter and bloody feuding. Yuan bests the Wen elders and heads
off with Wen Qingqing for further adventures, interweaving the rivalries
between and within the various schools of wulin (“the Martial Grove,” i.e.,
the world of the martial arts) with resistance against the despotic Ming
regime, the Manchu invaders, and traitorous eunuch factions at court. Li
Zicheng’s armies finally take Beijing, and the Chongzhen emperor com-
mits suicide; the convoluted affairs of the Huashan School and of the
Golden Serpent’s legacy likewise draw toward a conclusion. Just at this
juncture, the wife of Li Yan, Li Zicheng’s most trusted lieutenant and Yuan
Chengzhi’s sworn brother, appears on the scene to report that the Ming

64 Chapter 3
general Wu Sangui has opened the mountain passes to the Manchu armies,
Li Zicheng is in retreat, and Li Yan has been framed by a rival and sen-
tenced to execution. Yuan Chengzhi rushes off to save his comrade, but
arrives too late. Disconsolate, he gathers his remaining companions and
sets off for an island in the southern seas; there, he hopes, they can begin
a new life.
How does Yuan Chengzhi know of this island? During his adventures
he has encountered a troop of Portuguese soldiers who are escorting a bat-
tery of Western-made artillery to Beijing. The foreigners are arrogant, con-
tentious, and armed with deadly pistols and muskets. They are accompa-
nied by a jewel-bedecked European beauty who excites Wen Qingqing’s
envy, and by a Chinese interpreter who uses the status conferred by his
association with foreigners to abuse his countrymen. Believing the Ming
emperor will use the cannon against the Manchus, Yuan Chengzhi tells
his comrades to leave the Portuguese in peace. When he learns that the
weapons will be directed against Li Zicheng’s uprising, however, he
destroys the cannon and captures their escort. The Portuguese captain is
shocked to hear that his artillery was to be used against the oppressed
people of the empire. Moved by Yuan Chengzhi’s chivalrous spirit, he pre-
sents him with the map to the southern isle:

“Rather than fight on so bitterly here, you would be better off leading the
hungry and oppressed common folk of China to this island.” Yuan Chengzhi
smiled to himself, thinking, “This foreigner has a good enough heart, but he
doesn’t know how vast China is. No matter how large this island of yours may
be, it will never hold our hundreds of millions!” 19

At the end of Yuan Chengzhi’s tale, though, as he despairs over the Man-
chu victories and Li Yan’s ignoble death, it is the sight of this map that
kindles his ambition to set forth and make a new home for himself and
his followers.
In Royal Blood, as in Book and Sword, the protagonists’ adventures
among the Rivers and Lakes of the empire end with their departure for a
land beyond China’s borders.20 Here, though, the departure is elaborated
far beyond the simple westward ride that concludes the earlier novel.
Yuan Chengzhi’s sailing off for a southern island evokes precedents in
such classic treatments of xia material as the Tang chuanqi “The Curly-
Bearded Stranger” and Chen Chen’s Sequel to the Water Margin. Yuan’s fate
also evokes the historical precedent of the Ming general Koxinga (Zheng

Early Fiction and Postwar Hong Kong 65

 Chenggong, 1624–1662), who seized Taiwan from the Dutch and estab-
lished there a base for anti-Manchu resistance. In the decades after 1949,
Chinese outside the mainland commonly read Koxinga as a heroic proto-
type for Chiang Kaishek and his Nationalist government on Taiwan.21 In
addition to these literary and historical allusions, however, we must also
note the resonances between Yuan Chengzhi’s fate and the situation of
many of the residents of 1950s Hong Kong. The characterization of Yuan’s
island refuge as a land made available by Europeans suggests a parallel
with the British colony to which so many of his readers had so recently
fled.22 Such a parallel, in turn, suggests once again a resonance between
the dynastic struggle against which the novel takes place and recent events
on the Chinese mainland.
There is no intent here to propose a direct allegorical correspondence
between the novel’s representation of the historical past and the political
events of the mid-twentieth century. The author’s explicit rejection of such
readings in the case of a later work (see chapter 6) may be presumed to
extend to the rest of his corpus. The most obvious such interpretation,
moreover, which would cast the novel’s hero as a figure for the exiled
Nationalist government on Taiwan, runs directly contrary to the expressed
sympathies of the newspaper that serialized the story.23 The significance
of Yuan Chengzhi’s departure for his southern island lies less in any spe-
cific representation of contemporary politics than in its expression of the
“Central Plains syndrome” and its mapping of the relationship between
the discursive territory of the martial arts novel and that of life in contem-
porary Hong Kong. A strictly allegorical reading would extend to few if
any martial arts novels apart from Royal Blood itself and would therefore
fail to take us far in understanding the appeal of Jin Yong’s other works or
the wealth of New School works contemporary with them.24 Even in the
particular case of Royal Blood, those elements that might be read as politi-
cal allegory belong to the overall setting of the tale and are concentrated
in certain episodes within the narrative. They assume greater prominence
in an analytic summary of the work than they might in the context of
accretive daily reading, where the broad contours of the plot and any polit-
ical messages implied in the narrative frame might well take second place
to the flavors of a piece of fiction’s prose, the appeal of its characters, its
inventiveness of incident, its narrative pacing, its excitation and gratifica-
tion of the reader’s desire to know “what happens next.” While Jin Yong’s
fiction is frequently lauded for its excellence in all these respects, none of
these features is necessarily unique to his work or to martial arts fiction in
general. What distinguishes the martial arts novel of postwar Hong Kong

66 Chapter 3
from the other adventures, romances, and mysteries with which it shares
the columns of the newspaper supplements, what gives it as a thematic
genre a particular significance at this time and place, is its setting: the
Rivers and Lakes of an imagined Chinese past. More precisely, the Rivers
and Lakes attain significance here not as a mere “setting,” but as a chrono-
tope—a set of geographic and temporal parameters inalienably implicated
with certain emotional resonances and ideological associations.25 In order
to understand these parameters and the particular significances accruing
to them in the context of postwar Hong Kong, it will be useful to examine
another thematic genre contemporary with New School martial arts fic-
tion, one we have already seen adumbrated in Fang Shiyu Journeys to the
South Seas: the comedy of temporal, spatial, and cultural displacement.

Comedies of Displacement

Royal Blood’s serialization in Xianggang shangbao’s supplement “Shuoyue”

marks the beginning of a long and fruitful collaboration between Jin Yong
and the illustrator Yun Jun. 26 Day by day the text is graced with Yun Jun’s
renderings (quite crude in comparison with his later work) of robed and
topknotted gallants brandishing their swords among the mountains and
villages of ancient China. At the base of the page appears another tale, this
one embellished with two illustrations daily. Here we find a gowned and
bewhiskered figure, the double of a Daoist adept from Jin Yong’s world—
but sporting, now, among modern Hong Kong’s avenues, shanties, bars,
and bedrooms. This is Lü Dongbin, the protagonist of San Su’s Lü Dong-
bin xiafan (Lü Dongbin descends to the mortal world), one example of a
genre of fiction that flourished in Hong Kong’s newspapers in the 1950s
and 1960s: comedies of displacement, in which figures from the China of
legend find themselves adrift in the modern city.
A good deal of the literary fiction written in postwar Hong Kong—
“literary” in that it appeared in literary journals or literary (wenyi) as dis-
tinct from “fiction” (xiaoshuo) newspaper supplements, and made implicit
claim to artistic and political rather than merely recreational aims—took
the colony for its setting, in effect undertaking to narrate the Hong Kong
experience. Leftist writers took an early lead in this project, employing the
techniques of social-realist fiction to depict the sufferings of the Chinese
masses in a capitalist colonial society or the degenerate lives of the Nation-
alist “aristocracy.”27 Authors with Nationalist sympathies tended at first to
favor mainland settings and the events of recent history but soon began to
direct their own efforts toward producing a “refugee literature.”28 Much of

Early Fiction and Postwar Hong Kong 67

 the popular genre fiction published in the newspaper supplements was
likewise set in Hong Kong. For the most part these tales merely used the
colony as the backdrop for conventional narratives of romance, crime, and
adventure. But a unique and powerful strategy for narrating the life of
Hong Kong’s residents appeared in one of the most popular works of the
postwar era, Jingji La’s (another pen name of San Su) Jingji riji (An agent’s
diary).29 The “diary” adopts a first-person voice, the persona of an “agent”
or middleman in Hong Kong’s commercial markets, and the prose style
christened sanjidi (roughly “three-in-one”), a mix of laconic classical and
standard vernacular with Cantonese dialogue and the most up-to-date of
slang.30 The narrative eschews genre fiction’s linear plots in favor of a
repetitive, often almost directionless chronicle of the protagonist’s finan-
cial wheelings and dealings, romantic frustrations and entanglements, and
the daily routines of eating, drinking, and socializing. It ceaselessly weaves
into the story local teahouses and nightclubs, the latest social scandals,
and the commercial world’s trends and misadventures. This blurring of
the lines between fiction, column, and news, no less than the intimacy of
voice and persona and the naturalism of the narrative strategy, make An
Agent’s Diary not merely a chronicle of the Hong Kong society of its time
but a brilliantly apt deployment of the medium of serialized newspaper
fiction to both mirror and narrate the daily experience of its contempo-
rary readership.31
In addition to penning An Agent’s Diary and such similar narratives as
Xin wanbao’s long-running Personal Diary of Shigougong, San Su produced
a number of works in the genre here dubbed “comedies of displacement.”
Although not the sole author of such works, he was one of the most pro-
lific.32 Sing pao and Xianggang shangbao were among the primary venues
for his works in this vein. Under the pen names Xia Bo and Xiaosheng
Xing Gao, Sing pao carried his Jigong xinzhuan (The new legend of Jigong)
from 1951 through 1958, Baxian nao Xianggang (The eight immortals raise
a ruckus in Hong Kong) from 1958 through 1964, and Zhu Bajie you Xiang-
gang (Zhu Bajie’s travels in Hong Kong) from 1968 through 1969. In Xiang-
gang shangbao, his Lü Dongbin xiafan rivalled Sing pao’s Jigong xinzhuan in
length, beginning publication in August 1955 and running into the early
1960s.
San Su shared the pen name Xia Bo with a colleague, Chen Xiazi. It
was Chen who was responsible for the works appearing under Xia Bo’s
name in Xianggang shangbao: 33 first ribald reworkings of traditional tales
with Dahua Xiyouji (Tall tales from the Journey to the West) (1952–1953)
and Laopo huangdi (The “old lady” emperor [i.e., Wu Zetian]) (1953), then

68 Chapter 3
“comedy of displacement” with Haijiao Liangshanbo (The marshes of
Mount Liang beyond the sea) (hereafter Beyond the Sea), which was serial-
ized from June 1 through September 30, 1953.
Because of its links with The Water Margin and thus the tradition of
martial fiction, Beyond the Sea will serve as a useful introduction to the
basic features of the “comedy of displacement” genre. The tale begins
where Jin Shengtan’s truncated seventy-chapter version of Water Margin
leaves off, numbering its own first chapter “71” 34 and commencing its
narrative with Lu Junyi, whose dream of the assembled heroes’ execution
brings Jin Shengtan’s work to its grim conclusion. In Xia Bo’s tale, Lu Junyi,
unable to sleep after the heroes’ Grand Assembly, wanders out to gaze
upon the stars that fill the heavens, to contemplate the revelation that he
and his comrades are themselves star spirits sent down to earth, 35 to med-
itate on the brevity of human life and to wonder what changes in the world
a thousand years might bring. He finally falls into a drunken sleep and
dreams that Mount Liang is ripped from the marsh in which it stands and
whirled away to the ends of the earth. The legend tianxia taiping (“peace
under heaven”), inscribed upon a placard hanging over the Hall of Loy-
alty and Righteousness, blurs and shifts before his eyes, changing first to
writing in some foreign script, then to Taiping shan—that is, Victoria Peak.
And so he finds himself in twentieth-century Hong Kong.
Here he finds turbaned Indians, towering buildings, airplanes, and
speeding motorcars. He enters a bar where scantily clad women shake and
shimmy; if they feel so cold, he wonders, why don’t they put on a few more
clothes? 36 He soon encounters his sworn brother Yan Qing, who intro-
duces him to his patron, the “renowned philanthropist” and underworld
boss Mr. Qi. Mr. Qi, barely literate, has heard storytellers’ accounts of the
Liangshan heroes and vaguely understands them to be underworld stal-
warts from some other locale. He is eager to increase his own standing and
power by bringing them all into his own organization; as an ersatz Song
Jiang, he thus becomes the vehicle for the narrative’s introduction of var-
ious characters from the original novel. Each successive chapter relates the
misadventures of one or more members of the Liangshan band in their
encounters with scandalous aspects of Hong Kong society. Li Kui becomes
mixed up in an affair of stolen infants; Wu Song suspects his new fiancée
of engaging in prostitution; Lu Zhishen falls in with a foreigners’ nudist
association, and so on. Stringing these episodes together, and counterbal-
ancing the presence of the contemptible Mr. Qi, is the heroes’ determina-
tion to find their missing elder brother, Song Jiang. They become con-
vinced that they must seek him back in the interior (neidi); and at the end

Early Fiction and Postwar Hong Kong 69

 of the tale Mr. Qi, anxious to escape involvement in the police investiga-
tion of a murder committed by Li Kui, packs them all onto buses and
sends them over the border.
The comedies of displacement appearing in postwar Hong Kong revive
a fictional subgenre whose genealogy can be traced at least to turn-of-the-
century Shanghai and such works as Wu Woyao’s 1908 Xin shitou ji (New
Story of the Stone), which brings Hongloumeng’s Jia Baoyu face to face
with the modern metropolis.37 The reappearance of such stories in 1950s
Hong Kong testifies both, perhaps, to the strong presence of Shanghainese
in Hong Kong’s commercial and artistic communities and to certain essen-
tial similarities in the cultural conditions of the prewar treaty port and the
postwar colony. What little critical attention has been given to this litera-
ture treats it as a satirical record of contemporary Hong Kong society.
Huang Zhongming characterizes fiction of this type as “satiric fantasy” (jie
xian feng jin, literally “borrowing immortals to satirize the present”) and
points out how it serves both to mock and to record in rare detail the
underbelly of Hong Kong life in the 1950s and 1960s.38 Luo Fu similarly
lists The New Legend of Jigong and Zhu Bajie’s Travels in Hong Kong along-
side An Agent’s Diary, The Personal Diary of Shigouggong, and other works by
San Su that “mock and curse” the realities of life in Hong Kong.39 That
these works’ fundamental motivation is satirical cannot be denied. Yet sev-
eral features set them apart from others among San Su’s many satirical
works. The first is the fact that fiction such as Beyond the Sea simultane-
ously engages in both satire and extended storytelling. The degraded bar-
girls, hypocritical socialites, corrupt doctors, and opportunistic reporters
featured in this novel’s first episode might easily appear in a nonfiction
column such as San Su’s own “Guailun lianpian” (Outlandish essays); 40
in the context of fiction as such, however, they are interwoven with a tale
spun out with an eye toward startling incident, narrative tension, and
melodramatic emotional appeal.
The feature that further distinguishes the “comedies of displacement”
from other satirical narrative, such as An Agent’s Diary, is the strategy they
employ in staging their humor and critique. An Agent’s Diary engages in
“thick description” of the phenomena of Hong Kong social and economic
life. Amusement at or censure of these phenomena emerges from (without
being demanded by) the perspective of the world-weary first-person nar-
rator, or from the reader’s own collation of events against some assumed
standard of decency, honesty, et cetera. A work such as Beyond the Sea, in
contrast, provides within the narrative a concrete foil to the phenomena
of life in Hong Kong—the presence of characters from another time, place,

70 Chapter 3
or order of existence. If satire consists in the demonstration of observed
social phenomena’s failure to measure up to the standards of some second,
more ideal reality, the comedies of displacement give this second world a
narrative incarnation in the form of its wandering native sons.
The significance of this collision of worlds is ambivalent in at least two
respects, both evident in the scene of Lu Junyi’s visit to a strip bar. To
describe this episode as simply “satiric,” that is, humorously critical of the
degraded scene within the bar, glosses over, on the one hand, the fact that
Lu Junyi’s naiveté makes him a fair target for a certain amount of mockery
himself, and, on the other, the fact that the scene allows for some measure
of prurient enjoyment, and not censure alone, on the part of the reader.
Clues within the text (details such as the stench of the women’s sweat and
the brutality of their handlers) and common habits of readership (posi-
tive identification with a protagonist, charitable imputation of moral
motives to both reader and author) guide reader and critic toward the
“satiric” reading without completely closing out the other possibilities. In
any event, the moral or evaluative orientation of these episodes, while far
from irrelevant to the present argument, is perhaps secondary in signifi-
cance to their underlying structure—the essential conceit of a meeting of
two worlds.
There is strong prima facie evidence for the proposition that this fic-
tion articulates the experience of displacement that so shaped the lives of
Hong Kong’s residents during the decades in which the genre flourished.
If the realist fiction of the left and right and such gritty entertainments as
An Agent’s Diary address the struggles, triumphs, and absurdities of Hong
Kong life, then the comedies of displacement shift the narrative focus
toward the existential situation underlying the daily melodrama—a con-
sciousness of having been thrust into the Hong Kong arena from some
other environment. Beyond the Sea imagines its protagonists’ original home
as distant from Hong Kong in space (Shandong, or the “interior” more
generally), in time (the past of a thousand years ago), and in cosmologic
mode (the “reality” to Hong Kong’s “dream”). At the end of the tale, we
find these three axes of distance merging into one; when the dream-arrived
heroes climb onto a bus to return to the mainland, the text sees no need
to account for any discrepancy. In other stories, those involving Lü Dong-
bin or characters from The Journey to the West, the protagonists descend to
the colony from the heavenly realm. Here the cosmologic distance claims
priority, yet remains inseparable from a sense of temporal and spatial
removal as well. The “elsewhere” from which the characters arrive is not
just another place but another time and another order of reality; most

Early Fiction and Postwar Hong Kong 71

 important on the affective level, perhaps, is the fact that it is a profoundly
familiar terrain.
Since these tales’ concern is displacement, the heroes’ homeland lies
outside the boundaries of the narrative as such. Water Margin’s Mount
Liang appears only briefly in the first installment of Beyond the Sea; when,
in the final episode, the characters set off for the interior, they exit the
narrative’s discursive domain, and the story perforce must end. To say
that their homeland is familiar terrain, then, is perhaps less to the point
than to say that it carries the connotation of familiarity. It is precisely the
assumed familiarity, the “homeliness,” of this absent homeland that
allows the tale’s protagonists, and through them the reader, to experience
Hong Kong as alien. Within the boundaries of the narrative proper, the
sense of familiarity is borne by the characters themselves. The heroes from
Mt. Liang, the eccentric Daoist Lü Dongbin, Sun Wukong, Zhu Bajie, and
the rest of the company from The Journey to the West, would all be familiar
to this fiction’s readers, from the Ming and Qing novels recounting their
exploits, from more recent fictional adaptations, from storytelling and
operatic versions and radio broadcasts of the same, and from countless
other renditions in both traditional popular cultures and the modern mass
media. The recognition they evoke in the reader combines personal his-
tory (familiarity since childhood), a broad sense of cultural tradition, and
a more specific association with the traditional literary and artistic genres
in which these characters appeared. The comedies of displacement mobi-
lize this recognition in at least two directions. On the one hand, the char-
acters and their implied homeland offer a familiar and positively identified
ground from which to mock and critique the absurdities of modern life in
Hong Kong. On the other, the characters’ familiarity gives latitude for the
staging of their own shortcomings. Ignorance or ineptitude in dealing with
the modern colonial city is both humorous and excusable in these beings
from another realm; displays of lust or anger are simultaneously deplor-
able and welcome as the signature traits of old companions.

The Discursive Terrain of New School Martial Arts Fiction

The comedies of displacement give us one perspective from which to

understand the shape and contemporary significance of Hong Kong’s New
School martial arts fiction. Beyond, or perhaps prior to, the attractions of
plotting, characterization, and prose style, works such as Book and Sword
and Royal Blood offer the more fundamental appeal of a compelling

72 Chapter 3
chronotope—the Rivers and Lakes of a mythicized Chinese past. If fiction
such as An Agent’s Diary offers a narrative of Hong Kong society in the
1950s and 1960s, and the comedies of displacement satirize this world by
introducing characters from another, then the New School martial arts
novel may be thought of as presenting a vision of that second world in its
pristine state. The often-advanced claim that the figure of the knight-errant
(xia) and the world in which he moves have an immemorial appeal for
the Chinese reader does not sufficiently account for the martial arts novel’s
rebirth at this particular time and place. An aura of “immemorial appeal”
is indeed a crucial element of New School martial arts fiction; but this
aura is less an ahistorical given than a part of the deliberate evocation of
tradition that lies at the genre’s heart, and that assumes a special signifi-
cance in the particular cultural environment of post-1949 Hong Kong.
The clearest evidence of the relative discursive positions of the come-
dies of displacement and martial arts fiction is the fact that characters
from the latter genre can themselves be deployed in the staging of a dis-
placement farce. From February 21 through June 20, 1960, Jin Yong’s own
fledgling newspaper Ming Pao serialized the novel Honghuahui qunxiong nao
Xiangjiang (The heroes of the Red Flower Society raise a ruckus in Hong
Kong) (hereafter Red Flower Society). An “Editor’s Introduction” on the first
day of publication presents the piece as follows:

Mr. Jin Yong’s martial arts novel Book and Sword has received an enthusiastic
welcome from its readers. Each one of the ten or more heroes of the novel’s
Red Flower Society—Chen Jialuo, Wuchen, Wen Tailai, Yu Yutong, and the
rest—is given a distinctive personality, “like a living dragon appearing in the
flesh.” The present work employs a comical style and imagines that these
heroes have arrived in Hong Kong, where they become embroiled in a variety
of adventures. The tale is exciting and unique. The author, Mai Xuan, narrates
it in the person of Chen Jialuo’s page, Xin Yan, bringing us even closer to the
action.

The motivation for the journey to Hong Kong is Chen Jialuo’s yearn-
ing for Princess Fragrance. The final pages of Book and Sword show the
heroes visiting her tomb and finding it empty but for a lingering perfume;
as Red Flower Society opens, the group decides to seek the lost princess
through all the “fragrant” places of the earth. They save the “fragrant har-
bor” of Hong Kong for last because of the overwhelming number of “fra-
grant” hotels, restaurants, banks, and so forth within its tiny area. While

Early Fiction and Postwar Hong Kong 73

 the Society’s strategist, Xu Tianhong, pores over the itinerary, prepares a
press release for their arrival, and awaits a telegram from Jin Yong confirm-
ing their travel plans (which the author is slow in sending, busy as he is
with writing his next novel), the impetuous swordswoman Zhou Qi hur-
ries down to Hong Kong on her own. There she puzzles over her hotel’s
practice of charging by the hour, samples the sickly sweet liquors at the
bar, and before long has become involved in the affair of a bar-girl’s stolen
racing ticket. The other members of the Red Flower Society eventually
arrive for a series of adventures that, in the standard mode of the displace-
ment farce, play their chivalry and ignorance against the colony’s modern
amenities, curious Western ways, and cutthroat pursuit of personal gain.
The existence of such a story makes clear the affinity between the New
School heroes’ native environment and that of Zhu Bajie, Lü Dongbin,
and other “displacement” protagonists. This affinity may be, in part, one
of genre, indicating the close association of the martial arts novel with tra-
ditional forms of fiction. Its primary register, however, is cosmographic:
Chen Jialuo and his comrades come from the same “place,” in some sense,
as the heroes of the displacement comedies. A sequence of serializations
in Xianggang shangbao provides a fortuitous illustration of this point.
Beyond the Sea concludes, as we have seen, on September 30, 1953, with
the Water Margin’s heroes leaving Hong Kong on a bus bound for the
interior. The following day the paper’s fiction supplement begins the seri-
alization of Mou Songting’s Highwaymen of Shandong, an adventure set
during the late Qing period in the Water Margin’s home province of Shan-
dong. Highwaymen of Shandong is succeeded in January 1956 by Royal Blood;
and this novel ends, on the last day of the year, with the protagonist on
board a ship bound for what sounds uncannily like Hong Kong.
The symmetry between Beyond the Sea’s heroes departing their tale for
the interior and Royal Blood’s protagonists departing theirs for an island to
the south neatly suggests the identity, on a conceptual level, of the charac-
ters’ homelands. At the same time, though, it also dramatizes the relation-
ship between this homeland and the two genres’ quite divergent discursive
projects. When the Beyond the Sea’s protagonists set out for Shandong, the
curtain falls on their story, for their role in this work is to enact a tale of
satire and burlesque that is predicated on the very fact of their finding
themselves in an alien land. Yuan Chengzhi’s story ends, in contrast, at that
moment when he turns his back on the Chinese mainland; for the New
School martial arts tale is a story of China proper, the middle kingdom,
the unassailable center of cultural authority.41

74 Chapter 3
 If the displacement comedy’s business is the staging of cultural disori-
entation, the New School martial arts novel’s is the nostalgic recreation of
a Chinese culture envisioned as whole and unchallenged. To say that this
fiction’s imagined China is “whole and unchallenged” as a cultural entity
is not, of course, to claim that it is free from conflict. The Rivers and Lakes
are by definition the unstable and often violent regions of society; and
in a strand of the martial arts tradition that stretches from “The Curly-
Bearded Stranger” to the New School novelists, this innately dangerous
terrain further serves as the ground for struggles over political control of
the empire. Yet in the world of the New School novel neither the violence
nor the political contest imperils the cultural hegemony of the Chinese
tradition. To the contrary, conflict provides the occasion for the perform-
ance of what is, in the discourse of martial arts fiction, the cultural tra-
dition’s consummate manifestation: the practice of the Chinese martial
arts. Royal Blood’s Portuguese soldiers, whose weapons threaten both the
empire’s political balance and the supremacy of China’s martial practices,
are the exception that proves the rule.42 Foreigners with such radically dis-
ruptive potential reappear in Jin Yong’s oeuvre only with his final novel,
the consciously iconoclastic The Deer and the Cauldron. In his other works,
as in the vast majority of New School fiction, the various roles played by
foreigners (whether non-Han subjects of the empire or peoples from
beyond the borders)—as objects of mockery, horror, or erotic allure; as
hungry aspirants to the dragon throne; as supporters and nurturers of Han
protagonists and Han traditions—all tend to reaffirm the paradigmatic
centrality of the Chinese state and Chinese cultural identity. The colonial
presence that haunts the comedies of displacement makes itself known
in New School martial arts fiction primarily through the fervency of its
disavowal.
That this impregnable cultural China be imagined as temporally and
spatially distant from the Hong Kong of the mid-twentieth century is obvi-
ously a necessity. It is not so much that the absence of modern technol-
ogy and competing cultural systems allows the supremacy of traditional
Chinese arts as that the Chinese cultural tradition, epitomized in the mar-
tial arts, stakes out an imagined territory in which other cultures and tech-
nologies lack any right to issue a challenge. And yet the world portrayed
by Hong Kong’s New School novelists is not an entirely mythical realm.
Jin Yong, Liang Yusheng, and other Hong Kong writers of the late 1950s
and early 1960s almost invariably provide their tales with concrete histor-
ical backgrounds. Their contemporaries in Taiwan, where a body of New

Early Fiction and Postwar Hong Kong 75

 School martial arts literature also emerged during the 1950s, generally
avoid defining historical settings, instead placing their tales in an unspec-
ified and apparently timeless past, and often in a self-contained world of
Rivers and Lakes thoroughly divorced from the affairs of court and the
institutions of ordinary society. These choices reflect the Taiwan novelists’
skirting of painful political realities and their care to avoid government
censorship. The Hong Kong authors’ predilection for moments of histori-
cal crisis, in contrast, given room for free expression under the British colo-
nial government’s laissez-faire policy toward the arts, suggests the extent
to which this literature, for all its fantastic tendencies, is also informed by
a sense of political and cultural urgency generated by the ongoing crises
in China and the Cold War world at large.
Also useful for clarifying the shape of and motivations behind the
Hong Kong New School’s imagining of its world is the contrast with the
works of the Old School master Huanzhu Louzhu. This author set several
of his novels at the moments of dynastic crisis favored by the New School
writers: the Manchu conquest of China in his epic Shu shan jianxia zhuan
(Legend of the swordsmen of the mountains of Shu, 1932–1949), the
Mongol invasion in Liuhu xiayin (The hermit knights of Willow Lake,
1946). In Huanzhu Louzhu’s tales political disaster occasions the protag-
onists’ flight to remote mountains, the habitation of grotesque monsters
and swordsman-immortals with preternatural powers, and it is within this
transcendent world that his stories unfold. In Hong Kong’s New School
novels, as we have seen, the hero’s withdrawal to an overseas island or
beyond the mountains signals the conclusion of the tale. The milieux of
Huanzhu Louzhu’s novels, however turbulent, are far removed from the
sufferings of the empire; but it is these sufferings themselves—the crises
that set the fate of the nation adrift among the perilous and unstable bor-
derlands of society—that make up the Rivers and Lakes of Hong Kong’s
New School. The New School novel’s imagined world is shaped by both
the nostalgic invocation of an idealized cultural past and the anxious
awareness of precisely those political and historical contingencies that
make the nostalgic vision so appealing.
While chapter 2 reviewed New School fiction’s immediate predecessor,
the martial arts tales of the Guangdong School, and ended with a Guang-
dong School hero’s appearance in a comedy of displacement, this chapter’s
further exploration of the displacement comedies, as well as of Jin Yong’s
earliest novels, has illuminated the shift from the Guangdong School’s
imaginary world to that of Jin Yong and his contemporaries. It is the inter-
secting visions of the Chinese nation as an immemorial cultural entity and

76 Chapter 3
as an imperiled political body that move Jin Yong’s novels away from the
more parochial concerns of their Guangdong School predecessors. Guang-
dong School fiction’s fascination with local heroes, personal rivalries, and
regional culture make its world too narrow to serve as a vehicle for the
expression of an “émigré discourse of centralizing nationalism.”43 More
importantly, perhaps, the concreteness and continuity of its ties with the
local community preclude the establishment of that distance so essential
to the imagining of an idealized Chinese past. Having touched on differ-
ences between the settings, plots, and characters of Guangdong and New
School martial arts fiction above, we may now consider, as a final illustra-
tion of their divergent concerns, the variance in their respective linguistic
registers. Jin Yong, Liang Yusheng, and their imitators reject the Guang-
dong School’s Cantonese-inflected prose in favor of a standard vernacular
braced with colorful four-character phrases and studded with conscious
archaisms. Their models are the classics of premodern vernacular fiction
(Water Margin, Dream of the Red Chamber, etc.) and the works of the prewar
Old School authors. The New School’s prose thus epitomizes the under-
taking of the novels as a whole: the envisioning of a world projected into
the past, supported by the cultural authority of a venerable tradition, and
implicitly but emphatically distinguished from the realities of life in con-
temporary Hong Kong. There exists no better testimony to the importance
of the linguistic register in the New School’s imaginative project than the
role that language plays in Red Flower Society’s cultural burlesque. Here lan-
guage serves as a medium for the comedy of displacement both on the
narratorial level, where the text makes play of Xin Yan’s leaps from hack-
neyed classical tags to Cantonese vernacular, and on the diegetic level,
where the visiting heroes’ unfamiliarity with contemporary slang leads to
scandalous misunderstandings.44
Led by the works of Jin Yong and Liang Yusheng, New School martial
arts fiction vaulted to a popularity far beyond any ever enjoyed by the
works of the Guangdong School. It did not immediately or completely
replace this earlier mode of martial arts fiction; Sing pao continued to seri-
alize Zhongyi Xiangren’s tales well into the 1960s, and even Jin Yong’s own
Ming Pao carried fiction by Woshi Shanren in its early days. 45 But while
Guangdong School fiction maintained its modest niche, New School works
proliferated rapidly, often claiming first billing in the expanding fiction
supplements of the late 1950s and early 1960s. On January 1, 1957, Xiang-
gang shangbao began its serialization of the work that was to solidify Jin
Yong’s reputation as the new master of martial arts fiction, The Eagle-
Shooting Heroes. On March 29 of the same year, the paper began running

Early Fiction and Postwar Hong Kong 77

 Huang Hanxi and Hua Qiao’s Huang Feihong shifu zhuan (The story of our
master Huang Feihong), a series of biographical anecdotes reminiscent of
those published by Zhu Yuzhai in Gongshang ribao some ten years earlier.
This feature appeared not in the fiction supplement but alongside local
news and sports. Such placement is only logical, given the anecdotes’ sup-
posedly factual basis; nonetheless, Huang Feihong’s retreat to the sphere
of local interest illustrates the extent to which the Guangdong heroes have
ceded the imaginary empire of martial arts fiction to the new creations of
Jin Yong and his peers.

78 Chapter 3
 Chapter 4
National Passions

From The Eagle-Shooting Heroes to

The Giant Eagle and Its Companion

W ith The Eagle-Shooting Heroes and The Giant Eagle

and Its Companion, Jin Yong’s fiction emerges more
confidently from the nurturing and shaping soil of its contexts to assert a
new distinctiveness and independence. This independence manifests in
multiple modes: thematic, institutional, and critical, and it is the articula-
tion of the new thematic vision that is the primary focus of this chapter.
These two novels represent the consummation of that heroic nationalism
expressed through a dialectic of heartland versus geo-cultural margins,
which hints at an underlying consciousness of exile. At the same time, they
reveal the coalescence and increasing dominance of a second vision: an
essentialized and celebratory Chinese cultural identity. Gradually extricat-
ing itself from the dynastic and territorial concerns that govern the early
works, this vision of identity locates itself within a timeless, mandala-like
mythic geography; simultaneously, it asserts the priority of individual
emotional experience—expressed above all in romantic relationships—
over political and ethnic allegiances.
If the early works’ consciousness of loss and displacement can be
termed exilic, the later novels’ vision might be described as diasporic. The
word “diaspora” is close in sense to “exile” in its earliest usages; recent dis-
cussions, however, have differentiated the two on the basis of diaspora’s
more constructive aspects:

The key contrast with exile lies in diaspora’s emphasis on lateral and decen-
tered relationships among the dispersed. Exile suggests pining for home; dias-
pora suggests networks among compatriots. Exile may be solitary, but diaspora
is always collective. Diaspora suggests real or imagined relationships among

79
 scattered fellows, whose sense of community is sustained by forms of com-
munication and contact such as kinship, pilgrimage, trade, travel, and shared
culture (language, ritual, scripture, or print and electronic media). Some com-
munities in diaspora may agitate for return, but the normative force that
return is desirable or even possible is not a necessary part of diaspora today.1

Just as the current usage of the term “diaspora” has evolved from its ear-
lier deployment as a near synonym for “exile,” so the phenomena of mod-
ern diaspora, both as a mode of social organization and as a form of con-
sciousness, represent extensions and permutations of historic experiences
of exile. “As a form of cultural invention, exile often conjures up some-
thing new in the very act of looking backward.”2 The thematic evolution
of Jin Yong’s works can be understood in part as a transformation of the
early novels’ exilic metaphors and narratives of loss into a creative and cel-
ebratory vision of a Chinese cultural tradition conceived as untainted by
political struggle, manifested through individual subjectivity, and indepen-
dent of, though still emotionally tied to, the physical territory of the Chi-
nese empire.3 Yet the independence staked out in The Eagle-Shooting Heroes
and The Giant Eagle and Its Companion is not a thematic independence
alone. These two novels allowed the author to achieve institutional inde-
pendence through the establishment of a publishing enterprise—an enter-
prise that would quickly assume a diasporic configuration of its own. And
the developing publishing enterprise served as a vehicle for the enuncia-
tion of a critical project—an argument for the value of the genre of martial
arts fiction. The institutional and critical aspects of this pivotal juncture in
the development of Jin Yong’s enterprise will be further explored in this
study’s fifth and seventh chapters.

The Eagle-Shooting Heroes

Jin Yong’s Shediao yingxiong zhuan (titled in English as The Eagle-Shooting

Heroes, hereafter referred to as Heroes) began serialization in Xianggang
shangbao on January 1, 1957, the day after Royal Blood’s completion. It ran
for over two years, through May 19, 1959; toward the end of its serializa-
tion, the author’s Xueshan feihu (titled in English as Flying Fox on Snowy
Mountain, hereafter referred to as Flying Fox) appeared simultaneously in
Xin wanbao (February 9–June 18, 1959). Flying Fox stands out among Jin
Yong’s novels for its formalistic experimentation. The primary narrative
occupies the space of a single day; but within this one day, various char-

80 Chapter 4
acters narrate a sequence of events reaching back some hundred years, to
the downfall of Li Zicheng and the Ming/Qing transition. Each narrator’s
knowledge of and prejudice toward these past events differs from the
others’, causing the reader’s own perspective to shift constantly as the text
unfolds. The loyalties, debts, and vendettas of the narrated past come to a
head on the day of the primary narration, in a life-or-death battle between
the Flying Fox Hu Fei and Miao Renfeng—the killer of Hu Fei’s parents,
the father of his true love, and a valiant hero who has won his heartfelt
admiration. And the text, in its second formal peculiarity, ends abruptly
at the brink of a climactic resolution, with Hu Fei’s blade poised above his
foe’s body: “Would Hu Fei be able to return safely to [his lover’s] side?
Would he deliver this blow or not?” (244).
Flying Fox’s multi-standpoint flashback narration has elicited count-
less comparisons (not entirely apt) with Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, while
the suspended conclusion has generated debate over both the tale’s reso-
lution and the author’s technique.4 The novel has generated a dispropor-
tionate quantity of analysis and commentary, and (perhaps because of its
modest length as much as its narrative interest) was the first of Jin Yong’s
works to be translated into English.5 Its studied intricacy testifies to the
author’s ambitions for bringing his work into artistic territories hitherto
unexplored by the genre of martial arts fiction. The broad course of Jin
Yong’s future writing, however, and the basis of his fame, was laid not so
much by the compact and formally experimental Flying Fox as by Heroes—
epic in length, played out along labyrinthine narrative lines at least super-
ficially reminiscent of traditional episodic “chaptered” (zhanghui) fiction,
and focused less on overt narratorial pyrotechnics than on the adven-
tures, personalities, and emotional vicissitudes of strikingly conceived
protagonists. With this third novel, both the imagined world of Jin Yong’s
fiction and Jin Yong’s own career as author and publisher made dramatic
advances. Book and Sword and Royal Blood had met with enthusiastic recep-
tions; Heroes cemented and expanded the author’s reputation to such an
extent that by the end of its serialization, Jin Yong was willing to gamble
on his fame and his readers’ appetites by launching his own newspaper,
Ming Pao. Ming Pao’s first edition, featuring the initial installment of Heroes’
sequel, Shendiao xialü (titled in English as The Giant Eagle and Its Compan-
ion, hereafter referred to as Companion), appeared on May 20, 1959, the day
after Heroes’ completion. The loose linkages between the characters and
events of Heroes and those of Companions were continued in a third novel,
Yitian tulong ji (titled in English as The Heaven Sword and the Dragon Sabre,

National Passions 81
 hereafter referred to as Dragon Sabre) (serialized from July 6, 1961, to Sep-
tember 2, 1963), and the three novels of this “trilogy” constitute the fruit
of the author’s early maturity.
In Heroes the central concerns of Jin Yong’s earliest novels—the fate of
the Chinese empire in the face of foreign aggression, played out against
the background of the historical record and a geographical imaginary of
homeland and exilic periphery—are recapitulated, given their most posi-
tive affirmative articulation to date in the heroic and unconflicted charac-
ter of Guo Jing, yet modified in character and intensity by the increasing
prominence of another set of interlocking concerns: the elaboration of the
narrative labyrinth; a focus on the life history and personal development
of the protagonist; an exploration of passions and vendettas within the
Rivers and Lakes largely unrelated to the political struggle for the Chinese
nation; the association of the martial arts with the protagonist’s personal
journey as well as with the struggle for power; and the central role of a
secret text in both the articulation of the martial arts and the disposition
of the narrative. Intimations of these latter concerns appear even in Book
and Sword, and Royal Blood develops several of them to a degree that more
clearly anticipates Heroes. But it is in Heroes, the novel widely considered
the “classic” work of Jin Yong’s early oeuvre, that these elements achieve a
fuller development, a more complex interrelationship, and a prominence
that harbors the potential of overshadowing the narrative of dynastic
crisis.

Dynastic Struggle and Exile in The Eagle-Shooting Heroes

Heroes’ historical framework restages key elements from Book and Sword
and Royal Blood—foreign invasion, corruption within the Chinese court,
and a flight to the south. In this case, however, the setting is not the Qing
conquest of the Ming, but the Song dynasty’s (960–1279) struggles
against northern invaders. In 1127 CE, Jurchen tribesmen, who had estab-
lished themselves as the Jin dynasty, seized the Song capital of Kaifeng
and took the Huizong and Qinzong emperors hostage. One of the Hui-
zong emperor’s sons established himself as the Gaozong emperor with his
capital in Lin’an (modern Hangzhou), south of the Huai River. Half of the
nation’s territory now lay in enemy hands; but rather than fighting to
regain it, the emperor, according to popular tradition, heeded the counsel
of traitorous ministers, executed the heroic general Yue Fei, made shame-
ful peace with the barbarians, and gave himself up to luxury and pleasure
amidst the scenic beauty of the southern capital’s West Lake.6

82 Chapter 4
 Heroes’ primary narrative begins some decades later, in the reign of
the Southern Song Ningzong emperor (r. 1195–1224), with two refugees
from the north now dwelling in a village not far from Lin’an: Guo Xiao-
tian, a descendant of Guo Sheng, one of the 108 heroes of the Water Mar-
gin band; and Yang Tiexin, a descendant of Yang Zaixing, one of the gen-
erals who served under the martyred Yue Fei. The two heroes’ ancestries
both establish their identities as “goodfellows”—they practice the martial
skills handed down by their forefathers, have met through their involve-
ment in the society of the Rivers and Lakes, and have sworn the traditional
oaths of brotherhood—and frame these identities within a patriotism
defined by resistance to foreign aggression.7 Their patriotism establishes a
bond with a Daoist priest, Qiu Chuji of the Quanzhen (Complete Reality)
sect, whom they encounter as he returns from assassinating a Song minis-
ter engaged in treacherous alliance with the Jin. Qiu Chuji chooses names
for the sworn brothers’ unborn children: Guo Jing and Yang Kang. The
names allude to the Jingkang reign title, the year of the fall of the North-
ern Song. The children will enter the world marked with the sign of the
nation’s humiliation, and with the burden of redeeming this loss.
Guo Xiaotian and Yang Tiexin agree that if their children are of the
same sex they too will become sworn brothers or sisters, and if of different
sexes will be betrothed to one another. These plans are disrupted when the
two heroes are struck down by Song troops dispatched by the pro-Jin fac-
tions at court. Their wives escape the carnage. Yang Tiexin’s wife becomes
the concubine of a Jin prince, Wanyan Honglie. Guo Xiaotian’s wife flees
to the northern steppes, where she finds refuge with nomadic Mongol
tribesmen. Both women give birth to sons, who will grow up among two
different non-Chinese peoples. The youngsters’ pre-birth affinity is rein-
forced, however, when the Quanzhen Daoists and the Seven Eccentrics of
the South (Jiangnan qi guai), a sworn band of chivalrous fighters, agree to
settle a dispute by providing the young Yang Kang and Guo Jing with their
respective martial tutelage and matching them against one another when
they reach maturity.
Heroes further refines the schematic geography we first discerned in
Book and Sword. In place of the latter work’s binary division of the land-
scape into a heartland occupied by aliens and a region beyond the passes
roamed by displaced Chinese and sympathetic minorities, it offers a three-
fold division: a still-unconquered heartland in the south, the Chinese ter-
ritory usurped by the Jin, and the steppes beyond the empire’s borders in
which the Mongol tribes hold sway. It then distributes its paired protago-
nists among the latter two locales—the equivalent, within this scheme, of

National Passions 83
 Book and Sword’s allocation of its siblings to occupied China and the
unconquered outlands. The non-Han peoples dwelling in Heroes’ occu-
pied China and non-Chinese periphery display moral qualities commen-
surate with their relationship to the Chinese empire. The usurping Jin are
portrayed as treacherous, cruel, and corrupt, while the Mongols, roaming
free beyond the passes, appear as barbarian heroes—bloodthirsty, indeed;
uncouth and exotic; but admirable in their bravery, loyalty, frankness, and
largesse. It is only at the end of the novel, when they too set their ambi-
tions on Chinese territory, that they take on the villain’s role. The novel’s
two protagonists, in turn, enact the moral qualities allocated to their
respective foster peoples. Guo Jing, raised among the rude but valiant
Mongols, becomes the hero of the tale, redeeming his innate slow-witted-
ness through his perseverance and unshakeable sense of loyalty. Though
raised to high status among the Mongols for his devotion and military
service, he sets himself against them when they threaten his ancestral
home. Yang Kang, raised as the scion of a Jin prince, is far more clever than
Guo Jing, but cowardly and self-serving. When his natural father reap-
pears and reveals the truth of his birth, Yang Kang rejects him—not out of
affection for the man who has actually raised him, as might be expected,
but out of horror at Yang Tiexin’s poverty—and dreams of attaining yet
greater wealth and power when the Jin complete their conquest of the
Song.8
Like Book and Sword, then, Heroes dramatizes the choices of Chinese
placed among non-Chinese peoples. Yang Kang’s fatal weakness, like that
of Book and Sword’s Qianlong emperor, is his willingness to “accept a vil-
lain as his father” (ren zei zuo fu), while Guo Jing’s crowning virtue is a loy-
alty akin to that of Chen Jialuo and Yuan Chengzhi. The culminating
expression of this loyalty occurs at the end of the novel, when Guo Jing,
having learned of the Khan’s imminent attack against the Song, rushes to
the strategic city of Xiangyang. He finds the military official in charge
cowardly and inept, and he takes over the defense himself, aided by the
people of the city who flock to his banner, young and old, in a sponta-
neous display of patriotism. In the context of dynastic struggle, then, the
China to which the novel’s protagonist owes his loyalty is a territorial
imperative, organically linked to a protective ardor on the part of its (rather
faceless) natives, but markedly disjunct from the interests and actions of
the agents of the state as such. For all the devotion Guo Jing commits to
it, and the eminence accorded to this devotion by the novel’s narrative
structure, China in its dynastic aspect—China in its role as an element in
political struggle—seems remarkably amorphous, even empty of content,

84 Chapter 4
when compared with a second, “cultural” model, which we shall shortly
examine.
The Mongol army attacking Xiangyang is commanded by Tuo Lei, Guo
Jing’s own longtime comrade and sworn brother. Realizing that his mili-
tia, for all their zeal, will never hold up against the seasoned Mongol war-
riors, Guo Jing resolves to assassinate Tuo Lei and so throw the attackers
into confusion. Just as he is about to strike, however, a messenger arrives
to report the Khan’s illness and order the Mongols’ withdrawal. Tuo Lei
and Guo Jing return together to the north for a final interview with the
dying Khan. Narrative sleight of hand thus permits Guo Jing to demon-
strate his devotion to nation over personal loyalties without forcing him
to pay the unchivalric price of actually murdering his sworn brother. It
also allows Heroes to end on a markedly different note than its predeces-
sors. Book and Sword closes with the failure of Chen Jialuo’s dream of a
Ming restoration, Royal Blood with the imminent triumph of the Qing, and
both with the protagonists’ flight beyond the borders of their lost home-
land. Heroes, in contrast, avoids decisive confrontation of the fact of the
Mongols’ historic conquest of the Chinese empire. It ends on an elegiac
note, to be sure, as Guo Jing and his beloved contemplate the lives sacri-
ficed to the Khan’s ambition; but the fall of the Southern Song is deferred,
and Guo Jing’s patriotism rewarded, through the invaders’ providential
retreat.

A Second Imaginary

Heroes’ evasion of the historical inevitability of the Mongol conquest

allows a celebration of Chinese patriotism while withdrawing from the
urgency of the first two novels’ confrontations with dynastic change and
the experience of exile. This withdrawal appears also, and perhaps even
more strikingly, in the novel’s elaboration of a second geographic imagi-
nary, a second narrative complex, and a second vision of China’s identity,
linked to, yet existing at a definite remove from, the tale of the struggles
between the Song, the Jin, and the Mongols.
The center of the novel’s second geography is Huashan, one of the five
sacred peaks of China, and the center of the second narrative complex is
a competition that took place here years before the novel’s primary narra-
tive begins—a mountaintop battle known as “The Dispute of the Swords
on Huashan” (Huashan lunjian), a contest for the title of supreme mar-
tial artist under heaven. Five masters joined the contest: the Heterodoct of
the East, Huang Yaoshi; the Venom of the West, Ouyang Feng; the Emperor

National Passions 85
 of the South, Duan Zhixing; the Beggar of the North, Hong Qigong; and
the Plenipotent of the Center, Wang Chongyang, founder of the Quanzhen
Daoist sect. After seven days and seven nights of struggle, Wang Chong-
yang established mastery over his rivals, winning as his prize not only the
title of supreme martial artist but also a treasure over which the denizens
of the Rivers and Lakes had warred bitterly for years—a manual revealing
the most profound principles and invincible techniques of the martial arts,
The Veritable Scripture of the Nine Yin (Jiuyin zhenjing).
The circumstances of the Dispute of the Swords, its significance, and
the degree to which it saturates the events of the novel, emerge only grad-
ually as the narrative unfolds. The novel’s text relates Guo Jing’s life and
adventures and the struggle between the Song, the Jin, and the Mongols in
normative chronological order. As this narrative (which we may call pri-
mary in the sense of its providing the novel’s most conspicuous narrative
and chronological framework) proceeds, it offers, through analeptic inter-
ludes (flashbacks), incremental glimpses of the constellation of characters
and events surrounding the Dispute and the Veritable Scripture. When the
Seven Eccentrics, traveling to the Mongolian steppes to train the young
Guo Jing, encounter the ghoulish Blackwind Demons (Heifeng shuang-
sha), Bronze Corpse Chen Xuanfeng and his wife Iron Corpse Mei Chao-
feng, the Eccentrics’ leader tells of his earlier battle with these villains; the
narrator then briefly sketches out how the pair stole the Scripture from
their teacher, Eastern Heterodoct Huang Yaoshi (chapter 4, revised edi-
tion). Guo Jing encounters Mei Chaofeng again on the steppes (chapter 6),
and then at the manor of a Jin prince (chapter 10). During the latter epi-
sode, Mei Chaofeng’s recollections and the narratorial voice combine to
reveal both unexplained aspects of the earlier encounters and further
details of the theft of the scriptures; at the same time, Huang Rong, the
mischievous lass with whom Guo Jing has become romantically involved,
declares herself to be Huang Yaoshi’s daughter and thus Mei Chaofeng’s
Swordsister. Some while later, another character, Qiu Qianren, offers the
first intimations of the Dispute of the Swords and of the Veritable Scripture’s
role in this event, and suggests as well that a second Dispute will soon
occur (chapter 13). It is only when Guo Jing travels to Peach Blossom Isle
(Taohua dao), Huang Yaoshi’s mysterious refuge, that he hears from the
eccentric master Zhou Botong something like the full story of the Scripture
and the Dispute (chapters 16–17); but Zhou Botong’s tale, while answer-
ing some questions, presents many new puzzles about the history of and
ongoing relationships between the masters who met upon Huashan and
their present-day disciples.

86 Chapter 4
 There is no need to rehearse here all the details of the plot or the com-
plexities of its narrative presentation. The point is that as the novel pro-
ceeds, the reader gradually becomes privy to information that allows him
or her to reconstruct the tale of the Dispute of the Swords and the Verita-
ble Scripture. The Dispute occurred twenty-five years in the past; the narra-
tive’s revelations, however, concern not merely these long-gone events in
themselves but also the extent to which they shape and provide connec-
tions between the at first seemingly unrelated characters and events of the
narrative present. A second meeting upon Huashan, moreover, emerges as
the climax toward which the novel is tending. And indeed, this second
Dispute takes place in the last chapters, immediately prior to Guo Jing’s
final confrontation with the Mongols.
The narrative strategy through which the novel presents the story of
the Dispute of the Swords upon Huashan intensifies the reader’s experi-
ence of the episode’s significance. The story is, in and of itself, epic in pro-
portions and mythic in its imagery. Chronologically it envelops the events
of the primary narrative, both preceding their commencement and paral-
leling their resolution. But the affective significance inherent in the events
themselves is magnified by the indirect, gradual, and accretive technique
of their narrative presentation. The reticence with which the text affords
knowledge of these events, the prolongation of both the reader’s and the
characters’ experience of understanding, grants to the events the stature
and resonance of a revelation; the technique resembles that of a mystery
novel, in which the dynamic of discovery affords compelling significance
to events that might attract much less interest if presented as a simple
chronology of fact. This technique of back-narration, the deepening of the
narrative through the cumulative revelation of an ever-expanding complex
of antecedent events, becomes a hallmark of Jin Yong’s fictional technique.
Book and Sword first intimates the technique with the episode of Mamir
and the desert necropolis; Royal Blood moves it toward the center of the
novel, with the tale of the Lord of the Golden Serpent; 9 Flying Fox on Snowy
Mountain deploys the device almost to formalistic excess. In Heroes, the
technique helps imbue the events, characters, and locales of the Dispute
of the Swords with an affective power that overshadows that of the “pri-
mary” events and their straightforward linear narration.
Huashan and the five masters who meet in combat thereon suggest
a geographic imaginary disassociated, and quite different in character,
from the primary narrative’s division of the map according to ethnic affil-
iation and political control. The actual Huashan is located in the modern
People’s Republic’s province of Shaanxi, and at the supposed historical

National Passions 87
 moment of the novel’s primary events, this area is already under Jin rule.
It is possible to trace certain connections between the five masters and the
political map: the Emperor of the South, for instance, Duan Zhixing, is the
ruler of the non-Chinese kingdom of Dali, while the Venom of the West,
Ouyang Feng, hails from the non-Han deserts of some distant occidental
region. But such associations are partial and nonschematic, and just as the
Dispute of the Swords bears no direct relation to the saga of dynastic
struggle sketched out above, so Huashan and the five masters’ emblematic
locations are free of any clear association with that ethnic and political
geography of homeland, occupied territory, and borderlands which acts as
the stage for the sagas of Guo Jing and Yang Kang. The masters mark out
instead the compass points of traditional cosmography, and the mountain
serves as the cosmic axis where the fate of the world is decided. Mountain
and masters together construct a world imagined as mandala. The mythic
contours of this world—this jianghu, “Rivers and Lakes,” existing along-
side the jiangshan, “rivers and mountains,” of the political struggle—accord
with the transcendent, ahistorical concerns of realization and mastery
that lie at its heart.
Perhaps the most striking representative of these concerns is the
character Zhou Botong, the younger Swordbrother of Wang Chongyang,
founder of the Quanzhen sect and victor in the first Dispute of the Swords.
Zhou Botong’s nickname is “Old Bratkin” (Lao wantong), an appellation
referring to his exaggeratedly childish temperament—his fascination with
games and practical jokes, his rapid swings between delight and peevish-
ness, his utter disinterest in propriety and convention, his capacity for
undivided absorption in the pleasures of the moment. The matter most
likely to compel his absorption is the study and practice of the martial
arts. As he declares to Guo Jing:

“The study of the martial arts offers inexhaustible pleasure. There’s really
nothing in this life of ours that’s nearly as much fun. Sure, there are amuse-
ments aplenty in this wide world, but sooner or later they all turn out to be
pretty dull. It’s only the martial arts that get more and more fun the more you
play!”(666).

Wang Chongyang entrusts upon his death the Veritable Scripture of the
Nine Yin to Zhou Botong, enjoining Zhou never to practice the arts
inscribed therein. Huang Yaoshi, playing on Zhou Botong’s passion for
games, tricks Zhou into letting Huang’s new wife take a look at the second
of the Scripture’s two constituent scrolls. When Zhou Botong discovers

88 Chapter 4
that the canny young woman has in fact memorized the text, he flies into
a passion and destroys his own copy. He later travels to Peach Blossom Isle
and becomes embroiled with Huang Yaoshi in a contest for the first half,
still in Huang’s possession. When Guo Jing encounters Zhou Botong, the
contest has already continued for fifteen years. Zhou Botong dwells in a
cave, which he has vowed not to leave until he has bested Huang Yaoshi.
Huang Yaoshi, for his part, delivers food and drink to his guest, and
refrains from seizing the Scripture when Zhou must step away to relieve
himself. Every day and night for fifteen years they have matched their mar-
tial arts and internal powers against one another. The contest is not for
mastery of the Veritable Scripture’s potent arts per se: Zhou Botong reli-
giously respects his pledge to safeguard the scroll while refraining from
practicing these arts himself, and Huang Yaoshi has vowed to destroy the
Scripture as a sacrifice to the spirit of his wife, who died trying to recon-
struct the text (and giving birth to Huang Rong) after Mei Chaofeng and
her lover had stolen the original copy. What drives the two masters in their
endless contest is the vindication of their honor through the fulfillment
of their respective vows, and the sheer fascination of pitting their skills
against an equal.
Zhou Botong, whose love of the martial arts is not sated by the daily
combats with Huang Yaoshi, spends his leisure moments inventing new
techniques. Inspired by the teachings of softness and emptiness in the Dao-
ist classic The Way and Its Virtue (Daode jing), he develops a style he dubs
“Empty Radiance Boxing” (Kongming quan). Bored with his solitary life
in the cave, he further devises the astonishing ability to let the two sides
of his body operate independently and battle one another. When Guo Jing
arrives upon the island, Zhou Botong, won over by his earnest simplicity,
swears brotherhood with the youth and teaches him his new techniques.
Then, consumed with curiosity about the Scripture’s arts and delighted
with the thought of playing a practical joke on his new friend, he has Guo
Jing memorize the contents of both scrolls—without revealing to him the
identity of the texts he is learning.
The text refrains from giving the Old Bratkin’s pranks unqualified
endorsement. Zhou Botong himself reports how his elder Swordbrother
chastised him for his heedless addiction to the raptures of martial practice.
Wang Chongyang’s critique is couched in terms of the Daoist ideals of
quietude and nonaction (wuwei); an opposite critique, privileging patri-
otic service over Zhou Botong’s self-centered enthusiasms, is implicit in
the novel’s choice of Guo Jing—who is both passionate and painstakingly
literal in the discharge of his responsibilities to his friends, his compatri-

National Passions 89
 ots, and his nation—as its chief protagonist. Nonetheless, Zhou Botong
remains one of the novel’s most memorable supporting characters, and he
serves as a spokesman for a radical vision of the martial arts: as not merely
a tool in the service of public allegiances or even personal gain, but as a
realm of delight, self-justifying and self-sufficient. The martial arts in this
guise represent the quintessential practice of a jianghu independent of the
political imperatives of jiangshan.

The Martial Arts, the Scripture, and Peach Blossom Isle

Just as Jin Yong’s previous novels offer foreshadowings of Heroes’ narrative

construction, so too they provide rudimentary versions of one of the pri-
mary constituents of this novel’s plot: the protagonist’s gradual matura-
tion in the practice and mastery of the martial arts. Book and Sword’s Chen
Jialuo enters the novel as an accomplished martial artist, trained beyond
the passes and outside the narrative perimeter of the text. When he exits
at the novel’s close, having failed in his personal and political endeavors,
he remains in much the same condition as that in which he began: the
episode of his learning new martial skills from the ancient scroll, rich as
it is in symbolic resonance, effects revolutionary change in neither the for-
tunes of his enterprise nor his already eminent stature as a martial artist.
Royal Blood’s Yuan Chengzhi, in contrast, first appears as a mere child, and
matures into a supreme martial master and leader of the society of the
Rivers and Lakes before the novel’s end. The text devotes considerable
attention to the process of his martial education. A great deal of this edu-
cation occurs under the tutelage of his master Mu Renqing, in the secure
geographical retreat of Huashan and in a narrative sequence largely segre-
gated from the events that occur after he leaves the mountain. It is during
his years upon the mountain, however, that he discovers the remains of
the Young Lord of the Golden Serpent and his mysterious Secret Scroll.
The Secret Scroll then serves as the basis for a part of his continuing
martial development, while the unraveling of the Young Lord’s debts of
passion and vengeance motivates a significant portion of the subsequent
narrative. Heroes expands upon this dimension of Royal Blood’s narrative
structure and establishes it as the pattern for much of Jin Yong’s later fic-
tion: Guo Jing’s gradual mastery of the martial arts, preparing him for the
final battle upon Huashan that proves his mastery, is interwoven with his
romance with Huang Rong, his relationship with his doomed sworn
brother Yang Kang, and the struggle for the fate of the Chinese realm, as
one of the primary strands of the novel’s plot.

90 Chapter 4
 The martial arts structure the experiences of Guo Jing and other char-
acters in several discrete ways. The complex hierarchical relationships that
define the Martial Grove in its social aspect provide the ground for many
of the moral and emotional conflicts that drive the plot. Different styles of
martial arts reflect and shape different individuals’ distinctive personalities.
And the gradual mastery of martial skills serves as the vehicle for broader
processes of emotional, intellectual, and spiritual maturation.10 Jin Yong
represents the martial arts in this last aspect as inextricably linked with
other practices and principles of the Chinese cultural tradition; and a cru-
cial aspect of this linkage is the role of texts and textuality in education,
both martial and otherwise.
The interlocking of philosophical principle, textual tradition, culture-
specific arts, and martial realization emerges in the scene where Guo Jing
witnesses a contest between Huang Yaoshi and Ouyang Feng. On the face
of it, the masters’ contest is not martial at all, but rather a duet between
Huang on the flute (xiao) and Ouyang on an iron-stringed zither (zheng).
As Guo Jing listens, however, he realizes that the music serves as a channel
for the rivals’ deadly cunning and awesome internal power. At this junc-
ture he recalls Zhou Botong’s Daoist-inspired “Empty Radiance Boxing”:

Now it seemed to Guo Jing as he listened that Huang Yaoshi would soon be
crushed by Ouyang Feng’s thunderous and unremitting onslaught. But the
music of the flute flashed and darted hither and thither, slipping through the
slightest break in the zither’s sound. After a while the zither gradually slack-
ened; the song of the flute, for its part, swelled with ever more fervent emo-
tion. Guo Jing suddenly thought of a couplet from the “Empty Radiance Box-
ing” formula that Zhou Botong had taught him: “The hard cannot endure for
long, the weak’s defense cannot be strong.” “The zither’s going to have a
chance to strike back,” he thought. And indeed, just as the music of the jade
flute soared into flight, with a sudden and mighty clamor the iron zither again
brandished its awesome tones.
Although Guo Jing had learned the boxing formula by heart, he was by
nature rather unperceptive, while Zhou Botong was not particularly good at
explanations. He had understood scarcely a tenth part of its inner meaning.
But now as he listened to Huang Yaoshi and Ouyang Feng’s musical battle,
their strikes and parries, advances and retreats all seemed to be in subtle accord
with the formula he had memorized. He realized, to his great joy, that through
the incessant combat of these two musical forces, he was gradually beginning
to grasp some of the secrets of those parts which he had not previously under-
stood. Guo Jing had also learned by heart the text of the first and second

National Passions 91
 scrolls of the Veritable Scripture of the Nine Yin. He suddenly had the dim sense
that certain phrases from the Scripture somehow corresponded to the music
of the zither and the song of the flute. But the text of the Scripture was pro-
found and abstruse, and he had never had it expounded to him in any detail;
even if he were to puzzle over it for a year or two, he would find it hard to make
any sense of it. Now, with the waves of music assailing his ears, no sooner did
he think of the Scripture than his mind was thrown into turmoil. Realizing the
peril, he quickly shied away, and didn’t dare let his thoughts stray again toward
the text of the Scripture. (714–715)

We see again, as we did in the case of Chen Jialuo’s learning from the
Zhuangzi, that the text is a necessary but not a sufficient cause of under-
standing. The text uninterpreted is meaningless, a source of confusion and
even of peril. Verbal explanation may contribute to the elucidation of the
text, but real understanding depends on the illumination of the text by
nontextual, nonverbal information: images, sounds, and other sensory
impressions, mediated through individual psychic and somatic experi-
ence. Yet such experience, conversely, would apparently remain inert with-
out the structures of language, principle, and cultural reference that the
text is uniquely capable of providing.
The most important text within Heroes is the Veritable Scripture of the
Nine Yin. Although the quoted passage shows Guo Jing unprepared to
digest or utilize the knowledge that Zhou Botong’s mischievousness has
recently bestowed upon him, very soon in the plot’s development the
Scripture comes to play a key role in his fortunes. Forced to face Ouyang
Feng’s nephew Ouyang Ke in a series of trials for Huang Rong’s hand, he
wins the contest and astounds all present by faultlessly reciting the text of
the second half of the Scripture. Zhou Botong subsequently reveals to Guo
Jing that the text he has learned is in fact the Veritable Scripture of the Nine
Yin, declares to Huang Yaoshi that he has given him the Scripture by pre-
senting him with Guo Jing as a son-in-law, and impulsively destroys the
original text. Through the remainder of the novel, the text Guo Jing has
memorized serves him as a guide to the further development of his inner
power and martial skills—most notably when he employs its teachings to
heal himself of a grievous wound and, in the process, brings his powers to
an unprecedented level. And yet Guo Jing’s relationship to the Scripture
has now become even more intimate than that of reader to text or practi-
tioner to manual. Once Zhou Botong has destroyed the only written copy
of the text, Huang Yaoshi attempts to send Guo Jing to his death in order
to fulfill his vow to sacrifice the Scripture to his late wife’s spirit; Ouyang

92 Chapter 4
Feng and his nephew, for their part, try to kidnap the young hero in order
to possess the Scripture’s secrets for themselves. As the Old Bratkin sug-
gests, Guo Jing has now himself become, in some fundamental sense, the
Scripture; the text is incarnate in the man.
In sum, then, the importance of the Veritable Scripture of the Nine Yin
lies in its function as a narrative device, driving the plot forward through
the narration of the protagonist’s encounters with this text and simultane-
ously “backward” through the analeptic narration of the volume’s origins;
and also in its function as a figural device, weaving together the discourses
of textuality, the martial arts, cultural knowledge, and personal matura-
tion through the internalization and embodiment of such knowledge. In
terms of the novel’s geographic imaginary, a similarly comprehensive
role is played by the figure of the Peach Blossom Isle. Peach Blossom
Isle’s function within the text not only reinforces our understanding of
the ties between the martial arts, more general cultural knowledge, and
the bildungsroman of the protagonist’s growth but also, through com-
parison with the geographic imaginary of the earlier novels, allows us to
measure the direction and scope of the development of Jin Yong’s fic-
tional imaginary.
Book and Sword’s generalized vision of the lands beyond the passes as
a realm of exile and refuge from political disaster assumes a more definite
form in Royal Blood, concretized as the specific locale of the island in the
southern seas to which Yuan Chengzhi leads his companions. Huang
Yaoshi’s Peach Blossom Isle can be seen as playing a similar role within
the plotting and geography of Heroes. After the second Dispute of the
Swords, Guo Jing, Huang Rong, and Huang Yaoshi descend from Huashan
and learn of the Mongols’ impending attack upon the Song. Huang Yaoshi
counsels Guo Jing and Huang Rong to speed to Xiangyang to lead the
defense while he returns to his island to await them: “Once the deed is
accomplished, return as we have planned. Even if the court should offer
position and reward, pay them no heed” (1554). The Mongols do in fact
withdraw from Xiangyang, although their retreat, as we have seen, is prov-
idential and temporary at best. In the novel’s final scene, Guo Jing and
Huang Rong leave the Mongol camp, sadly surveying the devastation of
war; and the clear implication is that they are returning not to the embat-
tled Song realm but to the haven of Peach Blossom Isle.
The novel’s deferral of the Song realm’s ultimate defeat makes the
Isle’s status as a haven in exile less pronounced, perhaps, than that of its
predecessors. Even more significant, though, is another distinction: the
fact that Peach Blossom Isle plays a prominent role within the unfolding

National Passions 93
 of the narrative. Yuan Chengzhi’s southern island exists both outside the
boundaries of the empire and beyond the limits of the tale; we know of it
only as the place for which the hero departs once his adventures have
played out to a conclusion. Peach Blossom Isle, in contrast, serves as the
stage for extended portions of the novel’s narrative and crucial events in
the unfolding of the plot. It is the site for dramatic conflicts between the
masters of the Martial Grove, their comrades and families, and for signif-
icant episodes in the chief protagonist’s maturation—through encounters
with the transformative text of the Scripture, and through interwoven devel-
opments in his romantic history. The earlier novels’ congruence between
the limits of the narrative and the borders of the empire has loosened.
Peach Blossom Isle extends the second imaginary’s claims upon the text
beyond what has already been established by Huashan and the masters of
the five directions. A locale poised on the waters outside the empire’s
boundary occupies significant narrative space with tales of a world of
Rivers and Lakes only tenuously associated with the fate of the “rivers and
mountains.”
Peach Blossom Isle’s very name declares its apolitical status, invoking
Tao Qian’s (365–427) classical fable of Peach Blossom Spring, the timeless
and idyllic community of refugees from political strife. The island, lying
somewhere in the Eastern Sea off Zhejiang province, presents a riot of color
and gusts of enrapturing scents to those who draw near, but is shunned by
local sailors for its mystery and hidden menace. Strangers who venture
onto its shores are lost within moments, bemazed by labyrinthine paths
and byways patterned on the Eight Diagram Formation of the wizard
Zhuge Liang. Huang Yaoshi has made his home here, not in retreat from
political disaster but in avoidance of social convention. Paired though he
is with Ouyang Feng, his “Heterodoxy” is quite different from his inveter-
ate foe’s “ Venom,” motivated not by cruelty and lust for power but by
contemptuous disregard for the vulgar world. Here on his isle he indulges
his passion for the esoteric arts. In Zhou Botong’s words, “old Heterodoct
Huang is terribly smart. The zither, chess, calligraphy and painting; medi-
cine, divination, astrology and physiognomy; even agriculture and hydrau-
lics, economics and military strategy—there’s not a one he doesn’t know,
not a one he hasn’t studied to perfection” (671). Although not explicitly
flagged here as “Chinese,” Huang Yaoshi’s arts are in effect the emblem-
atic cultural accomplishments of Chinese civilization. Heroes may be set at
a moment of crisis in Chinese dynastic history, and a major strand of its
protagonist’s destiny is played out against the fate of the empire; in Peach

94 Chapter 4
Blossom Isle, however, Jin Yong imagines the possibility of a Chinese cul-
tural terrain, beautiful, perilously entrancing perhaps, yet inexhaustibly
fertile, existing in timeless independence from the vicissitudes of the polit-
ical struggle.
The fact that Peach Blossom Isle is home not only to Huang Yaoshi,
the master and embodiment of the riches of Chinese culture, but also to
his daughter Huang Rong, Guo Jing’s love interest, points to an intersec-
tion of Heroes’ romantic elements with its culturalist themes. And indeed
the narrative of Guo Jing’s romantic travails not only runs parallel to that
of his martial development but is deeply implicated with it as well. Huang
Rong’s mother, exhausted by the stress of trying to reproduce the lost
Scripture from memory, dies giving birth to her daughter. Huang Rong is
therefore in some sense the Veritable Scripture incarnate in female form,
and so (as well as through the conventional logic of opposite personali-
ties that accordingly attract) the perfect match for the text’s male master
Guo Jing. A conjoining of the textual, the martial, the feminine, and the
erotic informs not only Guo Jing’s history but also those of Huang Yaoshi
(who pines for his lost bride) and Mei Chaofeng (who simultaneously
steals the Scripture and elopes with her Swordbrother, and who later car-
ries the stolen text inscribed on a scroll made from her slain husband’s
skin). Heroes thus offers rich opportunities for further analysis of the role
of romance. Rather than availing itself of these opportunities, however,
the next section of this chapter turns to even more fertile ground: Heroes’
sequel, The Giant Eagle and Its Companion, the novel widely regarded as Jin
Yong’s boldest and most focused exploration of the theme of love within
the universe of martial arts fiction.

The Giant Eagle and Its Companion

Companion’s story features Guo Jing, Huang Rong, and other characters
from the successful Heroes, while focusing on the next generation, above
all on Yang Guo, the son of Guo Jing’s ill-fated sworn brother Yang Kang.
In its broadest contours, Yang Guo’s story could be said to parallel Guo
Jing’s. A fatherless, displaced, and unpromising child undergoes a series of
bizarre and perilous encounters that refine his character and build his
martial skills to the point where he takes his place as the foremost cham-
pion of the age. His adventures culminate in a triumphant defense of the
Chinese nation against foreign aggressors, after which he withdraws from
the stage hand in hand with the warrior maid to whom he has pledged his

National Passions 95
 heart. A summary at this level of abstraction, of course, could apply to any
of hundreds of works of martial arts fiction. More importantly, it obscures
Jin Yong’s deliberate creation of Yang Guo’s character, and of the motives
impelling his maturation, as diametrically opposed to Guo Jing’s. “Guo
Jing is simple and sincere, Yang Guo passionate and unrestrained,” as the
author notes in comparing the protagonists of the three works in his tril-
ogy.11 While Guo Jing’s journey is a dogged progress through challenges
that polish and reveal a solid core of honesty and righteousness never far
from the surface, Yang Guo’s is that of the shaping, through wounding
and healing, of an emotionally and morally complex character. Midway
through the novel, Huang Rong speaks of “the two insoluble knots” in
Yang Guo’s heart (838): one, his birthright, is the mystery of his father’s
death, and the other, tied fast early in the course of the narrative, is his
romantic entanglement with the fey Xiao Longnü. On the narrative level
the tortuous quest to loosen these two knots sets Yang Guo directly against
Guo Jing and Huang Rong, who are implicated in Yang Kang’s demise and
who stand as guardians of the social and moral norms threatened by Yang
and Xiao Longnü’s relationship. On the level of characterization this quest
reveals Yang Guo as “passionate” both in the broadest sense—sensitive,
willful, and vehement—and in a narrower sense, profoundly invested in
the arena of romance. Yang’s fire and psychological complexity make Com-
panion a milestone in the evolution of Jin Yong’s successive novels toward
a more central interest in the depiction of character as such. And through
Yang Guo, Companion affirms a vision of romance—in the sense of hetero-
sexual sentimental and erotic relationships—as paramount in the portrayal
of character and the expression of individual identity.
Some of the differences between Heroes and Companion are blazoned
in the two novels’ titles.12 The shared “eagle,” which declares their affilia-
tion, is paired with “hero(es)” in the first instance and with “chivalric com-
panion(s)” or “lover(s)” (xialü) in the second. More specifically, the first
novel’s title refers to the feat of arms by which the young Guo Jing proves
his strength and skill, felling two black eagles with a single arrow from his
massive bow. “Eagle-shooting” is thus an iconic act of martial prowess;
one that does not, however, remain unencumbered by romantic entangle-
ments. When Genghis Khan offers Guo Jing a reward for his deed, the lad
begs him to release his daughter from an unwelcome betrothal—a request
into which the Mongol princess reads more than the naive Guo Jing per-
haps intends. Guo Jing and the princess then watch as a white eagle kills
itself rather than survive the mate that perished under the black eagles’

96 Chapter 4
claws. They rescue two orphaned white eagle chicks and rear them together,
an implicit symbol of their own prospective pairing. But when Guo Jing
returns to the central plains, the princess presents the eagles to him as a
gift, and the birds subsequently serve as the companions and allies of Guo
Jing and his beloved Huang Rong.
In this guise they reappear in Companion, heralding in fact Guo Jing
and Huang Rong’s first arrival in the narrative. Toward the end of the tale,
the eagles replay their parents’ fate from the earlier novel. When one of the
pair is fatally wounded while rescuing Guo and Huang’s youngest daugh-
ter, Guo Xiang, the other brains itself against a cliff, preferring death over
life without its mate. This avian act of sacrifice is modeled on an incident
celebrated by the Jin dynasty poet Yuan Haowen (1190–1257), who erected
a tomb to a pair of geese, one of whom had escaped a hunter’s nets only
to kill itself out of loyalty to its slaughtered companion. Yuan Haowen’s
plaintive lyric upon this occasion becomes a persistent refrain within
Companion, recited by several of its lovelorn characters.13 And the novel’s
human protagonists serially seek to recapitulate the birds’ ultimate expres-
sion of obsessive devotion. Guo Jing’s younger daughter Guo Xiang flings
herself over the cliff to follow Yang Guo, for whom she has conceived a
hopeless adolescent passion; Yang Guo has made the jump rather than live
without his beloved Xiao Longnü; and Xiao Longnü has hurled herself into
the invisible depths below Heartbreak Cliff in an attempt to conceal her
imminent death from Yang Guo, whom she knows will refuse to live on if
certain of her demise. The martial aspect of the eagle is present in Com-
panion as well, in Yang Guo’s apotheosis as the “knight of the divine eagle”
(shendiao xia), aided and mentored in his chivalric wanderings by a giant,
ill-favored raptor. The publisher’s English title, The Giant Eagle and Its Com-
panion, renders Shendiao xialü in this sense. But the Chinese title can
equally be read in the plural, as “divine eagles, chivalric companions,” sug-
gesting Guo Jing and Huang Rong’s paired birds and their various human
counterparts discussed here; and this reading would weight the interpre-
tation of the word lü towards “(romantic) companions,” that is, “lovers.”
The ambiguity is presumably intentional. The dominating role of roman-
tic passions within Companion raises the eagle’s value as a symbol of erotic
devotion—a more grandiose version of Yuan Haowen’s goose or the con-
ventional mandarin duck—to a prominence it lacks in Heroes. And it is the
relationship between the erotic and the heroic, their interwoven roles in
the formation of the protagonist’s character, which serves as the novel’s
central thread.14

National Passions 97
 The Tomb of the Living Dead and the
Jade Maiden’s Heart Scripture

As this study’s analysis of Jin Yong’s earlier novels has focused in good
part on the works’ evolving geographic imaginary and on the narrative
and symbolic roles of the martial arts, it will be useful to begin the further
exploration of Companion along similar lines. How does the deepening
interest in individual experience and the arena of romance affect the organ-
ization of the novel’s fictional landscapes? And what are the fate and func-
tion of martial practice under the recalibrated thematic agenda?
The governing structures of Heroes’ geography—the political division
of the map between a Chinese heartland and an alien periphery, and a
more mythic organization of space around an axial sacred mountain—
reappear in Companion. The former continues to find its chief representa-
tion in the city of Xiangyang, where Guo Jing defied the Mongol invaders
in the first novel’s final chapters. He leaves Peach Blossom Isle to resume
this post in the sequel, holding the line against the foe through the years
of the narrative, and is joined here, at the end, by Yang Guo for another cli-
mactic confrontation and a victory over the Mongols even more resound-
ing than the first. Heroes’ Huashan, likewise, plays a prominent role in
Companion’s mythic geography and its associated narrative of martial and
moral development. At a key point in his wanderings, Yang Guo finds his
way to this mountain and witnesses the final duel between Venom of the
West Ouyang Feng and Beggar of the North Hong Qigong. The experience
not only deepens his mastery of the martial arts—in the later stages of the
contest the exhausted combatants employ him as a living model for their
rival techniques—but also, as he watches the inveterate foes die in a final
flash of illumination and a mutual embrace, opens his eyes to the vanity
of striving and the preciousness of human life. At the close of the novel,
after victory at Xiangyang, Yang Guo and Guo Jing return together to Hua-
shan and are recognized as Ouyang Feng’s and Hong Qigong’s successors,
the Madman of the West and the Knight (xia) of the North, respectively,
in a reconstituted pentarchy of the martial universe.
But Huashan’s dominance of Companion’s mythic terrain is far from
absolute. The sacred mountain’s heaven-piercing heights are mirrored and
paradoxically overshadowed by its topographic inverse—the recesses of a
cave. While various grottoes, tombs, and holes have played significant
narrative and symbolic roles in Heroes, and the earlier novels as well, in
Companion they claim priority as an alternate, subterranean version of the
world navel, characterized by darkness, cold, and death; by the emotional

98 Chapter 4
pain of loss and rejection; by the feminine, the erotic, and the ultimately
redemptive energies of desire.
This constellation of images and significations is foreshadowed in
Yang Guo’s first appearance; he is discovered when a battle between char-
acters driven mad by thwarted passions leads to the abandoned kiln
where he lives as an orphan. But fuller elaboration of the symbolism of
the underground lair comes slightly later in the narrative, with the Tomb
of the Living Dead (Huosiren mu). The Tomb of the Living Dead lies adja-
cent to Zhongnanshan, the seat of the Quanzhen Daoist sect founded by
Wang Chongyang, victor at the first Dispute of the Swords on Huashan. As
a young man, Wang was a leader of Han loyalist resistance against the Jin
invaders, and he had disguised his underground arsenal and base of oper-
ations as an ancient tomb. With Jin victory and the failure of the Han
cause, he vowed never to live under the same heaven as his foes, named
himself the Living Dead Man, and immured himself in his erstwhile head-
quarters, which he fortified with further mazes and booby traps. After eight
years he was lured from his subterranean retreat by a former rival from the
Rivers and Lakes, the female champion Lin Zhaoying, who longed for
Wang to make her his wife. Wang Chongyang, though not unmoved by her
beauty and skill, was too obsessed with the national tragedy to accept her
suit. The warrioress, stung by Wang’s rejection, challenged him to a con-
test. If victory fell to him, she would kill herself, but if to her, he would
have to choose between either letting her join him in the tomb as his
wife or ceding it to her, renouncing the world, and erecting a temple on
nearby Zhongnanshan. Her (rigged) triumph resulted in the founding of
the Quanzhen sect; the female disciples of her own lineage continue to
inhabit the tomb, forbidden to leave its precincts. The Tomb of the Living
Dead simultaneously challenges the novel’s political and mythic geogra-
phies. It is the burial ground of Wang Chongyang’s patriotic ambitions,
and a monument to dynastic tragedy. It is the genetrix of Zhongnanshan’s
Quanzhen sect, the chthonic female obverse of the male-dominated
mountain (and by extension of the other peak, Huashan, on which its
master wins fame), and a reproachful reminder of the passion, pain, and
unresolved enmity that undergird its veneer of otherworldly transcen-
dence. It marks private experience in its most intense form—the erotic—
as sundered from and antagonistic to public heroism in both its historic
and mythic manifestations.
The reader learns the history of the Tomb of the Living Dead when it
is related to Guo Jing, who has come to Zhongnanshan to deliver Yang
Guo to the Quanzhen sect for tutelage. Yang Guo’s earlier apprenticeship

National Passions 99
 to Guo Jing and his wife has been sabotaged by his own willful, sensitive
nature and by Huang Rong’s distrust of his character and parentage. Guo
Jing’s second attempt to do right by his sworn brother’s offspring fares no
better. Yang Guo, scornful of the Daoists into whose care he has been deliv-
ered, and cheated and bullied by them in turn, flees the mountain and
finds refuge in the tomb. The Ancient Tomb sect’s present mistress, the
young Xiao Longnü, violates the lineage’s precepts and accepts him as its
first male disciple. And so it is neither Guo Jing and Huang Rong’s Peach
Blossom Isle nor the sacred mountain of the Quanzhen sect but the Tomb
of the Living Dead, which becomes the true cradle of Yang’s development.
The fit is a good one, despite Yang’s anomalous gender, for the new disci-
ple’s life is already marked by losses, misunderstandings, and harbored
enmities not dissimilar to those that motivated the sect’s founding.
Just as the Ancient Tomb is the topographical obverse of Zhongnan-
shan, so too are its martial arts an inverted mirror of the Quanzhen sect’s,
designed by Lin Zhaoying to counter and defeat the skills of her nemesis.
Ancient Tomb disciples first learn their own sect’s basic practices, then the
fundamentals of Quanzhen martial arts, and in a third and culminating
stage the energy training and sword techniques of the Jade Maiden’s Heart
Scripture (Yunü xinjing), which match and neutralize the Quanzhen tech-
niques move for move, point by point. It is not only in this obsessive mir-
roring of Wang Chongyang’s arts, however, that the practices passed down
by Lin Zhaoying embody her heartbreak and resentment. The guiding
principle of all of the Ancient Tomb’s esoteric techniques is an uncompro-
mising detachment from emotional excitation, which might disorder their
painstakingly cultivated psychosomatic energies. The sect’s female adher-
ents are indeed the living dead, forbidden to leave the Tomb’s precincts
and following a meditative regime that leaves them unfeeling, expression-
less, and physically cold to the touch.
Predictably, the fixation on emotional and erotic energy that under-
girds the Jade Maiden’s Heart Scripture produces results opposite to its
consciously articulated goals of chastity and detachment. Not only do the
icy virgins of the Ancient Tomb sect excite the unwelcome attention of
males who encounter or even hear of them, but they themselves prove cat-
astrophically susceptible to those energies, the denial of which structures
their practice. Xiao Longnü’s renegade Swordsister Li Mochou is a venge-
ful demoness twisted by thwarted desire. And Xiao Longnü herself opens
the gate to the return of the sect’s repressed through her transgressive act
of accepting a male disciple. Once Yang Guo has mastered the Ancient
Tomb sect’s first-stage techniques of control—sleeping on Xiao Longnü’s

100 Chapter 4
bed of frigid jade, capturing eighty-one sparrows in flight—the knowledge
of Quanzhen formulae he has brought with him enables him and his
teacher to quickly master the second stage. The third stage, the practices of
the Jade Maiden’s Heart Scripture proper, require master and disciple to
practice together—in physical proximity, lest either require assistance, and
unclothed, so that the powerful energies involved may circulate and dis-
perse freely. Yang Guo, a naive adolescent, sees no impediment to their
initiating this stage of practice, but Xiao Longnü, several years older and
more steeped in her sect’s suspicions of the ways of the world, demurs
until her disciple discovers an ideal locale: a dense thicket of crimson
flowers just outside the tomb that will allow them to meditate side by side
but screened from one another’s sight. So here, by night, they practice, as
the intensifying heat of their bodies carries the scent of the blossoms into
the air.
However foreseeable the ultimate outcome of their practice may be,
the vicissitudes interposed between its commencement and the pair’s ulti-
mate union as husband and wife fully vindicate Jin Yong’s reputation as a
master of narrative retardation and baroquely inventive plotting. Yang Guo
and Xiao Longnü are discovered by two Quanzhen Daoists, one of whom
already harbors a secret passion for Zhongnanshan’s bewitching neighbor.
Yang drives the two away, but not before the interruption of her practice
at a critical juncture—together with mortification at the accusations the
Daoists have voiced concerning her behavior—leaves Xiao Longnü stricken
with a grievous internal wound. Yang Guo heals her by feeding her with
his own hot blood. He further shows himself ready to die for his teacher
and benefactor when the renegade Li Mochou attacks. A man’s willingness
to give up his life for her releases Xiao Longnü from the sect’s stricture that
she spend her life within the tomb, and she leaves with Yang to resume
their joint practice in a secluded mountain valley. Here, though, while
temporarily alone and incapacitated, she is found and violated by the lust-
ful Daoist. Believing that it is Yang Guo who has taken such liberties with
her, she asks him to address her as his wife, not his teacher; taking his per-
plexed and embarrassed demurral as a sign of faithlessness, she flees. Thus
is tied the second of the knots that twist Yang Guo’s path. Although Xiao
Longnü’s sentimental education, the awakening of the ice maiden, is well
under way, Yang’s, the recognition of the character and depth of his feel-
ings for the woman he thinks of as his teacher, has only begun. The chain
of partings and reunions that ensues serves as one of the primary narra-
tive engines for the rest of the novel’s forty chapters.
The practices of the Jade Maiden’s Heart Scripture validate emotional

National Passions 101

 and erotic experience by positing it as integral to development in the mar-
tial arts. The path that leads Yang Guo and Xiao Longnü from joint med-
itation to romantic union is not, as it first appears, a perversion of the
Ancient Tomb sect’s teachings, but rather a revelation of their unacknowl-
edged essence. This point becomes most evident during the first of Yang
Guo and Xiao Longnü’s reunions. The pair’s confessions of mutual devo-
tion and delight in one another’s renewed company are interrupted by
contests with a series of foes led by the Mongols’ chief martial champion,
the Tibetan lama Jinlun Fawang. Even the Jade Maiden Swordplay fails to
subdue this adversary. But in the heat of battle, Yang Guo and Xiao Longnü
suddenly discover that if they deploy Ancient Tomb and Quanzhen tech-
niques in tandem, the apparently antagonistic styles prove to be in fact
complementary, and in synthesis form a martial art far more formidable
than either wielded alone. The passage describing their resulting perform-
ance bears quoting at length:

Yang Guo and Xiao Longnü had practiced this sword technique several times
without success. But now, as they faced unprecedented peril, their foremost
feelings were of closeness and concern for one other, and each placed the
beloved’s well-being above personal safety. This accorded precisely with the
sword technique’s guiding principle. Each move within the set suggested a
romantic pastime; and whether “stroking the lute and playing the flute,”
“sweeping the snow to brew tea,” “playing chess beneath the pines,” or “sport-
ing with cranes beside the pond,” each reflected the joining of man and
woman in an inexpressible delicacy of sentiment. Lin Zhaoying had met with
disappointment on the field of love and ended her days in sorrow within the
Ancient Tomb. She was skilled in both the martial and the civil arts: the zither,
chess, calligraphy, and painting—there was not one she had not mastered,
and in the end she poured the accomplishments of her entire lifetime into
this set of martial techniques. She created it merely to ease the feelings har-
bored within her own breast; never did she dream that decades later a pair of
lovers might appear who would actually employ it to foil a powerful foe.
When they first began using the technique, Yang Guo and Xiao Longnü
did not fully grasp its subtleties, but the more they fought on the more their
mastery increased. Many of this swordplay’s more profound aspects were sim-
ply impossible to grasp if the man and woman practicing it were not lovers.
Without that communion of souls, a pair joining their swords as friends would
be hindered by courtesy; master and disciple would unavoidably be over-
protective on the one hand and overdependent on the other; and husband and
wife, even if they might master some part of the art’s subtleties, would yet find

102 Chapter 4
 themselves lacking to a certain degree the lover’s myriad moods of amorous
languor, of bashful eagerness, of hesitation poised expectantly between union
and parting. At this time Yang Guo and Xiao Longnü’s love for one another
was at its most profound, but they had not yet joined the silken bonds of mat-
rimony, and deep in their hearts could feel that the road ahead was full of tri-
als and snares. They were filled with both sweet joy and bitter apprehension;
and this emotion gradually became identical with the very spirit in which Lin
Zhaoying had created the Jade Maiden Swordplay.
Watching the battle from the side, Huang Rong saw that an awkward shy-
ness had tinted Xiao Longnü’s cheeks with a blush, while time and again Yang
Guo stole longing and protective glances in her direction. Even as they joined
in battle against a powerful foe, they revealed the deep passion and ardent
affection of the love shared between man and woman. Huang Rong couldn’t
help but be astonished, yet at the same time was so affected by the pair that
she began to recall the time when love had first blossomed between herself
and Guo Jing. The clamorous violence that filled the tavern was somehow
suffused with a boundless tenderness of passion. (564–565)

Like Huang Yaoshi, Lin Zhaoying is depicted as steeped in the artistic

traditions of “the zither, chess, calligraphy, and painting” and effecting a
synthesis of the civil and martial arts. But where her arts diverge from the
model established by Huang Yaoshi is in the primacy of the erotic—the
energies of affection and desire that alone give power to the synthesis. Yang
Guo and Xiao Longnü’s discovery of the inner energies of the Jade Maiden
Swordplay serves in part to motivate the action of the novel, affecting the
course of the present combat as well as their subsequent adventures. Its sig-
nificance, however, is not merely confined to its utility to the protagonists
and its narrative function, for the erotic energies become also an occasion
for lyrical celebration. Delight in the experience and exchange of sentiment
dominates the lovers’ consciousness, overshadowing their investment in
the contest against their foe; their feelings are powerful enough to quicken
a similar emotional experience in the interdiegetic onlooker; and all this
is conveyed to the reader by the text’s own choice to delay the forward
impetus of incident and outcome in favor of a descriptive and discursive
tour de force. Through both emplotment and textual discourse, the valida-
tion of erotic experience is thus affirmed for the novel’s characters and
offered to its readers as well.
The description here of the lovers’ state as that of neither friends nor
spouses and as “poised expectantly between union and parting” suggests
that the erotic energies flow most powerfully when triggered by the uncer-

National Passions 103

 tainty and urgency that attend a crossing of thresholds. Transgression,
indeed, is a central theme throughout the narrative of Yang Guo and Xiao
Longnü’s romance. The emotional—and consequently, as we see here,
martial—power of their erotic connection serves as the mainstay of a per-
sonal integrity unbowed by convention and societal demands. Yang Guo
violates the rules of martial society by abandoning his sworn teachers in
the Quanzhen sect, and Xiao Longnü the strictures of her own order by
accepting a male disciple. Their joint practice of the Jade Maiden Heart
Scripture, though ostensibly innocent in motivation, clearly threatens the
norms of propriety governing male-female relations. And in the immedi-
ate antecedent to the episode discussed here, they overtly reject social pre-
cepts, stunning a plenary gathering of the heroes of the Martial Grove by
declaring their intention to marry despite Confucian insistence on the
inviolability of the hierarchy separating master from disciple. Originally
ignorant of such prohibitions, they are no less dismissive of them when
lectured by Guo Jing as the presiding elder. Their intransigence nearly
moves Guo Jing to execute Yang Guo, and it is Huang Rong’s warning to
Xiao Longnü that she will be subjecting her beloved to a life of ridicule if
she takes him as her husband that drives the lovers apart once again. Their
mutual devotion eventually reunites them, of course, and their long-
delayed wedding epitomizes the linkage between romantic experience and
defiantly individualistic integrity: they take their vows before the image of
Wang Chongyang in the Quanzhen sect’s inner sanctum, using a hostage
to hold at bay the mob of murderously outraged Daoists.
But while Yang Guo and Xiao Longnü’s union at one level underscores
the rift between the Ancient Tomb and the Quanzhen sect and the antag-
onism between the private and the public that we earlier noted as struc-
turing this rivalry, at another level it points to the potential healing of these
divisions. This is one of the possibilities indicated by the pair’s discovery
of the hidden complementarity of the Jade Maiden and Quanzhen sword
techniques, even if at this point the harmonizing of opposites remains
within the realm of individual practice, its wider implications only sym-
bolized. Their wedding brings the vision home to the geographic centers
of both camps; after swearing their vows in the Quanzhen sanctum, they
return to the Tomb of the Living Dead, where Xiao Longnü dons Lin Zhao-
ying’s never-used wedding finery. Yang Guo explicitly defines their union
as redressing the failure of the two sects’ founders: “Founding Master
Wang and the Founding Mistress were heroes a hundred times greater
than you or I, yet they never dared to wed. If the two of them are watch-
ing us from the netherworld, I’m not so sure they would say that we’ve

104 Chapter 4
done wrong!” (1132). Even the most persuasive championing of the pre-
rogatives of sentiment, however, does not in and of itself resolve the more
fundamental divide between private integrity and public duty. Yang Guo’s
road toward healing the wider divide is first intimated in the fact that the
secret of the Jade Maiden/Quanzhen swordplay is discovered in combat
against a champion of China’s Mongol invaders. This hint is reprised in
the wedding scene, when the newlyweds discover in Lin Zhaoying’s bridal
chest a packet of letters from Wang Chongyang in which he faithfully
reports his successes and setbacks in the campaign against the Jin. While
personal integrity as crystallized in erotic experience stands defiantly
independent from social morality, it seems to entertain the possibility of
a more productive dialogue with another aspect of public life—devotion
to the nation. This sketch of the romantic facets of Yang Guo’s develop-
ment is therefore incomplete until viewed alongside his education as a
loyalist hero.

The Education of a Loyalist

From its earliest pages, Comrade appears to relegate the questions of nation
and history to secondary status relative to the life of the heart. Heroes’
opening episodes, as we have seen, directly involve Song loyalist heroes in
the struggle against the Jin invaders, and the narrative and thematic frame-
works established in these episodes inform the entire novel. While the
opening of Comrade quickly identifies the historical setting—the Lizong
reign (1225–1264) of the Southern Song—it provides no further details
of the political situation; and while the initial narrative sequence serves
the same function of adumbrating the work’s themes and circuitously
initiating its plot lines, the figures it presents are not loyalist champions
but grief-maddened lovers. As the main characters are introduced and
more central strands of the plot engaged, the problem of the nation’s fate
remains in the background. Wang Chongyang’s struggles against the Jin
are a bit of backstory, an element in the account of the founding of the
Ancient Tomb and Quanzhen sects. And when the Mongols and their
allies first appear upon the stage, it is as importunate suitors of the virginal
Xiao Longnü; their villainy first manifests itself in erotic rather than polit-
ical guise.
It is only a good quarter of the way through the novel that the national
crisis gains prominence, when Guo Jing convenes a Feast of Heroes to rally
the champions of the Martial Grove against an imminent renewal of the
Mongol assault on Xiangyang. From the perspective of Yang Guo, however,

National Passions 105

 as well as of the narrative that remains centered on his adventures, the
Feast of Heroes is important less for its contribution to the patriotic cause
than for its role in the evolving melodrama of his relationship with Xiao
Longnü. Yang, making his way to the gathering after his encounter with
Ouyang Feng and Hong Qigong on Huashan, is moved by the displays of
patriotic fervor he sees, even though “he had been deprived of education
since childhood and didn’t know the weighty significance of the word
‘loyalty’ (zhongyi)” (471). But the sudden appearance of Xiao Longnü
absorbs his entire attention; when Jinlun Fawang and his disciples arrive
to challenge the assembly, the pair remains oblivious to the savage duels
being waged scant feet away from their persons until a flying shard from
a shattered weapon bruises Xiao Longnü’s toe. Yang Guo enters the fray to
avenge this slight, and he and his beloved win glory for the Han heroes by
besting the alien challengers. It is at the banquet held in their honor that
they shatter the goodwill they have earned, by announcing their intention
to marry in the face of Confucian prohibitions. Their subsequent depar-
ture from the company, and so from the defense of Xiangyang, declares
the priority of their romantic relationship not only over moral convention
but over any patriotic duty as well.
The issue of Yang Guo’s involvement in the loyalist project has none-
theless been raised. What moves the issue toward a crisis is not his rela-
tionship with his teacher/lover, but the other “knot” governing his course
—the mystery of his father’s death. After Huang Rong’s warnings have
prompted Xiao Longnü to abandon Yang Guo once again, the distraught
young hero discovers information that seems to confirm his lurking sus-
picions that it was Huang Rong and Guo Jing who killed Yang Kang. Half
mad with grief, he happens to encounter a party of pillaging Mongols,
outriders from the advance upon Xiangyang, one of whom flaunts on his
spear a not-quite-dead Chinese infant. The enraged Yang Guo slays the
Mongol, releases the child from its misery, and gives it a proper burial. He
meditates on the cruelty of the invaders; but his thoughts then turn from
his compassion for the infant he has just buried to his still-raw indigna-
tion over the fate of his father, whose corpse was left for the crows. He
interprets this harrowing incident, in other words, in terms not of national
peril but of personal injury. Resolving to avenge himself upon his father’s
murderers, he establishes a tentative alliance with Jinlun Fawang and his
followers—unconvincingly stipulating that he will not directly aid them
against the Song—and sets off for a pivotal confrontation with Guo Jing
and Huang Rong at Xiangyang.
The climactic encounter is delayed. While such delay is a sine qua non

106 Chapter 4
of Jin Yong’s narrative art, the particular content of the episodes interven-
ing and complicating the plot in this instance has direct bearing on the
novel’s calibration of the erotic and patriotic imperatives. No sooner has
Yang Guo allied himself with the Mongols than he and his companions
find themselves diverted into a hidden valley. The vale is inhabited by a
sect in antique garb, devoted to quietistic practices (and of course martial
arts) centered on the quelling of the passions. Growing within the vale are
thickets of a strange flower with luxuriant blossoms and nearly invisible
thorns. A small dose of the venom carried by the thorns will cause a vic-
tim pain each time he or she feels the stirring of desire; a large dose will
prove, in time, fatal. The plant’s fruits vary in taste, one in ten being deli-
cious while the others are inedible, but their multicolored skins offer no
clues for distinguishing the succulent from the foul. The flower is the pas-
sion flower (qinghua), and the valley is named Passion’s End Vale (Jueqing
gu). In Passion’s End Vale Yang Guo rediscovers Xiao Longnü, who, in a
despairing attempt to sever her seemingly ill-fated ties with her disciple,
has agreed to marry the valley’s master. Her resolve crumbles with Yang
Guo’s reappearance. But leaving the valley proves far from easy: the vale-
master refuses to relinquish his bride; his daughter conceives a passion for
Yang Guo; Yang and this maiden, cast together into a crocodile pit, dis-
cover the valemaster’s abandoned and crippled first wife, a crone nursing
scores against her faithless husband and against her brother’s killer, Guo
Jing. Poisonings by the thorns of the passion flower and struggles over the
antidote further complicate the mare’s nest of feuds and alliances. After
Yang Guo has fed his dose of the antidote to Xiao Longnü, the crone
promises to cure his own poisoning once he brings her the heads of Guo
Jing and Huang Rong. And so, after an interval of some chapters and (in
the book edition) several hundred pages, Yang Guo resumes his mission
to Xiangyang.
This first sequence in Passion’s End Vale ensures that Yang Guo’s mis-
sion against Guo Jing is motivated by both of the fixations that drive him,
the need to avenge his father and his devotion to Xiao Longnü (who will
refuse to live on if he himself perishes). It also establishes numerous ancil-
lary plot lines and an inevitable return to the vale. Besides playing these
roles in the architecture of the plot, the vale also elaborates the novel’s
symbolic topography. Just as its inhabitants’ quietistic practices recall the
Ancient Tomb sect’s insistence on detachment and emotional control, so
do its contours echo those of that previous subterranean space. It is a cav-
ity in the earth; and its general depression is punctuated by two more dra-
matic chasms—the pit in which the vale master’s wife is entombed, and

National Passions 107

 the abyss of Heartbreak Cliff, into which Xiao Longnü will later hurl her-
self. As with the Tomb of the Living Dead itself, a space ostensibly dedi-
cated to the burial of passion thus proves to be a womb in which the pas-
sions fester and incubate, building strength for their inevitable return. For
Yang Guo and Xiao Longnü, this second tomb/womb of passion serves as
the proving ground where the love engendered in the Tomb of the Living
Dead is sacrificed and reborn.
But where does this erotically symbolic terrain stand in relation to the
problem of public duty raised by Yang Guo’s determination to assassinate
China’s defender against the Mongols? A clue may be found in the vale
master’s account of the vale’s settlement in the wake of the chaos of the
Tianbao reign (742–756) of the Tang. The vale’s origin as a refuge from
political disorder evokes—as do the antique garb of its inhabitants, its hid-
den grottolike entrance, and its ubiquitous blossoms—the model of Tao
Qian’s Peach Blossom Spring. Unlike the Qin oppression from which the
founders of that utopia sought refuge, however, the chaos that drove the
vale master’s ancestor into reclusion carries erotic connotations. It was
infatuation with his consort Yang Guifei that led the Tang emperor to neg-
lect his duties and allow the revolt of the barbarian An Lushan. Indigna-
tion at passion’s subversion of the empire motivated the vale’s founding
and implicitly informs its regime of rigorous detachment. Passion’s End
Vale manifests a conventional view of erotic passion as subversive of both
the personal microcosm and the political macrocosm. It is thus no acci-
dent that soon after entering the vale, Yang Guo, flirting with the vale mas-
ter’s daughter, evokes another classic parable of this worldview, the story
of the ruler whose attempts to amuse a concubine by lighting beacon fires
leads to the destruction of his reign. Like the Tomb of the Living Dead,
Passion’s End Vale raises the question of the compatibility of private pas-
sion and public duty. The web of myth and blatant allegory of which the
vale is composed poses the question in even more absolute terms than the
Ancient Tomb’s more closely textured interweaving of fiction and history.
And the very transposition of the problem onto such dehistoricized and
fabulous terrain grants a clear advantage to the claims of a transcendent
passion. So too, of course, does the rapidly emergent hypocrisy of the vale
master’s puritanical position.
In order to vindicate the compatibility of duty and passion, Yang Guo
must leave the allegorical precincts of the vale and return to the Mongol-
invested city of Xiangyang. There Guo Jing, sharing his couch with his for-
mer disciple, declares that the epitome of chivalry is service to the nation
and the people (wei min wei guo, xia zhi da zhe). Though moved by these

108 Chapter 4
ideals, by Guo Jing’s personal cordiality, and by awareness of the terrors
of a Mongol conquest, Yang Guo persists in his assassination attempt and
is foiled only by accident. The next day, the oblivious Guo Jing takes him
on a tour of the defenses that becomes a patriotic review of the city’s his-
torical and cultural heritage—the stream across which the future emperor
Liu Bei escaped his enemies, the birthplace of the great poet Du Fu, the
hermitage of the immortal minister Zhuge Liang. When Guo Jing rides to
the rescue of a mob of civilian refugees, Yang Guo saves him from a deadly
attack by Jinlun Fawang. This deed is perhaps motivated by Yang’s desire
to strike the fatal blow himself. But when Guo Jing enters the Mongol
camp alone to negotiate the release of hostages, Yang Guo, who had orig-
inally planned to take this opportunity to strike, ends up fighting off his
supposed allies and rescuing the wounded hero single-handed. Even this
act, however, stems from personal loyalty rather than a sense of public
duty; Yang is unable to raise his hand against the man who (still unaware
of Yang’s intentions) has just risked his own life to defend him. The final
stage in the extended subversion and transformation of Yang Guo’s mis-
sion occurs when Jinlun Fawang enters the city to attack the grievously
injured Guo Jing and the imminently expectant Huang Rong. Guo Jing
seeks to stand between his wife and their foe; Huang Rong asks him who
is more important to the city’s defense, he or she; and Guo Jing concedes:
“The nation comes first!” Witnessing this demonstration of a patriotism
that takes precedence even over their undeniable mutual devotion, Yang
Guo finds his own private commitments bowing to something greater:

In an instant, the texts that Huang Rong had taught him as a child on Peach
Blossom Isle, with their phrases about “sacrificing one’s self to realize benev-
olence” and “giving up life to gain righteousness,” 15 became extraordinarily
lucid in his mind, and he found himself filled with both a profound sense of
shame and a feeling of exalted purpose. Facing an attack from a fearsome foe,
with life and death poised in the balance, he suddenly understood with utter
clarity a host of matters to which he had never given the slightest conscious
thought. As his spirit soared, it seemed as if his whole body grew taller, and
his expression grew radiant, almost as if he had become a different person
entirely. (892–893)

Here at the midpoint of the novel, as Huang Rong gives birth to twins who
will be named for the bastion she and her husband are defending, Yang
Guo himself is reborn as a hero devoted to his nation and its people.
The problem remains of reconciling his reordered priorities with the

National Passions 109

 still insistent claims of vengeance and love. The immediate need to pro-
cure an antidote to the passion flower’s poison is mitigated by an act of
altruism that providentially delays the venom’s effects until an alternate
cure is discovered. The need to avenge Yang Kang, repressed rather than
resolved by the patriotic apotheosis, is relinquished when Yang Guo finally
learns the truth of his father’s character and deeds and the precise circum-
stances of his death. Yang Guo’s willingness to subjugate fierce filial loyalty
to the dictates of higher moral and public values thus stands in contrast
to Yang Kang’s betrayal of his own father (in Heroes) for personal interest.
It could be argued, even so, that Yang Guo’s loss of an arm to the blade of
the spoiled and spiteful Guo Fu is in part a payment of the symbolic price
for the abandonment of a fundamental obligation owed to his patriarchal
heritage.
However that may be, it is the balance between the public and patri-
otic roles of the xia and the private passions of the lover that is of primary
concern through the remainder of the novel. The most basic level on
which this balance is weighed is, of course, the disposition of the plot.
Yang Guo and Xiao Longnü are separated yet again in the aftermath of the
events at Xiangyang. Yang loses his arm, but at the novel’s third significant
sub-terrene locale, the Sword Tomb of Dugu Qiubai (literally “the solitary
seeker of defeat”), begins to learn this departed master’s martial skills
under the tutelage of a mystic eagle. He rejoins Xiao Longnü at Zhongnan-
shan, where the pair helps prevent the Quanzhen sect from falling under
Mongol control and then declares through their marriage a rejection of
that rupture between the private and the public that shadowed the lives of
Wang Chongyang and Lin Zhaoying. But their vision still awaits testing.
They return to Passion’s End Vale, where Xiao Longnü wins the final dose
of the passion flower antidote for Yang Guo, only to see him toss it over
the cliff—he is unwilling to live on knowing that she has received incur-
able wounds. Huang Rong discovers an herb that will cure Yang’s poison-
ing and informs Xiao Longnü, who disappears, leaving only a note charg-
ing Yang to make use of the cure and rejoin her at Heartbreak Cliff in
sixteen years.
The note is a decoy; Xiao Longnü has hurled herself over the cliff in
order to conceal her imminent demise and left the message in order to
trick Yang Guo into preserving his own life. Yang falls for the ploy and,
after healing himself, resumes his training under the eagle. The narrative
jumps forward almost sixteen years. Chapter 33 opens with a set piece in
a snowbound inn, where a gathering of travelers from all regions of China
shares tales of the one-armed Knight of the Divine Eagle, who has touched

110 Chapter 4
each of their lives with his chivalry, defense of justice, and uncompromis-
ing resistance against the Mongol oppressors. Yang Guo soon appears
in person and befriends Guo Jing’s younger daughter, Guo Xiang. The
resumed narrative labyrinth winds its way once again toward the city of
Guo Xiang’s birth, Xiangyang, now girding itself against yet another
renewal of the Mongol assault. At a birthday celebration that coincides
with a meeting to plan the city’s defense, Guo Xiang receives astounding
gifts from the Knight of the Divine Eagle: the ears of the Mongol van-
guard, fireworks heralding the burning of the enemy’s granaries, a cap-
tured Mongol champion. Yang Guo himself, however, does not attend, for
he has returned to Passion’s End Vale to keep his appointment with Xiao
Longnü at Heartbreak Cliff. There he finally realizes that her promised
return was only a ploy, and he throws himself from the precipice. Back at
Xiangyang the city is about to fall and Guo Xiang about to perish under
Jinlun Fawang’s hand—when Yang Guo reappears. He has discovered Xiao
Longnü alive and miraculously healed in a grotto beyond the pool at the
bottom of Heartbreak Cliff. He slays Jinlun Fawang and then the Mongol
Khan; the invaders are routed. All lingering misunderstandings between
Yang Guo and Guo Jing are resolved. Yang and Guo travel to Huashan and
are enrolled among the five paramount masters of the martial world. Yang
Guo and Xiao Longnü depart bathed in moonlight, hand in hand.
On the face of it, the narrative affirms the compatibility of the public
and the private, the erotic and the patriotic: Yang Guo succeeds as both
devoted lover and champion of the nation, and he fulfills the promise of
healing the wound that sundered Wang Chongyang’s mountain from Lin
Zhaoying’s cave. On closer examination, though, the equation uniting the
two poles of experience remains complex. Are the patriotic and the erotic
truly of commensurate value? One might argue that on some moral or
karmic scale it is Yang Guo’s sixteen years of chivalric and loyalist service
that win Xiao Longnü’s miraculous return, and his routing of the nation’s
enemies that earns him the right to leave the stage at her side. It is not dif-
ficult, however, to turn this argument around and point out that it is his
beloved’s absence and the hope of her return that move him to fill the
long years with chivalric endeavor, and that if their reunion is his reward,
then it is also the ultimate end to which patriotic service is an instrumen-
tal or obligatory means. Certainly the plot’s final pivot and the novel’s cli-
mactic act, Yang Guo’s leap from Heartbreak Cliff, is motivated—whatever
its providential consequences—by a romantic devotion that rejects the
imminent crisis at Xiangyang and all other competing claims. The most
cursory look at the secondary literature likewise confirms that while read-

National Passions 111

 ers dutifully admire the novel’s patriotism, it is its exploration of erotic
experience that inspires their identification, analysis, and tireless debate.16
This is not to deny that Comrade represents Jin Yong’s perhaps most stir-
ring rendition of the notion that “the epitome of chivalry is service to the
nation and the people.” Yang Guo is a more convincing embodiment of
this ideal than Guo Jing precisely because of the competing demands on
his allegiance and his need to undergo a painful education in what Guo
seems to take for granted. On the levels both of plot and of textual per-
formance, though, the novel grants private erotic experience a power that
harbors the potential to subvert its ostensible allegiance with the public
and patriotic project. Chapter 6 will examine the flowering of this poten-
tial in a later novel, The Smiling, Proud Wanderer.
The novel’s exploration of the public and the private casts the Chinese
cultural tradition in a complex set of roles. The key text within the narra-
tive, the Jade Maiden Heart Scripture, represents, as we have seen, an appar-
ently seamless fusion of Lin Zhaoying’s mastery of the culture’s civil and
military arts with her plumbing of her own emotional experience, and
through its power—activated by Yang Guo and Xiao Longnü’s own emo-
tional integrity—testifies to a productive synthesis between the individual
and the cultural heritage. Guo Jing’s literary and historical citations dur-
ing the tour of Xiangyang and Yang Guo’s sudden grasp of the classics at
his moment of patriotic illumination indicate a similarly fruitful relation-
ship between the tradition and the public virtues, and so corroborates the
novel’s overall harmonization of the public with the private. What com-
plicates the picture is the fact that the tradition appears in another role as
well: for what if not “tradition” and the classics are the source of the Con-
fucian morality that heaps shame upon Yang Guo and his beloved at the
Feast of Heroes and drives them once more apart? We see here an echo,
perhaps reflexive, of the tension between modernism and iconoclasm on
the one hand and cultural nationalism on the other, which has played out
in China’s life and literature since at least the late Qing era.17 “Confucian
morality” seems rather an opportunistic target here, as the violent and
fantastic world in which the novel’s characters operate bears only the most
tenuous relationship to the social conditions of historical Song China.
What is noteworthy in any case is the fact that a rejection of the tradition’s
supposed subjugation of individual desire to public morality does not pre-
clude the reification of that same tradition as a public “Chinese culture”
worthy of the individual’s allegiance.
Both the erotic and the patriotic are constructed through the individ-
ual’s relationship with an other. But in Comrade, as throughout Jin Yong’s

112 Chapter 4
oeuvre, the ultimate focus of both types of relationship is the individual
himself (I use the pronoun advisedly, for the protagonists are uniformly
male). Yang Guo’s engagement in public duty is not participation in a
community but the heroic and solitary rendering of services that win him
renown and the right to leave the scene with his beloved. As for his union
with Xiao Longnü, not only does it assert the traditional hierarchy of male
over female—even she is delighted when he first begins to command her
as his wife rather than heed her as his teacher—but it also provides psy-
chic energies that further his quest for individual and exclusive mastery. It
is during his final long separation from her that he devises a consummate
set of martial techniques, the Desolate Soul-Dissolving Palm (Anran xiao-
hun zhang), which derives not only its name but its very spirit and power
from the extremes of his emotional desolation; its effectiveness wanes
under the joy Yang Guo feels at Xiao Longnü’s reappearance.18 Jin Yong’s
novels are bildungsromans, as has been noted before, and as such their
fundamental interest is in the shaping of the central protagonist.
To once more compare Yang Guo with Guo Jing, we may say that the
course of the latter’s development is his perfect fulfillment of the roles laid
out for him, while the former’s requires the blazing of his own path. It is
facile but not entirely inapt to correlate the two protagonists with the
place of their respective novels within Jin Yong’s career. Heroes’ success
strengthened the author’s reputation and finances to the point where he
felt ready to launch a paper of his own. Jin Yong’s Companion and his Ming
Pao entered the world together, with the first issue of the newspaper car-
rying the novel’s first installment, and the serialization, for its part, carry-
ing the lion’s share of the burden of selling the fledgling paper. “The three
years [of Companion’s serialization] were that most arduous period of
Ming Pao’s earliest publication,” writes the author in the afterword to the
revised edition. “As I revised it once again, it seemed that with each
episode of the story I recalled the scenes of our small group of colleagues’
laborious efforts in years gone by” (1671). We will turn now from the
analysis of Jin Yong’s texts to a study of this crucial period in the develop-
ment of the institutional contexts within which they materialized.

National Passions 113

 Chapter 5
The Empire of the Text

Jin Yong and Ming Pao

I n November 1998 the Republic of China’s Center for

Chinese Studies, the China Times Literary Supplement,
and Yuanliu Publishing Company Ltd. cosponsored the International Aca-
demic Conference on Jin Yong’s Novels. The three days of the conference
featured presentations by scholars and critics from Taiwan, Hong Kong,
and the Chinese mainland, other Asian countries, Europe, and the United
States. The meeting was convened in the International Conference Hall at
the National Central Library in Taipei, where speakers mounted the dais
beneath an immense reproduction of the landscape painting commis-
sioned for the latest Yuanliu edition of Jin Yong’s works. Opening remarks
were offered by no less a dignitary than the vice president of the Republic
of China, Lian Zhan, who noted the need for those involved in politics to
keep abreast of cultural phenomena, recycled several inescapable tropes of
Jin Yong criticism (the role of the novels’ characters as universal types of
human nature and society, the ubiquity of Jin Yong’s works, and their
importance as a bridge to Chinese culture for the Chinese overseas), and
closed with a reference to President Li Teng-hui’s call to elevate the peo-
ple’s spiritual life through culture.1
The vice president’s presence and remarks, no less than the conference
as a whole, testified to the interest and respect now widely accorded to a
body of work that forty years ago first appeared in one of the least regarded
of “subliterary” forms—as martial arts adventure stories serialized a few
hundred characters at a time in the entertainment and fiction sections of
Hong Kong’s daily newspapers. It has been noted that Jin Yong is likely to
enjoy the extraordinary good fortune of “seeing the complete ‘canoniza-

114
tion’ (jingdianhua) of his works within his own lifetime.”2 This good for-
tune sheds its blessings also on students of literature and literary history,
who have the opportunity to observe firsthand so dramatic a shift in the
status of an author and a body of writing. And the first question evoked
by even a cursory observation of the “Jin Yong phenomenon” is that of
the alleged canonization’s precise contours and status. The 1998 confer-
ence not only confirmed the extent to which some sort of “canonization”
of Jin Yong and his works is an established fact but also revealed the mul-
tiplicity and sometimes disharmony of the voices raised in Jin Yong’s
acclaim.
The hosting of the conference at the Center for Chinese Studies in Tai-
pei would seem to guarantee the event and its subject an aura of consum-
mate scholarly respectability.3 The event’s cosponsors, however—the China
Times and Yuanliu Publishing—were institutions deeply involved in the
commercial distribution of Jin Yong’s works; and the conference coincided
with an island-wide frenzy of marketing of Jin Yong–related products. The
summer and fall of 1998 saw the simultaneous broadcasting of three dif-
ferent serialized versions of The Giant Eagle and Its Companion—a new pro-
duction by Taiwan’s TTV competing with a 1998 version from Singapore
and a 1995 Hong Kong effort.4 Also flooding Taiwan were comic book
adaptations of Jin Yong’s works. By the end of October, Yuanliu Publish-
ing had issued the third volume of a projected eighteen-volume version of
The Eagle-Shooting Heroes, adapted and illustrated by a Hong Kong comic
artist, Li Zhiqing, known for his previous comic-art renditions of the his-
torical and military classics Three Kingdoms and Sunzi’s Art of War. Jin Yong
had recently pronounced himself pleased with Li’s style, influenced by the
artist’s training in traditional Chinese painting, and established a com-
pany, Minghe chuangwenshe gongsi, to support Li’s further adaptations of
his work. Li himself traveled to Taiwan during the conference to hold book
signings at the island’s two largest bookselling chains, Eslite and King-
stone. His Eagle-Shooting Heroes followed on the heels of a Giant Eagle and
Its Companion adapted by the Singapore comic artist Huang Zhanming,
and of a Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils illustrated by Huang Yulang which had
been the hit of the 1997 Hong Kong Book Fair. Taiwan’s Dongli Publish-
ing Company was now distributing Huang’s Semi-Devils, Ma Rongcheng’s
adaptation of Dragon Sabre, and He Zhiwen’s version of Flying Fox to com-
pete with Yuanliu’s Heroes and Companion. A spokesman for Dongli noted
that adaptations of Jin Yong’s works were reliable best sellers, even in the
weak comic market of the last two years in Taiwan; he attributed their suc-

The Empire of the Text 115

 cess to the appeal of the original works and the support of the television
serializations. Individual volumes of the various comic adaptations were
reported to be selling in the range of 70,000–100,000 copies.5
A visit to any bookstore in Taipei would verify the continuing popular-
ity of Jin Yong’s original novels, prominently displayed in the latest print-
ing of Yuanliu’s authorized edition of the thirty-six-volume Collected Works
of Jin Yong. Some outlets sold The Giant Eagle and Its Companion packaged
with a CD of the television serial’s theme songs. Also present in bookstores
was Jin Yong’s latest work, just published: Tanqiu yige canlan de shiji (Com-
passionate light in Asia)—not a martial arts novel but a collection of con-
versations between Jin Yong and the Japanese educator and philosopher
Ikeda Daisaku. In this “epochal dialogue between two outstanding repre-
sentatives of Chinese and Japanese culture,”6 published in Hong Kong,
Beijing, and Japan as well as in Taiwan, the two share their views on top-
ics including Hong Kong’s future, China’s place in the Pacific Rim, Sino-
Japanese relations, literature, peace, and human existence.
Jin Yong himself visited Taiwan during the conference. He was met at
the airport by representatives of the conference’s sponsors, stars from the
television serialization, and a crowd of reporters, and was given “a movie
star’s reception by the customs workers present: besides bouquets of flow-
ers and cries of excitement, more than a few offered him copies of his
books for him to sign, while passengers waiting in the terminal crowded
around and stared.” 7 Jin Yong personally attended most sessions of the
conference, commenting on some of the papers, offering remarks at the
closing session, and sometimes accepting questions from the audience
during the periods nominally set aside for discussion of the presentations.
He participated as well in other activities organized for his visit. On his
first evening in Taipei he attended a reception and dinner at TTV, the most
prominent Taiwan producer of Jin Yong serializations; he received there a
“hero’s welcome,” posed with the prop department’s Heaven Sword and
Dragon Saber, and received a medallion inscribed “Master of the martial
arts, chief of the alliance of the Martial Grove” (wuxue dashi, Wulin meng-
zhu).8 Toward the end of his visit he was the guest of honor at “A Night at
the Jin Yong Teahouse,” an event organized by the China Times Literary
Supplement. Since March of 1997 the China Times had been publishing
a weekly “Jin Yong Teahouse” column, linked with Yuanliu’s book series of
the same name, where readers and fans published articles and exchanged
letters commenting on Jin Yong’s novels, critiquing the television adapta-
tions, comparing different characters’ relationships and martial skills, and
speculating on their blood types. The paper also sponsored associated

116 Chapter 5
polls and contests and assisted Yuanliu in maintaining one of the more
popular Jin Yong Web sites. 9 Tickets to the “Night at the Jin Yong Tea-
house” were awarded to a group of four hundred readers selected from
some two thousand who had applied by submitting questions and point-
ing out inconsistencies or puzzles in Jin Yong’s works. Those not privi-
leged to attend in person could watch on television or participate via a
live internet link, as the guests “crossed swords with the master” and
applauded his sagacity and wit.10
Jin Yong attracted the attention of Taiwan’s political world as well, as
evidenced not only by the vice president’s opening speech but even more
colorfully at the “Feast of the Eagle-Shooting Heroes” (Shediao yingxiong
yan). Produced by the Sherwood, one of Taipei’s five-star hotels, in coop-
eration with Hong Kong’s renowned Yung Kee Restaurant, the “Feast” was
a theme dinner along the lines of the “Dream of the Red Chamber” ban-
quets popular in recent years. It featured elaborate dishes inspired by Jin
Yong’s novels (in particular Heroes, wherein the clever Huang Rong courts
the favor and martial tutelage of the chief of the Beggars’ Gang with a suc-
cession of culinary delights), served by waiters dressed as Jin Yong’s char-
acters in a hall decorated with Jin Yong–related couplets, martial props,
centerpieces in the form of miniature landscapes, and an enormous carved
eagle. While the “Feast” was to be available to paying customers over the
course of several weeks, the first sitting was scheduled for the opening night
of the conference, with the participants, including Jin Yong and his entou-
rage, as the guests of honor. Also appearing at the head table were all three
mayoral candidates for the fiercely contested Taipei elections: the Nation-
alist Party’s Ma Ying-jeou, the Democratic Progressive Party’s Chen Shui-
bian, and the New Party’s Wang Chien-shien. Reporters and camera crews
mobbed the table for shots of the politicians paying their respects to Jin
Yong and suspending their venomous struggle for handshakes and cour-
teous toasts. The media had to be expelled from the hall before the ban-
quet proper could be served. Reports of the event ran as the lead story in
Taipei’s newspapers and broadcasts; the media’s portrayal of the banquet
as a “meeting of heroes” worthy of Jin Yong’s novels, and narrated in the
novels’ own imagery and vocabulary, found echo in the comments of the
candidates themselves:

As to his views on Jin Yong’s fiction, [Nationalist candidate] Ma Ying-jeou

remarked that more than a few people had compared him to the patriotic and
public-spirited Guo Jing [protagonist of Heroes]. He opined that Guo Jing’s
personality—tough and determined, earnest and slow of speech, dedicated to

The Empire of the Text 117

 his ideals—was not dissimilar to his own: “This is unquestionably a role I’m
willing to take on.”

The “Feast of the Eagle-Shooting Heroes,” he noted, had allowed him to

seek instruction from the master himself; truly, he had not made this trip
in vain. Upon his departure, Ma Ying-jeou uttered an expression from the
Rivers and Lakes: “The green hills change not, the blue waters flow on, and
we shall meet again,” and took his leave of the reporters with a bow.11
The Taipei Jin Yong Conference and the events surrounding it testify
to the astounding degree to which a “Jin Yong phenomenon” has grown
beyond the pages of the Hong Kong newspapers’ serialized fiction supple-
ments in which the author’s martial arts novels first appeared. Jin Yong’s
works are now known not only as novels, but as comic books, television
serials, films, and computer games. In these various media, they circulate
not merely in Hong Kong but among Chinese speakers around the world,
from overseas communities in the United States and Europe to the Chi-
nese mainland itself. In such forms as films and electronic games, more-
over, as well as in translated editions, they have reached beyond Chinese-
language communities to international audiences in both hemispheres of
the globe. Their widespread circulation is spurred in good part by relent-
less marketing strategies, in which the different incarnations of Jin Yong’s
works and their respective corporate producers and media distributors
unflaggingly promote one another and both excite and feed the appetites
of an enthusiastic fan culture. Neither the exuberant commercialism of
the phenomenon, though, nor the proliferation of such nonliterary forms
as video games and television serials has precluded the works’ acquiring
the status of literary masterpieces. If the conference itself serves as suffi-
cient testimony of the attention now given to Jin Yong’s works by aca-
demic and intellectual communities, the almost fetishistic aura accruing
to his writing was dramatized by the conference’s final ceremony—the
author’s presentation to Taiwan’s Center for the Preservation and Study of
Cultural Materials of framed pages from his original handwritten manu-
scripts. Jin Yong’s status and reputation have expanded well beyond those
of an ordinary novelist, extending, on the one hand, into the kind of
celebrity commonly associated with movie stars and, on the other, into
veneration of the sort reserved for cultural spokesmen and gatekeepers of
the high tradition. No simple analytical model, whether of literary excel-
lence or of mass appeal, can do justice to this interweaving of artistic pres-
tige, marketing savvy, fan culture, celebrity worship, political theater, and
media fomentation.

118 Chapter 5
 The character and status of the “Jin Yong phenomenon”—its compo-
nents, structure, and continuous renegotiation—is a recurrent theme for
study in the remaining chapters of this book, and this chapter begins with
what is perhaps the innermost of the concentric circles linking Jin Yong’s
fiction with the phenomenon at large: Jin Yong’s publishing enterprises.
Jin Yong’s newspaper, Ming Pao, served as the primary medium for the
presentation of his fiction to its audience, serializing each of his major
novels beginning with The Giant Eagle and Its Companion. The novels, in
turn, played a crucial role in ensuring the paper’s survival, especially dur-
ing the precarious early days. As the newspaper, growing in prestige and
commercial strength, became the keystone of an expanding press and
financial empire, Jin Yong’s fiction was not infrequently called upon to
bestow a measure of the author’s cachet upon subsidiary publications. In
turn, again, the rising status of the newspaper, Jin Yong’s reputation as
author of its influential daily editorials, and the power and prestige of
Ming Pao Enterprises and its chairman within Hong Kong’s commercial
world, all played a role in shaping perceptions of Jin Yong’s martial arts
fiction. Whereas preceding chapters of this book discussed Hong Kong’s
newspapers primarily in order to establish New School martial arts fic-
tion’s historical and social context, this chapter expands the focus to con-
sider institutional aspects of Jin Yong’s publications: the financial and
institutional growth of Jin Yong’s publishing enterprises, the concomitant
elevation in the publisher’s cultural status, and the ways in which both
spheres of growth facilitated and were facilitated by the enunciation of a
particular political and cultural stance—a Chinese cultural nationalism
that defined itself in large measure against the excesses of the mainland’s
Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
In the 1990s Ming Pao’s luster dimmed somewhat with Jin Yong’s with-
drawal from the paper, scandal-tinged changes of ownership, the editorial
board’s settling into stodgy pro-business, pro-mainland conservatism, and
shifts in audience habits and media dynamics favoring obstreperous new-
comers such as the Apple Daily (Pinguo ribao).12 During the 1960s, how-
ever, Ming Pao garnered wide attention with its independent stance and
incisive reporting and commentary on mainland China. Its coverage of
mainland affairs won notice and consideration in government circles in
China and abroad, while within Hong Kong the combination of distinc-
tive political reportage with popular columns, fiction, and entertainment
coverage won a loyal and prestigious readership of students, intellectuals,
civil servants, and white-collar workers. It became one of Hong Kong’s
most influential papers, enjoying the third-largest local circulation of the

The Empire of the Text 119

 Chinese dailies through the end of the 1980s and a reputation as the
newspaper of the international Chinese intelligentsia. The early Ming Pao,
modest in size and circulation, gives at first glance little promise of these
later developments. But a review of its history and character during the
first months and years of its publication provides valuable insights into
the future development of this newspaper, of Zha Liangyong /Jin Yong’s
expanding print empire, and of the relationships between his fiction and
these organs of its dissemination.

The Early Ming Pao’s Voice and Stance

(“Some Remarks on the Miss World Pageant”)

It is difficult not to read Ming Pao’s history teleologically, as a narrative of

gradual but inevitable progress from humble beginnings to its maturation
as central pillar of Jin Yong’s publishing empire and medium for the
expression of its founder’s influential views on politics, society, and cul-
ture. Inasmuch as the paper’s founders and staff engaged in a conscious
and continuing search for formulae that would ensure the publication’s
success, such a reading is valid and, in fact, essential to our understanding
of Ming Pao and the Jin Yong phenomenon. A central point of Cheung
Kwai-yeung’s recent study of Ming Pao, however, is that many of the key
decisions in the course of its development were adventitious, made not
according to any preexisting vision but in response to changing social
circumstances and market opportunities. In contemplating the relation-
ship between Jin Yong’s fiction and Jin Yong’s publishing enterprises, it
behooves us therefore to pay attention to elements that fit less neatly into
a grand narrative of the author/publisher’s imminent ascendancy—ele-
ments that point not only to alternative possibilities, “roads not taken” by
Ming Pao and its publisher, but also to persistent tensions and discontinu-
ities in Jin Yong’s enterprises as they have in fact developed.
Zha Liangyong, born in Haining county, Zhejiang, in 1924, to a fam-
ily that prided itself on the poets, scholars, and government officials in its
ancestry, entered the newspaper world in 1945, working as a reporter at
the Dongnan ribao in Hangzhou. He had previously studied international
relations at the Nationalist Party’s Central Political Academy in Chong-
qing, and then international law at Shanghai’s Dong Wu faxueyuan, but
personal circumstances and the vicissitudes of the war years had pre-
vented him from completing either degree. In 1947 he joined the staff of
Shanghai’s Dagong bao and, in 1948, was sent to Hong Kong to assist in
the establishment of the paper’s Hong Kong edition. For the next ten years

120 Chapter 5
he worked at Dagong bao and its sister paper Xin wanbao, at the latter pub-
lication serving as an editor of the supplement and writing film reviews
under the name Yao Fulan (i.e., “Your Friend”). During the second half of
this period, he was involved in Hong Kong’s film industry as well, produc-
ing screenplays for the Great Wall Company under the name Lin Huan,
writing articles and reviews for its pictorial Changcheng huabao, and codi-
recting several films.13
The growing popularity of his martial arts fiction, and in particular
the success of Heroes, afforded both the means and the motivation for Zha
Liangyong /Jin Yong to launch his own publication in 1959. The project
was inspired in part by frustration at seeing the potential profits from his
work diverted by contraband editions.14 Together with Shen Baoxin, a high
school classmate now managing a print shop in Hong Kong, and Pan Yue-
sheng, a writer and editor whose career in the newspaper and film worlds
Jin Yong had assisted, Jin began to lay plans for a ten-day fiction magazine,
Yema (Mustang). Several months before the first issue appeared, the group,
responding to vendors’ suggestions, altered their plans and devised a daily
publication, to be entitled Ming Pao, with “Yema” serving as the name for
the central fiction section.15
In terms of its organization and financing, the Ming Pao, which com-
menced publication on May 20, 1959, was what was called at the time a
“collegial” paper (tongren bao), namely one whose production was in the
hands of a small group of associates whose personal investments also con-
stituted the publication’s financial base.16 In Ming Pao’s case, Zha Liang-
yong provided 80 percent of the original capital, and Shen Baoxin the
remaining 20 percent; they divided the editorial and business duties
between them, and Pan Yuesheng and a proofreader completed the staff.
In terms of its physical size, circulation, and contents, Ming Pao was a typ-
ical “little paper” or “tabloid” (xiaobao): produced in quarto (sikai, half the
dimensions of a full-sized duikai or folio newspaper), printed in a run of
only eight thousand, and devoted entirely to fiction and entertainment.17
Despite featuring Jin Yong’s new The Giant Eagle and Its Companion as
its centerpiece, and fiction and columns by such prominent authors as
Song Yu and Gao Xiong (San Su) besides, the fledgling fiction paper failed
to attract the hoped-for readership. Its publishers responded with frequent
adjustments to its contents and format. On June 6, the eighteenth day of
its publication, the paper expanded to full folio size and recast its scope to
include local and international news. On the front page appeared the first
Ming Pao editorial (sheping), entitled “Our Standpoint.” Where the inau-
gural remarks (fakan ci) in the first edition had declared the paper’s watch-

The Empire of the Text 121

 words to be “impartiality, goodwill, liveliness, and beauty” (gongzheng,
shanliang, huopo, meili), “Our Standpoint” struck a more serious tone,
restricting the list to “impartiality and goodwill.” “If we report war and
chaos, murder, and suicide,” the editorial announces, “we shall do it with
regret; if we report peace and stability, joy and prosperity, we will do it
with the greatest satisfaction.” 18
Whatever pangs of regret the editors may have felt at reports of chaos
and murder, they apparently saw in them the promise of attracting a read-
ership as well. In the first months of the paper’s publication, extracts from
the international wire services jostle for attention with photographs of
bathing beauties and sensationalistic reports of car wrecks, abductions,
and crimes of passion. These items, together with advertisements and the
still occasional editorial, occupy the first and last of the four daily pages;
the second page contains columns, feature articles, and film reviews, and
the third the fiction supplement. Jin Yong’s martial arts fiction, scoops
from the entertainment world by Liu Wenying (Lei Weipo), and a gradu-
ally expanding racing sheet made up Ming Pao’s most reliable draws for
the first two years of its existence.
At least one of Jin Yong’s hagiographers portrays the early Ming Pao as
an unavoidable hodgepodge of the piquant and the sober:

On the market at the time were tabloids such as Xiangwei she (The rattlesnake),
Xiangwei long (The rattle-dragon), and Chaoran (The impartial), which used sex
to attract their audience and enjoyed fairly large readerships. This of course
was not a path that Ming Pao could follow; yet neither could the fledgling
Ming Pao follow the example of such major papers as Xingdao ribao, Huaqiao
ribao, or Gongshang ribao. Zha Liangyong therefore chose a “middle path”. . .
The result was a rather mismatched appearance. At first glance, Ming Pao’s
pages were tremendously incongruous, simultaneously presenting both Zha
Liangyong’s sober and serious editorials and other authors’ “erotic fiction.”
The overall effect was quite disjointed.19

Such remarks compel us to consider once again the fundamental ques-

tion of how to read a poly-vocal artifact such as a daily newspaper. What,
if any, relationship obtains between its apparently discrepant and unre-
lated voices? It is only reasonable to concede that, for the sake of attract-
ing the broadest possible range of readers, the editors might collect within
their pages materials generated by a variety of sources and aimed at quite
disparate interests and tastes. At the same time, though, as we assumed

122 Chapter 5
earlier in our survey of the contents of the Xin wanbao, both the notion
of editorial agency and the simple coexistence of certain materials within
the physical space of a newspaper circulated within given social and geo-
graphic communities on a given date seem to presume some sort of dia-
logic (if not necessarily harmonious) interaction. In the case of the early
Ming Pao and its editorials, in fact, it is possible to discover evidence of
quite deliberate transgression of what the passage just quoted assumes to
be boundaries.
The front-page editorial of November 13, 1959, is entitled “Some
Remarks on the Miss World Pageant”:

To begin with we must make it clear that this paper is merely a tabloid (xiao-
bao). We don’t pretend to the dignified and sober mien of the major papers,
whose honorable chief writers lift their pens only to speak of weighty matters
of war and peace, the nation’s future, and the people’s fortunes. We naturally
feel that the nation’s future and the people’s fortunes are matters of the great-
est importance. In this life of ours, though, it doesn’t do to be overly solemn,
and so it is that we feel free to mention “the wind and the flowers, the snow
and the moon” [i.e., romance and the life of pleasure]. Today’s editorial there-
fore offers some comments on the Miss World Pageant in London.
As everyone is aware, the Miss World competition is at present divided
into the English and the American Pageants. Miss Japan bore away the prize
at the American Pageant, while the British Pageant went to Miss Holland. Hol-
land produces cow’s milk in abundance, and this Miss, having drunk a great
deal of milk, had skin as white as snow, tender and flushed with pink, where-
fore her charms stole the crown from the assembled belles. This, however, is
not our subject here. What’s worthy of remark is that when Miss America was
eliminated from the contest, she could not contain her indignation and cried
out, “Those are falsies!”
Miss America’s eyes at this juncture were brimming with tears, and, to
borrow a catch-phrase from the left, “Such a reaction is entirely understand-
able.” But the word “falsies” seems to betray a certain lack of character. Now
this “character” may seem at first glance hardly worthy of remark; and yet it’s
something that cannot be cultivated without undergoing the shaping and
refinement of a long course of history and an eminent culture. Whether in
small matters such as ball games and beauty pageants, or in large matters such
as diplomatic affairs and military operations, one can tell at a glance who has
“character” and who does not. When Miss America cried out about the falsies,
Miss India came to Miss Holland’s defense, saying she was the real McCoy,

The Empire of the Text 123

 with the honest-to-God goods and so forth and so on. Miss India had been
eliminated at the same time, yet she spoke up in the cause of justice without
thinking twice. This truly is the mark of a great nation.
But when we take a glance at the opinions in India’s major newspapers,
there really ain’t no character at all. The CCP’s proposal that both sides with-
draw twenty kilometers and hold talks on the border dispute can certainly be
called fair and reasonable, yet India’s papers jabber on and on, determined to
hold on to a slice of China’s territory by force. It’s clear that this Miss India is
not only more comely in face and figure than the chief writers of India’s
major papers, but that in her character and integrity as well, she far surpasses
them all.

What we find here is not a “dignified and sober” discussion of the

1959 Sino-Indian border disputes incongruously framed by journalistic
sensationalism, but a gleeful and self-referential deployment of the pre-
rogatives of a “tabloid” newspaper, drawing on techniques of irony ele-
vated to a key status in journalistic commentary by Lu Xun and his peers
in the 1920s. The editorial begins by distinguishing itself from Hong
Kong’s “major papers.” This act of apparent self-deprecation already holds
a hint of mockery—the phrase “dignified and sober mien” (daomao anran)
often suggests pompousness or hypocrisy—and sets the stage for the later
caustic remarks on the “major papers” of India. The paper ’s confessed
status as a tabloid allows, or even calls for, discussion of the Miss World
Pageant. When the pageant then becomes the pretext for comments on
those very affairs of state on which the editorialist had disavowed any qual-
ification to speak, the discussion reveals itself to be double-voiced; it har-
bors international affairs as its “real” topic, yet at the same time indulges
a candid interest in the charms of the contestants, their “falsies” and fits
of pique, that is entirely congruent with the more univocally sensational
contents of other parts of the paper. In the article’s Chinese-language orig-
inal, self-conscious poly-vocality is evident on the level of linguistic prac-
tice as well. The standard vernacular (baihua wen) of the text is sprinkled
here and there with Cantonese idioms (indicated by italics in the preced-
ing translation), some used apparently at random but others (“Those are
falsies!” and “There really ain’t no character at all”) clearly reinforcing a
punch line. At other points (suggested in the quoted editorial through the
register of the English prose) it veers toward a humorously grandiose clas-
sical (wenyan) diction. In language as in discursive stance, the early Ming
Pao employs its allegedly exclusionary “minor” status as a privilege to
express itself freely and indulge in some fun while doing so. The sober and

124 Chapter 5
the sensational do not preserve a strained coexistence; neither do they
merge into a single mid-range or muddled voice; they provide the oppor-
tunity, rather, for enunciating meaning through deliberate manipulation
of distinctions, overlaps, and interactions.
In terms of position as distinct from rhetoric, the stance the editorial
adopts in addressing China’s border dispute with its southern neighbor is
not dissimilar to the variety of nationalism discernible in Heroes. Ardent
defense of China’s territorial integrity is combined with an implicit pride
in its “long history and eminent culture.” Patriotism here remains free of
alignment with any particular political party. Although the defense of
China’s sovereignty coincides in this case with the policies of the Chinese
Communist Party, the left is not spared a mild gibe, 20 which serves as a
reminder that the paper stands as distant from that camp as it does from
the Indians, the presumably characterless Americans, or Hong Kong’s
other newspapers. But while holding itself aloof from political partisan-
ship, the editorial clearly signals positions of other kinds; the same Can-
tonese usages that make up part of the text’s play with linguistic register
also help flag its perspective on mainland affairs as originating from the
privileged geographic position of Hong Kong and belonging to its partic-
ular Chinese community.
As Ming Pao ventured into news coverage and commentary it repeat-
edly asserted a nonaligned stance, a pride in Chinese cultural identity cou-
pled with a refusal to demonstrate allegiance to either of the parties seek-
ing to claim the nation’s fate. The July 5, 1959, editorial, “The Dignity of
the Chinese,” notes with regret the role of Chinese individuals in recent
international incidents of smuggling and drug trafficking, and quotes with
pride an American official’s assessment of the Chinese as America’s most
law-abiding community. “We hope that every Chinese will constantly
bear in mind that China is a nation with an ancient cultural tradition, a
‘realm of propriety and justice’ (li yi zhi bang)”; Chinese traveling abroad
in particular should act as representatives of their nation’s glory. The fol-
lowing day’s editorial, “The Great Man Uses Words, Not Force,” addresses
reports of air combat between mainland and KMT forces over the Matsu
islands. It expresses the hope that the conflict across the straits, and the
problems in “backward” Tibet as well, can be solved as quickly as possible
and without loss of Chinese life, so that “rather than wasting their ener-
gies in struggling against one another, everyone can join minds and hands
in building China.” The editorial of October 16, 1959, is one of several
that addresses the question of the paper’s neutral (zhongli) posture even
more directly. Individual news reports might at times bear a right- or left-

The Empire of the Text 125

 ward slant, it admits, depending on their source; the paper’s own stance,
however, is resolutely nonaligned, and any apparent leftward bias merely
a reflection of the predominantly rightward bent of the majority of Hong
Kong’s papers.
Despite such protestations, and despite Jin Yong’s growing personal
disenchantment with the left, 21 the fact that he and much of his staff had
begun their careers in media enterprises supportive of and supported by
the CCP fostered a widespread assumption that Ming Pao too fell within
that camp. The refugee crisis of 1962 redefined the paper’s stance. The
mainland at this time was still suffering widespread famine as a result of
the disastrous economic policies of the Great Leap Forward coupled with
natural disaster and the loss of Soviet aid. When the Guangdong govern-
ment opened the border with Hong Kong’s New Territories early in 1962,
desperate mainlanders began streaming toward the perceived wealth and
security of the British colony. By May, when the flood of refugees reached
its height, hundreds if not thousands were struggling across the territories’
rugged hills each day. The British authorities, already burdened by the
colony’s rapid population growth, sought to seal the border and detain
and return illegal arrivals. Those Hong Kong newspapers sympathetic to
the right (Huaqiao ribao, Xingdao ribao, Gongshang ribao, etc.) ran extensive
reports on the crisis, highlighting the catastrophic conditions on the main-
land, its government’s failures and its irresponsibility in opening the bor-
der; the left’s papers (Dagong bao, Xin wanbao, Wenhui bao, etc.) afforded
the refugee situation minimal coverage or none at all.
In the early months of the crisis, Ming Pao likewise avoided any men-
tion of the situation. Beginning on the eighth of May, however, the refugee
crisis suddenly began claiming front-page headlines, photographs, exten-
sive original reporting, and the attention of impassioned editorials. At first
the paper focused on the human tragedy of the refugees’ plight and the
commonality of Hong Kong readers’ experience. “Urgent! Help!” was the
title of the May 15 editorial, which, after portraying the desperate situation
in the hills, noted that “we residents of Hong Kong have fortunately not
been threatened with starvation, but most of us have come from the main-
land too—it’s merely that we came a bit earlier on,” and called on the gov-
ernments of both the mainland and the colony to come to the refugees’
aid. On the same day, the paper announced that it was taking the unprece-
dented step of organizing an aid-drive on its own and appealed directly to
its readers to donate funds and goods for their compatriots. Subsequent
editions published the names and contributions of donors. On May 18,
the British government, alarmed at the confusion caused by aid groups

126 Chapter 5
and the encouragement they seemed to offer illegal immigrants, forbade
unauthorized entry into the border areas. Ming Pao responded by suspend-
ing its aid operations the following day and then began devoting editorial
space to support of the government’s policies, arguing that sympathy for
compatriots had to be balanced against the threat to stability and prosper-
ity posed by unchecked immigration.
Ming Pao’s leap from ignoring the refugee problem to placing itself in
the center of controversy and action is said to have transpired almost in
spite of its publisher’s wishes. As the crisis developed in the early months
of the year, Jin Yong was unwilling to publicly alienate the left and his
many friends and colleagues within that camp by reporting on the situa-
tion. It was only the protests of his reporters and editorial staff, coupled
with the argument that readers would be lost to the papers that were cov-
ering the story, that eventually caused him to relent.22 Ming Pao’s exten-
sive coverage and aid efforts (the uniqueness of which the paper lost no
opportunity to trumpet) allowed it to give a concrete demonstration of
“nonaligned” solidarity with the Chinese people, won it greater journalis-
tic authority than it had hitherto enjoyed, and paid off in a dramatic rise
in daily circulation, from slightly above twenty thousand before the crisis
to over thirty thousand during its height. It also laid the groundwork for
precisely those confrontations with the left that Jin Yong had originally
hoped to avoid.
Ming Pao built upon its newfound credibility and reinforced its repu-
tation as a forum for critique of the CCP with the institution in June 1962
of the column “Free Discussion” (“Ziyou tan”—the name was borrowed
from the influential literary supplement of Shanghai’s Republican-era
Shen bao), a supposedly wide-ranging venue that soon came to focus on
contributions addressing mainland affairs. In late 1963 an editorial piece
mocking Foreign Minister Chen Yi’s unfortunate remark that China would
develop the atom bomb even if the Chinese people had to pawn their
trousers drew furious attacks on Ming Pao’s “anti-Chinese” (fanhua) stance
from the papers on the left. Hostilities simmered through most of 1964
and erupted into a prolonged war in October and November, when Ming
Pao responded to the CCP’s proud announcement of a successful nuclear
test with editorial denunciations of nuclear weapons as a threat to peace
and human existence. Dagong bao and its satellites published a series of
blistering denunciations of Ming Pao and its publisher, accusing him of
betraying Chinese interests on a wide range of issues. Jin Yong replied with
gusto, penning twenty-six daily editorials challenging his accusers point
by point, declaring Ming Pao’s patriotism, and insisting upon a distinction

The Empire of the Text 127

 between the spirit and achievements of the Chinese people and the poli-
cies of the current regime. 23
By the time the Cultural Revolution began to unfold on the mainland,
Ming Pao had developed the features, sources, and reputation for inde-
pendence that positioned it to serve as a noteworthy (though not infalli-
ble) channel for information. Jin Yong’s insightful, sometimes seemingly
prescient editorial commentary drew additional attention not only within
Hong Kong but from observers abroad and in the PRC itself as well. The
paper was subject to continual and vicious attack from the press on the
left, and when the Cultural Revolution spilled over into Hong Kong in May
through August of 1967 with strikes, riots, bombings, and calls for the end
of British colonial rule, Ming Pao and its publisher were the objects of
more-direct action. The June 23 issue of the paper was sabotaged by the
insertion of a manifesto from a leftist committee within the print shop;
later in the summer a package bomb was delivered to Jin Yong’s residence,
and his name was subsequently discovered to be on a blacklist of appar-
ent assassination targets. Jin Yong found it prudent to remove himself to
Singapore for part of this period. Ming Pao nonetheless maintained a vig-
orous editorial campaign, pointing out that the mainland had no practi-
cal interest in assuming control over Hong Kong, condemning the left for
inciting extremist violence, and voicing support for the British colonial
government as the upholder of the stability which was in all Hong Kong
residents’ best interest. Jin Yong set out essential elements of his defense of
the status quo in an editorial from early in this period, the May 10, 1967,
“We’ve Settled Down Here and Don’t Care to Leave!”:

By far the great majority of Hong Kongers, with the exception of a certain por-
tion of born-and-bred natives, have come here for reasons that have nothing
to do with any revolutionary objectives. . . . To put it bluntly, we escaped to
this place because we aren’t willing to live under CCP rule. . . . Even though
there are a thousand things, ten thousand things wrong with Hong Kong, still,
under present circumstances, the great majority of residents hope to keep on
living as they do now; our dwellings may not be as peaceful, our livelihoods
as happy as we might wish, but in comparison, this is the way we like it. . . .
We have gathered together here from every corner of the land; we’ve settled
down here, and don’t care to leave. 24

Each successive clash with the left increased Ming Pao’s visibility, bol-
stered its credibility, and raised its circulation. In the case of the 1964
editorial wars, the paper benefited primarily from the fact that the feud

128 Chapter 5
cast it as a feisty and independent voice capable of holding its own against
some of the territory’s, and indeed China’s, most powerful journalistic
opponents. The events of 1967 garnered sympathy for the paper and its
publisher as the objects of extremist attack, but more importantly con-
firmed Jin Yong’s Ming Pao as a prominent and articulate voice for atti-
tudes shared by the majority of Hong Kong’s Chinese residents, for whom
the disturbances reinforced a rejection of the path taken by the mainland
and inspired more conscious appreciation for the benefits of the British
colonial system.25 It is often said, and justly, that Hong Kong’s Ming Pao
owed its success to the mainland and to the Chinese Communist Party
against which it defined itself. It need not cast any doubt on the sincerity
and depth of Jin Yong’s commitment to the political stances that helped
make his reputation to note that the paper’s entry into news reporting and
the articulation of its critical standpoint were adventitious in origin and
validated at least in part by demonstrable commercial dividends.
A stance critical of the CCP yet independent of the financial and polit-
ical institutions associated with the Nationalists and their allies was made
possible by Hong Kong’s unique geopolitical situation. Commitment to
this political stance necessarily involved commitment to a particular atti-
tude toward Hong Kong itself: an extension of the “Central Plains syn-
drome,” which evaluated the colony entirely in terms of its relation to the
heartland on whose margins it stood. The Miss World editorial discussed
gives evidence of the extent to which the early Ming Pao experimented with
interests, attitudes, and linguistic practices associated with local Guang-
dong /Hong Kong journalistic traditions. 26 Local news, service to local
Hong Kong readers, and selective use of Cantonese (primarily in columns
and other fukan features) remain integral parts of the paper to this day.
But as the fame of Jin Yong’s editorials grew during the 1960s, these pieces
indulged less and less in the mixing of linguistic and discursive registers;
and the allegiance of the paper’s defining public voice to standard Man-
darin Chinese indicates both the assumption of the “dignified and sober
mien” proper to a major paper and a commitment to the affairs of the
nation over those of a “certain portion of born-and-bred natives.” In this
sense the voice of Jin Yong’s newspaper follows the path we have already
seen marked out in his fiction.

The Growth of a Publishing Empire

Jin Yong’s ventures into additional publications began as early as six

months after Ming Pao’s inauguration, with the January 11, 1960, debut of

The Empire of the Text 129

 Wuxia yu lishi (Martial arts and history). This periodical revived Jin Yong’s
earlier plans for a weekly fiction magazine; a second, later (1962–1967)
fiction periodical, more heterogeneous in content, was to employ the
originally projected title, Yema. Ming Pao ran front-page advertisements
for Martial Arts and History a month before its first appearance, headlining
its exclusive presentation of a new Jin Yong novel, Feihu waizhuan (The
Young Flying Fox), a prequel to Flying Fox on Snowy Mountain. The paper con-
tinued to advertise the magazine for the first months of its existence, often
publishing each new issue’s table of contents. Prepublication advertise-
ments promised a range of contents, including contemporary adventure
tales, traditional tales retold, sketches from history and historical fiction,
and the early issues did in fact offer something of this variety. Soon,
though, the periodical settled into a solid diet of martial arts stories in the
New School style by authors such as Ni Kuang (writing as Yue Chuan),
Zhang Menghuan, Sanfa Sheng, and Gu Long. One of its primary selling
points, of course, was Jin Yong’s fiction; after its exclusive publication of
The Young Flying Fox, it regularly reprinted the previous week’s installments
of the novel currently featured in Ming Pao, offering readers an alternative
or supplement to the newspaper’s rhythm of daily serialization.
Martial Arts and History demonstrates several aspects of Jin Yong’s pub-
lishing strategies. The first is the continuation and extension of a process
begun with the founding of Ming Pao itself: the employment of Jin Yong’s
fictional product as capital for the establishment of a new publishing
enterprise—both, that is, as literal capital, with the earnings from already
published fiction helping to finance a new product, and as literary capital,
with new fiction serving to raise the new product’s value and appeal. The
second, closely related to the first, is the careful cultivation of a synergistic
relationship among the various elements of this enterprise. Not only does
Jin Yong’s fiction serve as a fundamental selling point for both the news-
paper and the magazine, but the former publication actively promotes the
latter, heralding its presentation of a Jin Yong story nowhere else available.
The magazine, in turn, later in its run features regular advertisements for
others of Jin Yong’s publications, including Ming Pao Monthly and Ming
Pao Weekly. A third aspect of Martial Arts and History’s publication practice
worthy of remark is its participation in the project—analyzed further in
chapter 6—of defining contexts for the genre of martial arts fiction. The
ambitious vision of presenting martial arts tales in company with histor-
ical studies and reworkings of traditional material, sketched out in the
prepublication advertisements and realized to some extent in the earliest
issues, seems to have faded quickly over the subsequent months. But early

130 Chapter 5
articles such as those in a series by Jin Yong entitled “On Several Ques-
tions Concerning Martial Arts Fiction” (“Guanyu wuxia xiaoshuo de jige
wenti”), and regular “Editor’s Remarks” commenting on the themes, char-
acters, and style of the stories in current serialization, maintained a self-
consciousness about the genre and encouraged habits of readerly appreci-
ation. The magazine’s covers likewise contributed to the positioning of the
genre. They occasionally presented scenes from the stories (similar to the
illustrations by Yun Jun and others accompanying the text within), and for
a period in the early 1970s featured movie stills or photos of luminaries
from the Bruce Lee–inspired craze for kung fu movies. For the greater part
of the magazine’s run, however, the covers were dedicated to photographs
of scenic and historical sites in China or reproductions of traditional art
and scenes from classical novels and drama. A paragraph of text on the
inside cover identified the image and explained its significance. The covers
thus asserted, however casually, a continuity between contemporary mar-
tial arts fiction and China’s geography, history, and artistic and narrative
traditions; and as such they prefigured practices we shall find developed
further in Ming Pao Monthly and in the Collected Works of Jin Yong.
The scope, both conceptual and geographic, of Ming Pao–related pub-
lications expanded dramatically with the 1966 appearance of Ming Pao
Monthly (Ming bao yuekan), “A Non-Profit Magazine Promoting Culture
and Understanding.” 27 Under the editorship of Jin Yong and then of the
columnist and literary critic Hu Juren (Hu Bingwen, b. 1933), who suc-
ceeded to the post in 1967, Ming Pao Monthly emerged as a general intel-
lectual review for the international Chinese community. The breadth and
variety of its content are difficult to characterize succinctly. The first issue
alone contains scholarly articles (on historical method and the sociology
of youth crime), biographical studies (of Albert Schweitzer, Mao Zedong,
and the young Chinese Go [weiqi] champion Lin Haofeng), and travel writ-
ing (from Tokyo and Moscow). Subsequent issues include (besides expand-
ing coverage of the Cultural Revolution) notes on the activities of Chinese
scholars overseas; reports on contemporary art, literature, and entertain-
ment; debates on problems in education; and presentations and analysis
of historical documents. The range of the articles is echoed by that of the
magazine’s illustrations, in particular the covers and the eye-catching
monthly selection of color plates. In the first issue, the plates are devoted
to reproductions of classic Chinese artwork—Su Dongpo’s (1037–1101)
calligraphy, an eighth-century mural from Dunhuang; soon, though, the
scope expands to include modern Chinese woodcuts, oils by European
masters, “primitive” art from Africa and Oceania, and photographs of con-

The Empire of the Text 131

 temporary political figures and celebrities. The list of the magazine’s con-
tributors and editorial board over the years constitutes a virtual who’s who
of the overseas Chinese intelligentsia. Its readership was similary wide-
spread; 35 percent of the December 1979 run of nearly 35,000 copies was
distributed overseas, half of this portion in the United States, Canada, and
Britain, and the rest distributed among Chinese communities in Singa-
pore, Malaysia, Southeast Asia, and beyond.28
Jin Yong’s fiction and Ming Pao’s political reporting had attracted for
the paper a growing readership among Chinese communities abroad since
the early 1960s. Ming Pao Monthly, with its active solicitation of overseas
contributors and readers, represented a more deliberate institutional
involvement with these communities. Jin Yong further expanded his over-
seas enterprises with the inauguration of the daily newspaper Xingming
ribao in Singapore in March 1967 and the establishment of a Malaysian
edition the following month. Both papers were joint enterprises with local
businessmen; news and financial reporting varied to suit local conditions,
but the entertainment and fiction supplements replicated those of Hong
Kong’s Ming Pao. A North American edition of Ming Pao, essentially an
abbreviated version of the Hong Kong edition, again with the fiction sup-
plement intact, was later to follow. In Hong Kong itself, meanwhile, Jin
Yong experimented with adding an evening paper to the Ming Pao roster.
The first attempt, Huaren yebao, commenced publication in September
1967 but folded in its second year, allegedly due to disagreements among
the staff. Ming bao wanbao, founded in December 1969 and offering an
emphasis on financial reporting, enjoyed greater success and continued to
publish until 1988.
The other significant member of the Ming Pao family was the Ming
Pao Weekly (Ming bao zhoukan). Ming Pao Weekly commenced independent
publication in November 1968 but was in essence an extension of the
Southeast Asia Weekly (Dongnanya zhoukan), a supplement distributed free
of charge with Ming Pao and Singapore’s Nanyang shangbao since 1963.
Southeast Asia Weekly’s early issues had featured the exclusive serialization
of yet another Jin Yong martial arts novel, Suxin jian, later renamed Lian-
cheng jue (A deadly secret).29 In the latter half of 1969 the Weekly’s edito-
rial responsibilities passed from Pan Yuesheng, now put in charge of the
nascent Ming bao wanbao, to Lei Weipo, whose scoops from the film and
opera worlds had been one of the infant Ming Pao’s chief draws. Under his
direction the magazine reconstituted itself as Hong Kong’s premier enter-
tainment weekly and quickly began to attract a broad readership and hefty
advertising revenues.30

132 Chapter 5
 The second half of the 1960s thus saw not only the consolidation of
Ming Pao’s identity and status through its reporting on mainland affairs but
also its growth from a Hong Kong newspaper with a pair of ancillary pulp-
fiction weeklies to the keystone of a publishing enterprise that included a
transnational family of daily papers, an influential intellectual review, and
a widely popular entertainment pictorial. The Ming Pao family’s range of
appeal and adaptable deployment of discursive strategies reflected on a
larger scale those of the parent publication. The newspaper’s increasingly
respected political reporting and analysis maintained a happy coexistence
with its lively fiction supplement, entertainment columns, and ever more
daring photos of models and bathing beauties; the Weekly’s contributions
to the readership pool and advertising coffers were similarly matched by
the Monthly’s confirmation of Jin Yong and his enterprises’ cultural weight.
The expansion and variegation of Jin Yong’s publishing concerns
involved not only financial growth and the cultivation of a broad and
multifaceted readership but the cultivation of an extensive network of pro-
fessional relationships as well. A decade of employment in the newspaper
and motion picture industries had allowed Jin Yong to develop widespread
connections and friendships within Hong Kong’s close-knit and overlap-
ping literary, publishing, entertainment, and business communities even
before he established his own newspaper. While his break with the left rup-
tured or attenuated some of these early relationships, any losses in his
social capital were more than recouped through the opportunities afforded
by his successful establishment of publications covering a range of topics
and styles and addressed to varied audiences. The Ming Pao family of pub-
lications served as a cradle for several generations of cultural professionals,
ranging from gossip columnists to economic reporters, popular novelists
to exiled mainland political pundits, proofreaders and print-room work-
ers to general editors. By the 1970s and 1980s personal and professional
affiliations with Jin Yong’s enterprises ran throughout the journalistic, lit-
erary, and publishing worlds of Hong Kong and the overseas Chinese com-
munities, and these webs of personal connection were as integral to the
establishment of Jin Yong’s social and cultural status as his financial suc-
cess and the loyalty of his audiences.31
The period that saw such substantial expansion of Jin Yong’s publish-
ing enterprises is also often noted as having witnessed the emergence of
a distinctive local identity in Hong Kong. The new Hong Kong identity
was sketched in Hugh Baker’s 1983 article on “Hong Kong man,” and
affirmed by a frequently cited 1985 poll in which a majority of respon-
dents identified themselves as “Hongkongese” (Xianggangren) rather

The Empire of the Text 133

 than Chinese.32 Most scholars see its birth pangs, however, in the distur-
bances of 1966 and 1967, which confirmed Hong Kong’s immigrants’
sense of alienation from current trends on the mainland and commonal-
ity of interest with the colonial government and marked the coming of
age of a new generation born and raised in the colony itself. Over the
subsequent years, shifting relationships between the British colonial gov-
ernment and the Chinese population provided social and institutional
contexts for the indigenous Hong Kong identity; new media and popular-
culture forms, especially television, fostered its expression; and the 1984
signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, establishing the groundwork
for Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, instilled it with a
sense of precarious mortality and an urgent self-consciousness.33
Jin Yong was to serve as a prominent Hong Kong voice in the lead-up
to 1997 as he had during the Cultural Revolution. But his voice, whether
in his fiction or in his political commentaries, no more articulated the
emerging Hong Kong “nativism”—cosmopolitan, hybrid, consciously dif-
ferentiating itself from the mainland—than it had the Guangdong-
oriented local identity that preceded it. While championing the affluence,
independence, and opportunity available in Hong Kong, in its cultural
vision it remained loyal to the “Central Plains syndrome,” valuing Hong
Kong not so much for any identity unique to itself as for its status as a
central node in a diasporic network that paradoxically laid claim to a
uniquely authentic Chinese identity.
Ming Pao Monthly offers the most explicit expressions of this cultural
vision. Indeed, it is largely through expressing this particular vision that
the publication stakes its claim to gravitas and cultural capital. In terms
of social position, the readership the Monthly envisions for itself closely
resembles that bourgeois intelligentsia for whom (in the West at least) the
periodical press facilitated the creation of a public sphere of discourse.
From the inaugural issue, though, the magazine’s community is explicitly
imagined as diasporic: geographically dispersed while rooted in a com-
mon Chinese heritage. Its readers and contributors are scattered around
the world, throughout Asia, Europe, and America; but they are united,
implicitly, by the Chinese language, and more explicitly by a desire for a
periodical that can “objectively report on the true conditions of Chinese
society (Huaren shehui) in every locale.” The concern for China compre-
hends a respect for the “traditions and values of several thousand years of
Chinese culture,” but also an eagerness to keep abreast of the “newest tides
of thought, the important works and writings” of a rapidly changing and
increasingly interconnected world.34 The periodical that will serve this

134 Chapter 5
community models itself on “Peking University during the May Fourth
period” and “Dagong bao (L’Impartial) during the War of Resistance Against
Japan.” 35 And it requires, as its fundamental principles of operation, the
tolerance and nonalignment essayed on a more modest scale by Ming Pao’s
“Free Discussion” columns—meaning both an unbiased openness to any
reasonable point of view and a freedom from the ideological and finan-
cial pressures of any outside party.36
Ming Pao Monthly’s birth coincided with the outbreak of the Cultural
Revolution, and political reporting inevitably came to occupy a greater part
of the magazine’s contents than its editors had perhaps originally envi-
sioned. By the same token, however, the crisis helped to define the period-
ical’s sense of mission.37 Like Ming Pao itself, Ming Pao Monthly was val-
ued in Hong Kong and abroad as a source of information relatively free of
the cant of left and right; the magazine additionally assumed the role of
articulating an alternative vision of China’s past and future course. Some
of the readers whose letters are published soon after the 1967 disturbances
had quieted encourage the magazine to “preserve the culture of our ances-
tral nation and carry on the traditions of the descendants of the Yellow
Emperor” in the face of the Cultural Revolution’s assault upon the past.38
Editorial remarks published in the same issue echo the newspaper’s stance
during the 1967 disturbances but give special attention to the significance
of the geopolitical parameters of the war for cultural survival, emphasiz-
ing the privileged relationship of the overseas Chinese communities and
Hong Kong in particular to the Chinese heritage and its future:

Not only must we depend on this seaport to live our lives in peace, make a
home, and raise our children; with respect to China, and especially with
respect to China’s culture, Hong Kong may also have a great contribution to
make. With China presently in a condition of chaos, Hong Kong is one of the
few places to offer the freedom and the opportunities that will allow Chinese
people to create a scholarly culture. Therefore, Hong Kong’s unique environ-
ment seems to require that we take on a special mission.39

The illustration on the first issue’s cover casts the mission in graphic
form. Featured is a photograph of a white jade ring (bi) from the ancient
Zhou dynasty, dated to the fourth century BC; text on the inside cover
identifies and describes the piece. The object itself suggests wholeness, ele-
gance, and strength, while the identification and description contribute the
powerful connotations of antiquity, cultural accomplishment, and histor-
ical continuity. It is easy to read this range of connotations as consciously

The Empire of the Text 135

 intended by the editor to symbolize the magazine’s mission. One won-
ders, though, whether the additional implications of the last line of the
interior text are deliberate or providential. “Currently preserved at the Art
Institute of Chicago in America,” it reads—a telling reminder of the dis-
persal of the antique cultural heritage outside the confines of its geograph-
ical homeland. What allows the recirculation of this image of the Zhou
dynasty jade are the technology and commercial institutions of the twen-
tieth-century periodical press. And the press, in granting the jade new life,
subjects it to at least two forms of radical dislocation: it causes it to act as
an emblem for a community quite alien (in time, space, and social con-
stitution) from the community that produced and used the original piece;
and it circulates not the jade itself but a mass-produced reproduction of
the work. Ming Pao Monthly may in fact participate in the continuing
transmission of an integral Chinese cultural heritage, but it also deploys
the simulation of such a heritage as a token of significance and value, and
stakes its own claims to significance upon the continuing currency of this
token.
Chapter 7 resumes examination of Jin Yong’s publishing enterprises
and considers the ways in which their institutional resources and discursive
stance were brought to bear upon the specific problem of the status of
martial arts fiction. First, though, chapter 6 returns to analysis of the fic-
tion itself. It presents a reading of Jin Yong’s penultimate novel, The Smil-
ing, Proud Wanderer, written and first serialized at the height of the main-
land’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and at the moment of the
Ming Pao empire’s most significant expansions. In exploring the develop-
ment within this “mature” work of themes and narrative strategies identi-
fied in the preceding chapters’ discussions of Jin Yong’s earlier novels, this
reading will also attempt to identify the shifting points of contact between
the text and its historical context—the points at which the political events
of the day, and the author’s increasingly confident sense of cultural mis-
sion, both shaped the novel and served as objects of the text’s conscious
attention.

136 Chapter 5
 Chapter 6
Beyond the Rivers and Lakes

The Smiling, Proud Wanderer

X iaoao jianghu (titled in English as The Smiling, Proud

Wanderer, and referred to hereafter as Wanderer) was
serialized in Ming Pao from April 20, 1967, through October 12, 1969; a
revised version first appeared in 1977–1978. The publisher’s English ver-
sion of the title does not convey the full range of meaning suggested by the
original. Since jianghu, here rendered with the sense of “one who wanders
(the Rivers and Lakes),” more directly denotes the Rivers and Lakes them-
selves, the title can also be understood as implying “scornfully laughing
at the Rivers and Lakes”—a gesture succinctly expressive of the work’s
themes. Beyond representing the author’s imaginative and narrative pow-
ers at their conjoined heights of complexity and controlled extravagance,
the novel stands out among Jin Yong’s works for its focused and emotion-
ally powerful treatment of some of the author’s recurrent thematic con-
cerns. Wanderer’s subject is the struggle for power, its clear moral the futil-
ity and viciousness of political struggle and the emptiness of the ideologies
that variously motivate and mask it. This perspective has been adumbrated
in many of Jin Yong’s earlier works; in order to achieve its definitive artic-
ulation, Wanderer reimagines the relationship between imperial authority
and the Rivers and Lakes within the world of the novel, and, even more
strikingly, alters the terms by which the fictional world refers to the real
world in both its historical and its contemporary aspects. It casts the Rivers
and Lakes as a comprehensive metaphor for the political arena; and as an
alternative to the dystopia of political life, it offers a vision of reclusion, of
individual liberty given solace and substance by romantic fulfillment on
the one hand and transmitted cultural practices on the other. In so doing,
it extends the author’s use of martial arts fiction to interrogate the prob-

137
 lems of politics, culture, and individual identity to a point from which the
gleeful subversion of the genre’s paradigms in The Deer and the Cauldron
seems almost inevitable. Yet Wanderer’s significance lies not only in its
importance for a mapping of the oeuvre’s thematic development but also
in the position it bespeaks for the political function of Jin Yong’s fictional
project as a whole.
The initial focus of the novel’s narrative is Lin Pingzhi, the pampered
heir apparent of a prosperous caravan security agency (biaoju) in the city
of Fuzhou. Returning from a hunting trip, Lin assays an iconic act of xia
chivalry, defending a tavern-keeper’s daughter from the unwanted atten-
tions of a boorish stranger, and inadvertently kills his opponent in the
ensuing broil. The dead man turns out to have been the son of Yu Cang-
hai, chief of the powerful Qingcheng School, whose subsequent destruc-
tion of the Lin family and its concerns seems at first to be a simple act of
vengeance. But as Lin flees for his life, he discovers that the attack has been
long in the planning and has as its real aim the seizure of a hidden man-
ual of supreme martial skills, the Evil-Quelling Sword Technique (Pixie
jianfa), rumored to have belonged to his renowned great-grandfather. Lin’s
travels bring him to Heng Shan City,1 where a grand convocation of the
denizens of the Martial Grove offers him hope of intercepting his foes and
rescuing his captured parents. The extended sequence in and around Heng
Shan (chapters 2 through 7) begins to unveil the epic scope of a plot to
which the catastrophe that has struck Lin Pingzhi serves as a mere prelude.
It reveals the extent and configuration of, and the principal players within,
the novel’s Rivers and Lakes, the imagined society of the martial arts. It
introduces key narrative elements and the novel’s real protagonist—the
errant Huashan disciple Linghu Chong. And it propounds the work’s dom-
inant themes through a melodramatic enactment of the cruelty of politi-
cal struggle, the problematic validity of its ideological motivations, and the
chimeric dream of an alternative.
The inhabitants of the novel’s Rivers and Lakes, or Martial Grove—to
the extent that they serve as general references to the society of martial
artists, the two terms are here virtually synonymous—see their world as
structured around a fundamental opposition between the forces of good
(zheng) and the forces of evil (xie). In representing the good, the venera-
ble powers of Shaolin and Wudang are joined by an alliance of the sword
schools of the Five Sacred Mountains (Wuyue) and by several other sects
and clans, Sichuan’s Qingcheng School among them. The opposing camp
comprises a large and motley assortment of bandits, gangs, underworld
societies, and heterodox sects; its recognized leader, though, to which the

138 Chapter 6
other elements recognize formal or informal allegiance, is the dreaded
Divine Sect of the Sun and Moon (Riyue shenjiao), known to its foes as the
Demon Sect (Mo jiao). Though not as powerful as Shaolin and Wudang,
the schools of the Five Mountains—Taishan in the east, Huashan in the
west, Heng Shan in the south, Hengshan in the north, and Songshan in
the center—have borne the brunt of the struggle against the Demon Sect
over the last hundred years, and their formal alliance, headed by Song-
shan, was created specifically to counter their foe’s increasing might. Wan-
derer’s use of China’s five sacred mountains echoes the fivefold organiza-
tion of the mythic and martial universe in Heroes and its sequels; and
although Huashan, the axis of that earlier cosmography, topographically
here assumes its traditional place as the westernmost of the five peaks, it
occupies a central position in the novel’s plotting.
The occasion that early in the narrative draws together many of the
luminaries of this world is a grand ceremony at which Liu Zhengfeng, a
senior disciple of the Heng Shan School, will wash his hands in a golden
basin to declare his retirement from the Rivers and Lakes. It is because he
knows that both his foes and his potential allies will be present at the
ritual that the desperate Lin Pingzhi betakes himself to Heng Shan City.
Once there, though, he becomes involved—first as an eavesdropper, later
as a participant—in a series of events initially unconnected (or so it seems)
with either his own predicament or Liu’s abjuration of the Martial Grove.
He first overhears disciples of a school he eventually learns is Huashan
joking in a teahouse about the raucous deeds of their hard-drinking eldest
Swordbrother. He then watches as the nuns of Hengshan School appear to
demand that this individual—now named as Linghu Chong—be handed
over to them, accusing him of kidnapping one of their Swordsisters and
forcing her to drink together with him and the notorious rapist Tian
Boguang. Lin Pingzhi follows the Huashan and Hengshan disciples to Liu
Zhengfeng’s manor, where the Taishan and Qingcheng Schools further
accuse the absent Linghu Chong of violence and murder. The beautiful
young nun Yilin, Linghu’s supposed victim, now reveals through an
extended narration, punctuated by the questions and comments of her
audience, that Linghu Chong’s evident transgressions were in fact a valiant
ploy to rescue her from Tian’s attentions—a ploy that succeeded, but only
at the cost (she believes) of the young hero’s own life. At this point Yilin
inherits from Lin Pingzhi the burden of focalizing the narrative. She is
taken to minister to a wounded man who reportedly knows the where-
abouts of her savior’s mysteriously missing remains. The location to which
she is led turns out to be a brothel, and the wounded man is (as the reader

Beyond the Rivers and Lakes 139

 realizes long before Yilin) none other than Linghu Chong, who only now
makes his entrance into the primary diegesis.
This sequence exemplifies Jin Yong’s mature mastery of the narrative
strategies of delayal, indirection, and anticipation deployed with such for-
malistic heavy-handedness in the early Flying Fox. The interruption of the
forward momentum of Lin’s adventures, and the deferral of information
on the recently introduced element of Liu’s retirement, is joined by the
tantalizingly gradual revelation of the actions, character, and even the iden-
tity of the narrative’s new focus. The sequence’s primary function is not
the simple accretion of narrative information but rather the intensifica-
tion of the reader’s involvement through the simultaneous excitation and
deferred gratification of the desire for knowledge. In terms of content, the
knowledge doled out does establish deepening connections between the
various strands of the plot: Lin Pingzhi learns that Huashan has been
aware of, and even seems to have some interest in, Qingcheng’s plot
against his family. But the central figure in this particular revelatory pro-
gression is Linghu Chong, and the elaborate preparation for his appear-
ance both underscores his centrality within the story and throws the con-
stitutive elements of his personality into high relief. It is his generosity,
forthrightness, high-spiritedness, impetuous courage, innate sense of chiv-
alry, and lack of regard or even mischievous disdain for convention that
embroil him in his misadventures. And if these misadventures have a
motif beyond or within the illumination of the character that drives them,
it is the problematization of conventional moral categories. Yilin’s recital
reveals, and her audience’s reactions approve, the altruistic motives under-
lying Linghu Chong’s apparently transgressive behavior but cannot mask
the delight with which he embraces the transgression. Other actors in
the episode similarly defy easy moral characterization: the lustful Tian
Boguang is not only refreshingly frank in his villainy but also proves him-
self openhanded and scrupulously true to his word, while the Qingcheng
and Tianshan disciples, ostensibly champions of the good, distinguish
themselves by their pettiness, vindictiveness, and opportunism.
The broader thematic implications of these moral uncertainties
emerge when the narrative finally arrives (in chapter 6) at the moment of
Liu Zhengfeng’s hand-washing ceremony. Liu’s invited guests have been
speculating as to the motives behind his proposed retirement from the
martial world. They are stunned when he announces his intention to take
up a minor post in the imperial military bureaucracy. Their shock increases
when the ceremony is abruptly halted by an emissary of Zuo Lengchan,

140 Chapter 6
chief of the Songshan School and head of the Five Mountain alliance, who
accuses Liu of consorting with one Qu Yang, an elder of the Demon Sect.
Liu readily admits his association with Qu but claims that theirs is a
friendship based on a shared love of music, free of any political designs;
it is precisely in order to pursue their shared passion that the two friends
—whose very names embody the supposed dichotomy between the
“straight” (zheng) and the “bent” (qu)—have decided to renounce their
respective allegiances and withdraw from the Rivers and Lakes altogether.
The Songshan envoy rejects the very possibility of apolitical motives or
actions, maintaining that at best Liu has fallen victim to a Demon Sect
plot to undermine Heng Shan’s strength and the Five Mountains’ unity.
He demands that Liu kill Qu in order to prove his loyalty. When Liu con-
tinues to demur, the Songshan disciples begin to systematically execute
his family and followers. Liu Zhengfeng moves to end the slaughter by
killing himself, only to be snatched from the scene by none other than Qu
Yang, who receives a mortal wound during the course of his rescue.
The scene of the hand-washing ceremony exemplifies one of Jin Yong’s
characteristic narrative tactics: the staging of a confrontation between key
characters, enacted in almost ceremonial fashion (in this case the cere-
mony is literal) before an assembled crowd of onlookers, extended and
elaborated through a series of revelations, the introduction of new partic-
ipants, and repeated shifts in alliances and reversals of the issues at stake,
leading finally to a violent denouement that complicates rather than
resolves the multiple strands of the plot. Among the more important of
the complications introduced by this particular episode is that of Zuo
Lengchan’s ambitions. Evident in his actions here is a desire not only to
combat the Demon Sect but to assert his dominance over the allied Five
Mountain schools as well; and as the novel progresses, the reader learns,
through events witnessed and information discovered by Linghu Chong
and other characters, that the Songshan chief aims to unite the Five Moun-
tain schools into a single sect under his command as the first step toward
establishing complete hegemony over the Rivers and Lakes. Zuo Leng-
chan’s readiness to use any means necessary to accomplish his goals rein-
forces the perception suggested by Linghu Chong’s earlier adventures that
there is no simple correlation between the ostensible camps of good and
evil and actual devotion to principled or moral behavior. “You Songshan
disciples are a thousand times more vile than the Demon Sect!” cries Liu
Zhengfeng’s daughter before being cut down in cold blood (256). Indeed,
as what is at first cast as a battle between the Demon Sect and the allied

Beyond the Rivers and Lakes 141

 forces of light is joined by the struggle for control of the alliance and by
internecine warfare both within the Demon Sect and within various of the
Five Mountain schools, the ideology of good and evil is increasingly
revealed to be no more than a veil for the naked struggle for power. It is
this struggle that characterizes, even constitutes, the world of the Rivers
and Lakes. It is this struggle that Liu Zhengfeng and Qu Yang seek to tran-
scend through their embrace of friendship and music. But the tragic out-
come of their attempt raises doubt as to whether any form of transcen-
dence or withdrawal is ultimately realizable.
As with all of Jin Yong’s novels, the text’s primary vehicle for tracing
the multilayered conflicts of its plot and the thematic issues they raise is
the developmental trajectory of its protagonist. Linghu Chong makes his
entrance, as we have seen, wounded and under suspicion of moral laxness.
He is absent from the scene of Liu’s hand-washing ceremony but entan-
gled in its ideological thickets when Liu Zhengfeng reveals that it was Qu
Yang, struck by his courage and flair, who saved him from his seemingly
mortal wounds. Liu offers this information in testimony to Qu’s renunci-
ation of the feuding between the Demon Sect and the Five Mountains, but
one of the Songshan representatives reads it as further evidence of the
foe’s cunning; might not Linghu Chong’s natural gratitude lead, “hypo-
thetically” (249), to the emergence of another traitor within the Five
Mountains’ ranks? The immediate sequel to the hand-washing ceremony
casts Linghu Chong even more unequivocally as the bearer of its thematic
burdens. Liu and Qu, fleeing to the wilderness outside Heng Shan City to
expire from their wounds, encounter Linghu, recovering from his, and,
before breathing their last, pass on to him the score they have composed,
charging him with finding a pair who can perform it and make their
shared music live on. The name of their duet is “Xiaoao jianghu,” the title
of the novel itself. With this score hidden in the breast of his garments,
Linghu Chong embarks on a journey of further wounding, unjust accusa-
tions, disillusionment, healing, vindication, martial mastery, reluctant
leadership, scornful rejection of power, and eventual fulfillment as he and
the daughter of the Demon Sect’s chief withdraw to the mountains to play
“Xiaoao jianghu” together on lute (qin) and flute (xiao).
There is no need to continue tracing the novel’s intricate plot in
exhaustive or sequential fashion; readers interested in the unfolding of the
narrative are urged to turn to the original work. We shift here instead to a
topical discussion of the work, beginning with the representation of the
martial arts within its thematic exploration of political struggle and its
alternatives.

142 Chapter 6
The Viciousness and Perversity of Martial Technology

Within the generic conventions of the martial arts novel it is a given that
the struggle for power will involve the acquisition and deployment of
supreme martial skills. So it is in Wanderer. In all of the interlocking con-
flicts noted above, the antagonists seek to possess and master the technolo-
gies that they see as the key to supremacy. In each case, furthermore, the
desire to master martial techniques itself turns out to be one of the origi-
nal sources of contention. In particular, the Evil-Quelling Sword Manual,
which initiates the unfolding of “text-time,” is revealed through accretive
analepses to lie at the root of the tale’s various struggles and thus serves
as the prime mover of “story-time” as well. The gradual discovery of the
manual’s role in driving events and the revelation of the true nature of the
techniques it contains function as primary engines of the novel’s narrative
development. In all these respects the Evil-Quelling Sword Manual’s func-
tions within Wanderer resemble those of the Veritable Scripture of the Nine
Yin within Heroes and of similarly potent texts in the intervening novels.
Where Wanderer surpasses its predecessors is in the ingenuity and affective
force with which it integrates its representation of the pivotal martial tech-
niques’ nature and history with the novel’s central thematic concerns. It
represents the Evil-Quelling Swordplay—and through it the martial arts
in general—not merely as a tool for the ambitions of the ruthless and
hypocritical, and not merely as inhumanly savage in the most significant
instances of its deployment, but also as structured around an intrinsic per-
versity that comes to symbolize the violence and unnaturalness of the
quest for power. The martial arts, the defining practice of the Martial Grove
and the Rivers and Lakes, become homologous with the Rivers and Lakes
as an expression of the inalienable viciousness of political life.
Of the many characters in the novel who manipulate the martial arts
for personal and political ends, perhaps the most emblematic is Yue
Buqun, Linghu Chong’s master and father-surrogate and the chief of the
Huashan School. Known by the cognomen “The Righteous Sword” (Junzi
jian), Yue is in bearing and by reputation a gentleman-scholar whose
scrupulous devotion to altruistic Confucian principles elevates him (as the
name Yue, literally “sacred mountain,” Buqun, “not [of the] crowd,” sug-
gests) far above the plane of petty men (xiaoren). He first appears in the
narrative as a champion to the desperate Lin Pingzhi, godlike in the eyes
of the recipient of his grace. But subsequent developments gradually reveal
that even this seemingly chivalric act is but one element in a deep-laid
plan to seize the Evil-Quelling Sword Manual and the dominance it prom-

Beyond the Rivers and Lakes 143

 ises. Yue has a penchant for pietistic oration, including a forbidding lec-
ture to his disciples on the inviolable distinction between orthodoxy and
heterodoxy that several generations ago plunged his school into warfare
between a spirit sect and a sword sect. But when his own schemes and rep-
utation are at stake, he does not hesitate to employ a martial technique
from the supposedly apostate branch. Yue Buqun is easily as ambitious,
cunning, and ruthless as Zuo Lengchan or the chiefs of the Qingcheng
School and the Demon Sect; he is more false and vicious than any of them
by virtue of the pieties with which he masks his lust for power.
If the enterprise of the martial arts is compromised by its hypocritical
manipulation at the hands of Yue Buqun and his ilk, it is darkened also
by the inhuman savagery of the climactic combats within the novel. Like
all of Jin Yong’s works, Wanderer abounds in lyrical descriptions of mar-
tial exercise, in fusions of the martial and civil arts (discussed further
below), and in baroquely plotted encounters that explore not only the
shifting relationships between the combatants but the arcana of martial
techniques and the niceties of the Martial Grove’s code of honor as well.
The battles that resolve the primary plot lines, however—such as the duel
between the rival claimants to the Demon Sect’s throne, the contest for
leadership of the newly unified Five Mountain School, Lin Pingzhi’s venge-
ance upon his enemies, or the last general melee among the Five Moun-
tain disciples—uniformly degenerate into savagery of the sort adumbrated
in the narrative’s first fight, the fatal tavern brawl between Lin Pingzhi and
the scion of the Qingcheng School. Perhaps the most grotesque of these
combats is Lin Pingzhi’s accomplishment of his long-sought revenge. Hav-
ing recovered his family’s stolen manual and (at a cost discussed below)
mastered its techniques, he cold-bloodedly stalks his foes, toying with
them and murdering them one by one before being forced into a final con-
frontation. In the fight that follows he lames one of his opponents, the
hunchback Mu Gaofeng, then blinds Yu Canghai and hacks off both his
arms. Crazed with delight and taunting the ruined Yu, he stumbles against
Mu, who locks his arms around Lin’s legs:

Lin Pingzhi gave a start. Seeing several dozen Qingcheng disciples rushing
toward him, he struggled to pull his legs free, but Mu Gaofeng’s arms encir-
cled them like hoops of iron, and he struggled in vain. He raised his sword
and stabbed straight down at the hump on Mu’s back. With a splat a gout of
black and fetid liquid came gushing forth.
Utterly unprepared for this event, Lin thrust his legs against the ground,
intending to dodge to one side. He had forgotten though that his legs were

144 Chapter 6
 still locked in Mu’s grasp. The stinking liquid sprayed right into his face, and
he screamed in pain. It was in fact a virulent poison; Mu Gaofeng had carried
a sack of venoms hidden in his hump. Shielding his face with his left hand
and closing his eyes, Lin Pingzhi raised his sword and began hacking madly
at Mu’s body.
The strokes fell thick and fast. Powerless to avoid them, Mu could only
hold fast to Lin’s legs. And now Yu Canghai, divining the pair’s location from
their cries, rushed forward, opened his mouth, and sank his teeth deep into
Lin Pingzhi’s right cheek. The three locked themselves in a tangled heap, their
minds in chaos. . . .
Mu Gaofeng’s wild cries began to fade as Lin Pingzhi sank his sword into
his back over and over again. Yu Canghai, bloody from head to toe, kept his
teeth still locked in Lin’s face. Lin finally gave a mighty shove with his left arm
that sent Yu flying, and at the same time let out a horrible cry. His right cheek
was soaked with gore; Yu Canghai had bitten a great chunk of flesh right off
his face. Though Mu Gaofeng had already breathed his last, he still held tight
to Lin Pingzhi’s legs. Lin used his left hand to locate Mu’s arms, then raised
his sword and slashed down, lopping both arms off and only thus freeing
himself from his grip. . . .
Lin Pingzhi gave a wild laugh. “I’m avenged! I’m avenged!” he cried.
Every one of the [watching] Hengshan disciples blanched in shock at this
astonishing and horrendous spectacle. (1447–1448)

The focus here on the brutality of the combatants’ emotions and

actions heightens the dramatic spectacle of the scene but robs it of any
heroism or martial grace; while gratifying the reader’s desire for narrative
resolution, the text also directs him/her to feel the same horror imputed
to the fictional onlookers. In a number of its narrative elements, as well as
in the general tone of gothic extravagance, the passage is comparable to
the climactic sequence in Lu Xun’s “Zhu jian” (Forging the swords, 1926),
with which it shares the aim of dramatizing the self-consuming violence
of revenge.2 Where Lu Xun’s tale operates in the spare and abstract mode
of mythic archetypes, however, Jin Yong’s scene draws additional pathetic
force from the reader’s extended involvement in the characters and their
histories. Yet the melodramatic dimension does not exclude the symbolic
power of the images of entanglement, dismemberment, and blindness.3
In this and similar scenes in Wanderer, martial conflict serves as a vehicle
for the simultaneously visceral and allegorical expression of a horror so
overwhelming as to invalidate any narrative justification for the charac-
ters’ actions or intrinsic value of the martial arts themselves.

Beyond the Rivers and Lakes 145

 At one level of signification, then, both the general subjection of the
quest for martial mastery to selfish ends and the brutish and futile denoue-
ments to various characters’ endeavors render void any distinction between
“good” and “bad” martial techniques such as that hypocritically advanced
by Yue Buqun, reducing the martial arts in their entirety to a value-neutral
instrument at best. At another level, however, the text expressly identifies
certain martial technologies as evil. Chief among these is the plot’s pri-
mary narrative engine, the ironically named Evil-Quelling Swordplay. The
inalienable wickedness of this art is vouched for both by authorial provi-
dence, which assigns wretched fates to all those who practice it, and by the
reactions of such presumptively normative characters as the protagonist
Linghu Chong. Linghu is described as feeling a frisson of horror and dis-
gust each time he encounters the Evil-Quelling Swordplay, and it is the
realization that Yue Buqun has embraced this technique that finally
demolishes his desperately held faith in his master’s virtue.
In performance, the techniques of the Evil-Quelling Swordplay are
distinguished only by a preternatural speed and suddenness. The aura of
abomination associated with the art lies not in its moves as such but rather
in the changes it effects in the person of the practitioner, who undergoes a
process of feminization explicitly marked as perverse. Linghu Chong (and
through him the reader) first encounters these changes when he accompa-
nies Ren Woxing, the deposed chief of the Demon Sect whose escape from
a subterranean prison he has unwittingly aided, to the sect’s headquarters
at Blackwood Crag to confront the usurper Dongfang Bubai. After passing
in disguise through a series of impregnable defenses and casting down the
body-double seated on the sect’s throne, Ren, Linghu, Ren’s daughter Ying-
ying and his faithful lieutenant Xiang Wentian make their way to Dong-
fang’s secret lair. They are astonished to discover that the sanctum of the
most dreaded champion of the Martial Grove is a boudoir decorated with
embroidery and paintings of famous beauties, set in the midst of a garden
full of intoxicating scents. Linghu Chong’s speculation that this is a love
nest to which the sect leader has retired with a favorite concubine is con-
futed when the interlopers follow a shrill, hackle-raising voice to discover
Dongfang Bubai himself seated before a makeup stand, smooth-cheeked,
daubed with makeup and reeking of perfume, dressed in robes “whose
style was that of neither man nor woman, and whose seductive colors
would have looked rather too feminine, rather too garish, even if Ying-
ying had been wearing them” (1282). In the furious combat that follows,
Dongfang’s weapon of choice is the emblematically female embroidery
needle, which he flings at his opponents’ eyes and other vital points. So

146 Chapter 6
formidable are his skills that he is defeated only when Yingying succeeds
in shattering his focus by torturing his hapless male favorite.
Dongfang Bubai’s martial power, the political power that rests squarely
on this martial might, the feminization of his being, all spring simultane-
ously from a single source: the techniques he has learned from the Sun-
flower Scripture (Kuihua baodian). And this text, the Demon Sect’s most
fiercely guarded treasure, turns out to be the Evil-Quelling Sword Manual in
another guise. The abbot of Shaolin discloses its history to Linghu Chong
in the chapter preceding the showdown on Blackwood Crag. The Scrip-
ture’s author was a eunuch of the imperial household. The volume in
which he recorded the secrets of his supreme martial technique passed
through various hands in the centuries after his death, ending up in the
possession of the southern Shaolin temple, whose abbot refused to prac-
tice or teach its methods. But two visiting disciples of the Huashan school
stole glimpses of the manuscript and, on the basis of their furtive and par-
tial readings, established Huashan’s rival sword and spirit sects. A Shaolin
monk sent to warn Huashan of the dangers of the Scripture made a copy
of the two sects’ fragmentary texts instead, then disappeared. The Demon
Sect, learning that a copy of the manuscript existed on Huashan, attacked,
was driven back by the allied Five Mountain Schools, but succeeded in
making off with the reconstructed Sunflower Scripture. A second retaliatory
attack some years later resulted in the decimation of both the Demon Sect
and the Five Mountain Schools. The vanished Shaolin monk, meanwhile,
returned to lay life, changed his name to Lin, and used the arts he studied
from his own stolen copy of the scripture to establish a caravan security
agency. The Demon Sect’s Sunflower Scripture is thus the original of the Lin
clan’s Evil-Quelling Sword Manual. And the key to the technique taught by
the varied recensions of this text is the well-nigh-unbearable first step in
its practice: self-castration. The most potent technology of the Martial
Grove is based paradoxically on emasculation.
Castration allows the aspirant to the text’s secrets to manipulate the
formidable energies involved, free from the danger that they might be cat-
astrophically diverted by surges of sexual desire. This rationale, a fictional
elaboration of the strictures against sexual activity associated with many
martial traditions, provides the author with an emotionally charged and
symbolically rich figure for the self-destructiveness of the quest for power
—a figure that is constructed on presumptions of a male, phallic, hetero-
sexual, and patrilineal norm. The cultivation of power requires violence
against one’s physical masculinity; it is the results of this violence that are
manifested in the substitution of the needle for the sword and in the per-

Beyond the Rivers and Lakes 147

 formance of an exaggerated and grotesque femininity. It requires a corre-
sponding rejection of heterosexual relationships: Dongfang Bubai, after
beginning his practice, executes his concubines and takes up with a male
favorite, while Lin Pingzhi chooses the Evil-Quelling Swordplay and the
promise of revenge over consummation of his marriage to Yue Buqun’s
daughter, murdering her in the end. And it requires the disruption and
perversion of the transmission of power and knowledge from father to
son. Thus Lin Pingzhi learns that the revered ancestor who founded the Lin
family enterprise was not in fact his grandfather’s sire—could not have
been, given the fundamental demand of his art. His own father’s dying
wish is not that he inherit the ancestral art, but rather that he not recover
or study the family’s heirloom manual. And by then contravening this
command, Lin Pingzhi makes himself guilty not only of disobedience but
also of the obliteration of the family line, which traditional Chinese moral-
ity ranks as the most cardinal of sins. Ren Woxing, for his part, enacts a
vicious distortion of transmission, entrusting the perilous Sunflower Scrip-
ture to his protégé Dongfang Bubai precisely in order to test his loyalty
and to lead him to ruin in the event his suspicions prove correct.
The Evil-Quelling Swordplay, structured around the destruction and
perversion of multiple aspects of masculinity, is the martial technology
within the novel most clearly marked by an intrinsic evil; it is not, however,
the only martial art to bring harm to its practitioner and bear an attendant
burden of negative symbolic connotations. Ren Woxing’s distinctive tech-
nique, the Star-Absorbing Thaumaturgy (Xixing dafa), works by draining
an opponent’s internal energies, augmenting the wielder’s potency while
rendering the attacker helpless. Its fatal flaw lies in the difficulty of con-
trolling and integrating the energies absorbed, and the danger that ener-
gies not properly neutralized will bring madness or death to the user. This
is precisely the fate that consumes Ren Woxing, who perishes at the zenith
of his triumph, exhausted by the need to incessantly repress the forces
raging within him. Where the symbology surrounding the Evil-Quelling
Swordplay seems designed to connote an irreducible perversity, that asso-
ciated with the Star-Absorbing Thaumaturgy functions as a simpler meta-
phor for the perils of hegemony.4 That it represents evil on a less inalien-
able level—functional, perhaps, rather than intrinsic—is suggested by the
fact that Linghu Chong acquires the art yet ends the narrative physically
and morally whole. He learns the technique during a sequence at the
novel’s halfway point that marks the reversal of his personal fortunes and
a turning point in the plot. Imprisoned in the underground cell formerly
occupied by Ren Woxing, for whom he has been unwittingly substituted,

148 Chapter 6
he discovers the characters of the Thaumaturgy’s formulae impressed upon
his flesh by the bars of the cage onto which Ren had engraved them. He
memorizes the text, ignorant of its nature, and begins practicing the tech-
nique subconsciously in his dreams. The method proves capable of reliev-
ing the symptoms of the unique internal wounds he has suffered. Though
he subsequently has occasion to employ its deadly martial capabilities,
most notably in his final confrontation with Yue Buqun, such uses are
always inadvertent or compelled, and he readily renounces the vicious
and danger-fraught practice in the end, turning instead to healing arts
transmitted by the abbot of Shaolin.
The novel portrays no convincing rival to the sinister power of the
Evil-Quelling Swordplay. Many of the other contending martial technolo-
gies are conceived of as not merely inferior in potency but also negative in
their operation—that is, centered on the dispersal of power or the neutral-
ization of technique. The Star-Absorbing Thaumaturgy, which drains in
order to (perilously) amass, is an obvious example. The other arts mastered
by the novel’s protagonist can be similarly characterized as well. While
confined to Huashan’s Crag of Penance to reflect on his transgressions,
Linghu Chong comes into possession of two bodies of martial lore that
carry him through his subsequent adventures. One is a compendium of
the techniques of the Five Mountain Schools, with the countermoves that
render them useless, inscribed on the walls of a cavern by the Demon Sect
champions immured there several generations ago. This knowledge so
demolishes Linghu Chong’s faith in his own school’s techniques that he
can scarcely bring himself to practice; it also bears with it the first evidence
(which he is not yet ready to credit) of the Five Schools’ perfidy and
hypocrisy. The second art he acquires is that known as the Solitary Cham-
pion’s Nine Sword Techniques (Dugu jiu jian), which contains the secrets
of defeating or neutralizing all other martial methods, known or yet unin-
vented. The existential emptiness inherent in this form of supremacy is
evident in the name and fate of the technique’s inventor, Dugu Qiubai,
“the solitary seeker of defeat” introduced (as here, indirectly) in Compan-
ion, who spent his life in a fruitless quest for a worthy opponent. A dis-
tinctive feature of the Nine Sword Techniques is that they rely entirely on
subtlety of method; it is this that allows Linghu Chong to deploy them to
great effect even when his wounds have left him completely bereft of inter-
nal power. Neither Linghu’s repertory, in sum, nor that of any other char-
acter contains a constructive or positive martial counterbalance to the Evil-
Quelling Swordplay. As the supreme martial technology, the Evil-Quelling
Swordplay represents, in one sense, the martial arts’ quintessence, and

Beyond the Rivers and Lakes 149

 casts the shadow of its power and its perversity over the enterprise as a
whole. The alternative the novel imagines to this baneful practice is not
some other, more positively valuated martial technique, but a fundamen-
tal rejection of the martial arts and of the Rivers and Lakes in which they
hold sway.

Reclusion, Romance, and the Role of Culture

The dream of forsaking the Rivers and Lakes is first articulated in the novel
by Heng Shan’s Liu Zhengfeng and the Demon Sect’s Qu Yang. Music,
epitomized in their joint composition and performance of “Xiaoao
jianghu,” serves as the medium of their friendship and the aim of their
intended withdrawal; just as the martial arts define and epitomize the
political world of the Rivers and Lakes, so music does the opposed terrain
of reclusion. The text’s representation of Qu and Yang’s musical commun-
ion is informed by several allusions. The first is to the notion of the zhi yin,
“the one who understands the music.” The term derives from the story
(found in the Lie zi and other early texts) of the Spring and Autumn Period
lute player Bo Ya, who destroyed his instrument at the death of Zhong
Ziqi, the one man who could intuit and appreciate the music’s intent and
thus the heart of the player. The concept of the zhi yin speaks to central
tenets of Chinese aesthetics and is also a close variant of the zhi ji trope so
central to the xia tradition (see chapter 1 herein). Wanderer’s implicit evo-
cation of the story of Bo Ya and Zhong Ziqi both invests Qu and Liu’s
friendship with the gravitas of cultural precedent and affirms the ideal
xia’s allegiance to values transcending the raw exercise of power. These val-
ues, and the impediments to their realization, are the subject of a second
and more explicit allusion. As Qu Yang and Liu Zhengfeng await death in
the hills outside Heng Shan City, Qu compares their final performance
with that of the Jin dynasty scholar-official Xi Kang (223–262). Xi Kang is
known as one of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, a fraternity of
scholar-officials whose cultivation of artistic and philosophical pursuits in
a retreat near Luoyang serves as one of China’s most enduring images of
reclusion—a principled withdrawal from public life, motivated by Confu-
cian condemnation of the political and moral status quo and/or by Dao-
ist yearnings for spiritual freedom.5 Xi Kang, condemned to death by his
political enemies, is said to have played the lute piece “Guangling san”
with unruffled composure while facing execution, then sighed that after
his death the music would be lost to the world. The overt points of Qu
Yang’s reference to Xi Kang are the passion of the music—Qu actually

150 Chapter 6
claims that in this respect the “Guangling san” was no match for his and
Liu’s “Xiaoao jianghu”—and the player’s grief at the imminent loss of his
art. Other, unstated elements of the story are, however, also relevant to Qu
and Liu’s situation: the contrast between a private and transcendent vision
and the sordid politics that condemn the artist to death, and the general
air of chivalry and unbowed heroism associated with the figure of Xi
Kang.6 And the connection between the Jin dynasty scholar and Jin Yong’s
characters turns out to be one not of mere homology but of concrete fili-
ation. Before handing the manuscript of “Xiaoao jianghu” over to Linghu
Chong and entrusting him with the task of finding a worthy pair of inher-
itors, Qu Yang proudly reveals (274–276) that the lute’s portion of the
score is adapted from the music that supposedly perished with Xi Kang’s
death. Reasoning that even if the transmission of “Guangling san” ended
with Xi Kang, it did not begin with him, Qu has plundered dozens of pre-
Jin tombs to find an ancient copy of the score, then used this unique relic
as the basis for the music that is the consummate expression of his tran-
scendent relationship with his zhi yin.
Through the tale of its creation, thus, no less than through the charge
laid upon Linghu Chong, the “Xiaoao jianghu” manuscript interweaves
the concerns of apolitical transcendence and unique mutual understand-
ing with those of transmission and inheritance. Linghu Chong’s struggles
to free himself from the vicissitudes of the Rivers and Lakes and to dis-
cover his soul mate are of a piece with his quest to find the score’s right-
ful heirs—heirs who are, in the end, himself and his beloved Yingying. As
a textual vehicle of transmitted knowledge, the “Xiaoao jianghu” manu-
script functions as the narrative counterpart to the pernicious legacy of the
Evil-Quelling Sword Manual. The correspondence between the two is sug-
gested by the fact that Linghu Chong receives the key to the latter’s loca-
tion from Lin Pingzhi’s dying father immediately after accepting the for-
mer from Qu and Yang. The point is further driven home when in-laws of
the Lin clan, suspecting Linghu Chong of having seized the manual for
himself, capture and search him and take the undecipherable (to them)
score as proof of his alleged treachery.
Indeed, if we view Linghu Chong’s adventures in terms of the trans-
mission of knowledge and power, we find that his acceptance of the legacy
of Qu and Yang’s music stands in contrast to his varying responses to an
array of alternative inheritances that present themselves to him during the
course of the novel. As an orphan adopted by Yue Buqun and his wife,
their daughter Yue Lingshan’s childhood playmate, and the highest rank-
ing Huashan disciple, he is his master’s virtual son, presumed son-in-law,

Beyond the Rivers and Lakes 151

 and anticipated heir as chief of the Huashan School. Throughout the novel
he displays a heartbreaking and ultimately futile longing to maintain these
roles in the face of the mounting tension between his conscience on the
one hand and the inescapable knowledge of his master’s perfidy on the
other. In this set of roles, he is darkly mirrored by Lin Pingzhi, who not
only lusts after that knowledge of the Evil-Quelling Sword Manual, which
has passed by chance into Linghu Chong’s unwilling hands, but also
replaces Linghu in Yue Lingshan’s affections and (for a time) in her father’s
schemes. A second inheritance offered to the protagonist, parallel in many
ways to that of the Huashan School, is the Demon Sect’s. Linghu Chong’s
role in Ren Woxing’s liberation from his underground prison, his master-
ing (albeit unwittingly) the Star-Absorbing Thaumaturgy, his deepening
involvement with Ren Yingying, and certain underlying concords in per-
sonality, all move the once-and-future chief of the Demon Sect to nomi-
nate Linghu Chong as his own son-in-law and successor. Linghu rejects the
mantle offered him by Ren Woxing, with the same fervor—and not infre-
quent doubt—he displays in fighting to regain his place in the Huashan
succession. And if his doppelgänger in the latter lineage is Lin Pingzhi, in
the former it is Ren Woxing’s erstwhile protégé Dongfang Bubai.
An element in each of Linghu Chong’s possible martial inheritances
is a potential romantic partner—the daughter of the chief of the respec-
tive school or sect. His final choice, though, is not of one martial lineage
over another but of disengagement from the world of the martial arts as a
whole. And so before he can consummate his union with Ren Yingying,
he must dissociate it from the quest for martial supremacy and political
power. He does so by repeatedly declining the union as long as it is impli-
cated in these martial and political contexts. The pair weds only after Ren
Woxing has died; and Yingying’s observation of the traditional three years
of mourning for her father’s death, and her resignation of the chieftain-
ship of the Demon Sect before the wedding, underscore their determina-
tion to establish a union free of the inherited burdens of the Rivers and
Lakes. They mark their success by playfully replacing the Demon Sect’s
hegemonic mantra, “For a thousand autumns, for a myriad of years, the
Rivers and Lakes shall be united!” (Qianqiu wanzai, yitong jianghu), with a
celebration of romantic union, “For a thousand autumns, for a myriad of
years, we shall be husband and wife forever!” (Qianqiu wanzai, yong wei
fufu) (1684).
It is important to note that in the act of declaring their union’s inde-
pendence from the shadow of the Rivers and Lakes, the revision of the slo-
gan additionally posits romantic love itself as one primary alternative to

152 Chapter 6
political struggle. In accepting and fulfilling Qu Yang and Liu Zhengfeng’s
legacy of apolitical transcendence through music, Linghu Chong and Ren
Yingying also transform it, transposing it from the homosocial context of
male zhi yin in the mode of Bo Ya and Zhong Ziqi to a heterosexual model
of romantic relationships. The trope of the “fair-faced zhi ji” (as Linghu
Chong refers to Yingying during the scene in which they finally clarify
their mutual devotion [1452]) has deep roots in Chinese romantic litera-
ture of the “scholar and beauty” (caizi jiaren) tradition. Its appearance here
accords with a predilection for happy romantic endings in Jin Yong’s work
and in certain strands of New School martial arts fiction in general. In
terms of Wanderer’s particular thematic concerns, though, the romantic
denouement of the protagonist’s trials both draws validity from and simul-
taneously serves to buttress the work’s deployment of normative hetero-
sexuality as a standard of difference and moral evaluation. The mutual
implication of manhood, heterosexual union, and inheritance in Linghu
Chong’s fulfillment of the ideals symbolized by the music of “Xiaoao
jianghu” mirrors and rectifies the perversions surrounding the Evil-Quell-
ing Sword Manual. Details of narrative figuration persistently reinforce the
correspondences and crucial distinctions between the two. When Linghu
Chong and Yingying accompany Ren Woxing into Dongfang Bubai’s sanc-
tum, for instance, not only does Linghu misrecognize the garden as a
retreat for the sect leader and a presumed female companion, he further
imagines himself and Yingying playing their music together in this para-
dise once Dongfang has been defeated; and when Yingying expresses sat-
isfaction at the destruction of the Sunflower Scripture, he jests that she must
have been worried that he too would be tempted to practice its arts.
The text’s use of masculinity and heterosexual desire to distinguish
the martial traditions and political roles, which Linghu Chong declines,
from the tradition of transcendence and reclusion, which he embraces,
illuminates the most significant exception to the rejection of the burdens
of martial transmission that otherwise characterize his path: his accession
to the post of chief of Hengshan. The members of Hengshan, one of the
Five Mountain Schools, are all Buddhist nuns or female lay practitioners.
Linghu’s involvement with the school begins with his rescue of Yilin from
the attentions of Tian Boguang. He clears himself from suspicion that his
own designs on the beautiful young nun might have been less than hon-
orable even as she is ensnared by worldly passion for her dashing benefac-
tor. Linghu Chong’s subsequent acts of selfless chivalry toward the school
inspire the abbess Ding Jing, an unyielding opponent of Zuo Lengshan’s
plans for hegemony, to make the dying request that he succeed her as its

Beyond the Rivers and Lakes 153

 chief. His consequent position as leader and sole male member of a school
of unattached females draws responses ranging from good-natured merri-
ment to derision and imputations against his and his charges’ integrity:
on the one hand he is suspected of debauchery, and on the other symbol-
ically emasculated by his occupation of a historically female role. Yingying
soon affirms Hengshan’s masculine credentials by commanding hundreds
of the Demon Sect’s allies to enroll in an all-male auxiliary branch. Linghu
Chong, for his part, indulges in meat and wine but maintains scrupulous
decorum in his dealings with his female subordinates; he teaches them
Hengshan techniques he has learned in the cavern beneath Huashan, safe-
guards them against the perils of the Rivers and Lakes, and turns leader-
ship of the school over to a worthy nun at the earliest decent opportunity.
Linghu Chong’s acceptance of the chieftainship is thus explicable as
an act of chivalry whose apparent dissonance with his reclusive tendencies
is mitigated by its temporariness and by the Hengshan School’s relative
freedom from the contagion of political ambition. Femininity combines
with religious otherworldliness to construct the nuns as pure, principled,
and benevolent; misconstructions of Linghu’s position or his relationship
with his charges merely prove the sordidness of the world from which he
and they hold themselves apart. But adding depth to this surface level of
signification are more complex resonances within the novel’s symbolic
system. Linghu Chong’s scrupulous propriety with the nuns and his resist-
ance of the temptation that Yilin might present differentiate him from the
lustful Tian Boguang and so validate the moral authority of his hetero-
sexuality. His principled and willed abjuration of masculine sexuality in
the limited context of these relationships, moreover, stands in contrast to
the violent, instrumental, and perverse emasculation required by the Evil-
Quelling Swordplay. In this light, Linghu Chong’s role as leader of the
Hengshan School constitutes one facet of a cross-reflection between emas-
culation on the one hand and Buddhist renunciation on the other that is
sustained throughout the novel. The essential configuration of the ele-
ments of this cross-reflection appears in the story of the sword manual’s
genesis: it is created by a eunuch, hidden away by a virtuous Shaolin abbot,
then stolen, practiced, and disseminated by an apostate and self-castrating
monk. On the level of foregrounded narrative action rather than that of
the story’s mythic underpinnings, the same themes animate a series of
burlesque incidents: Yilin’s father turns out to be a monk, Bujie (“no pro-
hibitions”), who took the tonsure in order to “marry” a nun with whom
he was smitten; Bujie makes a monk out of Tian Boguang by castrating
him, and gives him the name Buke Bujie (“no choice but to follow the

154 Chapter 6
prohibitions”); Yilin’s mother tries to force Linghu Chong to take her
lovesick daughter as his wife, threatening him with the alternative of the
same irreversible “monkhood” that Tian Boguang has suffered. The fact
that the text plays these incidents for comedy, however grotesque, rein-
forces the status of Buddhist renunciation as a more benign mirror of the
perversions of the Evil-Quelling Swordplay.
Linghu Chong’s path, as we have seen, lies with neither of the com-
plementary terms of this dyad, but with an alternative form of renuncia-
tion: reclusion from the struggles of the world in an idyll suffused with the
transcendent powers of music and shared with his beloved. He first recog-
nizes music’s fidelity to a realm beyond politics and ideology during his
fateful encounter with Qu Yang and Liu Zhengfeng. He discovers its impor-
tance to his own fate when, in disgrace, humiliated, and accused of treach-
ery, he is brought to the bamboo-shadowed retreat of a lute master who
not only identifies the manuscript he carries as a musical score, and so
vindicates his innocence, but also uses music to salve his wounds and
begins to teach him to play. The mysterious lute master is in fact none
other than Ren Yingying, hidden from sight and masquerading as a wiz-
ened crone.7 Her sympathy for Linghu Chong’s plight and her admiration
for his talents and untrammeled spirit plant the seeds of their subsequent
romance, in which music serves as both a narrative thread and a govern-
ing image.8 The linkage between music and the garden retreat established
in their first meeting is reprised in Linghu’s fantasy of Dongfang Bubai’s
lair as a refuge for himself and his beloved, and is realized later in the nar-
rative when the pair find temporary sanctuary—a presentiment of their
retirement to the mountains at the novel’s close—in an unpeopled valley
where they perfect their musical communion. The flowering peach trees
that fill this vale make clear its affinity with Tao Qian’s rustic and apoliti-
cal utopia of Peach Blossom Spring.
In order to appreciate the continuities and shifts in the configuration
of Jin Yong’s imaginary universe, it will be useful to recall an earlier blos-
som-filled cradle of traditional arts: The Eagle-Shooting Heroes’ Peach Blos-
som Isle. Here the military and civil arts found union; Huang Yaoshi, the
Heterodoct of the East, practiced his music and other accomplishments
not as alternatives to his martial skills but as complements to and even
vehicles for them, as witnessed by his duel with Ouyang Feng on zither
and flute. Wanderer presents at one point an almost identical fusion of
the martial arts with traditional artistic and cultural practices, giving it
extended and programmatic treatment—while at the same time represent-
ing it as essentially flawed. When Linghu Chong, innocent of his compan-

Beyond the Rivers and Lakes 155

 ion’s designs, is brought to Plum Manor near Hangzhou’s West Lake to aid
in releasing Ren Woxing from his subterranean prison, he is matched in a
series of duels against the four squires who dwell there in bucolic reclu-
sion. Each of the squires devotes his leisure to one of the arts cultivated by
the traditional Confucian scholar, and each has made his art an expression
of his formidable martial skills. The fourth squire demonstrates swordplay
informed by his landscape-painting techniques; the third wields an iron
brush in moves based stroke for stroke on the calligraphy of famous mas-
ters; the second brandishes a magnetic chessboard in chess-inspired strate-
gies; and the first and senior squire engages Linghu Chong in a duel of
flute and lute that evokes simultaneously the precedent of Huang Yaoshi
and the defining image of Linghu’s romance with Yingying. This dramatic
and inventive set piece is perhaps the best-known of Jin Yong’s fictional
weddings of China’s martial and cultural arts. Its moral, however, is the
fatal limitations of such a wedding. The four squires are seduced by their
lust for the cultural treasures offered as stakes in the contest—fabulously
rare paintings, calligraphy, chess manuals, and the “Guangling san” score
unearthed by Qu Yang—into compromising their duties as Ren Woxing’s
jailers. Their martial techniques’ fidelity to their respective artistic inspira-
tions ultimately limits their combat effectiveness, leaving them open to
defeat by Linghu Chong’s intuitive, free-form talents. And just as the
attempted fusion cripples their martial skills, so too does it sabotage their
dreams of scholarly reclusion; the willingness to serve Dongfang Bubai,
which gains them twelve idyllic years at Plum Manor, also leaves them vul-
nerable to the catastrophic consequences of Ren Woxing’s escape. The first
squire returns “Guangling san” to Linghu Chong before taking his own
life. Where The Eagle-Shooting Heroes envisions the China’s martial and
cultural arts as complementary and mutually fulfilling, Wanderer suggests
that for all their structural and stylistic affinities, their fundamental aims
are incompatible. Qu Yang and Liu Zhengfeng propose, and Linghu Chong
and Ren Yingying confirm, that the value of music, and by extension of
the artistic and cultural heritage as a whole, lies precisely in its capacity to
create an alternative to the Rivers and Lakes and to the martial arts that
are this arena’s defining practice.
In censuring the inhumanity of the martial arts and the Rivers and
Lakes, the text makes an ostensible rejection of what it implicitly embraces
as the very building blocks of its existence. The novel is a martial arts
novel, and in most readers’ eyes a fine one, depending for its success on
the author’s mastery of and the audience’s fascination with the formulae
and assumptions of the genre. The struggles of the Rivers and Lakes make

156 Chapter 6
up the warp and woof of its engrossing narrative, and an innate talent for
and innocent delight in the martial arts are central features of the sympa-
thetic protagonist’s character. While certain key passages dramatize the
brutality of violent conflict, many others delight in the beauty, spirit, and
complexity of martial performance. There is no need to belabor the mar-
tial arts’ centrality to the work, nor the apparent dissonance (far from
unique, either to this work or to martial arts fiction) between stated moral
and generic imperative. What is perhaps most interesting, or at least most
germane to the present argument, is the reorientation of the fundamental
cosmology of the martial arts novel that enables the expression of Wan-
derer’s themes. Book and Sword and its more proximate successors set their
tales of struggle and maturation, romance, and martial and cultural inher-
itance in a world of Rivers and Lakes defined by its contingency to and
antagonism with the historic Chinese imperial order. Wanderer makes but
the most perfunctory of gestures toward the martial world’s defining and
limiting counterpart. It allows the Rivers and Lakes to become in effect a
self-subsistent universe, incorporating within itself issues previously con-
structed through tension with its other. The reflexive and critical perspec-
tive that arises alongside the Rivers and Lakes’ emergent self-sufficiency
can be understood in part as a conscious exploration of the assumptions
and limitations of the martial arts novel, by a master of the genre at the
apex of his authorial career. Yet this critical turn involves not only the
genre’s reflection upon itself but also a shift in its referential coordinates.
Where the previous sections of this chapter have sought to elucidate the
internal logic of Wanderer’s narrative and symbolic structures, the final sec-
tion will therefore address the relationship between the novel’s fictional
Rivers and Lakes, its representation of Chinese history, and its provocative
evocations of contemporary events.

Terms of Reference: China’s Past and China’s Present

The novel’s very title promises (at least in the Chinese) a thematic treat-
ment of the Rivers and Lakes, and the text explicitly addresses the ques-
tion of the nature of this realm, beginning in the first chapter when Lin
Pingzhi’s father delivers a lecture on the history of the family business and
the secrets of its success. The old caravan guard preaches that survival and
prosperity within the Rivers and Lakes’ treacherous tides depend less on
martial skill than on the canny cultivation of wide-ranging and cordial
relationships. The catastrophe that soon befalls the Lin family lays bare
the insufficiency of this worldly but essentially benign perspective and

Beyond the Rivers and Lakes 157

 thrusts Lin Pingzhi out into an environment he has previously experi-
enced only from the shelter of his father’s accomplishments. As discussed,
the assembly for Liu Zhengfeng’s hand-washing ceremony serves to reveal
the Rivers and Lakes’ internal configuration. The same scene also reasserts
a familiar conception of the milieu as separate from and opposed to the
world of officialdom and the orthodox structures of imperial power. The
assembled heroes greet with suspicion and aggression the arrival of a gov-
ernment official; their reflexive defensiveness turns to disbelief, scorn, and
bemused tolerance at the revelation that he has come to confer a minor
post on Liu Zhengfeng. Liu’s ploy of intended “retirement” thus confirms
the division between, and complementarity of, the two worlds. It also
reverses, however, their respective roles. The Rivers and Lakes, traditionally
conceived as a place of exile from the center of power and the struggles
surrounding it, here become a zone of peril from which officialdom prom-
ises (vainly) an escape. The “reek of blood” that Chen Pingyuan notes as
characterizing the Rivers and Lakes of traditional vernacular fiction had
never obscured the fact that they shared their position at the margins of
orthodox authority with the hills and forests of the recluse; 9 in Wanderer,
though, it is the savagery of the Rivers and Lakes themselves that defines
the peaceful disengagement of reclusion as an alternative.
The contemptible official who appears at the hand-washing ceremony
is almost the sole representative within the novel’s pages of the consti-
tuted imperial authority in whose margins and interstices the Rivers and
Lakes traditionally find their existence. He is joined only by a buffoonish
general whose armor and beard Linghu Chong borrows for an extended
slapstick masquerade. As Linghu Chong accompanies Ren Woxing on his
journey to confront Dongfang Bubai, the text notes that local officials in
the vicinity of Blackwood Crag have all but relinquished their authority
before the might of the Demon Sect, which parades unchallenged through
the streets. The Rivers and Lakes’ dominance of this specific locale, justi-
fied on the narrative level, can stand as a figure for its virtual monopoly
over the novel’s discursive terrain; and while this monopoly is only proper
to the genre, and shared with the majority of works of martial arts fiction,
in Wanderer it explicitly assumes a specific representational function. Con-
tinuing his progress up Blackwood Crag, Linghu Chong notes with amuse-
ment the increasingly elaborate ceremonies and trappings of authority
with which Dongfang Bubai has vested the Demon Sect and his own posi-
tion. “This is just like when the eunuch reads the imperial edict in a play!”
he notes at one point (1257). His amusement, though not his distaste,
diminishes as he recognizes the depth of the power the sect has gathered,

158 Chapter 6
and the ease with which the victorious Ren Woxing succumbs to the lure
of the pomp and flattery that the usurper has made the norm. The Demon
Sect has become a mirror of imperial authority—a perverse and distorting
mirror, as the image of the eunuch makes clear. Zuo Lengchan’s ambitions
imitate the same model. As the champions of the Martial Grove converge
upon Songshan to choose the leader of the newly unified Five Mountain
Sect, Zuo’s disciples pointedly remind them of the central sacred moun-
tain’s proximity to ancient imperial capitals; when they crowd the Song-
shan School’s main hall, Zuo himself suggests, with false diffidence, that
they remove to a more commodious terrace nearby, where emperors once
made ritual offerings. “He’s leading us all out to this Dais of Sacrifice,”
muses Linghu Chong; “Don’t tell me he really sees himself as emperor?”
(1317–1318). The Shaolin abbot has in fact already warned that Zuo’s
ambition might extend this far; after vanquishing the Demon Sect and
unifying the Rivers and Lakes, “who knows but what he might want to
make himself emperor; and once he’s made himself emperor, he might
want to live forever, deathless and immortal!” (1224). The abbot’s warn-
ing may be only metaphorical; in any event, whether or not Zuo Lengchan
or one of his rivals might actually extend his power beyond the Rivers and
Lakes to claim the throne of Wanderer’s fictional China is in an important
sense irrelevant. For within a fictional world where imperial authority has
attenuated to near invisibility, the Rivers and Lakes have become not a
liminal territory on the margins of political struggle but the site and rep-
resentation of that struggle itself; and the battles for hegemony over this
terrain replace on the narrative level, and on an analogical level subsume,
the battles for imperial hegemony that underpin the author’s earlier works.
The Rivers and Lakes’ metaphorical assumption of the role of empire
is facilitated not only by the paucity of characters representing the actual
imperial order but also by the absence of referents that might fix the nar-
rative’s place within the chronology of Chinese history. Wanderer “has no
historical background,” as the author puts it in his 1980 afterword to the
revised edition; “this signifies,” he continues, “that similar situations can
occur in any dynasty” (1692). The novel and its immediate predecessor
Xiake xing (titled in English as Ode to Gallantry, first serialized from June 11,
1966, through April 19, 1967) share the distinction of being the only two
among Jin Yong’s full-length works neither set at an identifiable historical
moment nor tying their plots to a particular crisis or problem in the his-
tory of a Chinese dynasty. This is not to say that references to China’s his-
torical past are entirely absent from the text. The novel’s geography is made
recognizably Chinese through place-names implicitly and sometimes

Beyond the Rivers and Lakes 159

 explicitly linked with historical events, and the cultural landscape of such
scenes as Linghu Chong’s duels with the four squires of Plum Manor is
similarly concretized through references to artists and works of identifi-
able periods. These clues have allowed aficionados to specify a terminus
post quem for the narrative’s events, which many accordingly place during
the Wanli period of the Ming (AD 1573–1620).
The contributions these references make to the conjectural dating of
the story are perhaps less significant than the perspective they provide on
the text’s general posture toward the Chinese past. The past is first of all
celebrated as the source of that solace and meaning available through the
cultural practices associated with reclusion. Xi Kang and his lute score
epitomize this function. Xi Kang’s era clearly lies distant from the events
of the novel. It provides the tale’s “historical background,” though, in the
sense that the common perception of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo
Grove as principled abstainers from the cruel and Byzantine factionalism
of the Jin imperial court provides the model for the novel’s conceptual
framework. By specifying a physical linkage (in the form of the lute man-
uscript) between Xi Kang and its characters, the text suggests that the past
does not merely exist as a pattern of immanent meaning but in fact trans-
mits its value through a tangible patrimony, an unbroken inheritance. The
patrimony is not however immutable; the more important of the two
scores in the text is not the original “Guangling san,” recovered from a
tomb and so fatally appealing to the eldest Plum Manor squire’s antiquar-
ian passions, but the “Xiaoao jianghu,” created by Qu and Liu with the
relic as one of its constituent elements and passed on to become a vehicle
of Linghu Chong and Ren Yingying’s renunciation and romance. The
novel’s appropriation of the latter score’s title for itself implies that it too
not only extols the same world-spurning values but also does so by carry-
ing on the tradition of excavating and reinterpreting the past.
And yet this validation of the Chinese past as the source of cultural
values inherited through concrete acts of transmission is accompanied by
and even facilitated by the flattening and abstraction of the political
aspects of history. Linghu Chong’s conference with the Shaolin abbot and
the chief of Wudang in chapter 30, which lays bare the causal roots and
thematic implications of the novel’s chief conflicts, begins with the trio
gazing out from Hengshan upon a road cut through the rugged moun-
tains of the north China landscape. The two elders cite the historical
annals to explain how tens of thousands of laborers built the highway at
the command of a campaigning emperor of the Northern Wei dynasty
(AD 386–534). Linghu Chong expresses awe at the power of the throne,

160 Chapter 6
and remarks that it’s no wonder that men have fought so fiercely to claim
that seat. “Countless heroes and champions through the ages have found
the lure of power impossible to resist,” replies the Wudang chief. “Never
mind the imperial throne; the turmoils that rock the Martial Grove this
very day, these never-ending struggles, are all due to nothing other than
this thing called ‘power ’” (1222). And so commence their discussions of
the Five Mountain Schools, the Demon Sect, and the Evil-Quelling Sword
Manual. The passage confirms the virtual identification of the empire with
the Rivers and Lakes (here the Martial Grove) and at the same time demon-
strates how such identification empties historical reference of any specific
value. The aims, justification, and results of the Wei emperor’s acts are
irrelevant. He stands only as a representative of the presumably universal
dynamics of power, ambition, and (implicitly) oppression. Absent are the
earlier novels’ partisan investment in, even their interest in the concrete
details of, the triumphs and tragedies of dynastic history. Wanderer’s dis-
tance from Jin Yong’s earlier works in this regard is further underscored by
an incident in which Yue Buqun visits the site of a famous victory by
the Song general Yue Fei over the armies of the barbarian Jin. “There was
not a single exponent of the martial arts who didn’t cherish the greatest
admiration for Yue Fei, foe of the Jin and defender of the nation” (581);
the chief of Huashan has the further honor of sharing a surname with the
hero. But a battlefield temple dedicated to the general Yang Zaixing
becomes the site first for Yue Lingshan’s amorous comparisons between
the image of the martyr and her handsome fiancé, then for raucous and
irreverent nonsense from the novel’s recurrent comic figures, the Six
Immortals of the Peach Vale. The occasion’s rich historical and patriotic
possibilities are left inert and quickly vanish before the claims of other
narrative and discursive agendas.
The relegation of Yue Fei and the Yang generals to an iconic yet essen-
tially irrelevant status stems from a reconsideration of the ethnic nation-
alism tragically embodied in Book and Sword’s Chen Jialuo and given tri-
umphant expression by Heroes’ Guo Jing and Companion’s Yang Guo. One
can trace the gradual progress of this reconsideration across the author’s
middle-period works; its defining figure is Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils’ Xiao
Feng, who gives his life to seal a truce between the Liao whose bloodline
he carries and the Han Chinese by whom he was raised. In Wanderer the
ethnic other is as rare as the government official, and represented prima-
rily by the Miao chieftainess of the Five Venoms Sect, Lan Fenghuang. Lan
and her followers belong firmly in the tradition of exoticized and eroti-
cized ethnic females inaugurated by Book and Sword’s Princess Fragrance.

Beyond the Rivers and Lakes 161

 As one of Linghu Chong’s staunch allies, she contributes to the validation
of the protagonist’s normative heterosexuality and to the exposure of the
hypocritical Puritanism of Yue Buqun and other “upright” figures; but the
ancillary nature of her role only underlines the extent to which questions
of ethnicity are peripheral to the tale’s main concerns. The attenuation of
the problem of ethnicity dissolves in turn the divisions of the political
map. While Chen Jialuo and Yuan Chengzhi retire beyond the borders of
an ethnically contested empire, the final scene of Wanderer finds Linghu
Chong returning to Huashan. His struggles transcend geography, and his
withdrawal is not from a politically defined locale but from the realm of
political activity.
For it is not only ethnic and territorial definitions of nationalism that
are repudiated in the aftermath of the martyrdom of Semi-Devils’ Xiao
Feng. Faith in the integrity of any attempt to guide the nation’s fate
through political action seems to be disavowed as well. Intimations of this
loss of faith can be found prior to Semi-Devils, most notably in Heaven
Sword and Dragon Sabre, the conclusion of the trilogy begun by Heroes and
Companion. The protagonists of those two novels, it will be remembered,
won the right to idyllic retirement with their beloveds through devoted
and triumphant discharge of their duties to the nation and its people.
Dragon Sabre’s Zhang Wuji similarly dedicates his own skills and Yue Fei’s
long-hidden manual of military strategy to the cause of driving the Mon-
gols from the central plains but then cedes the stage to the treacherous
Zhu Yuanzhang, future founder of the Ming dynasty, and withdraws to a
life of marital bliss with a Mongol princess. His choice represents transcen-
dence of ethnic divisions, but also disenchantment with the martial and
political struggles that have secured a Han Chinese victory at the clearly
implied price of tyranny. As a rejection of ethnic, dynastic, and political
struggle, Zhang Wuji’s withdrawal from public life is trumped by Xiao
Feng’s engaged yet annihilative sacrifice of life itself. And in the two novels
that follow Semi-Devils, it is not Jin Yong’s protagonists who withdraw from
the arena of dynastic contestation but dynastic history itself that vanishes
from the narrative. The specificity of political history is replaced by a more
abstract vision of politics itself as a realm of violence and delusion. It is as
a representation of political strife in an essentialized form that the Rivers
and Lakes come to stand in for the historically specific empire. And it is as
the alternative to the increasingly discredited and abstracted political arena
that China’s cultural past assumes a central role as the positively valuated
constituent of inherited identity.10

162 Chapter 6
 It would be naive to take at face value the ostensibly apolitical char-
acter of this culturalist stance. The previous chapter of this study has noted
how Jin Yong’s publications in the later 1960s gave explicit voice to calls
for the preservation of Chinese culture in the face of the devastation
threatened by the mainland’s Cultural Revolution. In the context of the
upheavals reported daily on the pages of Ming Pao and critiqued in its edi-
torials, a reverent evocation of China’s cultural past, even one appearing
in the fiction supplement, inevitably assumed a contingent political sig-
nificance. Even more charged, of course, were Wanderer’s representations
of the political arena itself. The novel’s portrait of ruthless power struggles
hypocritically justified and but thinly masked by appeals to morality and
orthodoxy closely paralleled Jin Yong and his fellow commentators’ path-
breaking analysis of the Cultural Revolution as factional warfare waged
under a veil of ideology. And the general homology between contempo-
rary politics and the novel’s events was reinforced by numerous details of
language, plot, and imagery.
Wanderer’s first clear echoes of contemporary events appear in the
scene of Liu Zhengfeng’s hand-washing ceremony. As already noted, the
episode’s basic structure resembles that of similar scenes throughout Jin
Yong’s oeuvre. Here, though, the shifting confrontation played out before
a crowd of witnesses is furnished with particulars—the demand for a pub-
lic recantation of error and renunciation of ties with the enemy, the insis-
tence that the audience both bear witness to the confession and declare
their own allegiance to orthodoxy, the son’s betrayal of his father under
threat of humiliation and torture, and Liu Zhengfeng’s attempt at suicide
as his world turns against him—that clearly evoke the public struggle ses-
sions developed by the Communist Party over two decades of political
campaigns and implemented with renewed intensity during the Cultural
Revolution. Later in the novel, as Linghu Chong and his companions
approach the Demon Sect’s headquarters, allusions to the politics of the
Cultural Revolution and the cult of Mao proliferate. The sect’s leader is
described as having withdrawn from public view and allowed authority to
pass into the hands of his handsome young favorite; one of his venerable
comrades-in-arms is accused of treachery, bound and beaten, and paraded
through the streets; Dongfang Bubai’s elevation to nearly divine status has
replaced strategy with sycophancy in the sect’s councils and made shrill
and hollow slogans the sole language of communication among its mem-
bers. Dongfang Bubai’s very name, which might be translated as “the
invincible east,” evokes the solar imagery of the Mao cult, as does the

Beyond the Rivers and Lakes 163

 title of the sect’s secret manual, The Sunflower Scripture; the ruthless Ren
Woxing’s name, literally “I do as I will,” calls to mind Mao Zedong’s noto-
rious characterization of himself as “a monk with a parasol—without hair
or heaven” (wu fa wu tian, homophonous with “defying law and nature”).
Jin Yong’s afterword simultaneously acknowledges and disavows the
novel’s references to contemporary events:

In writing martial arts fiction, my aim is to write about human nature, the
same as with any fiction. During the years when I was writing The Smiling,
Proud Wanderer, the power struggles of the Communist Party’s Cultural Revo-
lution were raging like wildfire. In the battle for authority and control, those
in power and those in revolt against them shirked no extremes, and the
foulest aspects of human nature were revealed in their most concentrated
form. Every day I was writing editorials for Ming Pao, and my violent reaction
against the sordidness of political events was naturally reflected in the daily
installments of my martial arts fiction. This novel does not however inten-
tionally allude to the Cultural Revolution. It intends rather to employ charac-
ters within the novel to depict certain universal phenomena from the three
thousand years of Chinese political life. Romans à clef are not all that inter-
esting, for the political situation changes very quickly; it is only the depiction
of human nature that has relatively lasting value. The ruthless struggle for
power is the basic condition of political life, from antiquity to the present, in
China and abroad. So it has been for several thousand years, and so I fear it
is likely to be for several thousand years in the future. In planning the novel
I thought of Ren Woxing, Dongfang Bubai, Yue Buqun, Zuo Lengchan, and
others not primarily as masters of the Martial Grove, but rather as political
figures. . . . Characters of all these types have existed under every dynasty, and
most likely in other countries as well. (1690) 11

There is no question but that Wanderer cannot be reduced to a simple

roman à clef. Vast stretches of the narrative bear no discernible reference
to specific contemporary events, and even those characters and incidents
that do, fail to cohere into any comprehensive or consistent allegory; both
Dongfang Bubai and Ren Woxing, for instance, seem to refract elements of
Mao’s persona and political role, and while much of the Cultural Revolu-
tion imagery clusters around the Demon Sect, it is the Songshan School
that first raises the specters of ideological orthodoxy and the public strug-
gle session. On the other hand, however, given the aptness and acerbity of
such correspondences as are noted above, the unequivocal claim that the
novel does not specifically refer to the personalities and events of the Cul-

164 Chapter 6
tural Revolution, or that any apparent references result only from the per-
sistence of universal political phenomena, seems so disingenuous as to
raise the question of its motivation. The dating and provenance of the
afterword provide keys to an answer. By 1980 Jin Yong, increasingly well-
disposed toward the incipient economic and social reforms of the Deng
Xiaoping era, may have wished to distance himself from the bitter antag-
onism that had existed between him and an earlier stage of the Chinese
Communist Party’s rule. At the same time, with the revised editions of his
novels to which this and other authorial reflections were appended, he
was deeply engaged in the project of refashioning and repackaging his
serialized fiction as a body of literary work with enduring appeal. Publi-
cation in book form does much in and of itself to liberate the text from
the fragmentation, transience, and contingency of publication in a daily
newspaper; to this the author adds his endorsement of an interpretive
strategy emphasizing the “timeless” themes of human nature and politi-
cal archetypes over limiting situational references.
Jin Yong’s efforts to shape the reception and reputation of his fiction
and his evolving relationship with the mainland regime will be discussed
in the following chapters of this book. Before moving on to these topics,
it may be fruitful to consider from a broader perspective the question of
how Wanderer’s direct yet parabolic address of contemporary political
reality positions Jin Yong’s work relative to the overall project of twenti-
eth-century Chinese fiction. To speak of an “overall project” is admittedly
problematic from the outset. Theodore Huters has reminded us of the
danger of drawing too facile comparisons between works hailing from dif-
ferent temporal and geographic regions of a literary history “marked by
ideological and political interventions that have been at once crude, intri-
cate, subtle, and absolute.” 12 And Jin Yong’s work suffers the additional
disadvantage of belonging to a popular genre commonly held to lie out-
side or beneath the purview of this history altogether. On the other hand,
however, it is precisely the martial arts novel’s disengagement from the
fractious and divisive tides of consciously political literature that has
allowed it to claim temporal continuity and geographical universality
undreamed of by ideologically more contingent schools. Independence
from instrumental political agendas has by no means liberated the genre
from the “obsession with China” so famously (or infamously) held by
C. T. Hsia to be one of the hallmarks of twentieth-century Chinese litera-
ture; 13 to the contrary, as illustrated here, martial arts fiction may testify
better than any other body of literature to the shadow this obsession has
cast in the popular imagination. What makes Wanderer distinctive is its

Beyond the Rivers and Lakes 165

 shift from a generalized evocation of Chinese identity in the face of cul-
tural dislocation and historical crisis to a deliberate deployment of generic
conventions in a critique of contemporary (though not exclusively con-
temporary) political conditions. With this shift, Jin Yong moves closer to
the express engagement intended by Hsia’s formulation.
Wanderer’s strategy may be likened to that of the early Ming pao edi-
torial on the Miss World Pageant; both employ an ostensibly marginal and
unserious medium to address matters of grave concern. In so doing, while
they exploit the chosen medium’s freedom of expression and the novelty
of its application to the topic at hand, they allow the topic to invest the
medium with an unexpected dignity. The editorial cloaks its gravity in the
declared status of a minor tabloid paper, in the use of vernacular Can-
tonese, and in the choice of an apparently nugatory topic for discussion.
The case of the novel is more complex. Martial arts fiction’s stock in trade
of life-and-death struggle constitutes a surface of melodramatic gravity
that is conventionally discounted by assumptions of the genre’s essential
triviality. Wanderer calls upon its readers to see the masque as real—to rec-
ognize that the divertingly bloody show is no show at all but a window
both topical and universal on the world’s horrors.
The stance taken by Wanderer has implications beyond the imputation
of gravitas to a particular genre banned by the Communist regime and dis-
missed as inconsequential by the Chinese literary establishments outside
the mainland. It assumes an independent and potentially critical role for
fiction in general in the definition of individual and national identity. In
this sense Wanderer, far from merely satirizing the personae and politics of
the Cultural Revolution, challenges the exclusive arrogation of discursive
power by the political sphere on the mainland and abroad.14 Maoist
orthodoxy’s requirement that culture dance anxious attendance upon the
designs of the political authorities, although a narrowing of the moral and
exploratory aspects of the May Fourth tradition, derives in part from that
tradition’s utilitarian concept of literature as the handmaid of nationalist
ideological projects; and in its inheritance of this utilitarian directive,
mainland literature from the decades after 1949 was less distant from its
counterparts in Taiwan and Hong Kong than the overt divergence of polit-
ical stance might suggest. Bodies of literature, whether popular or avant-
garde, that sought to evade the utilitarian tradition’s limitations most often
did so through the disavowal of political concerns. Jin Yong’s approach is
not so much apolitical as metapolitical. It critiques the project of politics
itself, rejecting political activity as a fruitful site for the production of

166 Chapter 6
meaning and identity and asserting the competing and even superior
claims of cultural practices operating outside the political realm. Such is
the message of Wanderer’s narrative, as we have seen; but as I argue in the
next chapter, such also is the operating assumption and hence the mes-
sage of Jin Yong’s own project. Not merely in the contents of his fiction
but through his efforts to define the contexts of that fiction’s reception as
well, he asserts culture’s claim to a voice independent of politics narrowly
defined and one empowered to articulate its own visions of Chinese and,
more broadly, human identity.

Beyond the Rivers and Lakes 167

 Chapter 7
Revision and Canonization

From Ming Pao to The Collected Works

of Jin Yong

T he manipulation of the supposed boundaries

between entertainment and serious journalism evi-
dent in such early editorials as “Some Remarks on the Miss World Pageant”
represents a first step in the canny leveraging of Ming Pao’s credibility,
which over the years garnered increasing respect and status for the paper
and its sister publications. This increasing status inevitably reflected upon
the paper’s publisher and editorialist, and upon the fiction he published
in its pages as well, while the particular cultural and political stances artic-
ulated in Ming Pao’s editorials and through the Ming Pao Monthly supplied
the fiction with potential (though not restrictive) interpretive contexts.
But Jin Yong did not abandon the fate of his fictional work to the opera-
tion of such fortuitous and imprecise engines alone. Beginning from Ming
Pao’s earliest days, he used his unique role as both author and publisher
to shape the conceptual contexts for the acceptance of martial arts fiction
and to open the possibility of his own work’s serving as a bearer of liter-
ary and cultural capital.

A Tradition and an Aesthetics for Martial Arts Fiction

Liu Yichang’s (b. 1918) novel Jiutu (The drunkard), first serialized in 1962–
1963 in the literary supplement of Xingdao wanbao and now recognized as
one of the classics of literary modernism in Hong Kong, offers a snapshot
of the status of martial arts fiction at that moment in the colony’s cultural
history. The novel’s nameless protagonist and first-person narrator is a
would-be author, a disciple of Hemingway and The Dream of the Red Cham-
ber, who faces with despair the necessity of penning martial arts fiction

168
and pornography in order to pay the rent and supply the alcohol into
whose embrace his philistine society compels him. For this anguished
soul, the demands of art and of the marketplace are incommensurate; the
former is in fact recognized and defined by its uncompromising rejection
(a rejection that he himself lacks the strength to realize) of the latter. The
martial arts novels he pens in the novel’s early scenes and the pornogra-
phy at which he temporarily succeeds as his degradation progresses are
guaranteed both moral turpitude and lack of artistic merit by the very fact
that editors and readers are willing to accord them a different order of
value in the form of cold hard cash.
The perspective of Liu Yichang’s protagonist replicates at least in broad
outline the model of the cultural economy proposed by the sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu. Seeking to account for the mechanisms by which, and
ends to which, cultural and literary value or “capital” are socially con-
structed, Bourdieu describes the literary field—the community of those
involved in the material and symbolic production of what a given society
defines as “literature”—as existing within the larger networks of society,
and yet finding autonomous definition only to the extent that it articu-
lates values unique to itself, distinct from the values and power structures
of the society within which it is embedded. Its structure and hierarchies
are therefore generated by the continually shifting tension between its
unique autonomous principles and the heteronomous principles of polit-
ical and economic authority in effect throughout society at large.1 Bour-
dieu believes the literary and cultural fields achieved the above-described
configuration in France during the nineteenth century and continue to
function essentially unaltered through the present day, at least in the soci-
ety that gave them birth.2 We might trace the model’s reflection in the
consciousness of The Drunkard’s late-twentieth-century Hong Kong writer
in part to this figure’s absorption of the social and aesthetic presumptions
of his pantheon of Western modernist literary heroes (Proust, Faulkner,
etc.). But at least some of its antecedents are closer to home. The novel’s
protagonist also sees himself as a (potential) heir to China’s May Fourth
literary tradition, a movement that was constructed in opposition to and
contradistinction from the commercial and popular publications of its day.
The leaders of the May Fourth movement (themselves, of course, influ-
enced by Western models) articulated their aims in ideological terms, as
rejecting benighted forms of “entertainment”—of which martial arts fic-
tion and film were among the most regressive—in favor of socially and
morally responsible art. But intertwined with these ideological arguments
were the Chinese intellectual’s traditional disdain for the world of com-

Revision and Canonization 169

 merce, and the prejudice of the academy, based in the north near the seat
of political power, against the southern (Shanghai) nexus of the publish-
ing industry.3
The Drunkard’s linkage of martial arts fiction with pornography merges
the disdain for these genres’ contents with an abhorrence for their com-
mercial imperative and inherits the May Fourth tradition’s scorn for “lit-
erary beggars” (wengai) and “literary prostitutes” (wenchang) who write
for the market. In his yearning to realize a literary space unsullied by eco-
nomic concerns, Liu Yichang’s protagonist exemplifies Bourdieu’s auton-
omous principle, the articulation of the artistic domain per se precisely
through the “loser wins” logic of spurning the common markers of socie-
tal achievement. His attitudes also illustrate the role of journalism (one of
the “seemingly most heteronomous forms of cultural production”) and
the modes of (sub-)literature associated with it (serialized fiction and its
thematic subgenres) in defining those reaches of the literary field most
barren of symbolic capital.4 What the novel presents is of course a fictional
portrait, and it is possible to read The Drunkard’s protagonist ironically, as
the self-destructive architect of the system of belief that imprisons him.
But the author Liu Yuchang clearly seconds his fictional offspring’s views.
This prominent spokesman for Hong Kong’s literary circles has frequently
dismissed the bulk of his own writing, produced for newspaper serializa-
tion, as “trash,” 5 and in a representative passage reads another author’s
tale of a woman forced into prostitution as a figure for the plight of the
writer in postwar Hong Kong.6
Liu Yichang and his protagonist can be taken as speaking for intellec-
tual critics of popular fiction in general and the martial arts genre in par-
ticular who believed that the commercial imperative fostered formulaicism
and an appeal to the readership’s baser emotions, which consigned such
works to the realm of the subliterary, or even constituted the antithesis that
might define pure literature as such. The newspapers themselves, not sur-
prisingly, did not regard the contents of their fiction supplements in quite
so harsh a light. What anguished literati viewed as commercialism, they
regarded as popularity; and they often presented this popularity, whether
of their fiction sections or of their editorial policies more generally, as a
form of populism, a solidarity with the political tendencies or social and
cultural affinities of their readerships.
Ming Pao’s marketing of and self-marketing by means of Jin Yong’s fic-
tion begin during its first week of publication, with the third issue (May
22, 1959) featuring the first in a series of banners announcing the serial-
ization of The Giant Eagle and Its Companion within. Subsequent weeks

170 Chapter 7
and months present persistent advertisements for the bound editions of
Jin Yong’s earlier novels, for radio broadcasts of storytellers’ renditions, for
film adaptations, and, by the end of November 1959, for the soon-to-
appear Martial Arts and History. Promotion is not limited, however, to such
straightforward reminders of the availability of Jin Yong’s works in their
various adaptations. It also includes material integrated with the newspa-
per’s other contents in a variety of ways and suggesting several distinct
strategies for evaluating Jin Yong’s martial arts fiction.
One prominent strategy is an insistence on the popularity of Jin Yong’s
work, cast not as mere self-celebration but as an extension of the news-
paper’s overall populist stance, an expression of solidarity between the
paper and its readers. Perhaps the earliest expression of this stance is the
May 22 front-page “story” on the enthusiasm for Jin Yong’s fiction among
Chinese students in England. And one of its more melodramatic manifes-
tations is a notice printed on September 28 in the upper-right-hand cor-
ner of the fiction supplement, the place of honor reserved for the daily
installment of Companion, following upon the previous day’s brief notice
of the novel’s suspension on account of the author’s illness:

Mr. Jin Yong Indisposed: Readers’ Letters and Calls Pour In

Novel to Appear Tomorrow: Eagle Fans Please Be At Ease
Since the onset of Mr. Jin Yong’s illness, this paper has received numerous
telephone calls and letters personally delivered by our readers, inquiring after
Mr. Jin Yong’s health and asking whether Companion will be published today.
The response has been truly moving. When the editor reported this news to
Mr. Jin Yong yesterday on his sickbed, he felt quite distressed, and originally
intended to write in spite of his illness. In the end, though, his strength did
not match his desire, and he was unable to write. Today we are forced to sus-
pend Companion for another day. The editor is himself an “Eagle Fan,” and
once Mr. Jin Yong is fully recovered, we will definitely ask him to make up for
lost time, and never allow him to make apologies to his readers again!

The serialization’s absence is thus parlayed into a celebration of the

practice of dedicated, involved readership and the community it creates
among newspaper, author, and readers. The foundation for such a move
had been previously laid through direct exchanges between Jin Yong and
his readers, published primarily in the “Jin Yong Mailbox” (“Jin Yong
xinxiang”), which first appeared on June 6, and then at irregular intervals
thereafter. Most of the letters presented through this feature begin with
the writer identifying himself (the writers seem to be all, or almost all,

Revision and Canonization 171

 male) as a fan, and some, like that published on July 3,7 take the trouble
to detail how the correspondent has followed Jin Yong’s work from novel
to novel, from one newspaper to another. Jin Yong is equally cordial in his
responses; his reply in this case, for instance, is devoted more to thanking
the fan for his support, praising his success as a self-taught writer (the let-
ter mentions a lack of education), and expanding on the column’s possi-
bilities as an avenue of communication, than it is to providing substantive
responses to his comments on Jin Yong’s fiction.
In the process of fostering a readership community, nonetheless, these
exchanges also suggest certain parameters for discussing and evaluating
the content of Jin Yong’s work. Most noticeably, they privilege those emo-
tional and character-driven aspects of the fiction that we have already
noted as assuming progressive prominence as Jin Yong’s work develops
from Book and Sword to Heroes. “Eagle Fan Number Two,” writing to the
“Jin Yong Mailbox” on June 18, locates the reason for Jin Yong’s work’s sur-
passing all other fiction, whether ancient or modern, in the fact that “any
character whatsoever needs only to undergo description at your hands to
become as real as life.” In comments on Book and Sword printed in the
“Ming Pao Club” (“Ming bao julebu”) on June 23, another correspondent
similarly opines that “as to the characters, each and every one is drawn
with great success,” and goes on to add that “the descriptions of romance
are a unique characteristic of Mr. Jin Yong’s martial arts fiction.” The pre-
viously cited letter of July 3 notes Heroes’ success as a bildungsroman:

In [this novel] your writing focused on depicting the protagonist Guo Jing
from his birth though the course of his maturation. That story left a deep
impression on us readers; we were moved by Guo Jing’s heroic character
throughout his tortuous and winding experiences, and grew to respect him
more and more, until he became the “idol of our hearts.”

Jin Yong not only endorses such readings by affording them publication
but also, in the “Mailbox” of October 6, explicitly points out the current
novel’s shift from historical themes to character portrayal: “Companion
will touch upon historical events, but the historical component is not so
strong, and the focus will be on depicting the characters and experiences
of several protagonists.”
A character-driven aesthetic’s claim to validity is often simply pre-
sumed, on the basis perhaps of the vague humanism and populism that
serve as the paper’s guiding lights. At times a moral prerogative is implied,
as when the June 23 letter praises Book and Sword for elevating the altru-

172 Chapter 7
ism of xia over the violence of wu and asserts that its depiction of princi-
pled, self-sacrificing love might serve as a model for the youth of today. In
yet other instances, however, the standards appealed to are what we might
call “canonical,” in the sense that they consist of identifying literary affil-
iations and precedents for Jin Yong’s work. The October 5 “Mailbox” thus
begins by paraphrasing several readers’ letters questioning the credibility
of scenes in which Jin Yong’s characters ride a shark or are carried off by
eagles. The author goes on to describe a recent dinner conversation with
a lung specialist and an editor at Xin wanbao, who debated the plausibil-
ity of Zhou Botong’s character, adducing biology, IQ studies, and exam-
ples of historical personages in support of their views. “I believe,” says Jin
Yong, “that examining the plausibility of a fictional personality represents
a very elevated perspective”—rather more lofty than the weighing of mere
phenomenal likelihood. He cites the authority of the English novelist
Thomas Hardy, paraphrasing him to the effect that “the crux of the mat-
ter is whether or not something is possible in terms of personality, not
whether or not it is possible in terms of events.” Further quoting the Chi-
nese proverb “without coincidence there’s no story” (wu qiao bu cheng shu),
he admits the irrationality of some fictional plots, and then closes with an
episode from The Romance of the Three Kingdoms that illustrates how psy-
chological plausibility can overcome apparent arbitrariness in plotting.
The appeal to character is thus consecrated by reference to two venerable
literary traditions—that of the Chinese historical romance, and that of the
European novel of psychological realism.
While such remarks open the possibility of evaluating Jin Yong’s work
in accordance with standards derived from other, recognizably “literary”
bodies of fiction, Jin Yong elsewhere addresses the more limited question
of the traditions of the martial arts novel per se. Beginning from June 6,
1959, Ming Pao’s fiction page includes a column entitled “Selections from
the Classics of Martial Arts Fiction” (“Wuxia mingzhu jingxuan”), consist-
ing of excerpts from the work of prewar authors introduced by Jin Yong
himself. The introduction to the first selection briefly sketches out a line-
age reaching from antiquity to contemporary Hong Kong. “Martial arts
fiction has a long history in our nation,” beginning with Sima Qian and
expressing itself in a variety of literary forms over the ages. The primary
exponents of the genre in recent years have been Bai Yu, Huanzhu Louzhu,
and Zheng Zhengyin (1900–1960); these three authors excelled in the cre-
ation of characters, in fantastic imagination, and in writing combat scenes
respectively. It is from Zheng’s Yingzhua wang (King of the “eagle’s talons”),
serialized in 1941, that the first selection is taken.

Revision and Canonization 173

 The topic of Zheng Zhengyin’s combat scenes recurs in the introduc-
tion to the next selection (June 25), from Bai Yu’s The Dozen Gold Coin
Darts. Here it is linked to an explicit statement of the possibility that mar-
tial arts fiction may have “literary value,” and to an enunciation of the
criteria for such value: the creation of memorable characters and the explo-
ration of their relationships. Jin Yong mentions the story that it was actu-
ally Zheng who drafted the fight scenes in Bai Yu’s novel, as Bai Yu him-
self knew almost nothing of the martial arts. Bai Yu’s work as a whole is
nonetheless superior to Zheng’s. “It is clear that although combat is an
important part of martial arts fiction, in essence it is still about characters
and events.” Bai Yu’s strengths lie in creating characters and telling stories
of human relationships. Hong Kong’s authors of martial arts fiction are all
indebted to him; and though he is often mentioned together with Huan-
zhu Louzhu, “he far surpasses him in literary value.”
Jin Yong’s account of martial arts fiction’s venerable heritage is by no
means original; its predecessors can be found in prefaces and other writ-
ings by some of the very prewar authors excerpted in this feature (and
elaborations of it in recent years’ proliferating histories of the genre). By
rehearsing this genealogy in “Classics of Martial Arts Fiction,” Jin Yong
reasserts the identity and dignity of his chosen genre, while at the same
time staking contemporary Hong Kong practitioners’ claim to membership
in the lineage and establishing himself as arbiter and spokesman for the
tradition. In propounding here his view that the delineation of character
lies at the heart of martial arts fiction’s aesthetic, finally, he both demon-
strates and makes use of his self-appointed role.
The same issue of Ming Pao (June 6, 1959) that published the first
installment of the “Classics of Martial Arts Fiction” series also contained
a review of a film adaptation of one of Jin Yong’s works: The Eagle-Shoot-
ing Heroes, Part II.8 Under the title “A Martial Arts Film with Feeling” (“You
ganqing de wuxia pian”), the paper’s film critic, Ye Qin, begins by describ-
ing her younger brother, who is a fan who reads martial arts fiction far
into the night, smuggling a flashlight under the covers to evade his angry
mother’s interdiction, and whose speech has begun to mimic the bravado
and curious locutions of a character from the Rivers and Lakes. The writer’s
assumption that martial arts fiction is “something for the kids” is shaken
when a university professor of her acquaintance shows up for tea with,
tucked under his arm, a history of the English novel, a study of the Dumas
family, and two volumes of Jin Yong’s The Eagle-Shooting Heroes. The critic
expresses surprise; the professor paraphrases Zola and urges her to try it
for herself; the kid brother collects the various volumes of Heroes lent out

174 Chapter 7
to his friends; the critic begins to read and is utterly entranced; and so it
is that she, who has never before bothered with martial arts films, now
finds herself recommending the film version of the novel to her readers.
There are three aspects of this brief review worthy of special notice, in
part because they establish the pattern for many future discussions of Jin
Yong’s work. The first is the fact that what is ostensibly a film review actu-
ally serves as an advertisement. The promotional aspect of this and other
items appearing in publications owned and operated by Jin Yong is quite
evident, yet should not be underestimated as a force in the distribution of
his works and the elevation of their status. Ming Pao was only the first step
in what was to become an enormously successful publishing and financial
empire. There have been many press barons and financial magnates in
Hong Kong, and many popular authors of martial arts novels or other
genre fiction; but Jin Yong is the only figure to have combined the roles of
producer of a fictional product and manager of the print media through
which it was distributed. In the symbiosis of these two roles can be found
at least part of the momentum behind his success in each. And while the
symbiosis is on one level financial—the fiction provided the starting cap-
ital for the paper and drove its circulation, while the paper and its subse-
quent affiliates provided the media for the distribution of the fiction—it
is also, and in a perhaps more important sense, discursive. The cultural
field is constituted not merely by the artists and writers who produce cul-
tural works but also by the brokers—publishers, critics, gallery owners, and
such—who produce and negotiate the works’ value. In the act of conse-
crating particular works, these brokers also consecrate themselves, that is,
affirm that they have the power to perform such consecration.9 Endorse-
ments of Jin Yong’s work in his publications, like such critical interven-
tions as Jin Yong’s comments on the “Classics of Martial Arts Fiction,”
both directly promote the works in question and stake a claim on the cul-
tural capital, which alone can give the endorsements force. Jin Yong’s pub-
lishing empire has thus allowed him to combine the roles not only of
author and of financier but of cultural broker as well.
A second striking aspect of the review of Heroes, Part II is the fact that
less than half the article is devoted to appraisal of the film itself; the
greater part addresses the original novel and the question of its literary
value. The early Cantonese film versions of Jin Yong’s fiction were only the
first step in a process of adaptation into film, television, comic books, and
computer role-playing games that continues through the present day.
These adaptations have introduced Jin Yong’s works to larger and larger
audiences and, undoubtedly, drawn many new readers to the original nov-

Revision and Canonization 175

 els. In addition, the adaptations have worked to elevate the cultural status
of the texts through the logic of differentiation. If we follow Bourdieu in
understanding the cultural field as structured in hierarchies of opposition,
we can appreciate that the increasing dominance of film and television as
media of large-scale production and mass audiences have allowed the
novel, as a literary form, to define itself more credibly as a medium of (rel-
atively) restricted distribution and to ally itself symbolically with the elite
arts of the culture. As early as this film review, we can see this dynamic
playing itself out in the specific case of the book and film versions of Jin
Yong’s works.10
The third paradigmatic aspect of the review is its use of recognizable
emblems of high culture to define the position of Jin Yong’s fiction. These
emblems include representatives of the European fiction tradition, Dumas
and Zola; most prominent, though, is the figure of the university profes-
sor as champion of Jin Yong’s work. The professor’s presence is important
in part because it allows us to discern more precisely the status that Jin
Yong’s work seeks to attain. By priding themselves in, and marketing them-
selves through, the same populist stance that is the basis for the news-
paper’s editorial voice, Jin Yong’s novels disavow any claim to the most
autonomous heights of the literary field, which are defined precisely by
restricted appeal and severely limited circulation. What they do aspire to,
as we shall see more clearly later, is the transmutation of popular appeal
into something akin to what Bourdieu calls “bourgeois consecration,” “the
consecration bestowed by the dominant fractions of the dominant class
and by private tribunals, such as salons, or public, state-guaranteed ones,
such as academies, which sanction the inseparably ethical and aesthetic
(and therefore political) taste of the dominant.”11 The university professor
in this film review—the first avatar of a figure whose further appearances
are examined in chapter 9—evokes the authority of the academy, one of
the key institutions in the bestowal of such “bourgeois consecration.” An
evocation of the academy by a popular film reviewer is, of course, some-
thing quite different from an endorsement by the academy’s own institu-
tions of evaluation. But we see here at least the limning of a desideratum.
The episodes of Xiao Longnü and Yang Guo’s practice of the Jade
Maiden’s Heart Scripture and of Xiao Longnü’s subsequent rape and its
consequences afford a concrete instance of the early Ming Pao’s joint
deployment of orchestrated reader involvement, appeal to a character-
driven aesthetic, and allusion to recognized literary models in shaping the
perception and assessment of Jin Yong’s fiction. Read in their original seri-
alized context—accompanied by Yun Jun’s illustrations of the bare-shoul-

176 Chapter 7
dered protagonists nestled among the flowers, surrounded by the racy tales
that fill out the fiction supplement, the photos of starlets and pageant
queens that grace the entertainment columns, and the vignettes of violence
and scandal that claim the larger share of the local news—the episodes
seem of a piece with the early Ming Pao’s frequent appeal to the prurient
and sensational. But commentary by both readers and the author quickly
works to establish a quite different context for Xiao Longnü’s tale, validat-
ing it as an instance of an emergent aesthetic.
Reader speculation about Yang Guo’s romantic prospects appears quite
early during Companion’s serialization, with a letter published on July 3,
1959, musing that an eventual union between him and Guo Jing’s daugh-
ter Guo Fu might heal the tragic rift between the Yang and Guo clans. As
the tale progresses, though, Xiao Longnü evidently wins the readers’ favor,
and her rape, quarrel with Yang Guo, and subsequent disappearance elicit
impassioned response. The sporadic “Jin Yong Mailbox” revives from an
extended dormancy to appear on seven of the eight days between Octo-
ber 3 and October 10, bearing titles such as “Xiao Longnü’s Future,” “Sym-
pathy for the Virginal Xiao Longnü,” “I Too Am Deeply Fond of Xiao
Longnü,” and “Yang Guo’s Worst Enemy Is Himself.” The readers’ letters,
some published in full and others summarized by Jin Yong in his
responses, strike common notes: affection and sympathy for the character
of Xiao Longnü; distress at what she has suffered, and anxiety that she and
Yang Guo may not in the end enjoy union, or that some even worse fate
may befall her; appeals to the author to grant her a happy denouement,
and suggestions as to how this might be achieved. Only one letter, printed
without response in the column of October 10, takes a different stance,
arguing that Xiao Longnü deserves punishment for breaking the rules of
her lineage (by accepting a male disciple) and expressing the hope that
Guo Fu will emerge as an even more sympathetic character, “so that [read-
ers’] preference for Xiao Longnü will gradually fade.”
In his responses, Jin Yong seeks to reassure his readers while at the
same time preserving suspense about future developments in his tale. The
question of whether Yang Guo will be eventually paired with Xiao Longnü
or with Guo Fu “has become a focus of interest in this tale, and of course
I can’t reveal it in advance,” he notes on October 10. “We can only ask
that, as Shakespeare puts it, ‘All’s well that ends well.’ What I can promise
is that the conclusion of this story will definitely not cause my readers to
feel revulsion or grief.” The author’s reticence may be due not only to a
storyteller’s need to maintain interest in the denouement but to his own
indecision about the outcome as well. Writing each day’s installment the

Revision and Canonization 177

 night before, he may not have plotted the entire tale in advance; or, as one
tradition maintains, he may have been moved by his readers’ demands to
reconsider his original intention to let Xiao Longnü die.12 The “Mailbox”
of October 8 insists that she is only a subordinate character, and offers the
ominous comparison with Ivanhoe’s Rebecca, “who is unable to wed the
protagonist.” At the end of the serialization, nonetheless, Xiao Longnü
returns from what seemed certain death, and a sixteen-year absence from
the events of the plot, to exit the tale on Yang Guo’s arm.
Beyond seeking to allay readers’ anxieties, Jin Yong’s remarks join his
readers’ voices in asserting the fascination and validity of character-based
storytelling. The author reminds his fans that this is only a novel but
admits that he too cannot help but feel a deep sympathy for his characters
(October 8):

I imagine very concretely their voices and expressions, I imagine their joy,
anger, grief and pleasure. As time goes on, an empathy arises, gradually and
imperceptibly, so that when I close my eyes, these characters all appear within
my mind, and when I sleep, I often dream of them.

The model posited here is of a fundamental consonance of human expe-

rience between author, characters, and readers. Citations of the European
fiction tradition of psychological realism, as we have seen, invest this con-
sonance with the dignity of an artistic pedigree, and Jin Yong further con-
tributes to the construction of this aura by calling attention to his own
artistic intentionality: “I intend to write Yang Guo’s personality in a way
different from that of any previous martial arts novel” (October 10). He
also makes some claim to supporting moral standards through his work:
“Since what I’m writing is a martial arts novel, there are very clear distinc-
tions between right and wrong, good and evil. . . . Actually, the laws of
human life would seem to be much the same as well” (October 3). The
ultimate authority appealed to, however, is not so much an abstract moral-
ity as a fidelity to presumably universal human experience (October 10):

In the usual martial arts novel, the most formidable enemy and opponent is
some other person, but Yang Guo’s most formidable enemy is himself. . . . The
most intense battles in this life often occur within a person’s heart.

We can only speculate on the ways in which readers’ reactions to the

tribulations of Yang Guo and Xiao Longnü might or might not have resem-
bled their responses to the misfortunes and crimes of passion reported in

178 Chapter 7
the paper’s news columns. The extended length and steady accretive pace
of serialization, as opposed to the brief, eruptive reporting of real world
events; the novel’s invitation to be privy to the inner thoughts and feelings
of the participants in its events; the cocoon of irreality surrounding fiction,
and the added envelope of distance and romance inherent in the martial
arts genre; the opportunity to communicate directly with the writer fash-
ioning events, and not merely read accounts of incidents already irrevoca-
bly transpired—all of these may well have encouraged a more intense emo-
tional involvement with the characters and events of the fiction, and/or a
greater willingness to admit and communicate fascination or concern.
What is clear from the pages of Ming Pao, in any case, is that Jin Yong
is a master not only of composing his tales but of exploiting their role
within the medium of his newspaper as well. His fiction helps support
Ming Pao during its early days, and the paper in turn serves as a forum for
the promotion of his fiction. This promotion is in part a matter of simply
putting his work before the public’s eye; more importantly, though, it
involves deliberately constructing a context and a set of standards for a
more serious valuation of martial arts fiction. The enunciation of the
author’s artistic intentions and the honoring of readers’ responses lay the
groundwork, establishing the simple but novel proposition that martial
arts fiction is in fact worthy of consideration. Upon this framework, Jin
Yong, working in concert with his readers, articulates more specific stan-
dards: a relationship with certain literary traditions, and an aesthetic of
reader/character/author identification through psychological verisimili-
tude. These standards shift the center of gravity in Jin Yong’s fiction away
from those public, political events that provided an important context for
its first appearance and that continue to play a crucial role for Ming Pao as
a whole.
We should perhaps resist the temptation to make too much of Ming
Pao’s promotion and definition of Jin Yong’s fiction. In some respects its
activities are far from unique. Not only was martial arts fiction common
to the majority of Hong Kong newspapers of the time, but many of them
published occasional commentary on the genre or on particular works as
well. Jin Yong’s remarks on his own works in Xin wanbao predate and mir-
ror his subsequent efforts in Ming Pao.13 Self-celebration, promotion of
featured works and authors, and active cultivation of the community of
readers through the publication of letters, sponsorship of contests, and so
forth, were common newspaper strategies, not at all limited to the martial
arts genre. Discussions of martial arts fiction were occasionally printed in
forums with no direct financial stake in the works considered (though

Revision and Canonization 179

 obviously with a general desire to engage readers’ interest). The most
notable example is the essay “Xinpai wuxia xiaoshuo liang da mingjia: Jin
Yong Liang Yusheng helun” (The two great masters of new school martial
arts fiction: a joint discussion of Jin Yong and Liang Yusheng), serially
published in 1966 in the first three issues of Haiguang wenyi, an arts jour-
nal seeking a broad-based audience. Signed “Tong Yanzhi,” it was long
assumed to be the work of the magazine’s editor, Luo Fu, the two novel-
ists’ erstwhile superior at Xin wanbao, but was eventually revealed to be
from the pen of Liang Yusheng himself.14 The most extended early discus-
sion of New School fiction to see publication, the article balances an over-
all gravity of tone and a scrupulous apportioning of praise and critique to
each of its subjects against a decidedly conservative assessment of the
genre’s place in the grand scheme of things:

I am not opposed to martial arts fiction, nor do I particularly advocate it. At

this time and place, there is no serious harm in reading martial arts fiction for
entertainment. If martial arts fiction of a relatively high artistic level should
appear, it would be even more worthy of our welcome. But because martial
arts fiction suffers from the innate restrictions of its form, I have no high
hopes for its artistic quality.15

Liang Yusheng’s essay, together with Jin Yong’s brief and modest response
in Haiguang wenyi’s fourth issue, thus conditions our understanding of
Ming Pao’s activities, reminding us, on the one hand, that Jin Yong’s news-
paper had no monopoly on the discussion of martial arts fiction, and, on
the other, that any claims made for this fiction’s value were still fairly
restricted. Ming Pao’s efforts in cultivating its audience and sketching a dis-
cursive context for martial arts fiction were unique, nonetheless, because
of the newspaper’s mutual implication of authorial, editorial, and institu-
tional agency and its focused development of what we might today think
of as a Jin Yong /Ming Pao “brand.” Moreover, in providing a forum in
which Jin Yong’s martial arts fiction exists in fruitful tension with other
modes and levels of journalistic and fictional discourse, in which discur-
sive and commercial projects can mutually support one another, and
through which readers can be simultaneously catered to and enlisted in
the furtherance of these projects, the early Ming Pao establishes strategies
that will continue to serve Jin Yong in his expanding career as author, jour-
nalist, media magnate, and cultural spokesman. The most significant
deployment of these strategies was to be in Jin Yong’s revising of his seri-
alized fiction for a thirty-six-volume Collected Works.

180 Chapter 7
The Collected Works of Jin Yong
The earliest “book” versions of Jin Yong’s novels were the compilations of
devoted readers, who cut the daily installments from the newspapers and
pasted or sewed them into homemade volumes.16 Scarcely less immediate
were danxing ben (“single,” i.e., “individual” volume editions) containing
a week or two’s worth of reprinted text, issued as soon as the requisite
quantity had appeared in serialization.17 Once a novel’s serialization had
been completed, the danxing ben were succeeded by heding ben “combined”
editions of some eighty pages of text per volume, then by versions present-
ing the entire work in (depending on the novel’s size) as few as two to five
volumes.18
In the afterword to the revised edition of Flying Fox, Jin Yong himself
mentions the proliferation and variety of early editions of his work, and
addresses a problem with which this proliferation was inextricably
involved—that of unauthorized publication:

After the novel’s newspaper serialization in 1959, no book versions of Flying

Fox were published with the author’s permission. On the basis of what I have
seen, booksellers issued a total of eight different versions, in single-volume,
two-volume, three-volume, and seven-volume editions. All of these were the
booksellers’ own reprints. Given that they demonstrated at least a certain
appreciation of my work, I never troubled myself about them. They were full
of misprints, however; they also divided the text into sections and chapters at
random, and devised their own chapter titles, not necessarily in accord with
my original intention. Nor did the illustrations included in some editions
meet with my approval. (247)

The laissez-faire attitude toward unauthorized editions expressed here

is not always evident during the period of the novels’ newspaper serializa-
tion. A notice appearing in Xianggang shangbao during Royal Blood’s run
takes pains to steer readers toward the authorized version of the text:

Volume One of This Paper’s Popular Novel

Royal Blood Now Available
Since Mr. Jin Yong’s martial arts novel Royal Blood first began serialization on
the pages of this newspaper, it has won tremendous appreciation from our
readers on account of its astounding and intricate storyline and the extraor-
dinary martial skills of its protagonist, the Guangdong native Yuan Chengzhi.
Already three or more pirated reprint editions have been produced by unscru-

Revision and Canonization 181

 pulous booksellers; they are replete with errors and omissions, and have given
their readers considerable disappointment. Now Mr. Jin Yong has revised the
original manuscript and given it to Sanyu Book Company for publication,
with Mr. Yun Jun’s illustrations included. Professionally printed in large char-
acters, $1.40 a volume, for sale at all major booksellers.19

Frustration over the pirates’ command of the market was allegedly a prime
motivation for Jin Yong’s establishing his own publishing concern.
Jin Yong’s novels appeared not only in editions from unauthorized
publishers, but in disguised editions as well, omitting or changing the
author’s name and offering the text under altered titles.20 And joining the
publishing maelstrom were spurious works issued under the author’s
name, often continuing the adventures of his novels’ protagonists. Thus,
only a few months after the completion of Book and Sword’s serialization,
Jin Yong felt compelled to add the following note to the day’s installment
of Royal Blood:

To Mssrs. Yu Tian, Zhang Xin, and others: Tianchi guaixia (The strange knight
of Heaven’s Lake [the name of a character from Book and Sword]) and Shujian
enchou lu xuji (A sequel to Book and Sword) are works by others appropriating
my name, and were not written by me. I am grateful for your concern. —Jin
Yong 21

Nonetheless, Jin Yong’s own publications were not entirely innocent of

this sort of dissimulation. Several novels serialized in Ming Pao in 1966 and
1967 as jointly authored by Ni Kuang and Jin Yong were in fact written by
Ni Kuang alone but used Jin Yong’s more prominent name as a lure.22
As advertisements and notices such as those cited above make clear,
the earliest authorized editions of Jin Yong’s novels were those issued by
Sanyu Book Company. Historical Novels Publishing Company later pub-
lished its own editions as well. The authorized book editions participated
in the synergistic cross-marketing of Jin Yong’s works: a 1963 edition of
Dragon Sabre from Historical Novels, for instance, alerts readers to the cur-
rent serialization of Semi-Devils in Ming Pao and Martial Arts and History
and to the fact that bound volumes of that novel (with color covers and
illustrations by Yun Jun) have already begun to appear. They also carried
on the struggle for sole claim over Jin Yong’s texts: a 1960 edition of Com-
panion from Sanyu, for example, carries a notice, signed by Jin Yong, list-
ing the titles of his authentic works; naming various novels and sequels
spuriously attributed to him; warning readers against inferior, pirated edi-

182 Chapter 7
tions; and threatening transgressors with legal action. The competition
between authentic and spurious works, authorized and unauthorized edi-
tions, continues to the present day. But a signal moment in the definition
and control of Jin Yong’s texts occurred with the author’s establishment of
Ming Ho Publications Corporation Limited (Minghe she chuban youxian
gongsi), a company devoted exclusively to the publication of his own nov-
els. Ming Ho copyrighted its editions of Book and Sword and Royal Blood in
1975, and by 1981 had completed The Collected Works of Jin Yong (Jin Yong
zuopin ji), a comprehensive, standardized edition of the author’s martial
arts fiction in thirty-six matching volumes of intensively revised text.
The earliest danxing ben book editions of Jin Yong’s novels already
included certain revisions of the original serialized text. Some erroneous
characters were corrected (although new mistakes also crept in, even in the
authorized editions, to say nothing of the pirated texts); paragraph and
chapter divisions were often altered, and chapter headings revised; minor
changes in continuity were made, in conformity, for example, with the
book edition’s freedom from the need to continually reidentify a scene’s
participants or speakers in each daily installment; and some of the incon-
sistencies natural to the hurried and piece-meal process of writing for seri-
alization were amended, as a notice appended to a late installment of
Royal Blood demonstrates:

To Mr. Liang Shizhuo: Since He Hongyao has already chopped off her left arm,
she should be “holding in her right hand” the skull of Jinshe Langjun, not
“bearing [it] in both hands.” This was a careless mistake on my part, and I am
extremely grateful for your correction; it should be rectified in the single vol-
ume edition. —Jin Yong 23

Beginning around 1969, however, Jin Yong undertook a systematic

revision of the texts of all of his martial arts novels. The revised Book and
Sword began serialization in Ming bao wanbao in December of that year; 24
Ming Pao was featuring at the time The Deer and the Cauldron; after this
novel concluded, in September 1972, Jin Yong produced no further new
martial arts novels but dedicated his fiction-writing energies entirely to
the task of revision. The revised texts were published in Ming bao wanbao
through the 1970s, as well as in Martial Arts and History and Ming Pao’s
overseas affiliates. After serialization they were published in book form by
Ming Ho, beginning with Book and Sword in 1975 and culminating in the
completion of The Collected Works of Jin Yong in 1982. Until the appear-
ance in 2001 and 2002 of the first volumes of a long-rumored second

Revision and Canonization 183

 revised edition, this Ming Ho edition of Jin Yong’s revised works served as
the basis for all subsequent editions, including those published in Taiwan
by Yuanjing beginning in 1979 (transferred in 1986 to Yuanliu); those in
simplified characters distributed by Ming Ho in Singapore and Malaysia;
the unauthorized editions that began flooding the mainland in the 1980s;
and the first complete authorized Collected Works of Jin Yong published in
the mainland by Beijing’s Sanlian in 1994.25
A number of commentators have criticized the revised texts for their
repression of at least some part of the originals’ rough vigor and unbridled
imagination.26 An opposing view, however, points out that the continuing
popularity of Jin Yong’s works rests primarily on the revised versions,
which have circulated exclusively for over twenty years. Li Yijian, an edi-
tor at Ming Ho, provides the most systematic elaboration of this perspec-
tive. He reminds us that the project of revision occupied ten years, fully
two-fifths of Jin Yong’s twenty-five-year career as an active author of fiction.
It is the fruits of this project, Li argues, that have extended Jin Yong’s fame
beyond the confines of genre fiction, to the point where he now receives
consideration as one of the great novelists of twentieth-century China.
The revised texts are “better” in the sense of being more literary than the
originals; they transcend the formulae and limitations of popular news-
paper fiction and hew more closely to the standards and values of “clas-
sic” literature.27
My aim here is not so much to evaluate the literary merits of Jin Yong’s
revisions as to examine the related but rather different question of how
the project of revision participates in the process of establishing literary
and cultural value. A case study of Royal Blood will demonstrate that the
revision process involves both the delineation of standards of value and
the presentation of the revised text as conforming to these same standards.
These acts of definition and presentation, moreover, are carried out not
only in and through the text itself but also by the text’s packaging as an ele-
ment of The Collected Works of Jin Yong. Royal Blood serves as a useful object
of analysis in part because its contents have already been introduced, and
in part because it received some of the heaviest revision of any of Jin
Yong’s texts.28 Royal Blood holds further interest for a study of the devel-
opment of Jin Yong’s fiction because of the fact that the author returned
several times to the material of this early novel. From May 23 through June
28, 1975, Ming Pao serialized Jin Yong’s Guangdong yingxiong Yuan Manzi:
Yuan Chonghuan pingzhuan (The Guangdong hero “ Yuan the Barbarian”:
a critical biography of Yuan Chonghuan), an account of the historical
father of Royal Blood’s fictional protagonist. This short work, inspired by

184 Chapter 7
the author’s research in connection with the second revision of the novel,
is included in revised and expanded form as an appendix in the Collected
Works edition (737–863). In addition to the Critical Biography, Jin Yong
revisited Royal Blood in his final work of fiction, The Deer and the Cauldron.
First serialized in Ming Pao contemporaneously with Ming bao wanbao’s
presentation of the revised Royal Blood, The Deer and the Cauldron not only
incorporates several of the earlier work’s characters but also represents, as
shown in this chapter and the next, a reassessment of some of its central
concerns.
Commenting on the revision of Book and Sword, Jin Yong remarks that
“nearly every sentence has been altered at some point.” 29 A comparison
of the Ming Ho revised edition of Royal Blood with the 1956 newspaper
serialization confirms that the alterations to this text are equally painstak-
ing. Almost every line from the newspaper version can be matched with
one in the book; yet each such matching reveals at the same time a recal-
culation of one or two items of vocabulary, an adjustment of syntax and
sentence structure, or a reorganization of the punctuation.
Such ubiquitous stylistic alterations are further joined by changes in
the narrative information relayed by the text. While these occasionally
involve modifications in the action or in a character’s role, they most fre-
quently take the form of clarifications of the protagonists’ motivations
and expanded exploration of their thought and emotions. Here, for
instance, is the 1956 text’s account of Wen Qingqing’s realization that
Ironhand He (He Tieshou), mistress of the Five Venom Sect, has fallen in
love with her:

Qingqing thought about Ironhand He’s speech and bearing towards her these
last few days; she really did appear as if she had set her heart on someone. She
had been smitten at first sight, and hadn’t realized that she herself was a
woman in man’s disguise. She couldn’t help but feel amused. “What can I do?”
she asked. “You’ll just have to take Madam Five Venoms as your wife!” said
Chengzhi. (November 6, 1956)

The revised text offers a fuller explanation of how her erstwhile captors
had failed to perceive her true gender:

Qingqing thought back on Ironhand He’s speech and bearing toward her these
last few days; she really had seemed to be brimming with affection. She had
been smitten at first sight, and her wits were all befuddled. He Hongyao for
her part had been poisoned by resentment and ready to burst with rage. These

Revision and Canonization 185

 two women were actually quite canny in the ways of the world, but one was
smitten by love while the other nursed her hate; both of them in the end were
as good as blind, and hadn’t realized that she herself was a woman in man’s
disguise. She couldn’t help but feel amused. “What can I do?” she asked.
“You’ll just have to take Madam Five Venoms as your wife!” laughed Yuan
Chengzhi. (616)

Another example occurs when Yuan Chengzhi, who yearns to assassinate

the Ming emperor in vengeance for his father’s execution, actually ends up
saving the ruler’s life in order to foil a plot by traitors in league with the
Manchus. The emperor is unaware of his savior’s identity:

Yuan Chengzhi gazed at Chongzhen and thought how his father had given
his life to protect his country, rendering heroic service, only to have this very
emperor send him to death by dismemberment. He felt grief, pain, rage, and
hatred. Chongzhen had no notion of this. He spoke in a kindly voice: “What
is your name? In which department do you serve?” (November 15, 1956)

The revised text adds to Yuan Chengzhi’s vengeful thoughts a sudden

spasm of compassion:

Yuan Chengzhi gazed at Chongzhen, and thought how his father had given
his life to protect his country, rendering heroic service, only to have this very
emperor send him to death by dismemberment. Grief, pain, rage, and hatred
filled his heart. But when he looked closely at his foe, his father’s murderer,
he saw that his cheeks were deeply sunken, the hair on his temples white, and
his eyes shot through with red—an utterly haggard appearance. By now the
plot to dethrone him had been foiled and the chief villain eliminated, but
Chongzhen’s face showed nothing but care and unease, without the slightest
trace of gladness. Yuan Chengzhi thought: “Being emperor is nothing but a
torture to him; he isn’t happy at all!”
Chongzhen had no notion of the thoughts passing through Yuan Cheng-
zhi’s mind. He spoke in a kindly voice: “What is your name? Where do you
serve?” (633–634)

Changes such as these tighten the narrative logic of the tale and add
some depth to the characters’ psychological lives. They do not, however,
alter the overall contours of the plot. For the most part it is possible to
match the original and final texts scene by scene, paragraph by paragraph,
and even (allowing for such expansions as just described) sentence by sen-

186 Chapter 7
tence. More extended and substantial alterations to the plot and narrative
of the original text occur at four points. The first is an expansion and mod-
ification of the novel’s opening sequence. The second is the addition of the
episode of Yuan Chengzhi’s attempt to assassinate the Manchu emperor.
The third is an elaboration of events in Beijing after the capital’s fall to
Li Zicheng. And the fourth is a fuller development of the original text’s
rather abrupt conclusion.
Reserving consideration of the reworked opening for last, let us begin
with an examination of the other revised sequences and their bearing upon
the novel’s representation of politics and history. In both versions of the
text, Yuan Chengzhi, journeying to Beijing in order to assassinate the Ming
emperor, encounters the Portuguese mercenaries, destroys their cannon,
and receives from them the map to the island in the southern seas. He then
proceeds to the capital, where, in the 1956 text, he makes his first entry into
the imperial palace. In the revised text, however, the sufferings of the war-
plagued populace along the road arouse in him the determination to assas-
sinate the Manchu ruler, Huang Taiji (Abahai). He therefore merely pauses
in Beijing before journeying on to the northeast and the Qing capital at
Shengjing. Infiltrating the palace, he is astounded to find the Manchu
emperor speaking the Chinese tongue, quoting Chinese classics and his-
tories in his deliberations with his Chinese-born advisors, sighing over
the follies of the Ming court and vowing to ease the people’s sufferings
when he attains the throne. Yuan proceeds with his assassination attempt
nonetheless, fired by his aversion to foreign rule and by knowledge of
Huang Taiji’s role in his father’s ruin. He fails, is captured and entrusted
to a lieutenant of his late father, now serving the foe; when this worthy
releases him, he enters the palace for a second attempt, only to witness
Huang Taiji’s murder at the hands of his brother Dorgon. Yuan Chengzhi
then returns to Beijing, and the revised text’s plot merges once again with
that of the newspaper text. The entire episode, inserted at the point of
Yuan’s arrival in the capital in the September 5 installment of the seriali-
zation, occupies some twenty-nine pages in the Ming Ho edition (487–
516, including a chapter break and illustration), comprising nearly 18,000
characters.
The next major amendment in the text occurs after Li Zicheng’s
seizure of the capital. Certain minor changes appear during the course of
Li Zicheng’s assault. The revised text omits, for instance, the 1956 text’s
account of Yuan Chengzhi’s bribing the Ming soldiery to relax their
defense, perhaps deeming this strategy unheroic (November 25, absent
from Ming Ho 652); it adds Li Zicheng’s address to his troops, forbidding

Revision and Canonization 187

 them to loot or harm the capital’s inhabitants (Ming Ho 660, absent from
November 28). The primary revision, however, appears with Yuan Cheng-
zhi’s audience with Li Zicheng after the city’s fall and the Ming emperor’s
suicide. In the November 30 installment of the serialization, Yuan refuses
Li Zicheng’s offer to marry him to the Ming princess and is gazed upon
with suspicion by Li’s chief advisor. When a messenger reports looting by
some of Li Zicheng’s troops, and the advisors begin debating how to han-
dle this matter, Yuan takes his leave. Returning to his residence, he finds a
summons from his master, and (in the December 2 installment) leaves the
capital for the novel’s final sequence of adventures.
Before Yuan’s departure from Beijing, the revised text adds over 7000
characters (Ming Ho 663–674), dramatizing the matter mentioned so
briefly in the serialization—the new regime’s rapid plunge into pillaging
and internal strife. Returning from his audience, Yuan Chengzhi is drawn
into a brawl with rebel troops seeking to pillage his own residence. He
returns to the palace, expecting Li Zicheng to enforce his earlier decree, but
finds him at a feast, surrounded by greedy generals and treacherous advi-
sors, drunken with wine and besotted with lust for the ravishing Chen
Yuanyuan. Li Zicheng’s desire for this beauty leads him to betray the gen-
eral Wu Sangui, who holds the passes against the Manchu armies. Yuan
departs, heavyhearted, and witnesses ever greater excesses of looting and
rapine. The next day, Li Zicheng, closeted with his new paramour and
swayed by his advisors’ whispers of treachery, refuses him audience; Yuan
wanders the terrorized capital and hears a blind street-singer’s ominous
lament; returning home, he receives his master’s summons, and so pre-
pares to depart.
The final major revision, that of the novel’s ending, has clear aesthetic
motivations and also reinforces the themes brought out in the expanded
treatment of Li Zicheng’s victory. Jin Yong replaces the last several hun-
dred characters of the final newspaper installment (December 31, 1956)
with six pages of new text (730–736), some 4000 characters in all. The
new material narrates in some detail Yuan Chengzhi’s journey to aid his
beleaguered comrade Li Yan, their meeting, Li Yan’s despair over the cor-
ruption of the rebellion, and the suicides of Li Yan and his wife. The addi-
tions ameliorate the abruptness of the original conclusion (brought about
in part, perhaps, by the need to finish the story on the last day of the cal-
endar year).30 They also produce a certain structural symmetry between
the work’s beginning and ending. The novel’s opening sequence (to be
discussed in detail) features a young student attacked by rapacious Ming
soldiery as he travels through China. In the original conclusion this stu-

188 Chapter 7
dent, now aging and careworn, appears suddenly at Li Yan’s tomb to recite
a lament, then disappears once again. In the expanded conclusion, Yuan
Chengzhi encounters the student on the road—assaulted not by Ming
troops this time but by Li Zicheng’s rampaging followers. The episode both
mirrors the opening more closely, and reemphasizes the degeneration of
Li Zicheng’s uprising. Indeed, these paired scenes of the ravages of the
Ming and rebel troops can be further matched with the scenes of Manchu
depredation at the beginning of the Shengjing episode, demonstrating the
sufferings of the populace at the hands of all three contenders for the
throne and justifying Yuan Chengzhi’s final departure for an island far
from the suffering empire.
Lin Baochun, noting the addition and amplification of historical mate-
rial as one of the most salient characteristics of Jin Yong’s revision of his
novels, takes Royal Blood as a prime illustration of this trend.31 And indeed
the revisions to Royal Blood examined here all concern the novel’s treatment
of its historical background and the protagonist’s response to China’s
political crisis, rather than his tangled romantic adventures or the debts
and vendettas within the world of the martial arts that occupy so much of
the narrative. If the original texts of Jin Yong’s novels are marked by a shift
of emphasis from dynastic history to character-driven plots, the reempha-
sis on history in the revised texts represents the pendulum’s return. The
changes made, moreover, do not constitute a simple increase in the novel’s
quotient of a neutral “historicity”; they adjust and amplify its assessment
of China’s political situation at a moment of historical crisis. The novel’s
fundamental assumption is that political legitimacy rests upon the ruler’s
concern for the best interests of the common people. By this yardstick, the
Ming brings about its own downfall. “The Ming dynasty destroyed itself,
it was not overthrown by the Manchus,” states the Critical Biography (784).
This point is implicit in the first days of the novel’s serialization, which
show Ming troops ravaging the coutryside, and is explicitly stated by Yuan
Chengzhi as he views the Chongzhen emperor’s corpse:

“If you had understood to begin with what it meant to cherish the people,
instead of driving the starving masses of the empire to desperation, you would
never have come to the state you’re in today.” (November 29, 1956; cf. Ming
Ho 661)

What the revised text adds to this assignation of blame for the Ming
collapse is, as we have seen, a more developed representation of Li
Zicheng’s failure to achieve legitimacy by the same criteria. More surpris-

Revision and Canonization 189

 ingly, perhaps, it also adds a more complex and even sympathetic view of
the eventual victors in the imperial struggle, the Manchu Qing. The origi-
nal text operates within the parameters of the anti-Manchu patriotism
common to much martial arts fiction, including the works of the Guang-
dong School and Jin Yong’s own Book and Sword, and takes its protagonist’s
resistance to the Qing for granted. But in the revised text, Yuan Chengzhi,
poised to assassinate Huang Taiji, is impressed not only by his formidable
cunning (which he suspects is superior to that of the Ming emperor and
even of Li Zicheng, and which reminds him of the devious wisdom of the
text from which he himself has studied the martial arts) but by his knowl-
edge of Chinese language and history and by his concern for the sufferings
of the common people.32 Yuan proceeds with his assassination attempt
nonetheless; capitulation to Manchu rule is not an option for this charac-
ter, the son of a renowned anti-Manchu general. Yet the depiction of the
capable and compassionate Huang Taiji brings the vision of the novel as
a whole much closer to the point of view expressed in Jin Yong’s Critical
Biography of that general: “It was necessary that the Ming dynasty perish.
For the Chinese people, the Qing dynasty was far better than the Ming”
(857). This same viewpoint receives an even more compelling fictional
expression in The Deer and the Cauldron. In this novel, discussed in detail
in chapter 8, the narrative’s adulatory representation of the Qing Kangxi
emperor as an enlightened ruler is matched by the conversion of the
novel’s protagonist, Wei Xiaobao, who spends much of the novel bounc-
ing between the Qing court and an anti-Manchu revolutionary society, first
cynically playing both sides to his personal advantage, then torn between
their rival claims to his loyalty. By the end of the tale, however, he admits
that he “can’t jump his way out of his imperial highness’s Buddha palm”
(1960), and dedicates his services to his friend and master, the Kangxi
emperor.33
If, as argued here, the changes made to Royal Blood bring the 1975
revised text closer to the point of view of the 1975 Critical Biography and
the 1969–1972 The Deer and the Cauldron; if they reframe the tale of Yuan
Chengzhi’s despair over the fate of China in such a way as to allow the pos-
sibility of Wei Xiaobao’s capitulation to the new order of things—what
then? What interest or implications do these revisions hold beyond their
evidence of the author’s judgment on this specific moment in Chinese
history? And how do we reconcile the reemphasis on history and the will-
ingness to weigh the relative merits of political solutions with the political
agnosticism and attenuation of historical specificity evident in Wanderer?
In the case of Royal Blood we might imagine the author as constrained by

190 Chapter 7
the focus on dynastic crisis in the original text; but this explanation will
not account for The Deer and the Cauldron’s apparent reversal of Wanderer’s
direction. The answer lies, I believe, not so much in the judgment passed
on history as in the criteria by which this judgment is rendered. The revised
Royal Blood, like The Deer and the Cauldron, reapplies to political history
the culturalism articulated in Wanderer as the political arena’s other. And
the logic of the culturalist criteria is spelled out in the rewriting of the
novel’s opening.

Textuality and Cultural Stewardship

As narrated in Xianggang shangbao beginning January 1, 1956, the novel

opens during the reign of the Ming Chongzhen emperor (1628–1644)
with the young student Hou Chaozong, son of a retired official from
Henan, who, despite his parents’ warnings about the perilous state of the
country, sets out with his servant to see a bit of the world. He witnesses the
misery of the peasantry and soon runs afoul of a troop of rapacious Ming
soldiers. Only the fortuitous appearance of the caravan guard Yang Pengju
saves him from robbery and worse at the hands of the government troops.
The warrior Yang and the scholar Hou receive aid from a group of myste-
rious recluses who are training a young boy in the arts of war. They even-
tually find themselves at a gathering of the followers of the patriotic gen-
eral Yuan Chonghuan, and learn that the child is the general’s orphaned
son, Yuan Chengzhi, who is being raised to take vengeance on the traitors
who executed his sire. Thus it is by gradual stages that the narrative leads
the reader to the tale’s protagonist: presenting first a stranger to the Rivers
and Lakes, the callow and bookish Hou Chaozong; then a classic type of
the “goodfellow,” the formidable and chivalrous Yang Pengju; and then
finally the particular characters and situations that will structure the rest
of the novel.
The revised text in the Ming Ho edition provides an even more cir-
cuitous entry to the main characters and events of the story. It first tells
how the king of Brunei traveled to the court of the Ming Chengzu emperor
in 1408. “Although [Brunei] was separated from the mainland by thou-
sands of leagues of ocean, it had long held China in reverence” (7). The
narrative details the gifts presented by the king and traces the history of
Brunei’s tributary missions since Song times. The present king of Brunei,
entranced by the splendors of the middle kingdom, lingers there and
passes away. The Ming emperor enfeoffs his son and indites an elegy, which
is subsequently inscribed on Brunei’s sacred mountain. Brunei continues

Revision and Canonization 191

 to send tribute to the Ming court, and Chinese travel to Brunei, often serv-
ing there as court officials. In later years one of these overseas Chinese,
remembering his homeland, names his only son Zhang Chaotang (“fac-
ing the Tang,” i.e., the Chinese empire), secures for him a classical educa-
tion from an itinerant scholar, and sends him back to his native land to
complete his education and win success through the imperial examina-
tions. The revised text’s Zhang Chaotang is the reincarnation of the earlier
version’s Hou Chaozong. When he arrives on the mainland, only to find
it ravaged by bandits and equally rapacious government soldiery, the two
versions of the text begin to run parallel.34
The revised opening does nothing to alter the tale of Yuan Chengzhi’s
adventures, whether private or public. Its function is rather to offer a larger
frame for the significance of Yuan’s personal and political travails by fore-
grounding the importance of China as the fountainhead of cultural mean-
ing. Brunei’s reverence for Chinese culture, the king’s visit and presenta-
tion of tribute, and the importance of Chinese officials and merchants in
Brunei’s government and society, all affirm the preeminence and influence
of the Chinese cultural tradition. One of the few alterations between the
opening in the first revised version serialized in Ming bao wanbao and the
final text presented in book form makes this point even more strongly. In
the Ming bao wanbao version the king appears as something of an awe-
struck tourist:

When the king had arrived in China, he beheld this dazzling world, strange
and novel in every way; the Ming emperor moreover received him with the
greatest generosity, and in the end he simply could not bear to take his leave.
(Ming bao wanbao, May 24, 1971)

The final version, however, explicitly attributes his response to an admira-

tion of China’s cultural achievements:

The king beheld the imperial court of this exalted nation, the people’s pros-
perity and the abundance of goods, the cultured governance and the civiliz-
ing balm of the teachings, the elegant attire and cunning utensils—none of
these but gladdened his heart and made him sigh with admiration. The Ming
emperor moreover received him with the greatest generosity, and in the end
he simply could not bear to take his leave. (Ming Ho edition, 7)

The conjoining of “cultured governance and the civilizing balm of the

teachings” with “elegant attire and cunning utensils” suggests that virtu-

192 Chapter 7
ous government is inseparable from the artifacts of the cultural tradition.
This same linkage is evident in Yuan Chengzhi’s perception of the Manchu
emperor Huang Taiji, and associated there even more specifically with the
linguistic and literary manifestations of the tradition: Yuan’s understand-
ing that this supposed tyrant actually feels concern for the people dawns
in the wake of the realization that he speaks the Chinese language and is
versed in China’s histories and scriptures. The revision of Royal Blood thus
reflects the same shift from concern with the ethnic and political terms of
the empire’s governance to concern with the continuity of Chinese cul-
tural values, which we found progressively elaborated in Jin Yong’s work
from Heroes to Wanderer.
If the king of Brunei’s respect for China’s culture parallels that of the
Manchu emperor, it also matches that of the character with whom the
monarch shares the revised text’s opening—Zhang Chaotang. This youth’s
schooling in the classics and return to the mainland to seek advance-
ment through the examinations reflects an acceptance of the centrality of
China’s cultural and literary traditions equivalent to that of the king. It is
not surprising that these fictional or fictionalized characters, imagined as
living during the Ming era, should demonstrate “traditional” attitudes
toward Chinese tradition and literary cultivation. But the deployment of
these attitudes by Jin Yong for his twentieth-century readership carries two
significant implications for the author’s own literary practice and self-
positioning.
The first point to note is that the revised text does not merely narrate
the story of two individuals seeking instruction in the Chinese cultural tra-
dition. It also enacts such a process of cultural initiation: it makes gestures
toward providing the reader with instruction in the content and value of
the Chinese literary and cultural heritage similar to that undergone by
Zhang Chaotang and the king of Brunei. On the narrative level, the story
of the king of Brunei has but a tenuous link to the events of the primary
narrative. The main purpose of this episode, as already noted, is to estab-
lish an image of Chinese cultural supremacy. In the course of establishing
this image, the text takes pains to offer explanations of geographic and lin-
guistic material likely to be unfamiliar to the modern reader. It reproduces
in full the text of the Ming emperor’s verses for Brunei’s sacred mountain;
and in an endnote to the first chapter, it explicates these verses in modern
vernacular Chinese (8, 40). Historical glosses within the text are some-
times enclosed in parentheses or set off by a variant typeface. This typo-
graphical practice highlights the authorial voice’s departure from simple
narrative and engagement in a more schoolmasterly practice of instruc-

Revision and Canonization 193

 tion. The adoption of an instructional stance extends far beyond the
revised opening. Several of the later chapters of the novel are provided with
endnotes explaining the background of the tale, elucidating historical and
literary allusions, or quoting historical sources. At several points the author
takes pains to make clear his story’s divergence from the verifiable histor-
ical record. “Historians need not inquire too closely into a novelist’s tales”
(524). By so carefully circumscribing the territory of fiction, of course, he
demonstrates a consciousness of responsibilities beyond those of a mere
entertainer—responsibilities explored in the extended piece of historical
writing appended to the revised novel, the Critical Biography.
The inclusion of chapter endnotes, intratextual glosses, and historical
appendices is the most obvious textual feature differentiating the revised
texts of the Collected Works from the form in which they first appeared in
Ming bao wanbao. These textual excrescences, however, are in turn only one
in a set of fundamental divergences of aspect and import between the book
and serialized (whether original or revised) versions of Jin Yong’s novels.
The mere fact of publication in book form, complete from beginning to
end and free of any textual material (with the minor exceptions of adver-
tisements and publishing data) unrelated to the narrative proper, liberates
a novel from the fragmentation, contextuality, and poly-vocal contingency
intrinsic to the text’s serialization in a daily newspaper. Such textual inde-
pendence was enjoyed even by the early, unrevised danxing ben and heding
ben editions of Jin Yong’s novels. The Ming Ho edition of the Collected
Works elevates the texts’ autonomy and prestige in several further respects.
First of all, it invests the novels with a new aura of artistic effort and a
unique claim to authoritativeness. The ten years Jin Yong spent in polish-
ing his texts are frequently referred to in the commentarial and apprecia-
tive literature, often as “unprecedented in the history of martial arts fic-
tion.” Quite apart from any concrete results realized within the texts, that
is, the effort has acquired an iconic status in the Jin Yong legend, certifying
the author’s credentials as a dedicated literary artist. In Bourdieu’s terms,
it marks Jin Yong’s turning away from a short-term production cycle (daily
serialization) geared toward immediate financial profits and toward the
longer production cycle necessary for the generation of more purely cul-
tural capital.35 Secondly, the Collected Works gather the individual novels
together into a larger system, a corpus that is simultaneously grand in
scale and exclusionary in its completeness—not incidentally, as Ye Hong-
sheng has pointed out, numbering a cosmographically significant total of
thirty-six volumes.36
The range of expository apparatus included within the volumes of

194 Chapter 7
the Collected Works extends the cultural didacticism represented in the
novels’ diegetic world into extra-diegetic textual space, a space more plainly
oriented toward interaction with the reader. The Collected Works further
extend this didacticism and cultural appropriation in nontextual directions
as well. The front of each volume in the set features a collection of cap-
tioned plates, many in full color, reproducing works of art, cultural relics,
historical documents, maps, portraits, and photographs of famous sites
associated with the events of the novels. The 1975 afterword to the Ming
Ho edition of Book and Sword introduces the plates as follows:

We estimate that the Collected Works of Jin Yong will comprise about forty vol-
umes in all. Full-color illustrations will be added to each volume; we hope
that this will allow our readers (especially our readers abroad) to gain some
further acquaintance with China’s cultural artifacts and works of art. (870)

It is instructive to compare these plates with the black-and-white illustra-

tions at the head of each chapter, line or wash illustrations by Yun Jun or
his colleague Wang Sima. The latter, reworkings of the illustrations that
accompanied the daily newspaper serializations, offer imaginative rendi-
tions of the characters and scenes of the narrative. But the former in effect
set the novels within a museum of Chinese history and culture. The prac-
tice of the Collected Works here replicates that of Ming Pao Monthly (also
adumbrated on a more modest scale in the covers of Martial Arts and His-
tory). This practice vests the novels with both a pedagogical mission and
the dignity of association with artifacts of recognized cultural significance;
beyond its explicit pedagogical intent, that is, it makes the implicit claim
that The Collected Works of Jin Yong have a rightful place within the Chi-
nese cultural museum.37
In expressing the wish that the plates inserted in the Collected Works
will allow readers “to gain some further acquaintance with China’s cultural
artifacts and works of art,” Jin Yong specifies “readers abroad” as the pri-
mary beneficiaries of this educational agenda; and this focus on the dias-
poric readership, together with the intimate linkage between the diaspora
and the text’s assumption of the duties of cultural stewardship, constitutes
the second noteworthy feature of the revision of Royal Blood’s opening
sequence. The revised opening emphasizes the essential role played by
individuals from outside the Chinese heartland in the validation and sus-
tenance of China’s cultural traditions. The king of Brunei, whose story
frames the tale from a certain distance, is a foreigner, drawn to China by
its glories and unable to depart. Zhang Chaotang, whose travels and tra-

Revision and Canonization 195

 vails lead directly into the primary narrative, is not the Henan native of
the original text but an overseas Chinese, schooled in the traditional arts
while growing up abroad, then sent by his father to fulfill his cultural des-
tiny back in his ancestral land.
On the structural level, Zhang Chaotang’s arrival from abroad estab-
lishes a parallelism with his final departure in Yuan Chengzhi’s company
for a haven overseas. In terms of emotional impact, the idealism of his
vision of the cultural heartland augments the poignancy of his encounter
with the brutal reality of the empire’s condition; his teacher, who has
instructed him in the classics, is slaughtered by pirates as soon as they reach
the mainland. To this extent, then, Zhang Chaotang’s tale echoes and sup-
ports the theme of exile sounded by Yuan Chengzhi’s narrative. Yet even
though Yuan and Zhang exit the tale together, the trajectories of their sto-
ries are differentiated by the fact that, while Yuan was born within the trou-
bled heartland, Zhang has entered it from without. His exit, consequently,
suggests not hopeless banishment from the cultural homeland but the pos-
sibility at least of return to those lands overseas that educated him in its
values to begin with. Through the figure of Zhang Chaotang, the tragic con-
dition of the Chinese mainland serves to highlight the importance of its
admirers and descendants overseas—both in affirming the central culture
through their adulation, and in sustaining it through their extraterritorial
transmission of its literature and values. The nameless, foreigner-infested
island to which Yuan Chengzhi must journey to carve out a new kingdom
is joined and tempered by the image of the overseas kingdom of Brunei,
blessed with a stele inscribed by the Ming emperor; and in this latter
image, in turn, we may discern an echo of the island in Ode to Gallantry,
the inscriptions within whose caverns bestow upon the questing hero the
ultimate rewards of understanding and power.
Just as the revised Royal Blood’s celebration of literature’s importance
as a steward of the cultural inheritance is replicated extratextually in the
presentation and marketing of The Collected Works of Jin Yong, so its vision
of the role of expatriate Chinese in the preservation of that inheritance is
played out in the history of the production and circulation of Jin Yong’s
novels. Distributed throughout Southeast Asia, Taiwan, North America,
and Europe, Jin Yong’s novels related to the dispersed Chinese-language
communities of these locales a narrative of the Chinese homeland and the
Chinese past—a narrative which, for all its reverence for the cultural her-
itage, had been crafted not within that homeland but in the geographi-
cally and politically alienated territory of Hong Kong, sundered from the
storied past as well by the historical ruptures of the mid-twentieth century.

196 Chapter 7
In the 1980s Jin Yong’s vision of China returned to the homeland of
which it had dreamed so long. With mainland China’s economic reforms
and opening to the outside world, millions of readers whose distance from
an idealized tradition stemmed not from geographic displacement but
from sociopolitical trauma found in Jin Yong’s work the double appeal of
a voice from the world outside and an echo of their own remembered or
imagined birthright. The “return” of Jin Yong’s fiction to the Chinese
mainland, as prefigured in his final novel and played out in the economic,
social, and critical tides of the 1980s and 1990s, is the burden of the final
chapters of this book.

Revision and Canonization 197

 Chapter 8
Beyond Martial Arts Fiction

The Deer and the Cauldron

T he September 1981 issue of Ming Pao Monthly

eschewed the multiple titles and leads that customar-
ily vied for attention on its cover in favor of a single dramatic headline,
printed against a photograph of the red walls of Tiananmen, gateway to the
historic seat of China’s emperors and symbolic center of the Communist
regime: “Mr. Zha Liangyong on his Journey to China.” The issue featured
an interview with Zha on his month-long trip to the mainland in July and
August, and a report of his personal meeting with Deng Xiaoping in Bei-
jing’s Great Hall of the People on July 18, 1981.1 The trip, and the meet-
ing with Deng in particular, represented a milestone in Zha Liangyong /Jin
Yong’s relations with the Chinese Communist Party. It was the Party that
had proposed and arranged the visit in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s con-
solidation of power, the removal of his rival Hua Guofeng, and the con-
vention of the Sixth Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee, whose
most dramatic task was the “resolution of certain historical questions”—
i.e., the formal repudiation of the Cultural Revolution and a measured cri-
tique of certain aspects of Mao Zedong’s actions and legacy. The audience
with Deng served to recognize the steady support for Deng’s pragmatic
policies of economic and social reform, which Zha Liangyong had been
voicing in Ming Pao’s editorials for several years, and likewise granted qual-
ified recognition to the paper’s criticisms of the Cultural Revolution and
the excesses of the left. In broader terms it was meant to signal, to the Chi-
nese people and perhaps more importantly to Chinese and non-Chinese
observers abroad, the new leadership’s break with the past and its open-
ness to the outside world.
For Zha Liangyong, the first representative (albeit unofficial) of Hong

198
Kong to be granted audience with Deng, the meeting was a powerful vali-
dation of his cultural and political status, and marked the expansion of his
role from that of publisher and political commentator into that of a direct
participant in the political maneuverings between Hong Kong and the
mainland. Over the next decade and a half, through a series of sometimes
dramatic advances and withdrawals, Zha not only negotiated a personal
rapprochement with the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party but
also played a part in facilitating the return of the British colony of Hong
Kong to mainland sovereignty. After the 1981 meeting with Deng, Ming Pao
became an ever more enthusiastic supporter of the mainland’s reforms,
and established a cooperative relationship with the official Xinhua News
Agency. When readers in Hong Kong and abroad voiced fears that Ming Pao
had “changed sides,” Zha responded that the crucial change was not in his
own or his newspaper’s principles but rather in the leadership and poli-
cies of the mainland government itself. Besides analyzing mainland affairs,
Ming Pao’s editorials began to deal extensively with the question of Hong
Kong’s own future.2 After the 1984 signing of the Sino-British Joint Dec-
laration announcing the colony’s return to Chinese sovereignty on July 1,
1997, Zha Liangyong was among those named by Beijing to the Basic Law
Draft Committee charged with planning the transition. His sponsorship in
late 1988 of a “Mainstream Model” calling for only the most conservative
implementation of democratic political reforms drew charges that he was
serving as a mouthpiece of the mainland government and led to student
protests outside the offices of Ming Pao. In the spring of 1989, however, as
a democracy movement sprung up in Beijing and other Chinese cities,
Ming Pao offered exhaustive and sympathetic coverage, while Zha’s edito-
rials strongly supported the mainland students’ positions and called on
the authorities to enter into dialogue with the student leaders. When Pre-
mier Li Peng declared martial law on May 20, 1989—the thirtieth anniver-
sary of Ming Pao’s founding—Zha resigned from the draft committee. This
action, together with a tearful television appearance and a passionate
signed editorial in the wake of the events of June 4, made Zha Liangyong
a prominent and revered representative of the Hong Kong population’s
concerns. He took pains, nonetheless, to distance himself from the more
virulent critics of the Communist leadership, counseling that the return to
mainland sovereignty was inevitable and a strategy for cooperation there-
fore of the utmost importance. In late 1992 he penned a series of editori-
als severely critical of Governor Chris Patten’s new package of democratic
reforms. A meeting with Secretary General Jiang Zemin in March of 1993
reaffirmed Zha’s importance as spokesman for and guarantor of the main-

Beyond Martial Arts Fiction 199

 land’s vision of a stable transfer of sovereignty.3 Zha was soon appointed
to the Advisory Council for Hong Kong Affairs, and in December 1995
named to the preparatory committee charged with establishing the polit-
ical institutions for post-1997 Hong Kong. He subsequently emerged as an
early and influential supporter of shipping magnate Tung Chee-hwa, who
was in due course chosen by the selection committee to serve as the first
chief executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
The October 1981 issue of Ming Pao Monthly—the issue immediately
following that which reported Zha Liangyong’s meeting with Deng Xiao-
ping—continued the theme of support for Deng with a series of articles
on the Special Economic Zones, which played a central role in his eco-
nomic reforms. It also included a section devoted to Jin Yong’s final novel,
Luding ji (titled in English as The Duke of the Mount Deer, hereafter referred
to as The Deer and the Cauldron).4 The Deer and the Cauldron had originally
been serialized in Ming Pao from October 24, 1969, through September 23,
1972. Ming Pao Monthly’s special section of October 1981 celebrated Ming
Ho’s publication of the revised version and included the afterword and a
historical appendix from the new edition, and an essay by Jin Yong on the
novel’s protagonist: “That Little Rascal Wei Xiabao!” 5 If the meeting with
Deng in July was a milestone in Zha Liangyong’s public and political
career, the publication of the revised edition of The Deer and the Cauldron
in August was equally a milestone in his career as an author, for it marked
the completion of the thirty-six-volume Collected Works of Jin Yong.
The Deer and the Cauldron has been the most controversial of Jin Yong’s
novels ever since its first serialization. It has attracted attention in part as
Jin Yong’s final work; after the completion of this novel, the author, appar-
ently at the height of his talent and productivity, “laid down his brush” as
far as new composition was concerned and turned instead to the task of
revision. But controversy over the work began early during its serializa-
tion, before its status as the author’s final novel was apparent. At the time,
in fact, its authenticity as a work from Jin Yong’s hand was frequently
questioned, so radically did its contents diverge from what his readers had
come to expect.6 The root element in this divergence and the resultant con-
troversy is the figure of the novel’s protagonist, Wei Xiaobao, the antith-
esis of Jin Yong’s previous heroes. A brat from the brothels of Yangzhou,
he perversely resists all opportunities to travel the familiar road of martial
and moral education, rising instead to the twin apexes of the Qing impe-
rial court and the Rivers and Lakes through the exercise of native wit, a glib
tongue, and naked self-interest, while crowning an eventful erotic career
with the acquisition of seven comely and submissive wives. Commenta-
tors, beginning with Ni Kuang, have seen a necessary connection between

200 Chapter 8
Jin Yong’s creation of Wei Xiaobao and his abandoning the composition of
new martial arts fiction. With The Deer and the Cauldron, declares Ni Kuang,
Jin Yong had reached the “terminus” of the martial arts novel, a fulfillment
and pressing of the limits that was at the same time a transcendence of the
genre. “If he were to write any more, all he could do would be to hover at
the borders of this terminus. Wasn’t it better simply not to write?” 7
Ni Kuang rates The Deer and the Cauldron not only first among Jin
Yong’s works but “the best novel of all time, Chinese or foreign.”8 To the
character of Wei Xiaobao he assigns a ranking of “supreme” and explicitly
contrasts this “true-to-life” character, whose flaws are the flaws of Every-
man, with the unnatural perfection of Heroes’ Guo Jing, whose importance
in Jin Yong’s oeuvre he acknowledges while discreetly declining to offer a
rating.9 Subsequent commentators have hotly contested Ni Kuang’s eval-
uation of The Deer and the Cauldron and its protagonist and, in doing so,
confirmed his overall view of their significance. When a panel ostensibly
on the subject of “Jin Yong’s fiction” was held in Taipei in conjunction
with the publication of the Taiwan edition of the author’s works, “in the
end, three quarters of the time was devoted to debates over the personal-
ity of Wei Xiaobao.”10 Nearly two decades later, at the Boulder conference
on “Jin Yong’s Fiction and Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature,”

the most frequent and heated topics of discussion were The Deer and the Caul-
dron and its protagonist Wei Xiaobao. Is The Deer and the Cauldron a historical
novel or a martial arts novel? Is Wei Xiaobao a tragic character, a comic char-
acter, or a tragicomic figure whose serious import merely assumes the guise of
humor? Can he hold his own alongside the archetypal figure of Ah Q? How
does his sociocultural or psychological significance differ from that of Ah Q?
Many of the papers addressed these questions and offered a variety of per-
spectives.11

Wei Xiaobao and The Deer and the Cauldron have thus played a crucial role
in the introduction of Jin Yong’s work to the purview of academic criticism
and analysis. The questions asked about this novel more than about any
other of Jin Yong’s works—questions of genre, of the fictional representa-
tion of personality and human nature, of typicality (dianxing) and national
character (guominxing), of parity with such universally recognized literary
creations as Lu Xun’s Ah Q—are questions the very posing of which con-
cedes a certain degree of literary value and cultural significance. It is not
surprising that The Deer and the Cauldron has been chosen for the first high-
profile publication of one of Jin Yong’s works in English translation.12
Jin Yong’s publication of the essay “That Little Rascal Wei Xiaobao!” in

Beyond Martial Arts Fiction 201

 the pages of Ming Pao Monthly may be seen as another instance of his lend-
ing the material and discursive support of his publishing enterprises to
the promotion (again, both commercial and discursive) of his fiction. In
its content, however, as indeed in its very title, the essay reveals a complex
and even conflicted attitude toward the author’s most famous literary cre-
ation. While doubting that any single fictional character can serve as an
epitome of the Chinese people, Jin Yong allows that Wei Xiaobao, like Ah
Q, Lin Daiyu from The Story of the Stone, or the heroes of The Romance of
the Three Kingdoms, possesses certain uniquely Chinese traits. His two most
distinguishing characteristics, in fact, his capacity to adapt to his environ-
ment and his loyalty to friends (jiang yiqi), are among the major reasons
for the Chinese people’s (Zhonghua minzu) survival and historically unique
resilience. Personal loyalty is perhaps the most deeply held value of the
Chinese people; it is at the heart of the teachings of Confucius and Men-
cius, yet has often stood in opposition to the moral codes imposed by the
ruling stratum of society. A popular, oppositional spirit stands at the heart
of classical Chinese fiction, and the continuance of this spirit represents
one of the ways in which the modern martial arts novel continues classi-
cal fiction’s traditions. Concrete or literal manifestations of the xia’s oppo-
sitional spirit are nonetheless unsuited to modern societies, in which the
interests of the rulers and those of the people are (in theory) in accord;
the lying and scheming to which Wei Xiaobao’s “adaptability” lead him
should be understood as revealing the weaknesses of the Qing society in
which he lived, and would properly disappear under more enlightened
social conditions; indeed, the prevalence of the “Wei Xiaobao style” (Wei
Xiaobao fengdu) of croneyism, self-interest, and disregard for the law “has
a great deal to do with the Chinese government’s continued failure to get
on the right track.” Jin Yong’s pride in Wei Xiaobao’s uniquely Chinese
attributes is thus balanced against a critical and “progressive” vision for a
modern Chinese society. And further complicating the author’s stance is
a large measure of personal affection:

“By the time I had written the first fifth of The Deer and the Cauldron, I already
looked upon ‘that little rascal Wei Xiaobao’ as a close friend. I felt rather par-
tial to him, and inclined to let him do as he pleased; that bad Chinese habit
of putting feelings (qing) over reason (li) was acting up again.” 13

Jin Yong’s ambivalent relationship with his “little rascal,” condemn-

ing him from a rational distance while confessing an affection that is
given a backhanded validation as distinctly “Chinese,” is mirrored within
the novel in the complex relationship between Wei Xiaobao and the Qing

202 Chapter 8
Kangxi emperor (r. 1662–1722). This same relationship is significant also
for the extent to which it represents Jin Yong’s own approach to a “resolu-
tion of certain historical questions.” The Deer and the Cauldron returns from
the historically unmoored Rivers and Lakes of Ode to Gallantry and The
Smiling, Proud Wanderer to the concrete dynastic setting of the earlier nov-
els, and to the particular historical problem of Manchu rule over the Han
Chinese. In place of Book and Sword and Royal Blood’s narratives of failure
and exile, however, it offers a triumphal representation of the consolida-
tion of power and enlightened rule by the second Qing emperor. In the
course of so doing, moreover, it presents an exploration of the landscapes
of literary and cultural practice, revealing a vision of the structure, tensions,
and political functions of Chinese culture, and suggesting its own position
within this complex system.14 This chapter thus undertakes to read The
Deer and the Cauldron as engaging both political issues that were to become
prominent in Zha Liangyong’s rapprochement with the Communist
regime and Hong Kong’s return to mainland rule, and the cultural ques-
tions that arose when Jin Yong’s martial arts fiction entered the Chinese
mainland’s rapidly changing fields of literary and cultural practice.

Narrative Structure, the Political Dilemma, and

the Dual Cultural Terrain
The parameters of The Deer and the Cauldron’s approach to the political
problem of Manchu rule and to the representation of the territory of cul-
tural practice are sketched out in the doubled opening sequences con-
tained in the text’s first two chapters. The first chapter of the novel portrays
the anti-Manchu activities of a group of Ming loyalist scholars during the
early years of Kangxi’s reign.15 The eminent literati Huang Zongxi and Gu
Yanwu pay a visit to their friend Lü Liuliang at his retreat in Zhejiang prov-
ince. The three discuss the Ming History case, in which dozens of scholars
and their families stand in danger of execution over the Zhuang family’s
publication of a history whose use of the former dynasty’s reign-titles inti-
mates treason against the Manchu Qing.16 Fearing for their own liberty
and lives, the loyalist scholars take flight. On a boat upon the Grand Canal,
their conversation turns to the anti-Manchu Heaven and Earth Society
(Tiandihui) and its leader Chen Jinnan. When Manchu agents suddenly
attack, they are rescued by a young gentleman whose scholarly appearance
belies his formidable martial prowess—a hero who turns out to be none
other than Chen Jinnan himself.
The first chapter’s opening image of Han captives tormented by their
Manchu guards recalls the similar tableaux of suffering at the hands of for-

Beyond Martial Arts Fiction 203

 eign oppressors in various of Jin Yong’s previous works. It is significant,
though, that the victims here are not the “common folk” but scholars and
their families; for if the anti-Manchu sentiments of Lü and his comrades
recall those of earlier novels’ loyalist protagonists, their means of express-
ing these sentiments are unique to their status as literati. They view paint-
ings and recite and compose verse in which loyalist allegiance is encoded
in historical, literary, and artistic allusion. In these activities, and in the
Ming History case, which is the focus of their immediate concern, what is
at issue is not physical conflict or direct political action but ideology and
representational practice. This representation, moreover, occurs in cultural
forms—painting, poetry, the writing of history—traditionally understood
as “high” culture, the domain of an educated and (at least potentially)
politically privileged elite. Within the discourse of this elite, men of action
and the heroes of the Rivers and Lakes appear only at a certain narrative
remove, as in the scholars’ discussion of the Heaven and Earth Society and
their recounting of a colleague’s encounter with a stalwart beggar. The
eruption of violence within the primary diegetic field at the chapter’s end,
with Gu Yanwu’s display of his “scant, crude skills of self-defense” (37)
and the appearance of the elegant but lethal Chen Jinnan, moves the text
toward the familiar territory of martial arts fiction, yet at the same time
marks a somewhat startling break with what has come before.
The novel’s second scene of combat, the brawl that breaks out at the
commencement of the second chapter, may dismay the wealthy salt mer-
chants who have gathered at the Vernal Delights brothel in Yangzhou, but
it is less likely to disorient the reader, as the violence seems in keeping
both with the more earthy milieu of this scene and with the participants
in the fight—toughs from a smugglers’ gang and Mao Shiba, a seasoned
goodfellow of the Rivers and Lakes. It is in this setting and in the course of
this brawl that we first encounter The Deer and the Cauldron’s protagonist,
Wei Xiaobao, the rascally offspring of one of Vernal Delights’ singsong
girls. And one of the first traits attributed to Wei Xiaobao is an intimate
familiarity not with the culture of the previous chapter’s scholars but with
the arts and entertainments of his native turf, the pleasure quarters of a
wealthy city:

In the markets and teahouses of Yangzhou were a great number of storytellers

who recounted the heroic tales of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the Water
Margin, the Tale of the Heroes and Martyrs of the Great Ming, and so forth. This
lad spent his days and nights scurrying about the brothels, gambling dens,
teahouses, and taverns, running errands and buying odds and ends for peo-

204 Chapter 8
 ple, skimming a little off the top and begging a few pennies in tips. Whenever
he had the time he would squat beside a table in a teahouse and listen to the
storytelling. He was always obsequiously polite to the waiters, calling them
uncle this and uncle that, and so they didn’t kick him out. He had heard the
stories time and again, and was utterly besotted with the heroes and goodfel-
lows of the tales. Seeing how this fellow [Mao Shiba], grievously wounded
though he was, yet battled on against the smugglers’ champions, he was filled
with admiration, and the phrases spoken by the heroes in the tales spilled
naturally from his mouth. (54)

As this passage suggests, Wei’s engagement with the storytellers’ art

goes far beyond that of a passive listener. The stories he has heard define
his perceptions of Mao Shiba; they inspire him to respond to Mao on the
basis of yiqi, “honor,” specifically the loyalty to friends and to one’s word,
which is the highest virtue of the heroic milieu of the tales; and they even
provide him with the vocabulary and verbal stylings with which to address
his newfound comrade. Later in the chapter Wei plays the role of storyteller
himself, recounting to Mao his version of a tale from the Da Ming yinglie
zhuan (Heroes and martyrs of the Ming).17 The fact that Wei’s tale is in its
own way a “Ming History” highlights the homology between the story-
telling and plays of the marketplace and the high cultural practices of the
first chapter’s literati. But the illiterate Wei’s garbling of historical details
and verbal formulae underscores the gulf that separates him from the
scholars’ specific modes of communication and representation; and his
high-handed approach to his material, unapologetically altering or elid-
ing bits he knows he doesn’t understand and gleefully twisting the tale in
order to insult his hapless listener, suggests a liberty from the burdens of
history and national destiny that weigh so heavily upon the shoulders of
Huang, Gu, and Lü.18
The narrative trajectory of the second chapter resembles that of the
first, as Wei’s association first with Mao Shiba and then, through Mao,
with members of the Heaven and Earth Society mirrors the scholars’ grad-
ual approach to an encounter with Chen Jinnan.19 These two paths toward
a meeting with the anti-Manchu resistance have very different starting
points, however; the scholars begin from their own loyalist convictions,
but Wei Xiaobao is motivated by an admiration for the heroic ideal of yiqi,
which is for him at least innocent of any specific political allegiance. And
while Wei’s path leads him too to an eventual encounter with Chen Jin-
nan himself, it does so only through a detour into that terrain which is the
geographic and discursive antithesis of the Rivers and Lakes—the Forbid-

Beyond Martial Arts Fiction 205

 den City, seat of the Manchu imperial court. He is taken into the palace,
assumes the identity of a young eunuch, and becomes a favored wrestling-
partner and companion of the young Kangxi emperor, thus introducing
this novel’s version of Book and Sword’s kinship between Qianlong and
Chen Jialuo and of the pairing and doubling that runs through so many
of Jin Yong’s subsequent works. He renders the ruler invaluable service by
capturing and then assassinating the menacing regent Oboi. Oboi had
been not only an arrogant threat to the boy emperor’s authority but also
one of the most ruthless foes of the Ming loyalists and the Han Chinese
in general. Wei’s role in his overthrow results in his being accepted as Chen
Jinnan’s personal disciple and named as master of the Society’s local Green
Wood Lodge. Thus is established the novel’s most fundamental tension:
Wei Xiaobao’s bifurcated loyalties, on the one hand to his friend and liege
the Kangxi emperor and on the other to his master Chen Jinnan and his
sworn brothers of the Heaven and Earth Society. As the novel proceeds,
Wei finds himself in a range of situations and takes on a bewildering vari-
ety of roles and names. But whether as master of the Green Wood Lodge,
court official, imperial envoy, general in the Manchu army, monk at Shao-
lin Temple, or White Dragon Marshal in the fanatical Divine Dragon Sect,
he remains, at the most fundamental level, torn between his allegiances to
Kangxi and to Chen Jinnan and so embodies in his person the problem of
the legitimacy of Manchu rule.

Legitimation and Exclusion: The Role and Fate of Wei Xiaobao

The novel as a whole responds to this problem with the solution already
noted in the revised text of Royal Blood—the Manchu emperor’s achieve-
ment of legitimacy through enlightened rule under the guidance of the
textual authority of the Chinese tradition. The regent Oboi is a virulent
opponent of Chinese learning. “When your servant followed the Founder
and his late Majesty on campaign,” he tells the young emperor, who has
just quoted a classical text on benevolent governance, “and we fought our
way into the passes, winning glory by the sweat of our brows, we didn’t
know a single Chinese character, but we still killed these southerners by
the thousands!” (162). Oboi’s elimination is thus, among other things,
the removal of reactionary Manchu resistance to Chinese culture. Kangxi’s
sinification and education as a ruler thereafter proceed apace; he takes to
heart and increasingly puts into practice the central tenet (according to the
novel) of the Chinese classics, that the welfare of the people takes prece-
dence over all. Even the anti-Manchu leader Chen Jinnan is forced to voice

206 Chapter 8
concern over the prospects of restoring the Ming, as “the people’s mem-
ory of the former dynasty gradually fades, and the barbarian emperor
exercises fair and benevolent rule” (1403).
The standards for imperial legitimacy are first articulated within the
novel by the literati who open the first chapter. Here Lü Liuliang, turning
from the spectacle of the convict-train of scholars, tutors his young son in
the meanings of the “deer” and the “cauldron” which give the book its
name. The phrases “inquiring after the cauldrons [of state]” (wen ding) and
“chasing the deer” (zhu lu), derived from passages in the classical histo-
ries, refer to the contest for the imperial throne; at the same time, though,
both the helpless deer and the cauldrons of sacrifice connote the suffer-
ings of the people at the hands of their rulers. The classical images thus
conflate the struggle for dominion with the compassion that alone grants
rulership legitimacy. Kangxi’s achievement, as represented in the novel,
lies in fulfilling the essential requirement for enlightened rulership by dis-
playing benevolence toward his subjects. Beyond this, though, it lies also
in mastering the discourse in which this requirement has been articulated,
that is, in acquiring and expressing his practice of governance through the
medium of classical literary culture. It is the culture of the Chinese schol-
ars themselves, in short, which provides the rationale for the legitimation
of Kangxi’s rule. Kangxi’s assimilation of Chinese cultural practice in gen-
eral, and the redress in particular of the Ming History incident that epito-
mized the scholars’ plight at the opening of the novel, can be seen in the
final chapter, where the emperor reviews a text that has been submitted to
him for interdiction and ends up quoting with approval its pronounce-
ments on the ruler’s proper relationship to his people. It soon falls to Wei
Xiaobao to report the emperor’s views to a group of Ming loyalist literati,
including Huang Lizhou, the author of the volume in question, and Gu
Yanwu and Lü Liuliang, two of the scholars from the opening chapter:

“So the barbarian emperor can tell right from wrong after all,” said Huang
Lizhou.
“That’s right,” said Wei Xiaobao, seizing his opportunity. “The young
emperor said that he’s no “bird-born fish chowder” [niaosheng yutang, the illit-
erate Wei’s garbling of Yao Shun Yu Tang, a proverbial reference to the sage-
emperors of antiquity]; but compared to the emperors of the Ming dynasty,
he’s not necessarily any worse, and maybe even a bit better. With him as their
ruler, the people of the empire get along better than they did under the Ming.
I haven’t got a scrap of learning or education myself, so I can’t say whether
he’s right or not.”

Beyond Martial Arts Fiction 207

 Gu, Zha, Huang, and Lü looked at one another, thinking of the various
emperors of the Ming. From the Founder down to the last emperor Chong-
zhen, if they weren’t ruthless tyrants, then they were muddle-headed incom-
petents; was there one among them who could match Kangxi? These four were
among the great scholars of their age, deeply versed in history and unwilling
to speak against their consciences; and they had no choice but to silently nod
in agreement. (2108)

The scene is significant not only for its representation of the Confu-
cian elite’s recognition, however grudging, of the Kangxi emperor’s legiti-
macy but also for the fact that it is Wei Xiaobao who mediates between
the emperor and his opponents. Wei’s service to Kangxi is scarcely limited
to his befriending the lonely boy emperor and aiding him in removing
Oboi early in the tale and to his acting as his apologist here in the final
chapter. Throughout the length of the novel he performs deed after deed
aiding the emperor in his private affairs, his defense of the realm against
foreign menace, his consolidation of his rule in the face of dissidents and
traitors, and his cultivation of a rapprochement with the people of the
empire. 20 On one level the novel is a fictional portrait of the achieve-
ments of Kangxi, the most illustrious of the Qing emperors, and of the
role of the emperor’s alter ego Wei Xiaobao in forging these achievements;
numerous commentators, indeed, have identified Wei Xiaobao and Kangxi
as co-protagonists of the work, or even named the emperor himself as its
real subject.
Given Wei Xiaobao’s pivotal role in the negotiation of mutual under-
standing between the Manchu ruler and the Han ruled, it is remarkable
that he himself declines to fully participate in the triumph of Kangxi’s
reign. He makes a meteoric rise through the hierarchy of the Qing court,
to be sure, ascending from assistant manager of the Imperial Catering
Department after the victory over Oboi to Duke of the First Level after the
defeat of the Russians and the signing of the Treaty of Nerchinsk. His title,
in fact, is Duke of Ludingshan (Luding gong), “Duke of Mount Deer” in
Jin Yong’s original English version of the novel’s title; and the identity of
the Luding of Wei’s honorific with the lu and the ding of the first chapter’s
exposition of the empire’s plight perfectly summarizes the glory (and
attendant wealth) that Wei Xiaobao gains from his role in engineering
Kangxi’s resolution of the problem of the cauldrons and the deer. Shortly
after first receiving his (at this point Third Level) dukedom, however, he
renounces his service to the emperor and retires with his seven wives to
the desert island he has christened Winner Takes All (Tongchidao). His

208 Chapter 8
rank is later restored and elevated in reward for his further deeds; yet he
finally abandons not only his dukedom but even the possibility of claim-
ing the imperial throne itself, and ends the novel living incognito in the
distant province of Yunnan.
Wei Xiaobao’s final retreat cannot be characterized as mean or renun-
ciatory, as he takes with him a substantial portion of his wealth and his
harem of seven wives. It is in fact in the interlinked modes of sexual con-
quest, phallic self-aggrandizement, and mastery of the symbolic and social
economies of patriarchy that Wei’s accomplishments over the course of
the novel find their most evident and unqualified expression. He enters the
narrative at the lowest rung of the patriarchal order, the son of a prosti-
tute, ignorant of his own father’s name.21 The symbolic castration implicit
in his assuming the identity of a eunuch throws his claim to phallic agency
into further question,22 which on one level may be read as the price he
pays for apparent collusion with the foes of the goodfellows (“true men”
—the han of the Chinese conflates manhood and Han ethnic identity) of
the Rivers and Lakes and the anti-Manchu resistance. Wei’s dreams of suc-
cess take the form of imagining himself as owner and master of a brothel
of his own; and this polygamous fantasy, the inversion of his original
identity as offspring of a woman “owned” by many men, is in one sense
realized through his accumulation of a growing number of female play-
mates, lovers, and wives. Many of his female companions are originally
foes, or associated with figures and forces opposed to Wei and to the
Kangxi emperor. His accumulation of the patriarchal capital of women is
thus closely linked both with victories over male rivals and with his con-
tributions to the establishment of the Qing emperor’s sovereignty. The
supreme example of the linkage between service to the empire, sexual con-
quest, the “unmanning” of foes, and phallic celebration appears in Wei’s
negotiation of the Treaty of Nerchinsk with the Russian aggressors. His
military success involves humiliating his “big-pistoled” captives and threat-
ening them with castration, and “pissing” the Russian fortifications into
submission with hose-cannons. During the subsequent treaty negotia-
tions, he hums a ditty from the brothels, “The Eighteen Feels,” as the Russ-
ian negotiator’s finger retreats before the Qing negotiator’s over the sur-
face of the map; and in signing the treaty, he overcomes his illiteracy just
enough to scrawl the simplest of the characters in his name, the central
xiao (“small”):

He picked up the brush, and drew a round ball on the left, a round ball on the
right, and then a long stick standing straight up in the middle. . . . “Look at this

Beyond Martial Arts Fiction 209

 character,” he laughed. “A chicky and two eggs—it sure does look like a you-
know-what!” The high officials of the Qing delegation couldn’t help but burst
out laughing, and even their attendants and guards joined in the merriment.
[The Russian negotiator] stared at them, wondering what was so funny.
Wei Xiaobao then signed his name to all four copies of the treaty, and on
the copy written in Russian he made that brushstroke in the middle especially
huge. (2050–2051)

Wei accompanies the treaty with a personal gift to the Russian czarina, his
former lover—a naked statue of himself, “one piece” of which eventually
becomes a fertility fetish for Russian peasant women.
The clear linkage between Wei’s attainment of phallic mastery and
patriarchal authority and his contributions to the establishment of the
empire only throws into higher relief his abdication from full participa-
tion in the Qing’s political triumph. What evidently prevents Wei’s com-
plete assimilation to the Qing imperial order is the irreconcilable conflict
between his allegiance to the Kangxi emperor and his loyalties to his com-
rades of the Heaven and Earth Society. He retreats to the desert island after
worming his way out of a harrowing incident in which the Society tries to
force his cooperation in the emperor’s assassination while the emperor
tries to compel his acquiescence to the destruction of Chen Jinnan and his
followers. He fakes his own death and flees to Yunnan when the final
interview with the Ming loyalist scholars (described above) is followed by
an encounter with die-hard members of the Society, who still expect him
to assassinate the emperor or pay the price himself. Both Wei and the
emperor at times describe this dilemma as a conflict between zhong, loy-
alty to a liege, and yi or yiqi, honorable dealings with friends.23 But Wei’s
relationship with Kangxi was first established as a friendship between pal-
ace youths whom Wei, at least, understood to be equals; and even those
deeds of Wei’s that most benefit the empire as a whole are often motivated
not by allegiance to Kangxi as a sovereign but by affection and concern for
him as a friend. Discovering Russian incursions in the north, for instance,
and fearing that these raids betoken revolt by Wu Sangui in the south, Wei
is consumed with worry, not for the nation, but for “little Xuanzi,” the
name under which the emperor wrestled with him in the palace: “If Wu
Sangui has raised his troops in revolt, the little emperor is sure to have an
awful lot of things to talk over with me. Even if I can’t come up with any
ideas, talking with him and helping him out with his worries is the right
thing to do” (1486). In the end, then, Wei Xiaobao’s conflict is less one of

210 Chapter 8
political “loyalty” against brotherhood’s ties of “honor” than of “honor”
owed to two different and opposing parties.24

Discongruous Cultures: The Cultural Economy in

The Deer and the Cauldron

The fact that the demands of yiqi (honor) prevent Wei’s full assimilation
into the enlightened Qing imperium is symptomatic of a more fundamen-
tal problem: a disjunction between those cultural practices that allow for
the validation of Manchu rule and that cultural terrain from which Wei
springs and which he continues to embody throughout the course of the
novel. As we have already seen, the book’s opening chapters portray the
culture of the literate elite and the oral popular culture of the marketplace
as occupying two distinct social and discursive spheres within the larger
field of “Chinese culture.” Something of the relationship between these
two realms becomes evident in the scene (also alluded to earlier) of Wei’s
recounting an episode from the storytellers’ version of Ming history: the
popular culture is a sort of fun-house mirror of the culture of the elite,
replicating some of its major themes and concerns but marked by exagger-
ations, variant points of focus, and simple misunderstandings. These
errors, distortions, and alternate intentions afford popular culture a comic
vitality that is double-faced, on the one hand providing a burlesque of the
gravity of elite discourse but on the other hand betraying the immaturity
and risibility of the popular culture itself.
An episode later in the novel, when Wei Xiaobao travels to Yangzhou
as the emperor’s personal envoy, affords a study of the two realms of the
cultural field in direct confrontation. As his first return to his birthplace
since entering the palace, the journey is a landmark for Wei himself. It also
marks a defining moment in the emperor’s program of nurturing the
bonds between the Manchu rulership and the largely Han population of
the empire; for Wei’s mission is to win the hearts of the people and atone
for the atrocities committed by conquering Manchu troops during the
notorious Yangzhou Massacres, by declaring a three-year amnesty on taxes
and erecting a Shrine of the Loyal Martyrs dedicated to a leader of the
Ming resistance. “We of the Qing revere loyal subjects and righteous men,”
explains the emperor, “and scorn rebels and dissidents” (1546).
Wei is conscious enough of the gulf between his role as imperial envoy
and his origins as an urchin from the brothels to conceal his personal his-
tory from his official associates and to stifle the impulse to establish the

Beyond Martial Arts Fiction 211

 envoy’s formal residence within the pleasure quarters. His cultural predi-
lections surface nonetheless at a dinner party arranged in his honor by the
prefect of Yangzhou, Wu Zhirong. Wei, “quite a vulgar fellow, without a
refined bone in his body” (as the narrator interjects, 1603), mistakes the
elaborate landscaped arbors erected for his delectation for the sheds in
which funeral rites are conducted and is barely dissuaded from destroying
one of the city’s scenic landmarks in vengeance for a grudge harbored
since childhood. Though delighted by the stories with which a perceptive
courtier regales him, he is utterly bored by songstresses’ recitations of Tang
and Song verse. “If Wei was to listen to songs, his first requirement was that
singer be young and pretty, the second that her songs be a bit risqué, and
the third that she sing in a saucy and lascivious style” (1611). When one
of Yangzhou’s most accomplished courtesans presents a ballad by a con-
temporary master, Wei calls for the “old whore” to sing his favorite bit of
bawdry, “The Eighteen Feels”—causing the officials around him to blanch
in shock and embarrassment, and the songstress to flee the hall in tears.
In this banquet scene, the gulf between Wei’s and his hosts’ cultural
styles is exploited primarily for its comic possibilities. The grotesque
humor generated by the spectacle of literati culture’s carnivalesque subjec-
tion to the tyranny of a “hoodlum from the marketplace” serves in the end
to reaffirm “high” culture’s proper position of hierarchical authority. A sub-
sequent audience between Wei Xiaobao and the prefect both restages this
carnivalesque dynamic and introduces some of the situation’s more spe-
cific political and ideological implications. Prefect Wu is none other than
the official whose invidious reports first set in motion the Ming History
affair; it was those efforts, in fact, that won him his current position. Wu
now seeks to curry favor with the imperial envoy by offering new evidence
of sedition by Gu Yanwu and his associates. Wei is less uninterested in the
political import of the writings Wu presents than simply bored with their
dense and (to him) incomprehensible classical idiom. He dismisses Wu’s
sedulous decodings with indifference or downright hostility; he is roused
to excitement only by a reference to historical figures whom he knows from
the Heroes and Martyrs of the Ming—a reference that spurs him to subject
the hapless prefect to a demonstration of his own storytelling abilities.
“He had learned these tales from the mouths of the storytellers, and need-
less to say there was more nonsense to them than solid truth” (1675). It
falls to Wu to remind his superior of the seditious implications of these
stories of the Ming generals’ wars against the barbarian usurpers.25 Wei
finally awakens to the danger posed by Wu’s evidence of a conspiracy
between the scholars and his comrades of the Heaven and Earth Society.

212 Chapter 8
Guided by the code of yiqi, he confiscates the evidence, frees the scholars,
frames Wu, and ultimately contrives to send him to his death.
It is important to note that the code of yiqi that Wei has learned from
his beloved tales does not, in itself, position him on one side or other of
the contest for dynastic legitimacy; it disengages him, rather, from the
appeals to historical and ideological validation through which this contest
is waged. His freeing the Ming scholars expresses neither allegiance to their
credo nor opposition to Qing policy; it follows simply from the personal
ties binding Wei to the scholars via his sworn brethren. If his elimination
of Wu Zhirong clearly aids the loyalists and the heroes of the Heaven and
Earth Society, it may equally be seen as prefiguring the emperor’s final
rejection of the politics of censorship and the consequent resolution of
the paradigmatic tensions of the Ming History affair. The crucial difference,
of course, is that the cultural parameters within which Wei operates
exclude him from participation in the ideological synthesis that informs
the emperor’s actions. The staging of the interview between Wei and Wu
as an encounter between a storyteller and a literary exegete underscores
the fundamental discontinuity not just between the principals’ political
positions but between the cultural practices that support these positions as
well. The same disconnection appears in the final interview between Wei
and the Kangxi emperor. The emperor breaks off from his admiring recita-
tion of Huang Lizhou’s treatise on rulership to admonish himself: “What’s
the point of discussing such lofty principles with this little hoodlum? If I
keep on talking, I’m afraid he’ll start yawning his head off” (2103). When
Kangxi nonetheless proceeds to explicate the text, Wei responds with the
proverb of the “bird-born fish chowder.” His garbling of the proverb’s his-
torical allusions and substitution of the homophones of oral perception
for the referents of the written characters epitomize his inability to do
ought but parrot the literary culture of the sage-kings.26 Wei goes on to
report the emperor’s enlightened views to the loyalist scholars—indeed,
he is perhaps the only person capable of performing this mediatory role.
Lacking “the slightest bit of learning or education,” however, he himself is
unqualified to fully comprehend or share in their capitulation and must
face the demands of yiqi in the form of the intractable warriors of the
Heaven and Earth Society. It is not the demands of yiqi alone, then, but in
the larger sense his allegiance to a cultural milieu removed from that of
the literate elite and insusceptible to its suasions that leaves Wei Xiaobao
with no recourse save flight to Yunnan. The position he finds for himself
in this distant outpost of the empire is in fact analogous to the place of
the popular culture that has nourished him relative to the high literate

Beyond Martial Arts Fiction 213

 culture that provides the empire’s mantle of authority: within its bounds,
posing in the end no credible challenge to its hierarchical eminence, yet
operating at a distance that allows for discongruity, oppositional display,
and incomplete assimilation.

The Swan Song of Jin Yong’s Martial Arts Fiction

The preceding discussions of Wei Xiaobao’s role and fate and of the novel’s
representation of China’s cultural realms allow us to now readdress, from
several perspectives, the question of The Deer and the Cauldron’s role within
Jin Yong’s work as a whole. To begin with, how does Wei’s final-chapter
withdrawal compare with his predecessors’ “rides into the sunset”? Earlier
chapters of this study have noted how the exits made by the protagonists
of Jin Yong’s previous novels assume a variety of geographical forms and
embody a developing range of political implications. Chen Jiaoluo’s flight
beyond the passes and Yuan Chengzhi’s migration to a southern island
express these heroes’ fundamental opposition to Qing rule, their recogni-
tion of defeat, and the political and moral need to remove themselves from
an occupied heartland. Victory (even if temporary) against foreign aggres-
sors wins Guo Jing and Yang Guo the right to retire to an idyllic space,
unthreatened by political turmoil and fructified with the twin blessings of
culture and romance. For Linghu Chong, the enjoyment of aesthetic and
erotic delights is not a reward for political victory gained through martial
prowess but a hard-won and transcendent alternative to the poisonous
practices of which both politics and the martial arts are constituted. Wei
Xiaobao’s final retreat is not a flight from foreign domination; Manchu
domination has been achieved in good part through his own efforts, and
in any case the abstract questions of political and ethnic allegiance are
moot to him. In some sense his retreat might be seen as a flight from pol-
itics but not from its practices of self-interest, deceit, and manipulation,
for he is, if anything, the world’s greatest master of these modes of opera-
tion. What he flees is simply the knot of conflicting loyalties in which he
has become enmeshed. His first refuge, upon Winner Takes All, offers phys-
ical removal from the mainland and the paradisiacal possibilities of life
on a desert island with his seven comely wives, yet it fails to liberate him
from the emperor’s persistent emissaries and his own still conflicted alle-
giances. His final retreat in Yunnan lies upon the mainland and within the
boundaries of the now consolidated Qing imperium. The siting of Wei’s
refuge—at a comfortably anonymous remove, yet still within the bounds
of the empire—gives geographical expression to the imagined reconjunc-

214 Chapter 8
tion of Chinese (high) culture and a Chinese polity in enlightened Qing
rule. The earlier novels’ visions of political exile or diasporic cultural recu-
peration have been superseded by a China imagined as re-centered and
inclusive.
A second island featured in the narrative both reconfirms The Deer and
the Cauldron’s geographic re-centering of an imagined China and illumi-
nates the relationship between this imaginary and the political realities of
the period of the novel’s creation. The Isle of the Divine Dragon (Shen-
longdao), located in the seas off the northeast coast of China, is the lair
of the Divine Dragon Sect (Shenlong jiao). The members of the sect prac-
tice a deadly form of martial arts that includes the chanting of mantras or
slogans, which drive them into a frenzy and hypnotize their opponents
with fear. They are led by the aged Sect Master Hong, who rules as much
through the idolatry and terror he cultivates among his followers as by his
powerful martial skills, and who is accompanied by a young and seduc-
tive consort. The sect is riven by violent factional strife; its elders, seasoned
companions of the master, live in fear of bands of arrogant youths, armed
and organized into color-coded brigades. The Divine Dragon Sect, in short,
resumes Wanderer’s various evocations of the Cultural Revolution—down
to the corpses bobbing in the waters off the isle, an echo of the bodies
floating down the Pearl River, one of Hong Kong residents’ most direct and
chilling reminders of the turmoil within mainland China.
After entering the palace early in the novel, Wei Xiaobao gradually
becomes aware of the Divine Dragon Sect and its efforts to seize copies of
the mysterious Scripture in Forty-Two Sections (Sishier zhang jing). Captured
by one of the sect’s elders, he wins his freedom after pretending to be able
to read the ancient script on a temple stele, fabricating a “text” that reveals
the scriptures’ locations and fulsomely praises the master of the sect. His
trick backfires, however; he is lured to the island by sect members hoping
to win their master’s favor by having Wei present his reading in person.
One of the engineers of this plan, Mr. Lu, probes Wei’s learning by invit-
ing him to critique his collection of paintings and calligraphy. As Wei has
not yet been told the identity of the island or the reason for his presence,
Lu veils his inquiries with the platitudes of an artistic connoisseur:

“We dwell upon this wild and forsaken island, isolated and cut off from tid-
ings of the world. Young master Wei has come from the glorious central plains,
and is a scion of the Chinese race; his experience is vast, and his taste undoubt-
edly exquisite. Please have a glance at these scrolls—can they bear the scrutiny
of so eminent an expert?” (776)

Beyond Martial Arts Fiction 215

 When he discovers that Wei is an imposter, not merely unschooled in the
fine arts but utterly illiterate, he flies into a rage, to which Wei responds by
defacing his artworks with obscene scribblings. But Lu still faces the terri-
fying prospect of presenting Wei and his reading of the stele text to Sect
Master Hong. Working from a rubbing of the text, he painstakingly con-
cocts an interpretation containing the required content and forces Wei to
memorize it word for word.
The full force of this episode is best revealed by recalling the opening
of the revised Royal Blood. There a “scion of the Chinese race” from a far-
off island where Chinese culture has been reverently preserved returns to
the mainland only to find it wracked by turmoil. Here the inhabitants of
the island look to the mainland and its antiquities for validation of their
ideological project—for though Lu’s pose as a disinterested connoisseur is
false, his need for the substantiation of the temple stele’s text is real indeed.
The choice of Wei Xiaobao as a cultural ambassador is, of course, unfortu-
nate, and in one respect the episode serves as merely another illustration
of Wei’s ignorance of and disrespect for the high cultural tradition. Beyond
this, however, the episode reflects upon the cultural character of the island
itself. The Divine Dragon Sect’s thirst for validation through the main-
land’s cultural heritage is exceeded only by their capacity for self-delusion,
their willingness to invent whatever reading of this heritage bests suits the
requirements of political expediency and personal survival. The Isle of the
Divine Dragon is neither an island of refuge nor a harbor for the trans-
planted culture of the heartland, but, rather, a false pretender to political
and cultural authority, a lair of terror and deception. As such it confirms
the novel’s retransferral of cultural authenticity back to the imagined space
of the mainland. And at the same time, it denies this cultural authenticity
to the actual Chinese mainland’s current regime, projecting an acerbicly
satiric rendition of that regime away from the heartland and onto this
dreadful island.27
In chapter six I noted how Wanderer’s abandonment of a historically
grounded setting seems to enrich the possibilities for topical and allegor-
ical readings of its narrative. Yet The Deer and the Cauldron’s reembrace of
historical specificity entails no dismissal of topicality; on the contrary, the
novel surpasses even Wanderer in the breadth and mordancy of its allusions
to contemporary events. References to the Cultural Revolution can be dis-
cerned not only in the Divine Dragon Sect but also in the first chapter’s
literary inquisition and the sixth’s incident of the Sayings of the Empress
Donggo (Duanjing hou yülu). 28 The extended treatment of the Qing con-
quest of Taiwan and the fate of Koxinga’s feckless heir unavoidably invites

216 Chapter 8
reflection on cross-strait relations in the Cold War era. Even the dispute
over the Senkaku/Diaoyutai Islands, which flared up during the period of
the novel’s serialization, leaves its mark on the text—for Diaoyutai is one
of the names of the temporary refuge that Wei Xiaobao dubs “Winner
Takes All.” A detailed analysis of the stances revealed by these various ref-
erences is beyond the aim of our discussion here. In broad terms, though,
it is clear that by reembracing history and imagining the possibility of a
political incarnation for Chinese cultural identity, the novel establishes
standards that almost reflexively call for the evaluation of contemporary
political reality.
If we return from the novel’s refractions of contemporary politics to
the design and symbolic implications of its imagined landscape, we may
note that, as in Jin Yong’s earlier works, questions of geography overlap
with questions of textuality. The text most crucial to the novel’s plot is the
aforementioned Scripture in Forty-Two Sections. The multiple copies of this
text emerge as the focus of struggles as fierce as those occasioned by ear-
lier novels’ manuals of the martial arts. Wei eventually discovers that there
are eight copies in all, originally distributed by the founding emperor of
the Qing among the eight banners of the Manchu military organization.
Among them, the copies of the scripture contain a map to a geomantically
potent site in the Manchu ancestral lands to the north, where the ances-
tral kings are buried and where a vast treasure amassed in the conquest and
pillaging of the Chinese empire has been hidden. Discovery of the site,
excavation of the treasure, and disruption of the currents of geomantic
power would destroy the fortunes of the Qing dynasty. The Chinese name
of the critical site (the “original” Manchu is not given) is Ludingshan,
“Deer Cauldron Mountain.”
Wei Xiaobao is markedly uninterested in the prospect of destroying the
Qing regime, which drives the other seekers of the scriptures; the thought
of the treasure, however, excites his avarice.28 He collects all eight copies
of the text, solves the puzzle of the map they contain, and then destroys
the crucial evidence, leaving only himself and his current female compan-
ion in possession of the secret. As he eventually finds his way north to
Ludingshan, he still harbors dreams of making off with the treasure. Upon
arriving, though, he discovers the area under the sway of raiders from the
aggressively expanding Russian empire. Concern for his friend “the little
emperor” distracts Wei from his covetous fantasies; a series of adventures
involving an affair with the Princess Sophia leads to the signing of a treaty
with the Russians and Wei’s triumphant return to Beijing, where he is first
enfeoffed as Duke of Luding. When later in the tale the Russians again

Beyond Martial Arts Fiction 217

 encroach upon Chinese territory, it falls to Wei Xiaobao to lead the Qing
troops to victory and oversee the signing of the treaty of Nerchinsk.
The association between the Scripture in Forty-Two Sections and Luding-
shan echoes the linkages between potent texts and crucial geographic sites
in Jin Yong’s earlier novels.29 But where such texts as the Veritable Scripture
of the Nine Yin convey the keys to individual mastery of the martial arts,
and sites such as Huashan stand at a discursive or physical remove from
the geopolitics of dynastic struggle, the secret of the Scripture in Forty-Two
Sections is precisely that of Qing political authority as materialized in the
physical space of the Manchu heartland. Wei Xiaobao’s decision to relin-
quish the personal advantage to be gained through the decoding of the
text in favor of his friendship with the Kangxi emperor is a crucial moment
in his (and the novel’s) acceptance of the non-Han authority, which ear-
lier novels’ martial masters had striven against or avoided. And the occa-
sion of his decision—the discovery of a threat to China as a whole by
non-Chinese foreigners—throws into sharper relief the essential terms of
this acceptance: the assertion of pan-ethnic Chineseness, of the unity of
the “races” through the transformative influence of the Chinese cultural
tradition.30
Although the text as guide to the cultural legitimation of political
authority displaces the text as key to supremacy in the martial arts, the
familiar trope of the martial arts manual is not entirely absent from The
Deer and the Cauldron. After accepting Wei Xiaobao as his disciple, the
leader of the Heaven and Earth Society, Chen Jinnan, gives him a manual
of the Society’s basic martial techniques and oral instructions on how to
practice. Wei lacks the discipline to persevere in the training, however, and
finds the manual a far less interesting object of study than the wads of
cash he has amassed through his part in the confiscation of Oboi’s prop-
erty. The failure to master Chen Jinnan’s martial arts is only one instance
of Wei Xiaobao’s repeated disregard of fortuitous opportunities to study
with eminent teachers—opportunities that served as the essential ele-
ments of earlier protagonists’ careers of martial and personal growth.31
The only technique for which he shows any real affinity is a footwork pat-
tern, the Divine Ambulation in a Hundred Variations (Shenxing baibian),
which he refines into an almost preternatural skill in fleeing danger. Oth-
erwise he relies not on martial techniques but on a collection of semimag-
ical objects (corpse-dissolving powder, armor of invulnerability, a razor-
sharp blade) or on his true talents of flattery, manipulation, chicanery,
and deceit. Wei Xiaobao’s brief and fruitless encounter with a manual of
the martial arts is but one facet of his general rejection, subversion, and

218 Chapter 8
fraudulent mimicry of the normative role of the martial arts novel’s
protagonist.
Wei Xiaobao the antihero is not only the Kangxi emperor’s shadow,
the appetite-driven obverse of his sovereign and wrestling-partner’s alle-
giance to principle; he is also a manifestation of the state to which the
xia is reduced under the reign of an enlightened ruler. Jin Yong has writ-
ten of his protagonists as belonging to the traditionally paired categories
of rushi, “entering (engaging) the world,” and chushi, “withdrawing from
the world.” 32 The Deer and the Cauldron’s reembrace of history and will-
ingness to imagine political solutions to historical conflicts implicitly reject
the renunciatory apoliticism of such chushi heroes as Linghu Chong. At
the same time, the particular solution it envisions—the transcendence of
ethnic rivalries through the enlightened teachings of the cultural tradi-
tion—undercuts both the loyalist ends and the martial means of the rushi
champions. The xia’s resultant plight is manifest in the character of Chen
Jinnan. Both his surname and his position as chief of an anti-Manchu
secret society mark him as an avatar of Jin Yong’s first protagonist, Book
and Sword’s Chen Jialuo. In the universe of The Deer and the Cauldron, how-
ever, the martial champion and resistance hero’s fate is not a starring role
crowned by tragic retreat to the geopolitical margins of the empire, but nar-
rative marginality and an ignoble death. The rascal who usurps his place
at center stage resembles Linghu Chong in his cold-eyed discernment of
the futility and hypocrisy of rushi ideals, yet chooses the path not of with-
drawal but of enthusiastic and self-serving gamesmanship. Wu Aiyi aptly
dubs this third path wanshi, “toying with the world.” It is through the
mutual emergence of the enlightened ruler and the manipulative anti-xia
that The Deer and the Cauldron abandons the familiar realm of the martial
arts novel.33

The Song of Chen Yuanyuan

We saw in the previous chapter how the representation of textuality within

Jin Yong’s novels affects the works’ representation and enactment of their
own status as literary artifacts. The foregrounding of artifacts and practices
of the literate high cultural tradition within the diegesis of the revised Royal
Blood joins with the greater “historicization” of the story line, extradiegetic
textual features such as explanatory notes and appendices, and extratex-
tual features including documentary illustrations and publication in “mas-
terpiece” format, to claim a place for Jin Yong’s work within a tradition of
literary practice dedicated to transmitting the fundamental knowledge and

Beyond Martial Arts Fiction 219

 values of “Chinese culture.” In Royal Blood as in the majority of Jin Yong’s
novels, this Chinese culture seems to be a homogenous system. There is
nothing within the texts, that is, to challenge the identity, or at least the
homology and functional overlap, of the literary classics of the high cul-
tural tradition, the manuals of the martial arts to which the novels’ pro-
tagonists dedicate their efforts and attention, and the texts that Jin Yong’s
readers find in their hands. The linkage between the spheres is in fact
asserted through such devices as Wanderer’s employment, for its Chinese
title, of the name of a key text within the tale it narrates, and celebrated
extradiegetically in fans’ description of the practice of reading Jin Yong’s
novels as liangong, “working out,” that is, practicing the martial arts.
The Deer and the Cauldron’s portrayal of a multi- (or at least bi-) level
and less than fully harmonious cultural system complicates this picture.
The novel’s argument for the authority of the high cultural tradition—
embodied in its narrative of the Qing empire’s attainment of internal unity
and external strength, as well as in its portrait of the Kangxi emperor as
sage-king—is the most overt of any of Jin Yong’s novels. This triumph is
achieved, however, at the cost of a widening disjunction between the high
tradition and the martial arts. Despite the novel’s acknowledgment of the
Manchu’s military virtues, the martial arts remain associated primarily
with the Han chauvinists of the Heaven and Earth Society, and the Soci-
ety’s final-scene appearance as embittered intransigents seems to exclude
not only them but all of Jin Yong’s earlier paladins as well from the rec-
onciliation here offered under the aegis of the sages’ teachings. An even
greater challenge to the status of the martial arts is presented, of course,
by the novel’s protagonist. Wei’s obdurate and self-satisfied refusal to walk
the path laid down by previous protagonists further displaces the martial
arts from the center of the novel’s vision. In this respect Wei can be said
to share discursive terrain with the Kangxi emperor and the literate cultural
tradition he embraces. Yet Wei Xiaobao, as we have seen, is only slightly
more successful than the Heaven and Earth Society in finding a place for
himself within the Kangxi emperor’s reaffirmed cultural order. Unassimi-
lability arises in his case neither from racialist convictions nor from the
problematic character of the martial arts, but from an even more radical
disjunction from the discourse of the sage-kings: his illiteracy, and his alle-
giance to a cultural sphere that mimics but does not totally submit to the
values and practices of the high tradition. If the earlier novels’ assumption
of a homogenous cultural system allowed for the possibility of the novels’
own participation in an unproblematized cultural project, The Deer and the
Cauldron’s representation of differentiated cultural spheres raises anew the

220 Chapter 8
question of the novel’s own status. The question arises not only from the
complexity of the interaction between the high culture of the literate elite
and the oral culture of the marketplace—the former claiming ultimate
authority, the latter apparently acknowledging this authority through imi-
tation, demonstrating inferiority through errors in its mimicry, yet mock-
ing its “superior” through irreverence and bowdlerization, and gleefully
pursuing aims unsanctioned by its counterpart—but also from the disso-
nance between the novel’s stated and affective loyalties: for while the nar-
rator and the arc of the narrative endorse the cultural accomplishments of
the Kangxi emperor, most readers understand the novel as a celebration
(for better or for worse) of the character and culture of Wei Xiaobao. How,
then, do the cultures represented in Jin Yong’s final novel illuminate the
novel’s understanding of its own fictional and cultural practice?
There is a prima facie case for associating the material, themes, and
narrative techniques of martial arts fiction with the oral entertainment cul-
ture of the marketplace rather than with the literary artifacts of the high
cultural tradition. Jin Yong in fact explicitly evokes this association in the
revised opening to Heroes, which takes background information concern-
ing Jin assaults upon the Song out of the hands of the serialized edition’s
extradiegetic narrator and places it in the mouth of an intradiegetic story-
teller, whose vivid narrative arouses his listeners’ patriotic passions. In the
afterword to the revised edition, Jin Yong remarks that “our nation’s tradi-
tional fiction had its origins in storytelling; using a storyteller in my intro-
duction is my way of paying homage to the source.” 34 It is noteworthy,
then, that one of the stylistic changes Jin Yong has made to the text of this
and others of his novels is the systematic removal of one of traditional Chi-
nese fiction’s most concrete and characteristic linkages with the oral tradi-
tion: the verbal tags such as qie shuo (“now let us speak of . . .”), zhanqie bu
biao (“but no more of this for the moment . . .”), and so forth, associated
with traditional vernacular fiction’s “simulated context of oral storytell-
ing.” 35 For all its willingness to acknowledge its venerable progenitors, Jin
Yong’s martial arts fiction does not offer an artless continuation of their
practices; rather, it lays claim to the antiquity and popular appeal of the
traditional narrative arts of the marketplace from a respectful but con-
scious distance.
This simultaneous appropriation of and distancing from the culture
of the marketplace is even more pronounced in the opening chapters of
The Deer and the Cauldron. The first chapter’s movement from scholarly
deliberation to hand-to-hand combat, and the second chapter’s forthright
plunge into a brothel brawl, seem to constitute a progressive entry into the

Beyond Martial Arts Fiction 221

 “natural” discursive terrain of the martial arts novel; and the affinity of
this generic terrain with the culture of the marketplace seems affirmed by
Wei Xiaobao’s imitation of his beloved legendary heroes and his eager
assumption of the storyteller’s role. Yet Wei’s mimicry, whether of charac-
ters from the stories or of the teller of the tales, opens a gap even as it
claims an affiliation. For his mimicry is imperfect: his employment of igno-
ble strategems (throwing lime into a foeman’s face), and his contemptu-
ous rejection of the exemplary goodfellow Mao Shiba’s precepts and offer
of discipleship, belie the heroic characterization promised by his embrace
of the ethics of yiqi; while both deliberate manipulations and ignorant
errors mar his reproduction of the art of the storyteller. It is the very imper-
fection of his mimicry, moreover, which is offered for the reader’s enjoy-
ment. The surprises, pleasures, and passions of Wei’s character and his
adventures emerge only from the fertile incongruity between his tale and
its purported models. The Deer and the Cauldron represents, rather than
naively reproduces, the sphere of popular marketplace culture.
The equivocal stance toward popular narrative traditions implicit in
the novel’s diegesis surfaces also in the narratorial voice. At the point in
the tale at which Wei Xiaobao intrudes upon a confrontation between the
Kangxi emperor and the regent Oboi, we find an example of the text’s
many narratorial asides:

When Kangxi (Note: “Kangxi” is actually a reign title, but it is the custom of
vernacular fiction [tongsu xiaoshuo] to refer to the emperor as “Kangxi” and not
by his given name “Xuanye”) suggested that it was personal ambition that
moved [Oboi] to seek Suksaha’s death, it touched him right at his sorest
point. (165)

The narratorial voice here assumes a particularly intrusive form, abruptly

interrupting the flow of the diegetic presentation, its invasiveness high-
lighted in the original by the use of a variant typeface. The novel’s text fre-
quently offers explanatory material through the voice of the anonymous
implied narrator; here, though, it is as if another speaker—perhaps the
implied author, Jin Yong himself—were stepping in to provide necessary
information. The information supplied bears directly upon the novel’s dis-
cursive register and generic status. The author places his novel within the
tradition of vernacular fiction by informing us that its usage conforms with
that literature’s standard practice. The very fact of identifying and explain-
ing this practice, however, betrays a self-conscious removal from the prac-
tice’s unmediated transmission. What is more, the need to correct the prac-

222 Chapter 8
tice, to ensure that the reader is aware of just how it departs from proper
historiographic usage, reveals that the text’s allegiance is twofold; while
manifestly aligning itself with vernacular fiction, it also assumes a weight
of responsibility toward historical and literary orthodoxy.
The imperative to provide access to the literary and historical tradi-
tions motivates most of the appearances of the authorial voice within the
text. One form these appearances take is that of correctives and supple-
ments to the novel’s diegetic material—notes, appendices, and narratorial
digressions that fill in historical background or explain how the novel’s
versions of characters and events differ from the historical record. At times
the text provides direct quotation of the literary or historiographic sources
from which the novel takes its inspiration. And such direct incorporation
of material from the high literary tradition occasions another characteris-
tic form of the novel’s authorial interventions: exegesis of the high tradi-
tion for readers who may lack the linguistic and cultural knowledge to
decipher it on their own.
These exegetical excursions often appear as direct communications
from the author to the reader. The most striking case is perhaps that of the
novel’s chapter headings. As Jin Yong explains in an extended note at the
end of the first chapter, the classical poetic couplets that serve as chapter
titles are all taken from the collected works of his own ancestor, the emi-
nent Qing era scholar and poet Zha Shenxing.36 Zha Shenxing makes an
indirect diegetic appearance as the author of the lyrics that the middle-
aged geisha sings (to Wei’s disgust) at the banquet in Yangzhou, and of
some of the “seditious” writings that the prefect Wu Zhirong presents for
Wei’s examination. The honor and priority given to his work in the extra-
diegetic space of the chapter headings demonstrates once again how the
discourse of the novel as a whole contains and is not contained by the dis-
cursive range of its unlettered protagonist, and how it claims instead the
authority of the culture embraced by the sage-kings: “The reason I wanted
to use Zha Shenxing’s poetry,” notes Jin Yong, “is that most of these poems
were read by Kangxi himself” (44). The reader’s joining the emperor in
appreciation of this poetry, however, requires the author’s active interven-
tion. Notes at the end of the individual chapters carefully explain recondite
vocabulary and classical allusions contained in the couplets, as well as
smoothing over any gaps between the excerpts’ original signification and
their applicability to the chapters’ contents.
The pedagogic function performed by such extradiegetic interventions
also occurs within the body of the tale. An example appears in the first
pages of the novel, when the Confucian scholar Lü Liuliang, contemplat-

Beyond Martial Arts Fiction 223

 ing the sufferings of the people of the empire, utters the lament, “They are
the cleaver, we are the meat; they are the cauldron, we are the deer,” and
then retreats to his study to explain these allusions to his school-age son
(8–9). His explication, complete with citations from the various historio-
graphic classics, serves to edify not only his son but also the novel’s reader,
who is instructed in both the connotations of the phrase and the literary
tradition that informs it. The most salient case of such intra-/extra- diegetic
pedagogy in The Deer and the Cauldron is Wei’s encounter with Chen Yuan-
yuan, the courtesan whose involvements with the Ming general Wu San-
gui and the rebel leader Li Zicheng allegedly contributed to the downfall
of the Ming dynasty.37 When Wei Xiaobao meets this aging but still beau-
tiful femme fatale at the cloister to which she has retired in Yunnan, his
defense of her reputation leads her to believe that he possesses extraordi-
nary insight into her place in the nation’s history. But as the narrator
points out,

Wei Xiaobao was actually ignorant and muddle-headed as far as the “great
affairs of the nation” were concerned. He hadn’t the foggiest idea whether or
not she had been unjustly accused; but at the first sight of her dazzling and
exquisite countenance, he had been completely bowled over. (1308)

He has the presence of mind at least to decline her praise of him as a

scholar: “I can’t read a single character, even if you write it as big as a barn.
If you want to call me a scholar, you’d better add the word ‘bullshit’—the
Bachelor of Bullshit, Wei Xiaobao, that’s me!” Chen Yuanyuan assures him
that it is insight and responsibility, not the ability to pen poetry and essays,
that makes the true scholar, and proceeds to relate her history in detail.
This she does by picking up a pipa, the courtesan’s traditional instrument,
and performing “The Song of Yuanyuan” (“Yuanyuan qu”) by the Qing
poet Wu Meicun (1609–1671). After each stanza of the verse (which the
text reproduces in the same variant typeface employed for interpolated
notes), she pauses and explains its import to her young listener, filling in
the historical background and rendering classical diction and allusions
into vernacular speech—performing the same functions, in short, that the
author elsewhere directly performs for his readers.
“On the face of things,” remarks Joseph Lau in his comments on this
passage, “Chen Yuanyuan is offering her explanation to Wei Xiaobao; but
the real beneficiaries are in fact those youngsters . . . who have already lost
the opportunity to receive an education in Chinese.”38 The previous chap-
ter has touched upon the historical and social identity of these “real ben-

224 Chapter 8
eficiaries”; of relevance to the present discussion of the novel’s rhetorical
stance is the apparent identification of the novel’s readers with Wei Xiao-
bao. As Lin Linghan notes, the narrator’s and author’s need to provide
careful explanations of Wei’s characteristic misuse of chengyu betrays the
unflattering assumption that the reader’s level of cultural literacy is not
much higher than that of the protagonist.39 Nonetheless, the identifica-
tion cannot be complete: apart from the obvious fact that Jin Yong’s audi-
ence must possess at least a functional competence in reading modern Chi-
nese prose, we may note also that Wei Xiaobao is offered not only for the
reader’s identification but also for his or her privileged amusement. The
reader is given the opportunity to laugh both with and at Wei Xiaobao.
And the establishment of a space from which one can laugh at Wei—even
if the reader’s claiming of this space requires the author’s sedulous assis-
tance, and even if Wei Xiaobao’s own talents include a capacity for join-
ing in the laughter at his own expense (“the Bachelor of Bullshit”)—shows
once again that the novel imagines both its own discursive stance as
extending beyond that of the marketplace culture it imitates and repre-
sents, and its readers as familiar with or capable of introduction to this
wider cultural terrain.
Song Weijie’s characterization of Wei Xiaobao’s mode of cultural
knowledge as “the historical memory of the weak,” the process of amne-
sia and self-distancing mythicization through which weak nations and
colonized peoples collude in stronger powers’ erosion of their native cul-
tures, posits the relationship between the popular and elite cultural spheres
represented in the novel as primarily one of degradation and bowdleriza-
tion.40 Lin Linghan draws out explicitly the relationship between the cul-
tural dynamics of the diegesis and the cultural function of Jin Yong’s nov-
els themselves, arguing that the works’ commercial and “inauthentic” (in
the Frankfurtian sense) reproduction of Chinese language, history, and art
constitutes a fetishistic compensation for the symbolic emasculation suf-
fered by Hong Kong’s Chinese population under colonial rule.41 Early in
his analysis, Lin invokes Matei Calinescu’s discussion of “kitsch” as the
culture industry’s mimicry and commodification of the artifacts and prac-
tices of high culture.42 Such kitsch offers “easy catharsis” and all too read-
ily transmutes insight into cliché; in its fashion, however, it does offer a
point of access to other cultural terrains. It is this mediatory role, this bidi-
rectional linkage between the culture of the marketplace and the high cul-
tural tradition, that The Deer and the Cauldron claims for itself.
Chen Yuanyuan’s recitation can be read as an epitome of this media-
tory position within the cultural economy. Her performance transmutes a

Beyond Martial Arts Fiction 225

 specimen of elite literary production into a more accessible register. The
transmutation bears a formal resemblance to the genres of marketplace
culture, 43 and both the association with teahouse storytelling and Chen
Yuanyuan’s own status as a (former) courtesan earmark this culture’s com-
mercial character. The original literary artifact nonetheless remains embed-
ded within her performance, and the performance’s intention is clearly
pedagogic, placing high culture within the marketplace for the express pur-
pose of drawing the audience out into an appreciation of literature and
the “great affairs of the nation.” From this perspective, the arts of the mar-
ketplace are in service to the high tradition; and it is upon this pedagogic
function, whose final loyalty seems to belong to the high tradition, that
Chen Yuanyuan’s performance (and by extension Jin Yong’s) bases certain
claims to cultural authority. In a world that contains a Wei Xiaobao, how-
ever, high culture’s authority cannot be seen as comprehensive or uncon-
tested. Chen Yuanyuan also embodies the purely sensual pleasures of
marketplace culture, gendered as female for the gaze of the irrepressible
polygamist. Wei Xiaobao, the narrator notes, “had listened to the song for
so long only because of the beauty of the songstress and the delight of the
melody; in the rapture of his spirits, he had completely lost track of why
he had come” (1314). There is no guarantee, likewise, that the novel’s
reader will perform more than perfunctory obeisance to the trappings of
historical and literary orthodoxy. It is entirely possible that the reader will
seek some pleasant corner of the discursive empire, ostensibly within the
purview of the high tradition yet distant enough to allow untroubled
enjoyment of the novel’s narrative and sensual pleasures, which have ren-
dered their own service to the narrative’s ideological project and yet refuse
to be contained by any complete submission. The novel itself thus proffers
a bifocal frame for reference and evaluation: on the one hand the com-
manding hierarchy of cultural forms, the apex of which is claimed by the
Kangxi emperor, and on the other the space opened up by the incomplete
concordance between elite and popular cultures—the space exploited by
Wei Xiaobao. Far from being unique to The Deer and the Cauldron’s self-
presentation, these same terms come into play in the history of the recep-
tion and criticism of Jin Yong’s works, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s
when—like Wei Xiaobao, Zha Liangyong, and the territory of Hong Kong
—the body of Jin Yong’s fiction negotiated a reentry into the sphere of
authority of the powers to the north.

226 Chapter 8
 Chapter 9
Coming Home

Jin Yong’s Fiction in Mainland China

J in Yong’s fiction entered mainland China as one part of

the massive influx of “Gang-Tai” (Hong Kong and Tai-
wanese) popular culture in the 1980s. The spread of this Gang-Tai culture
was a major aspect of what was sometimes called a “popular culture craze”
(tongsu re); and the conditions for the increasing commercialization of the
mainland cultural sphere, and its development in directions increasingly
independent of the central authorities’ ideological agendas, were estab-
lished by the pragmatic reform policies instituted under the leadership of
Deng Xiaoping. Thomas Gold sketches the circumstances as follows:

[T]he Party undertook economic reforms to regain the legitimacy damaged by

the Cultural Revolution. It redefined its primary task as modernization, which
involved marketizing and privatizing the domestic economy and opening to
foreign investment, trade, tourism, experts, students, and so on. The Party
greatly relaxed its control over the superstructure, both in terms of ideology
and directed culture. Rapid, although unequally distributed, economic devel-
opment ensued, with shops well stocked with consumer goods, and citizens
with money to spend. The state stressed the importance of the tertiary sector,
legitimizing personal enjoyment and leisure time, and leaving it to individu-
als to decide how to structure it. Gangtai popular culture demonstrated its
appeal to mainland Chinese, and aggressive domestic and external enterpre-
neurs moved to cultivate and satisfy this market.1

The “popular culture craze” of the 1980s thus grew from the conflu-
ence of new kinds of cultural products with new habits of leisure and con-

227
 sumption. It manifested in an expanding variety of media; the increasing
affluence of the mainland population was accompanied by the progres-
sively wider distribution of radios and cassette players, then of televisions
and video recorders, facilitating the seemingly universal dissemination of
such cultural products as the popular songs of the Taiwanese songstress
Deng Lijun and the films and serial melodramas of Hong Kong movie and
television stars. But a major component of the new entertainment culture
was popular fiction. The loosening of restrictions on material approved
for publication, publishing houses’ new opportunities (and need) to reap
profits from their products, the dissolving of Xinhua’s monopoly on dis-
tribution, and the even more dramatic proliferation of independent book-
sellers (most evident as streetside and train station bookstalls) dovetailed
with the public’s seemingly unquenchable appetite for entertainment-
oriented reading material. This appetite was answered by publishers’ swell-
ing catalogs and soaring print runs, by the mushrooming of book rental
shops, and by the establishment of dozens and even hundreds of new
entertainment papers (xiaobao) and popular literature (tongsu wenxue) peri-
odicals. The fiction filling the magazines and bookstalls was in part domes-
tically produced but in large part imported from overseas, from Hong
Kong and Taiwan in particular. And while the thematic genres represented
included romance, crime and detective fiction, science fiction, and espi-
onage thrillers, leading the field both in imports and in domestic produc-
tion was the genre of martial arts fiction.2

The Spread of Jin Yong’s Fiction in the Mainland

The production and distribution of martial arts fiction had essentially

ceased on the mainland after the establishment of the Peoples’ Republic,
in 1949. A small number of Republican-era works were reprinted in the
few years before the complete centralization of the publishing industry; a
few premodern works with martial and chivalric themes, such as the late
Qing Three Heroes and Five Gallants, were allowed to remain in print even
then.3 Preliberation editions of martial arts novels might still be found at
bookstalls through the early 1950s, and several veteran authors, including
Huanzhu Louzhu and Bai Yu, made stilted attempts at creating new mar-
tial fiction with socialist themes under the guidance of the new regime.4
The increasing stringency of political and artistic campaigns from 1957
on, however, and then the virulence of the Cultural Revolution’s rejec-
tion of “poisonous weeds” and the “four olds,” saw the almost complete

228 Chapter 9
expunging of both twentieth-century martial arts fiction and premodern
literature on chivalric themes from the public arena.5 Traces of martial
and chivalric material persisted nonetheless in the hand-copied entertain-
ment fiction that circulated underground during the 1960s and 1970s.6
And even some of the most exemplary works of revolutionary culture carry
strong echoes of the martial arts tradition. The plot of The White-Haired
Girl (Baimao nü) in its various adaptations replicates the classic paradigm
of the heroine’s flight to the mountains, transformation, and vengeful
return, while Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (Zhi qu Weihushan) makes
free use of the vocabulary, imagery, and narrative ploys of The Water Mar-
gin and its successors. One can only speculate on the relative weight of the
traditional narrative elements and the reformed ideological message in
audiences’ reception of such works.7
The Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee, in December
1978, where intellectuals were encouraged to “liberate thought,” and the
Fourth Congress of Literary and Art Workers, in October 1979, where
Deng Xiaoping decried the “bureaucratic style” of artistic production and
encouraged writers to learn from the more illustrious examples of foreign
and traditional literature, opened the door to a variety of changes in liter-
ary activity. The years 1979 and 1980 saw a reinvigoration of literature
addressing social concerns (beginning with the flourishing of “scar litera-
ture”) and experimentation with new fictional forms; the same period also
witnessed the resurgence of popular themes of romance and adventure.8

Although knight-errant (wuxia) stories . . . were still not deemed fit for publi-
cation, there were obvious signs of reader interest in them. Examples brought
in from Hong Kong were highly coveted. And when the French-Italian film
Zorro (a surrogate for the Chinese knight-errant if ever there was one) was
shown in major cities, tickets on the black market reached ten times their face
value. 9

Martial arts fiction drew yet closer to the sphere of allowed discourse
with such phenomena as The People’s Daily’s 1979 serialization of the
mainland author Liu Junxiang’s Wu Hao zhi jian (The sword of Wu Hao),
an adventure tale combining elements of martial arts fiction and espi-
onage.10 The early 1980s surge in the popularity of pingshu storytelling,
much of it on historical and adventurous themes, and the loosening of
restrictions on the publishing of Ming and Qing fiction, further whetted
the public’s appetite for related material.11 The impetus for the martial

Jin Yong’s Fiction in Mainland China 229

 arts genre in an unadulterated form, however, came in good part from
Hong Kong and Taiwan. Direct imports such as those mentioned above
were succeeded by (and often served as the basis for) instances of repub-
lication for limited circulation,12 and then by public reprinting and distri-
bution. The year 1981 saw what was apparently the first such public distri-
bution of Hong Kong martial arts fiction, with Guangzhou’s Keji
chubanshe publishing Jin Yong’s Book and Sword, Huacheng chubanshe
issuing Liang Yusheng’s Pingzong xiaying lu, and the Guangzhou-based
martial arts periodical Wulin serializing portions of Jin Yong’s Heroes.13 As
these cases make clear, the beachhead for martial arts fiction’s reentry into
the Chinese mainland was the city of Guangzhou, and Guangdong
province more generally. This situation was only natural, given
Guangzhou’s proximity to Hong Kong and its leading role in exploiting
the fruits of ties with the outside world and economic development. It is
worth remarking nonetheless that the mainland craze for martial arts fic-
tion in the 1980s was deeply indebted to the same geocultural sphere that
had fostered the Guangdong School fiction which served as the back-
ground and foil for Liang Yusheng’s and Jin Yong’s creations—but that the
flow was now reversed, with the fictional imaginary traveling from Hong
Kong (and through Hong Kong from the world beyond) back into the
Chinese heartland.14
One scholar’s sketch of the dissemination of Hong Kong and Taiwan
martial arts fiction in the mainland describes a three-stage process: the
first publications in the provinces around the Pearl River delta beginning
in 1981; further distribution, up to 1984, through the proliferating xiaobao
and the efforts of publishing companies along the southeast coast; and a
spread from the coast to publishing companies throughout the nation in
1985.15 A few years into the decade, domestic authors were making notable
contributions to the martial arts fiction craze. Nie Yunlan’s 1983 Yu Jiao-
long, a reworking of a martial arts novel by the Republican-era author
Wang Dulu, propelled the journal in which it was serialized into a circu-
lation of over two and a half million; 16 Feng Yu’nan’s Jinmen daxia Huo
Yuanjia (The paladin of Tianjin, Huo Yuanjia) was published in 1984 with
a first printing of nearly a million copies;17 and Feng Jicai’s Shenbian (The
miraculous pigtail) of the same year received both popular welcome and
critical acclaim. But such native efforts were still dwarfed by the appeal of
Jin Yong, Liang Yusheng, and Gu Long. It is impossible to estimate with
any accuracy the number of copies of their works circulated in the main-
land. Twenty or more publishing companies vied in printing New School

230 Chapter 9
novels; 18 print runs of a novel by Jin Yong or Liang Yusheng might run
into the millions; 19 the head of the National Publishing Bureau is reported
to have told Jin Yong that in 1985 alone forty million volumes of his fic-
tion were sold in the Chinese mainland.20 In the increasingly chaotic and
irregulable publishing world of the 1980s, not a few of these editions were
illegal, bending or evading altogether the laws governing the registration
of publications. And they were almost without exception unauthorized.
Prior to the publication of the authorized Sanlian shudian edition of Jin
Yong’s Collected Works in 1994, a 1985 edition of Book and Sword by Tian-
jin’s Baihua wenyi chubanshe was the sole mainland edition of any of the
novels to receive the author’s consent.21 The pirate editions were often full
of errors or alterations; and the unauthorized editions of Jin Yong and his
peers’ actual works were joined by a flood of fakes—any martial arts novel
was guaranteed greater sales if blazoned with the name of Jin Yong or
Liang Yusheng.22
By the mid- to late 1980s Jin Yong had emerged as one of the most
recognizable representatives not only of martial arts fiction but of popu-
lar fiction in general, and, further, of popular fiction as a force in the rad-
ically shifting and heatedly contested configuration of the mainland’s lit-
erary and cultural fields. Debates on popular culture often cited Jin Yong,
and discussions of Jin Yong could scarcely avoid the larger questions of the
nature and role of popular culture. Along with Jin Yong’s works, of course,
the mainland also inherited the popular and critical treatment accorded
these works in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other Chinese-language commu-
nities abroad. Although the mainland debates on Jin Yong were in many
ways generated by the mainland’s particular conditions, they were influ-
enced as well by this preexisting discourse. I have suggested in preceding
chapters the parallels between the developing spatial imaginary within Jin
Yong’s novels and the historical changes in the works’ geocultural circula-
tion. And as already suggested in the discussion of the revised editions’
claims to educational authority, the geographic element is also relevant to
the story of the critical reception of Jin Yong’s fiction. As the novels trav-
eled from Hong Kong and Southeast Asia to legalized publication in Tai-
wan at the end of the 1970s, inundated the Chinese mainland during the
1980s, and in 1994 received authorized publication there as well, the
social, commercial, political, and critical environments of each of these
locales left their stamps on the terms in which Jin Yong’s work was dis-
cussed and the type and degree of status it was accorded. Before consider-
ing the details of Jin Yong’s reception in the mainland, then, it is neces-

Jin Yong’s Fiction in Mainland China 231

 sary to pick up where chapter 7 left off and review the prior history of
“Jinology”—commentary on and study of Jin Yong and his novels.

“Jinology” in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Overseas

In 1966 and again in 1970, Professor Chen Shih-hsiang (1912–1971), a

Beijing University graduate who long taught at the University of Califor-
nia at Berkeley, wrote to Jin Yong to share his thoughts on Jin Yong’s novel
The Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils. In his letters Professor Chen describes how
he often discusses Jin Yong’s novels with his students and colleagues,
including another prominent overseas scholar, Hsia Tsi-an (1916–1965),
and states that “what compels my admiration for the accomplishment of
Jin Yong’s fiction is the way that artistry and talent continually overcome
the limitations of form and material.”23 He explains in greater detail that

readers of martial arts fiction generally develop a habit of casualness; you

could say that they read by rote, just as opera fans tend to listen by rote. Once
this habit has been formed, what the reader or listener asks for is quite lim-
ited and narrow, and so what they get is equally limited or narrow. Ordinary
books can be read, and ordinary opera listened to, in this manner; but Jin
Yong’s novels are not the same. The Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils must not be
read by rote; if you bear the prologue firmly in mind, you will find the themes
of karma and transcendence developed to their fullest throughout the work.24

Besides praising the novel’s transcendence of genre limitations and the

profundity of its insights on human life, Chen Shih-hsiang lauds its wed-
ding of form with content and likens Jin Yong’s achievement to the sud-
den flourishing of drama in the Yuan era: “the only difference is that in
the present age there is still only the one [writer] who has appeared.”25
The terms in which Professor Chen chooses to commend Jin Yong’s
fiction are significant; yet even more significant for our understanding of
the presentation and reception of Jin Yong’s work is not the content of
these letters but their fate. They were penned as a private communication,
not designed for publication, but in 1978 were printed as an appendix to
Ming Ho Publishing’s revised edition of Semi-Devils. In the afterword also
appended to the new edition, Jin Yong admits that he is pleased to be able
to share this eminent scholar’s favorable appraisal of his own work and
his open-minded attitude toward the potential of martial arts fiction as a
whole; he feels profoundly embarrassed, however, by the fulsomeness of
Chen’s praise. “Given the level of his erudition and his scholarly status,

232 Chapter 9
such accolades are really a bit excessive. They stem perhaps from his affec-
tion for the traditional Chinese novel form, or from certain similarities in
our perspectives on human life” (2125). Jin Yong had hoped, he writes, to
have Chen pen a preface for the new edition; but Chen having passed
away, Jin appends these letters in respectful memory of his friend and ded-
icates the novel to his memory.
Within the letters, Chen Shih-hsiang himself brings up the notion of
publishing something on Jin Yong’s fiction. He mentions that he has con-
sidered writing up his thoughts in a formal article but has never gotten
around to it; and as far as publishing such an article in Jin Yong’s new
Ming Pao Monthly, that might smack too much of toadying on his part, or
of blowing one’s own horn on the part of the magazine.26 Jin Yong, for all
his modesty, was evidently less hindered by such compunctions. An arti-
cle in memory of Chen Shih-hsiang published in Ming Pao Monthly shortly
after his death includes an extended discussion of his and other overseas
scholars’ fondness for martial arts fiction and respect for Jin Yong’s work.27
His letters, as we have seen, were included as part of the packaging of the
new edition; certain printings, indeed, include both typeset transcriptions
and photographic reproductions of the handwritten originals, thus elevat-
ing Professor Chen’s calligraphy to the level of the cultural artifacts dis-
played in plates at the front of each volume.28 And in the preface to the
series of criticism and commentary on Jin Yong’s fiction published by Tai-
pei’s Yuanliu Publishing in 1987, chief editor Wang Rongwen cites Chen
Shih-hsiang as one of the pathbreaking academics who helped found the
new field of “Jinology” (Jinxue).29
But what role, exactly, can Chen be said to have played in the found-
ing of this “field”? Discussion and appreciation of Jin Yong’s fiction within
the culturally influential circles of overseas Chinese scholars of Chen’s
generation undoubtedly contributed to the validation of Jin Yong’s work
as literature. Yet none of these scholars published on Jin Yong or made his
work a formal part of his professional life.30 We know of their views
through accounts circulated in Jin Yong’s own periodicals, in appendices
to the novels themselves, or in appreciative volumes from the author’s
publisher on Taiwan.31 The role Professor Chen Shih-hsiang finds himself
playing is thus representative of the early phase of public commentary on
Jin Yong’s fiction, in which tokens of cultural authority are deployed
within a field whose underlying imperative is that of the marketplace—
the world of commercial publishing and, more specifically, publications
with a direct economic stake in Jin Yong’s status. Jin Yong’s control of such
organs both provided him with obvious opportunities to promote him-

Jin Yong’s Fiction in Mainland China 233

 self and his work and at the same time inherently limited the influence of
such promotion. Jin Yong was preaching to the choir, to an audience made
up primarily of already engaged readers and fans; and to critical or aca-
demic groups on the outside, the complicity of producer and critic could
not but render somewhat suspect the substance of the critique.
Chapter 7 traced the origins of this strategy in the early days of Jin
Yong’s publishing enterprises, and discovered there, as well, the basic
forms of the various cultural authorities invoked: a Chinese literary her-
itage (“the traditional Chinese novel form,” as Jin Yong terms it in his
remarks on Chen’s letters); Chinese history and culture more generally;
aesthetic excellence (Chen’s “artistry and talent [that] continually over-
come the limitations of form and material”); humanistic values (“our per-
spectives on human life”); the prestige of the academy. Over the next two
decades discussion of Jin Yong’s fiction expanded in scope and confidence
while obeying the same essential logic. The most dramatic growth occurred
at the very end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s. Just as the Col-
lected Works of Jin Yong (which itself employed the strategy described, in its
textual revisions and its publication practice) was nearing completion, the
government of the Republic of China on Taiwan lifted its long-standing
ban against the publication and circulation of Jin Yong’s fiction.32 Lian-
cheng jue (A deadly secret) began serialization in Taiwan’s Lianhe bao on
September 7, 1979, and Dragon Sabre in Zhongguo shibao immediately there-
after. In that same month Yuanjing Publishing issued Ode to Gallantry, the
first title in its authorized edition of the Collected Works of Jin Yong. In a
letter to his Taiwan publisher, Jin Yong expressed his hopes not for an
expanded market but for a more refined evaluation of his work:

I too am extremely pleased that my novels will be distributed in Taiwan. There

is a real love of reading in Taiwan, and its cultural level is quite high. Every
author hopes that his works can reach a readership of a high cultural level—
can be appreciated, and receive a more elevated response. I hope that even
more people will come to understand that my martial arts fiction is scarcely
just a matter of mayhem and slaughter. 33

Jin Yong’s novels made their official entry into Taiwan already in their
polished revised forms, and preceded by a renown only heightened by the
drama of interdiction. They were serialized in literary supplements that
were a respected part of the island’s cultural scene (unlike Hong Kong’s
fiction supplements, generally segregated from their “literary” (wenyi)

234 Chapter 9
counterparts), 34 and were accompanied in their first appearances there by
a collection of appreciations of the genre and introductions to the author
that stressed his credentials as journalist, publisher, and political com-
mentator as well as his fiction.35 The bulk and visibility of secondary writ-
ing on the topic of Jin Yong’s novels vastly increased, and the field of
“Jinology” was formally inaugurated, with Yuanjing’s 1980 publication of
the first volume in its Studies in Jinology series, Ni Kuang’s Wo kan Jin
Yong xiaoshuo (My reading of Jin Yong’s fiction).
Jin Yong’s ambitions for a “higher level” of reception for his fiction
were clearly being realized. The most conspicuous representatives of this
elevated reception, however—the successive volumes of the Studies in Jin-
ology collection—reveal the extent to which consideration and evaluation
of Jin Yong’s work continued to be practiced primarily in what Bourdieu
would characterize as the more heteronomous reaches of the literary field,
those dominated by the forces (primarily economic) not uniquely literary
but operant in society at large. The Studies in Jinology were issued and
marketed by the Taiwan publisher of Jin Yong’s works themselves; an
advertisement soliciting manuscripts for the series appeared in Jin Yong’s
flagship publication, Ming Pao; and most of the authors in the series were
either aficionados of the novels or members of Jin Yong’s network of
friends and colleagues in the newspaper and publishing world. Ni Kuang,
who penned the first volume and four sequels, was both. A close enough
associate of Jin Yong’s to have taken over the serialization of Demi-Gods
and Semi-Devils while the author was abroad, he identifies himself in his
first preface as a devoted fan of novels in general and Jin Yong’s fiction
above all. “A fiction reader’s perspective on fiction is naturally not the same
as that of a literary critic or a scholar of ethics.”36 His breezy, enthusiasti-
cally opinionated rankings of the novels and his remarks on their charac-
ters, and his opening characterization of Jin Yong’s work as “surpassing all
others, never to be surpassed, from ancient times to the present day, in
China and abroad” (gujin Zhongwai, kongqian jue hou), set the tone for sub-
sequent volumes in the series. Other authors attempted more systematic or
philosophically ambitious approaches, but the series as a whole unques-
tionably warrants Chen Mo’s 1993 critique of Jinology to date: “most of
the articles and monographs remain at the preliminary level of apprecia-
tion, response, and impressions; they lack a sound scholarly foundation,
and, even more, any clear or sufficient scholarly standard.” 37
The academy’s internal agendas and inevitable (though culturally and
historically variable) involvement with the institutions of social and polit-

Jin Yong’s Fiction in Mainland China 235

 ical authority deny it claim to the more rarified pinnacles of “purely”
(elite or avant-garde) cultural authority dreamed of by The Drunkard’s pro-
tagonist and modeled by Bourdieu. At the same time, however, these fac-
tors guarantee it a powerful though not exclusive gatekeeping role in adju-
dicating the distribution of symbolic capital to other players in the literary
and cultural fields. Independent academic recognition of Jin Yong and the
genre in which he wrote thus marks an important stage in the definition
of the author’s cultural status. A certain measure of such recognition was
certified by the convening of an International Conference on Chinese Mar-
tial Arts Fiction at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in December of
1987. The organizers considered the incorporation of martial arts fiction
within the sphere of serious academic scrutiny one of their primary goals
for the meeting; and they succeeded in this endeavor at least to the extent
that some martial arts fiction enthusiasts in attendance found the proceed-
ings discouragingly arid.38
The papers presented at this conference did not focus exclusively on
the literary status or characteristics of martial arts fiction. Some dealt with
the genre as a social phenomenon, while others addressed the question of
the social and historical origins of the figure of the xia.39 The conference
nonetheless offered powerful support for granting a greater measure of
cultural authority to martial arts fiction, in particular through the propo-
sition, advanced by several speakers, that this traditionally disdained form
of writing might serve as an educational tool. One of the European speak-
ers, Professor Jacques Pimpaneau, suggests in his paper that martial arts
novels could provide the Western reader with an accessible introduction
to the history and cultural values of China.40 Huang Weiliang argues that
Jin Yong’s novels in particular might serve the same function for Chinese
youth; that for a generation increasingly attuned to technologized modes
of communication and the global cultures of science and finance, Jin
Yong’s novels can offer, in an enjoyable form, both essential knowledge of
Chinese history, geography, and customs, and a sound model of prose
undisfigured by imitations of Western syntax.41 Liu Shaoming (Joseph Lau)
is essentially in accord with Huang Weiliang’s position. To Huang’s pre-
scription of Jin Yong as a textbook for cultural literacy he adds the acknowl-
edgment that for many young people this practice is an established fact,
and the observation that the principal beneficiaries of this sort of educa-
tion are young Chinese overseas. He relates the archetypal anecdote of a
young man from Hong Kong boarding an overseas flight, to begin his col-
lege education, who opens for the first time a Jin Yong novel given him as

236 Chapter 9
a parting gift by a relative; the student ends up begging for the rest of Jin
Yong’s work as a Christmas present, and as he pursues his education in a
foreign language abroad, embraces Jin Yong as his sole link with Chinese
literacy. Professor Lau makes the further point that this educational func-
tion is explicitly claimed by the novels themselves, asserted by Jin Yong in
an authorial postscript and prefigured in the scene of Wei Xiaobao’s enjoy-
ment of Chen Yuanyuan’s “annotated” performance.42
The 1987 conference by no means marked the end of old-style Jin-
ology with its strong air of boosterism. The meeting itself was scarcely
exempt from uses with promotional and self-congratulatory overtones:
Ming Pao Monthly featured reports on the event (at which Jin Yong gave
a keynote address), and Jin Yong’s Ming Ho published the conference
papers.43 As we have already seen, Jin Yong and his publishers were to be
actively involved in the organization and promotion of future academic
conferences as well. Meanwhile, both the adulatory commentarial
approach and the frankly commercial publication strategy of Yuanjing
and Yuanliu’s Jinology series have been continued and imitated. A notable
example, though only one of many, can be found in the writings of Wu
Aiyi, whose essays, taking Jin Yong’s characters and tales as texts for rumi-
nations on human nature and the relations between the sexes, first ran as
columns in Ming Pao and were then issued in book form by Mingchuang
Publishing, another of its affiliates.44 The academy, for its part, did not
universally or uncritically welcome Jin Yong and martial arts fiction into
the sphere of academic discourse in the wake of the Chinese University
conference. As Bourdieu points out, however, “participation in the strug-
gle—which may be indicated objectively by, for example, the attacks that
are suffered—can be used as the criterion establishing that a work belongs”
to the negotiation and differentiation of positions that constitute the lit-
erary field.45 And so the importance of the conference lies not merely in
the pronouncements of several scholars, who would explicitly grant a role
in the work of cultural transmission to works that began by incorporating
chunks of the cultural heritage within tales of martial adventure, but more
broadly in the simple fact that credentialed representatives of the academy
now admitted the status of martial arts fiction and Jin Yong’s work as top-
ics worthy of formal deliberation. And nowhere were the effects of this
admission felt more strongly than on the Chinese mainland, where reports
of the Hong Kong conference added a voice to a growing discussion of the
nature and status of popular literature, martial arts fiction, and the novels
of Jin Yong.

Jin Yong’s Fiction in Mainland China 237

 The Mainland’s “Jinology”: Terms of Reception

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, some of the same conditions that
allowed the emergence of commercially successful entertainment fiction
and the resurgence of the martial arts genre in mainland China also con-
tributed to a stunning reinvigoration of the “serious” literary scene. The
institutions—journals, publishing houses, writers’ associations, and so
forth—of what Perry Link dubs the “socialist Chinese literary system” were
reestablished after the chaos of the Cultural Revolution years.46 On this
foundation, writers encouraged by the authorities’ calls for “opening new
ground” and reversals of earlier judgments against artists and intellectuals
produced works that engaged passionate and nationwide response. Liter-
ature marked by explicit social and moral engagement seemed to have
reclaimed the key role in society envisioned for it by the May Fourth gen-
eration and its historical progenitors, and intellectuals to have regained
recognition as the conscience of the nation. Amid the vigor and prestige
of this literary scene, mainstream writers and critics had minimal atten-
tion for the gathering momentum in the realm of popular literature. Dis-
cussions published through 1983 consisted primarily in appraisals of indi-
vidual works and of the thematic genres (detective stories, science fiction)
that first made their appearance on the literary scene.
By 1984–1985, however, with the “popular literature craze” in full
flood, discussion broadened into analysis of and debate on the phenom-
enon as a whole, published in forums ranging from the popular literature
periodicals themselves to academic journals and the arts supplements of
national newspapers.47 The new attention was due not merely to the
increased volume and visibility of popular fiction but also to the shifts it
heralded in the literary field as a whole. Divisions within literature and in
its publics were becoming evident. The specter of government restrictions
raised by the 1981 attacks against “bourgeois liberalism” and the 1983
campaign against “spiritual pollution” dampened writers’ enthusiasm for
tackling key issues of national concern even as a flood of modernist and
postmodernist literature from the West tempted them toward formalist
experimentation. Subscriptions to literary journals dropped as the general
reading public found “serious” literature increasingly abstruse and its own
tastes more easily gratified by popular fiction on the one hand and the
increasing availability of nonliterary forms of entertainment on the other.
It was the intellectual elite’s increasing marginalization and the apparent
reemergence of a bifurcated “elite (versus) popular” (yasu) cultural field
that generated a new critical interest in popular fiction.

238 Chapter 9
 Some commentators lauded the emergent literature in terms derived
from those articulated by Zheng Zhenduo (1898–1958) and others in pre-
war discussions, characterizing su or tongsu literature as somehow akin to
“folk” literature, the voice of the masses and an expression of the spirit of
the nation. Others penned jeremiads against the corruption of the Maoist
cultural orthodoxy.48 But by the latter half of the 1980s a broad consen-
sus emerged recognizing this literature, however appraised, as unique to
the social and economic conditions of the era of reforms. Frequent invo-
cations of the “broad masses of the population” and their innate affection
for “traditional forms” associated “popular literature” with a concept of
the nation that joined a sense of historical continuity to a vague and pop-
ulist class analysis. Other characteristics of popular literature commonly
cited were its “entertainment nature” (yulexing), that is, its relative free-
dom from the overtly ideological imperative of the arts of the Maoist era,
and its “commodity nature” (shangpinxing), or, its responsiveness to the
economic imperatives increasingly dominant in the cultural field—and
increasingly problematic for the literary elite. In Bourdieu’s terms, the pop-
ular literature of the 1980s manifested the new strength of economic het-
eronomous principles in a field previously shaped by almost complete
political heteronomy. It is not surprising, then, that the early objections of
the party faithful were succeeded by the scorn of an emergent avant-garde,
a group that saw in the new freedoms an opportunity to advance a claim
for art as an autonomous realm.49
Jin Yong, for the most part, escaped both groups’ censures. Commen-
tary on his novels published in the mainland during the 1980s was from
the beginning almost unanimously enthusiastic, and while repeating the
critical trope of his transcendence of the clichéd martial arts genre, at the
same time often upheld his work as proof of popular fiction’s positive
potential and a model for other authors to follow. A prestigious begin-
ning to the mainland critique of Jin Yong’s works was provided by Feng
Qiyong’s “Du Jin Yong” (Reading Jin Yong), published in 1986.50 Feng
praises Jin Yong’s novels for the breadth and depth of the knowledge they
display of history and human society; for their upright ideological bear-
ing (which he perceives as containing strong elements of patriotism and
national consciousness); for their unforgettable characters and extraordi-
nary plotting; and for the literary quality evinced in their language and
their evocation of a poetic atmosphere. Feng ends by endorsing the notion
of “Jinology” (Jinxue); though he characterizes his own article as only a
reader’s comments, lacking any systematic scholarly approach, his status as
a recognized expert in “Redology” (Hongxue, the study of the classic novel

Jin Yong’s Fiction in Mainland China 239

 Honglou meng) invests his endorsement with considerable authority, which
is reinforced by the explicit citation of various classics of traditional fic-
tion within the body of his essay.
The beginning of Feng Qiyong’s article, in which he describes how he
first encountered Jin Yong’s works in the home of the historian Yu Ying-
shih while a visiting scholar at Stanford, links this opening effort in main-
land “Jinology” (quotation marks to be henceforth understood) to the
overseas circulation of Jin Yong’s work and the network of overseas schol-
ars so influential in the protohistory of the “field.” 51 Several articles of this
period make direct reference to the state of Jinology in Hong Kong and
Taiwan, specifically citing the Chinese University conference and Yuanjing
Publishing’s Jinology series, and so buttressing the claim to discursive
validity advanced through their positive valuation of Jin Yong’s works in
themselves through this appeal to the authority of overseas scholarship.
Among them is Liu Su’s “Jinse de Jin Yong” (The golden Jin Yong), pub-
lished in the February issue of Dushu, which explains to its readers:

Things are different overseas from what they are on the mainland. Martial arts
fiction is something that can enter the halls of elegance and the grove of
literature. Quite a few scholars and specialists will admit without the slight-
est reservation that they read martial arts fiction, including Jin Yong, Liang
Yusheng, and so forth; among them are famous names in Confucian studies,
literature, history, and the natural sciences. In this area, Jin Yong’s status as an
author is well-established. His works and those of Liang Yusheng have
advanced the formerly outworn [genre of ] martial arts fiction into a new
world, marked by creative accomplishment and greater literary artistry, caus-
ing them to win acclaim as New School martial arts fiction. In Taiwan, there
is even the phrase “Jinology,” and Jinology Societies have been formed which
take Jin Yong’s works as the object of study. Despite the fact that there is a large
element of publishing promotion in all this, there are indeed certain special-
ists and scholars who have written careful and conscientious articles analyz-
ing Jin Yong’s works.52

Though not an honor reserved for Jin Yong alone—this article was but
one in a series of sketches of Hong Kong authors penned under the name
Liu Su by Luo Fu, Jin Yong’s editor during his Xin wanbao days and a long-
time stalwart of the mainland-affiliated press in Hong Kong 53 —the pub-
lication of an article on Jin Yong in the leading-edge intellectual journal
Dushu was nonetheless significant. Also noteworthy is the uniformly pos-
itive and favorable tone Luo Fu’s essay adopts, and the fact that it offers

240 Chapter 9
almost nothing in the way of concrete discussion of Jin Yong’s novels,
focusing instead on the career and character of Jin Yong the man. It
includes in its account an outline of his political involvements, from his
break with the left during a period of extremism to his present role in
Hong Kong’s Draft Committee and his status as “a journalist who main-
tains excellent relations with Beijing.” And it describes his financial suc-
cess, balancing descriptions of his wealth with characterizations of his
largesse and cultural refinement. He is thus a man who has “made his for-
tune through culture” (yi wenhua qijia de jufu); hints of the value of his
palatial residence on Hong Kong’s Peak lead into an account of his open-
ing his home to the chess champion Chen Zude, and an anecdote about
the donation to Hong Kong University that preceded the institution’s
awarding him an honorary doctorate illustrates both his astonishing
wealth and his openhandedness in dispensing it. Luo Fu’s article thus sug-
gests a role for Jin Yong as a possible model of, or even for, the “new era”
intellectual, and helps set the stage for the full-blown emergence of Jin
Yong as celebrity, which we shall see in the 1990s.
Without discrediting honest enthusiasm for Jin Yong’s fiction as a pri-
mary motivation for his generally positive critical reception during the lat-
ter part of the 1980s, we must also appreciate the larger stakes involved in
arguing for a reorganization of the critical field that would grant a place
to Jin Yong and to the new popular literature in general. The most naked
revelation of at least some of these stakes comes in a 1988 article by Zhang
Peiheng, whose comparison of Jin Yong’s works with the historical novel
Li Zicheng gleefully savages the “realist” aesthetics and ideological servi-
tude of Maoist-era literature.54 From this perspective, a voice for Jin Yong
is, at least in part, a voice against the historical ghost and still quite influ-
ential presence of Marxist literary orthodoxy.55 Such oppositional readings
of Jin Yong, and martial arts fiction in general, echoed even more strongly
in the wake of the events of June 1989, which for many intellectuals put
the nails in the coffin of any hopes for a vital role in the development of
a more open and progressive society. He Ping, in an article published in
Dushu in 1991, undertakes to investigate both “a question particular to
‘Jinology’—the reason for Jin Yong’s setting aside his pen at the height of
his powers”—and the larger question of “the vicissitudes of the Chinese
cultural tradition in the present age.” 56 He reads the protagonists of Jin
Yong’s successive novels as shifting from an ambition (generally thwarted)
to realize Confucian political and ethical values to an embrace of a Bud-
dhist philosophical vision, and arriving finally at Wei Xiaobao’s mockery
of the Chinese tradition as a whole. This shift, he surmises, reflects the

Jin Yong’s Fiction in Mainland China 241

 evolution of Jin Yong’s thought as he contemplated the fate of Confucian
values and the Chinese tradition in the turmoil of his own time. The tur-
moil specifically alluded to, of course, is that of the Cultural Revolution,
at its height when Jin Yong penned The Deer and the Cauldron; but it is easy
to hear the echo of more recent events, and the disillusionment and alien-
ation of the intellectual elite, in He Ping’s closing remarks on the prefer-
ence of most readers for the bright-eyed heroes of the early works over the
cynical Wei Xiaobao: “Perhaps it is still the tradition which most closely
suits the cultural vision of the great majority of the Chinese, while the
enlightenment of the wise will always be the lonely concern of the wise
man himself.”57
In early 1992 Deng Xiaoping made a highly publicized “tour of the
south” highlighted by a series of speeches in which he urged the expansion
and acceleration of economic reform. Like the similar excursions of vari-
ous of Deng’s predecessors, including the fictionalized Qianlong emperor
(see chapter 2), the tour served to reassert the northern-based rulers’
authority over the southern regions of the empire; at the same time,
though, it in some sense recognized an inversion of the north-south rela-
tionship, by authorizing the nationwide extension of the market-based
reforms previously concentrated in the southern and coastal Special Eco-
nomic Zones.58 The cultural and literary fields were among those most
profoundly affected by the ensuing economic restructuring. On the one
hand, official publishing houses and literary periodicals were faced with
the withdrawal of most of their remaining state support (though not of
state oversight); 59 on the other, the state and the previously marginalized
commercial cultural enterprises discovered a new commonality of eco-
nomic and ideological interest.60 During the 1980s the witticism “Deng
Xiaoping rules by day, Deng Lijun by night” expressed a perceived split
between the official and the popular; during the 1990s the division
became more an amicable pooling of authority.
The redoubled energy of the marketized cultural sphere combined
with the ideological chill of the post-Tiananmen years to deepen the main-
land Chinese intelligentsia’s sense of alienation. One trend evident in intel-
lectual circles was a neoconservatism, which found expression as “national
studies” (guoxue), an academic complement to the patriotic nationalism
through which the Party sought a new basis of popular support. Another
was a retreat to more rarified realms of aesthetics and scholarship, whether
in the revival of the casual essay or in the enthusiasm for contemporary
Western critical theory. And yet another was the embrace of the market-
place dubbed “taking the plunge” (xiahai).61 Many writers and intellectu-

242 Chapter 9
als attempted to reap the benefits of the new order of things by writing
would-be best sellers, joining the television or advertising industries, or
reconfiguring literary journals to appeal to popular tastes. Others lent sup-
port to the cultural marketplace in theoretical terms. The most controver-
sial of the latter efforts was the essay “Shunning the Sublime,” published
in 1993 by the former Minister of Culture Wang Meng.62 Wang Meng casts
the market economy as the cradle of a cultural diversity that might chal-
lenge China’s long-standing authoritarian traditions, and voices particular
enthusiasm for the fiction of Wang Shuo. Wang Shuo’s stories of rootless,
opportunistic, and seemingly amoral denizens of China’s contemporary
urban landscapes, written in a prose that makes heavy use of lively Beijing
slang, had been widely popular among readers since they first began
appearing in the mid-1980s, but frequently castigated by critics as a “hood-
lum literature” that implicitly promoted the nihilistic lifestyle it repre-
sented. In praising Wang Shuo’s protagonists for puncturing the hypocrisy
prevailing in Chinese public life, Wang Meng adds his influential voice to
what in the 1990s was becoming a chorus of intellectual enthusiasm for
Wang Shuo’s work. The elite’s admiration for Wang Shuo was not reserved
for his fictional creations alone: as the center and stage-manager of a
“Wang Shuo phenomenon,” an author who reveled in the public image of
a bad boy, who packaged his fiction into a best-selling Collected Works, and
who made a highly visible transition to the film and television industries,
Wang Shuo served as the model for a new breed of worldly and successful
cultural professionals.63
There is potential for friction between various of the elements of
the 1990s’ cultural scene suggested above—the increasing visibility and
authority of economic factors in the cultural field, the economic and
political integration of Hong Kong with the mainland, a neoconservatism
calling for a return to tradition and core Chinese values, the popularity of
new models of the public cultural figure. But there are at least equal pos-
sibilities for synergy among them as well; and each in its own way helped
prepare a fertile ground for the progress of Jin Yong and his works from
widespread popularity in the 1980s to an unprecedented degree of conse-
cration by the institutions of academic and public authority in the 1990s.
Zha Liangyong’s post-1989 reintegration into the processes facilitating
Hong Kong’s return to mainland authority was thus paralleled by the
reintegration of his work and his public persona into the 1990s’ “national
nostalgia for a traditional discourse characterized by ethical conformism,
the search for meaning, and a congenial yearning for harmony.” 64 Nine-
teen ninety-four stands as the defining year in this reintegration. Within

Jin Yong’s Fiction in Mainland China 243

 this year a series of events—the first authorized mainland publication of
Jin Yong’s Complete Works, the author’s being anthologized as one of the
“masters of twentieth-century Chinese fiction,” and his receiving an hon-
orary degree at Beijing University—confirmed the discursive framework
for such subsequent events as the 1996 establishment of a Jin Yong study
society,65 the series of conferences on his work held in 1998, and his
assuming in 1999 the position of Dean of Humanities at Zhejiang Univer-
sity. The events of 1994 were not uncontested however; and it was the
debates occasioned by Jin Yong’s recognition as much as that recognition
itself which defined his complex status within the mainland’s literary and
cultural fields.
The publication by Beijing’s distinguished Sanlian (Joint Publishing)
of the authorized mainland edition of Jin Yong’s Complete Works in May
of 1994 (this press’s first publication of any author’s collected works) and
the publication of Jin Yong’s preface to the edition in the March issue of
Sanlian’s Dushu exemplify the bidirectional adjustments characteristic of
the cultural field in the 1990s; on the one hand the eagerness of institu-
tions possessing a certain measure of cultural authority to pursue oppor-
tunities in the burgeoning cultural marketplace, and on the other a will-
ingness to position Jin Yong’s work within a framework identifying itself
as intellectual and cultural rather than nakedly economic. An even more
aggressive attempt at such positioning came in October of that year, with
the publication of the Ershi shiji Zhongguo wenxue dashi wenku (Treasury of
the masters of twentieth-century Chinese literature). This anthology, edited
by academics from several Beijing universities, undertakes to select, rank,
and present representative selections from the greatest twentieth-century
Chinese “masters” of the genres of fiction, poetry, drama, and the essay. It
declares its mission to be jettisoning of the “nonliterary” considerations—
political objectives and academic prejudices—that have heretofore shaped
literary history, and their replacement with purely aesthetic standards.
Such reevaluation, the editors point out, inevitably requires the elimina-
tion of certain hoary favorites and the inclusion of figures previously
ignored. In this spirit, the “Fiction” volumes of the anthology include Jin
Yong, ranked fourth, behind Lu Xun, Shen Congwen, and Ba Jin; while
Mao Dun, one of the canonical masters of China’s “new literature,” is
absent from the selection.66
For all their iconoclastic ambitions, the Treasury’s editors presumably
never anticipated that their anthology, issued by a midlevel publisher in a
first run of only three thousand copies, would attract such attention as
was generated by a short report published in Beijing’s Zhongguo qingnian

244 Chapter 9
bao in late August. The article makes the question of Jin Yong the chief
focus in its account of an interview with the fiction editor, Beijing Normal
University’s Wang Yichuan. “Can Jin Yong be Reckoned a Master?” runs
the headline, with the subheading “Some Surprises in the Treasury of the
Masters of Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature”; the lead paragraph moves
immediately to the matter of Jin Yong’s selection and Mao Dun’s elimi-
nation. While the rest of the article includes a reasonable summary of
the anthology’s general aims and criteria, it also emphasizes the youth of
the editors and implies a capriciousness (at best) to their choices: “Can
authors and their works be assessed by some measurable standard?” it
inquires, “And how can this standard be made scientific and precise? The
Treasury’s say-so alone is not enough. . . .”67 The Zhongguo qingnian bao
article was widely reprinted and reported, and generated a number of
responses in the press, mostly critical of the Treasury’s rankings and of the
sensationalism the article imputed to the editors (while so successfully
creating a sensation itself ). Typical is an article by Chen Liao appearing in
Wenyi bao. The author, who has apparently not seen the anthology him-
self, vigorously defends Mao Dun’s place in the canon. He grants that Jin
Yong’s accomplishment is considerable, but opines that even in the realm
of popular literature it falls short of that of Zhang Henshui. He credits the
anthologists’ choices to (unspecified) political motivations as prejudiced
as those they claim to be overturning, and repeats the Zhongguo qingnian
bao’s assertion that the ranks of the masters are not to be determined by a
small number of upstarts.68
Within two months of the Treasury’s appearance occurred an event
that offered weightier if less deliberately melodramatic confirmation of
Jin Yong’s acceptance into the purview of the contemporary academy: his
reception on October 25 of an honorary professorship at Beijing Univer-
sity. In his remarks at the award ceremony, Professor Yan Jiayan attributed
to Jin Yong’s work “an entrancing cultural atmosphere, a rich knowledge
of history, and a profound national spirit,” which caused them to tran-
scend the limits of their genre, and he credited Jin Yong with “a quiet lit-
erary revolution,” completing the May Fourth writers’ work of bringing
the novel into the domain of serious literature by carrying the neglected
genre of martial arts fiction onto that hallowed ground as well.69 Profes-
sor Yan was an eminent member and former chair of the university’s Chi-
nese department, among whose contributions to his field was a key role
in reawakening scholarly interest in the “neo-sensationalist” school (xin
ganjue pai), a group of prewar Shanghai writers long excluded from the
post–May Fourth canon. He was to emerge as a prominent spokesperson

Jin Yong’s Fiction in Mainland China 245

 for Jin Yong’s works, frequently cited by the media as a scholarly expert.
Within the academy proper, his offering a course on Jin Yong’s novels and
his writing numerous essays on Jin Yong’s work were instrumental in con-
firming the respectability of Jin Yong’s fiction as an object of scholarly
inquiry.70
Beijing University was neither the first school nor the last to present
Jin Yong with an honorary professorship or degree, but its unquestioned
status as China’s premier institute of higher learning and its geographic
and institutional proximity to the organs of governmental power guaran-
teed its recognition of Jin Yong an unparalleled academic cachet and
unmistakable political overtones. The honoree recognized both in his
acceptance speech, praising the university’s history of intellectual open-
ness and service to the nation. His citation of the May Fourth movement
as the prime example of this service could not but suggest the pregnant
omission of the 1989 demonstrations in which Beida students had played
a prominent role, and so signal his rapprochement with the political real-
ities of the present. The speech went on to address not martial arts fiction
but history, and by attributing the “continuous unbroken development of
Chinese civilization” from antiquity to the present to the Chinese nation’s
ability to counter foreign aggression with a flexible combination of “open-
ness and reform,” proffered an essentialized image of nationality and tra-
dition in homage to the policies of the current regime.71
At a second public lecture two days after the award ceremony, Jin Yong
satisfied his fans’ thirst to hear him speak on martial arts fiction. He attrib-
uted his works’ popularity to their continuation of the cultural tradition
but declared himself unqualified to be considered a “master.” 72 But nei-
ther this characteristic show of modesty nor the imprimatur of Beijing
University’s honors quieted the debates over Jin Yong’s status; the latter in
fact added fuel to the fire. In “Jujue Jin Yong” (Reject Jin Yong), published
in the popular Nanfang zhoumo (Southern Weekend) in December, the
essayist Yan Lieshan, proudly declaring that he has never read any of Jin
Yong’s works, rejects the genre of martial arts fiction and derides Beijing
University and its spokesman Yan Jiayan for degrading the May Fourth
heritage. Yan Jiayan’s reply to this piece includes a polite but earnest ques-
tioning of Yan Lieshan’s qualifications to speak of matters on which he has
himself professed ignorance, and seeks to clarify his own stance by reprint-
ing portions of his October speech.73 An article published at roughly the
same time in Wenxue ziyou tan deploys the events at Beijing University for
a rhetorical effect opposite to Yan Lieshan’s, citing Jin Yong’s honorary
professorship and the opinions of the distinguished Feng Qiyong as cor-

246 Chapter 9
roboration for the author’s approval of the Treasury’s electing Jin Yong to
the status of a “master.” 74
Within the academy, the Beijing University honors served more to
give public recognition to Jin Yong and the already accepted importance
of his work than to break any dramatic new ground.75 Heat was generated
primarily by the publicness of the recognition, and by the mass media’s
seizing upon the opportunity to portray events at the university as a sequel
to the already sensationalized “literary masters” affair. It was in the mass
media, rather than in organs of scholarly communication, that the ensuing
“debates” were primarily conducted, and at issue in the discussions and
opinionating were not only Jin Yong and his work but the current health
and proper social role of the academy itself as well. As far as Jin Yong was
concerned, the incident marked a certain de facto acceptance within those
realms of academic discourse to which his works and his publications had
long voiced a claim; at the same time, it marked the maturation of the “Jin
Yong phenomenon” as a force no longer nourished principally by the
Ming Pao and Yuanliu conglomerates and other institutions with a direct
financial interest, but riding free and evidently self-sustaining on the seas
of media attention.
A key element in this attention was the celebrity status accorded to the
figure of Jin Yong himself. This status was marked and further nurtured by
the appearance in 1994 of two book-length popular biographies. Leng
Xia’s Jin Yong zhuan (A biography of Jin Yong) was published in Hong Kong
in December, and issued (with modifications to accommodate the local
political climate) in Taiwan and the mainland the following year.76 Its
publication by Ming Pao in Hong Kong and Yuanliu in Taiwan marks it as
tied to the Jin Yong promotional machinery. Evidently more independent,
and slightly preceding the Leng Xia volume, was the volume published in
Beijing under the collective authorship of Guiguan gongzuoshi (Laurel
Wreath Workshop). The title, Xia zhi dazhe: Jin Yong pingzhuan (Greatest
among the xia: an evaluative biography of Jin Yong), applies to its subject
the appellation the author himself had bestowed upon his hero Guo Jing.
A uniformly hagiographic tone marks both volumes, as it does subsequent
biographies. The Guiguan gongzuoshi effort is perhaps the more effusive
of the two:

As a martial arts novelist, Jin Yong has won success and fame that are the
astonishment and envy of his colleagues. His fourteen martial arts novels have
not only caused him to become the wealthiest of all Chinese authors at home
or abroad but, more important, have caused his name to become a kind of

Jin Yong’s Fiction in Mainland China 247

 symbol: a symbol of learning, a symbol of success, a symbol of ideals, and the
symbol of a kind of cultural phenomenon. Since Taiwan’s Yuanliu Publishing
Company published its series of Jin Yong Studies in 1984 [sic], there has
appeared within the groves of overseas academia a great banner snapping
resoundingly in the wind: Jinology. Before long, the wind of scholarship swept
north, and the mainland’s Jin Yong fans also gathered to respond to the call
and display their might.77

While the title of the volume repeats the familiar trope by which the
author of martial arts fiction is cast as a chivalric champion, its contents
perform an equally fascinating conflation of modern enterpreneurial suc-
cess with the imagery of traditional Chinese scholarship in their portrait
of Jin Yong as the ideal intellectual:

There is nothing extraordinary about Jin Yong’s progress as an author: pursu-

ing his studies, working, writing—the road that he has walked is the road
steadily trodden by generation after generation of Chinese intellectuals. But
natural gifts, wealth of experience, and the favor of Providence allowed Jin
Yong to make the most of his abilities, and he has not only succeeded in his
own career, but fulfilled the unrealized dreams of traditional Chinese intellec-
tuals as well.
For a hundred thousand years, the road of Chinese scholars has been clear
and straightforward: “ten years’ study at the chilly window,” “the dragon leap
to the golden register,” “serving in office and taking a wife,” “leaving a name
in the annals of history,” and then “retiring to solitude among the woods and
hills.” And yet the shaded mountain path has proven elusive—tortuous and
long, strewn with disappointments, and beset with perils. It is only in the end-
less heartfelt chantings of the scholars, it seems, that the winding path can be
followed to its end. Yet the ideal has been passed on from generation to gen-
eration in the very heart’s blood of China’s scholars.
This is precisely the Confucian ideal. In prosperity, one brings benefit to
all under heaven; in poverty, one cultivates one’s own person.
Jin Yong appears to be the very incarnation of this ideal. He has realized
the ideal dreams of a hundred thousand years of scholars.78

It was in this guise—that of both dashing and triumphant knight and

wise and benevolent literatus, enjoying the fruits of this world while com-
manding and validating an ancient and venerable cultural tradition—that
Jin Yong came to figure prominently in the Chinese media of the 1990s. So
seamlessly did the legend cloak the man, Jin Yong was routinely addressed

248 Chapter 9
in public and referred to in the media as “Jin daxia,” literally “great xia Jin.”
Oppositional voices incited from time to time by the man’s involvement
in realpolitik seemed to sound only in a world disjunct from that warmed
by this resplendent image, leaving it undimmed in the public eye.79 And
the legend or persona of Jin Yong, the romanticized projection upon his
person of a romantic image of a benevolent and distinctly Chinese cul-
tural authority, the continuing validity of which is attested by his success,
came to take its place alongside other discursive and institutional factors
in negotiating Jin Yong’s position in the cultural field. In chapter 10 I will
recount and analyze the encounter between Jin Yong’s image and another
distinctive persona in one of the most prominent recent incidents in this
ongoing negotiation. Whereas we opened with the story of New School
fiction through the “duel” between Wu Gongyi and Chen Kefu, we close
with another “exhibition match”: the encounter between Jin Yong, “the
greatest among the xia,” and the “hooligan” author Wang Shuo.

Jin Yong’s Fiction in Mainland China 249

 Chapter 10
Jin Yong at the Century’s End

The Wang Shuo Incident and

Its Implications

O n November 1, 1999 the high-circulation Beijing

daily Zhongguo qingnian bao published an essay by
Wang Shuo entitled “Wo kan Jin Yong” (Reading Jin Yong).1 The title
(which translates more literally as “I read Jin Yong” or “I look at Jin Yong”)
may recall that of Ni Kuang’s first volume of Jinology but is also so generic
a heading for a piece of literary criticism or commentary as to attract atten-
tion only for its utter plainness. Plainspokenness is in fact the author’s aim
and chief technique. Wang Shuo begins by explaining that he has always
been dismissive of Hong Kong and Taiwan authors such as Jin Yong and
the romance writer Qiong Yao, disdaining to read their work and looking
down on those who do. Although unimpressed by Jin Yong’s rising criti-
cal status, he was once swayed by the urgings of friends to try one of the
novels—which one, he can’t recall, as he quickly gave up in disgust:

The plot was repetitive, the style long-winded. As soon as [the characters] ran
into one another they would fall to blows, incapable of straightening out mat-
ters that could have been made clear with a simple word or two. But nobody
ever finished anybody off; every time someone was about to give up the ghost,
a savior would come dropping down out of the skies. They were all mixed up
in a great muddle of feuds and enmities, which were the only things that kept
the plot moving along. (4)

Despite the fact that his first reading of Jin Yong was “a wretched expe-
rience,” his friends’ remonstrations (how can you condemn what you
haven’t even read?) and the popularity of the television adaptations com-
pelled him to make a second attempt. “Holding his nose,” he made it

250
through to the end of the first volume of The Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils.
It only confirmed his earlier impressions. “The author evidently put some
effort into it,” he concedes; “he made every single blunder you can make
in writing fiction” (5). The language was clichéd, antique, divorced from
living speech. The characters were one-dimensional plot-driven construc-
tions running unerringly in whatever direction the author pointed them,
“like pigs driven through a narrow alley”; they were recognizable neither
as human beings nor as Chinese. The content as a whole echoed that of
traditional fiction, indulging in violence and depravity under the sancti-
monious guise of moral teaching. The only reason Wang Shuo can imag-
ine for this stuff ’s popularity is the possibility that it serves as a kind of
“head massage” for the overstimulated victims of modern life. Jin Yong’s
fiction belongs, in sum, together with the “Four Heavenly Kings” of Canto-
pop music, Jacky Chan’s action films, and Qiong Yao–inspired television
soap operas, as the “four great vulgarities” (si da su) of our time.2 “I don’t
mean to say that I’m not vulgar myself—it’s just that my own vulgarity is
of a different sort. We used to have a taste of our own” (7). Standing
against the “four great vulgarities” were once the “four mainstays” of New
Era literature, rock and roll, the Beijing Film Academy, and the Beijing Tele-
vision Arts Center. But the four mainstays’ accomplishments have been
obliterated by the tide of the four vulgarities’ success. “Where the problem
lies, I don’t know. It may be that in China whatever is old, naive, and self-
mythologizing has a greater life force than anything else” (7).
Jin Yong’s first public response, in a letter printed in Shanghai’s Wen-
hui bao on November 5 under the title “Bu yu zhi yu he qiu quan zhi hui”
(Unexpected praise and perfectionist criticism),3 was brief and pointedly
understated. The letter makes four seemingly unconnected points. In the
face of Wang Shuo’s attack, Jin Yong first reminds himself of the Buddhist
precept that one should strive to remain unmoved by external influences,
whether favorable or malign, and of Mencius’s teaching that one should
not be surprised by “unexpected praise and perfectionist criticism”; 4 he
suggests that Wang Shuo’s expectations of his work may be too high, and
carefully lists a series of honors—his ranking among the masters of twen-
tieth-century fiction, his works’ selection as the subject of a class at Beida,
the Colorado conference on his fiction—of which, he assures us, he feels
entirely unworthy. He then notes with surprise his being ranked with the
“Four Heavenly Kings” and the rest, and is grateful that Wang Shuo has
not given the group a less flattering name. He recalls his own positive if
measured remarks on Wang Shuo’s fiction, at a forum at Beijing Univer-
sity. And he points out that he knows of no edition of The Demi-Gods and

Jin Yong at the Century’s End 251

 Semi-Devils in the “seven volumes” that Wang Shuo claims to have pur-
chased—suggesting that his critic had obtained an inferior or pirated edi-
tion, or perhaps more generally impugning the substantive basis of Wang
Shuo’s critiques. Jin Yong closes by thanking his legions of readers for their
appreciation, and Heaven for the favor it has shown him; in the face of
such good fortune, a few balancing words of abuse cannot make him too
unhappy.
Jin Yong characterizes Wang Shuo’s essay as “the first vigorous attack to
be made against my fiction.” In their introduction to Wang’s original piece,
the editors of the Zhongguo qingnian bao had likewise asserted that its sig-
nificance lay in part in the fact that “a challenger to Jin Yong has never
before appeared.” Actually, as we have seen, attacks against Jin Yong and
the wider bodies of martial arts fiction and popular fiction he is held to
represent appeared periodically in both academic and journalistic forums
during the 1980s and 1990s. Joining the roster of these critiques during
1999 was a series of newspaper articles by He Manzi, a scholar of tradi-
tional Chinese fiction. As several commentators were to point out, He
Manzi’s critiques anticipated many aspects of Wang Shuo’s essay. In “Wei
jiu wenhua xuming de yanqing xiaoshuo yu wuxia xiaoshuo” (Romance
and martial arts fiction: prolonging the life of the old culture), for instance,
which appeared in Guangming ribao on August 12, 1999, one finds not only
the same choice of targets (Qiong Yao and Jin Yong) but also such shared
details as the opening gambit of mocking Qiong Yao’s fans and the ready
avowal that the critic himself hasn’t the time to waste on reading the “lit-
erature” he assaults.5
But whereas He Manzi’s essays had evoked only mild response, Wang
Shuo’s provoked a firestorm of reaction. The article was reprinted and
reported upon in newspapers nationwide, and elicited a flood of follow-
up articles, readers’ responses, and interviews with anyone considered
qualified to comment. Even more immediate and voluminous than the
reaction in the print media was that on the Internet. The article and its
sequels circulated widely in electronic form, and within a day of the essay’s
first appearance, sites such as the online Zhongguo qingnian bao, Wang
Shuo’s personal Web page, and various Jin Yong discussion forums were
overwhelmed with commentary and debate. The heat and volume of the
reaction to Wang Shuo’s remarks can be attributed to the pungency of their
expression (like his best-known fiction, the essay excels in the display of
outspoken opinions, mordant characterizations, and witty and colorful
language) and the celebrity of their author. Wang Shuo was in fact widely
accused of seeking to stir up hype and interest in the wake of the tepid

252 Chapter 10
response to his attempted return to the literary scene with his first novel
in years, Kanshangqu hen mei (Nice enough to look at), released several
months earlier. If Wang Shuo was in fact guilty of seeking to generate hype
(a charge he shrugged off in several interviews), he was not alone. Print
and other media moved quickly to exploit the popular interest in what
appeared to be a colorful spat between two literary celebrities, and the
proliferating articles in newspapers and popular periodicals were joined
before the month was out by the first book-length compilation of materi-
als on the “debate.” 6
The range and sheer quantity of Internet discussion nonetheless testi-
fies to the fact that the response to Wang Shuo’s article, however much
encouraged and exploited by the media, still drew much of its initiative
from widespread and passionate reader engagement. Indeed, the very heat
and volume of reader response, and the Internet’s role in facilitating its
expression, soon attracted notice as one of the controversy’s points of inter-
est. Internet responses ranged from brief jibes and angry screeds to care-
fully articulated opinions on the issues raised. Jin Yong’s supporters in the
Internet forums greatly outnumbered Wang Shuo’s, at a ratio of eight to
one by some estimates.7 While some respondents focused on the substance
or internal consistency of Wang Shuo’s remarks, many chose to challenge
his credentials as a critic and impugn his motives, or to extol the virtues
of Jin Yong’s oeuvre. Wang Shuo’s supporters defended his right to express
his opinions and voiced their own disdain for Jin Yong and his legions of
fans. Discussion continued for months on the Internet and in the period-
ical and academic presses, engaging issues ranging from the evaluation of
the two authors’ works and personal characters to the nature of popular
literature, the responsibilities of literary critics, and the state of Chinese
literary culture at the turn of the millenium.8
If we return for a moment to the content of Wang Shuo’s original essay,
we may note that he attacks Jin Yong’s novels on several fronts. One is that
of what he considers sheer literary incompetence. Another is that of their
alleged enslavement, both aesthetic and ideological, to the limitations of
traditional Chinese fiction. While Wang Shuo objects to this archaism in
part on the grounds of its clichédness and irrelevance to modern life, he
also makes gestures toward an orthodox Marxist view of the historical
development of society and culture, as in his closing paragraph: “The art
which China’s bourgeois class is capable of producing is essentially rotten;
they can imitate the newest [trends], but their spiritual world is forever
steeped in and intoxicated with the old and resplendent dreams of the
past” (7). Here the iconoclastic Wang Shuo puts himself in surprising if

Jin Yong at the Century’s End 253

 casual alliance with He Manzi and other neoconservative cultural critics,
who take pride in reasserting, in unmodified form, the May Fourth gener-
ation’s blanket characterization of all cultural production not explicitly
aligned with its own enlightenment projects as “feudal,” outmoded, and
pernicious.9
Jin Yong’s defenders eagerly seized upon the irony of the master of
“hoodlum literature” attacking Jin Yong as “vulgar,” while Wang Shuo’s
supporters argued that in this essay, as in his fiction, Wang’s apparent crass-
ness and irreverence only mask an essential integrity.10 But the most sig-
nificant element in Wang Shuo’s evocation of su is his remark that “my
own vulgarity is of a different sort.” The heart of his concerns lies not in
any opportunistic rehearsal of orthodox literary historiography but rather
in his re-evocation of the cultural geopolitics of north and south, center
and periphery. “The real point of that article of mine,” he explained in a
subsequent interview, “was actually in the last section”—the expression of
puzzlement and dismay at the capitulation of Beijing’s New Era culture of
the 1980s to the flood of Hong Kong and Taiwan imports.11 Though set
forth most clearly in the closing juxtaposition of the “four great vulgari-
ties” against the “four mainstays,” this thread runs throughout the essay,
beginning with the opening sentence’s characterization of Jin Yong as “a
native of Zhejiang living in Hong Kong and writing martial arts fiction.”
Charging Jin Yong’s grotesque characters with misrepresenting the Chi-
nese to themselves and to the world, Wang Shuo states that “I have lived
among Chinese people my whole life,” clearly implying that Jin Yong’s
errors spring from the fact that he has not. And in critiquing Jin Yong’s
prose for its reliance on the hackneyed models of traditional fiction, he
speculates that it is the Zhejiang and Guangdong dialects’ unsuitability for
prose writing that has barred the novelist from devising a more modern
and natural style. The overall burden of such remarks is clear: Wang Shuo’s
standard of value is a “Chineseness,” the authenticity of which is meas-
ured by allegiance to the cultural and linguistic standards of Beijing. Con-
siderations of class, commerce, genre, and political ideology are ancillary
to this paramount geocultural criterion. It is their identity both as south-
erners and as products of the foreign-tainted periphery that condemns Jin
Yong and his peers to the category of the “four great vulgarities.”
The Jin Yong /Wang Shuo incident thus testifies both to the continu-
ing importance of geocultural categories in the Chinese literary world and
to the instability of membership in such categories. As we have seen, the
constant reimagining of geographic expressions of identity and orthodoxy
within Jin Yong’s fiction is paralleled by the crucial role played by geocul-

254 Chapter 10
tural categories in the negotiation of that fiction’s own status—from the
New School’s establishing its identity in terms of a “Central Plains men-
tality,” articulated within the geographically and politically peripheral
space of Hong Kong, to the symbiosis between Jin Yong’s political rap-
prochement with the mainland political establishment and his fiction’s
acceptance as a cultural product both fragrant with visions of a Hong
Kong–inspired future and redolent of roots in a central tradition allegedly
disrupted on the yellow soil of its birth. Wang Shuo peremptorily rejects
this exquisite balancing of “central” and “peripheral” credentials, invok-
ing his linguistic and cultural authority as a Beijinger to unmask Jin Yong
as an imposter from the tawdry margins to the south. The association of
the south with commercial and entertainment-oriented forms of culture
suspected of neglecting or explicitly violating art’s proper moral and social
responsibilities traces its modern-era genealogy to the May Fourth gener-
ation, as we have seen, and has roots much further back in Chinese his-
tory. A number of the commentators on the current incident follow Wang
Shuo’s own lead in reprising these themes in terms relevant to the reform
era.12 And while Jin Yong declines to engage this aspect of Wang Shuo’s
critique in his initial response, a subsequent, longer reply focuses exclu-
sively on the question of southern writers, citing a battery of authors and
texts from both twentieth-century literature and traditional fiction to build
the case that stylists from Zhejiang and other regions of the south stand
at the heart of China’s orthodox literary tradition.13
There is a markedly performative aspect to the incident as a whole.
This performativity is perhaps most evident—and the long-ago match
between Chen Kefu and Wu Gongyi most strongly evoked—in fans’ and
the media’s penchant for describing the encounter between the two liter-
ary figures as a contest between two martial artists. “The madman Wang
Shuo sinks another knife into Jin Yong; the great xia Jin Yong first yields
two swordstrokes to Wang Shuo.”14 While the characterization of Jin Yong
as a “great knight” (daxia) and the general employment of the language of
martial arts fiction in commentary upon that fiction are well-established
clichés, they are given new life by the occurrence of a seemingly combat-
ive exchange of views and the opportunity of assigning complementary
roles to the disputants. Jin Yong is the “great xia” or the “chief of the
alliance of the Martial Grove” to Wang Shuo’s “madman” or “outlandish
bravo of the Rivers and Lakes.”15 It is journalists, fans, and other commen-
tators who bestow such titles. But the principals themselves display an
umistakable awareness of and allegiance to their established public per-
sonae, whether in Wang Shuo’s noisy and irreverent challenge or in Jin

Jin Yong at the Century’s End 255

 Yong’s magnanimous and somewhat condescendingly pedantic response;
and it is in this sense too, of the rehearsal and reinforcement of familiar
roles, that the “debate” may be considered performative.16
A complex relationship obtains between the public personae adopted
by the two authors and their jockeying for the high or more properly cen-
tral ground in the geocultural framing of the issues involved. Wang Shuo,
in championing the culture of the north and the principled legacy of New
Era culture against the encroaching tides of southern vulgarity, positions
himself as a defender of a certain orthodoxy. At the same time, by voicing
an outspoken and even rude assault on what he portrays as the new ortho-
doxy of the day, he plays the outsider, the troublemaker, and seeks to rein-
vigorate the identification between the authorial persona and the devil-
may-care hoodlums peopling his works that was so central a part of the
“Wang Shuo phenomenon.” To employ (against Wang Shuo’s certain
objections) an analogy from Jin Yong’s oeuvre, in the former role, Wang
Shuo is the earnest Kangxi emperor, in the latter the irreverent and mis-
chievous Wei Xiaobao.17 By the terms of the same analogy, Wang Shuo’s
critiques clearly cast Jin Yong as the vulgar and mendacious southern
upstart. As we have seen, however, since at least the publication of the
essay “That Little Rascal Wei Xiaobao!” Jin Yong has striven to maintain a
strict if not entirely unaffectionate distance between his own image and
that of his most notorious fictional character. The roles generally imputed
to him, and reprised by him in the incident under discussion, are those of
Guo Jing, the brave and stolid defender of the nation and its people, and
of the Kangxi emperor, dedicated patron of an ancient yet still vital cul-
tural heritage.
The notion of performativity entails not only the actors’ adoption of
certain positions and roles but also the performance of those roles on a
certain stage and for a defined audience. And indeed the arena in which
the encounter between Jin Yong and Wang Shuo was played out is at least
as significant for our understanding of the former’s status in the contem-
porary Chinese literary field as are the particular roles rehearsed by the
principals. While statements made within the debate engaged the spatial
imaginaries of north and south, center and periphery, the metaphorical
geography most germane to the conduct of the debate itself is that of
Bourdieu’s literary field, the social space within which cultural authority
is assigned and given weight. We have already noted that the details of
Bourdieu’s scheme and analyses are not likely to conform to the social
and historical conditions of late-twentieth-century China. His general
approach, however, of analyzing the accumulation of cultural capital in

256 Chapter 10
terms of the homologies and tensions between a heteronomous axis of
social power measured in economic and political terms and an auton-
omous axis of “purely” artistic value remains useful. Some analysts have
described mainland China’s cultural scene, seemingly monolithic during
the Mao era, as fragmenting during the 1990s into distinct spheres of
mainstream or official culture, elite culture, and mass or popular culture.18
We may think of a system in which both the economic and cultural fields
were formerly held in close (if frequently flawed) alignment to political
authority devolving into one in which an official culture is marked (and
limited) by its continued allegiance to the political status quo, a mass cul-
ture thrives through the authority of the marketplace, and an elite culture
seeks to find validation despite or through its increasing neglect by both.
The discussions between and about Jin Yong and Wang Shuo, while
engaging issues of artistic value and social authority and responsibility,
took place to a large extent in the commercial mass media, operating
within limits established by the political authorities but, within those lim-
its, driven primarily by the logic of the marketplace. This forum deter-
mined the scope of the debate, established its degree of legitimacy, and in
a certain sense made the specific content of the statements by various
agents irrelevant to its “outcome.” The editors of Zhongguo qingnian bao, in
their brief introduction to Wang Shuo’s opening essay, explained them-
selves to be motivated in part by their hope that the publication of the
piece would help breathe life into the languishing literary scene. A num-
ber of commentators during the ensuing debate, and in its aftermath, sec-
onded this viewpoint, noting with satisfaction the unusual interest and
heat generated by a topic of literary interest. But cynics noted, early on, the
degree to which the “literary world” seemed to be dancing to a measure
set by the newspapers’ entertainment supplements, and wondered why lit-
erary critics had left it to a publicity hound like Wang Shuo to challenge
Jin Yong’s hegemony over the reading public.19 To a reader of the popular
press, the coverage of the Jin Yong / Wang Shuo incident was continuous
with and largely indistinguishable from the relentless flood of reporting
on a series of other Jin Yong–centered stories—his appointment at Zhe-
jiang University, his court battles with a group of publishers, the first main-
land filming of a television serial based on one of his novels.
The media coverage included and indeed actively solicited the opin-
ions of writers and academics. Of the authors who might be reckoned as
belonging to the more autonomous reaches of the literary field, some pre-
ferred to decline any involvement in the imbroglio, while those willing to
offer an opinion tended to voice support for Wang Shuo’s views or at least

Jin Yong at the Century’s End 257

 his right to express them.20 Academics and professional critics were in a
number of cases more forthcoming, and some of their pronouncements
are among those already noted. Many couched their views on Jin Yong,
whether positive or negative, in terms not only of judgment of his works
alone but also of the increasing prominence of popular culture; and some
took particular note of the extent to which the tide of the popular had
reached the realms of criticism and historiography as well:

In the past it was professional literary historians who composed literary his-
tory, and theorists and critics who chose and evaluated the masters, but now
they have to take into consideration the author’s relationship with his read-
ers. We can deny Jin Yong from the point of view of scholarship, and in the
halls of the university we can drive Jin Yong out the doors, but there’s not a
single owner of a book rental stall who would reject Jin Yong.21

Even within the halls of academe, as we have seen, Jin Yong’s works
had already won an established place. This place was limited in scope,
however, as can be judged by a glance at two literary histories published in
the last years of the decade. Hong Zicheng’s Zhongguo dangdai wenxue shi
(History of contemporary Chinese literature), published by Beijing Univer-
sity Press in 1999, discusses changes in the literary environment, includ-
ing the influence of overseas culture and the marketplace, in its overviews
of the 1980s and 1990s; in its discussions of individual authors and works,
though, it limits itself to the mainland’s various schools of serious or elite
literature, excluding altogether Hong Kong and Taiwan authors and pop-
ular writers of any stripe from the field of its investigation. In contrast, the
Zhonghua wenxue tongshi (General history of Chinese literature) published
under the direction of the Academy of Social Sciences in 1997 seeks to
distinguish itself by its catholic scope and its attention to such neglected
categories as popular literature, the literature of Taiwan and Hong Kong,
and the literatures of various national minorities.22 Jin Yong not only
appears in these pages but enjoys quite favorable treatment. The authors
note the artistic advances and patriotic and historic elements in Hong
Kong’s New School martial arts fiction; they proclaim Jin Yong the master
of this school, and record his seemingly universal appeal; they consider
the strengths of his writing and the themes (the cruelty of the struggle for
power, the complexity and weakness of the human character) of his work.
The positive elements of this account are nonetheless hedged by its segre-
gation according to the logic of the history as a whole. The ninth of the
set’s ten volumes covers contemporary fiction and drama; a chapter on

258 Chapter 10
Hong Kong is the last in the fiction section (following chapters on mili-
tary fiction, historical fiction, minority authors, and Taiwan); this Hong
Kong chapter begins with sections on the “realist” and “modernist”
schools, followed by the discussion of “Liang Yusheng, Jin Yong, and var-
ious types of popular fiction” (519–531). Only romance writers are left to
bring up the rear. From the perspective of this orthodox literary history,
the place that Jin Yong can claim is limited and defined by a powerful set
of geographic, generic, and aesthetic hierarchies.
One academic commentator on a roundtable on the Wang Shuo/
Jin Yong affair demanded a reaffirmation of the academy’s critical pre-
rogatives:

Our view is that in literary criticism’s current environment, we should distin-

guish two kinds of criticism: one is media criticism, and another is scholarly
criticism in the true sense of the word. We can say that media criticism is that
which is influenced by mass culture and commercial promotion. Criticism of
this kind may of course at times contain some element of scholarly criticism,
but due to promotionalism it may have certain specious elements as well, and
because of this its value is suspect. The existence of media criticism has its sig-
nificance, of course, but it stands at a definite distance from real scholarly crit-
icism. We should distinguish between criticism of these two kinds, and, as far
as their value and significance, we should treat them in different lights.23

Another participant, however, suggested that the reaffirmation of this dis-

tinction would not address the more basic problem of the waning influ-
ence in Chinese society of (serious) literary criticism and indeed of liter-
ature itself—a loss of influence due in part to critics’ failings, in part to the
emergence of other social and cultural factors.24 One factor pointed out
in this roundtable and elsewhere as being of particular importance in the
Wang Shuo incident was the development of the Internet. “Besides being
the biggest literary row in years in China, the controversy [was] also the
first interactive one.” 25 The volume and intensity of activity in chat rooms
and bulletin boards renders insufficient a portrayal of the incident, and
the cultural field on which it was played out, as structured simply by the
tensions between the economically aligned mass media and an academy
jealous of its dwindling claims on the more heteronomous (politically
and socially recognized) funds of cultural capital. Reader response on the
Internet was enmeshed, to be sure, with the media’s economic interests, by
means, for example, of corporate management of Web sites and the cull-
ing of Internet comments for print publication.26 The Internet nonethe-

Jin Yong at the Century’s End 259

 less allowed an unprecedented eruption onto the public stage of the hith-
erto marginalized passions and dynamics of fan culture, and at least sug-
gested the possibility of a “democratization” of cultural discourse different
in degree and kind from the brute economic maneuvering of the market-
place.27
The Jin Yong /Wang Shuo debate was shaped by, and by the same
token illuminates, a variety of social and cultural agents’ efforts to rede-
fine the Chinese literary field, and to establish their own position and pre-
rogatives within that field, during a period of profound change in Chinese
society in general. The fact that the changes at several levels are still ongo-
ing renders premature any attempt to offer a definitive characterization of
the status of Jin Yong and his works; so too does the fact that the works
themselves, and the “Jin Yong phenomenon” of which they are a part, are
also in a continuing state of evolution. Jin Yong has begun publishing a
new revision of his corpus of texts. A flood of television adaptations from
the mainland, different in style and attempted scope from their predeces-
sors, represents the latest wave of adaptations into other media. Jinology
continues, reinventing itself in such novel forms as the irreverent Dianfu
Jin Yong (Subverting Jin Yong) series published in both Taiwan and the
mainland; it is flanked and intersected, on the one hand, by attempts to
approach Jin Yong’s oeuvre from established academic perspectives and,
on the other, by the sometimes anarchic currents of readership and fan
culture. Jin Yong /Zha Liangyong himself continues both to garner media
attention and to function in a range of cultural and political roles. These
and other phenomena, as well as the multilevel fascinations of the texts
themselves, ensure that the study of Jin Yong and his works will continue
to play a fruitful role in our evolving understanding of the literature and
culture of contemporary China.

260 Chapter 10
 Notes

Chapter 1: Introduction
1. Ni Kuang, Wo kan Jin Yong xiaoshuo, 6–7, gives one of the simplest versions
of an oft-repeated and almost tautological definition of the genre: “The character-
istics of wuxia xiaoshuo are: wu, xia, and xiaoshuo. Wu: wuxia xiaoshuo must contain
descriptions of martial arts, and the martial arts described must be traditional Chi-
nese martial arts. . . . Xia: wuxia xiaoshuo must contain xia . . . [a]nd the xia in wuxia
xiaoshuo derives from China’s traditions of the chivalric spirit (xiayi jingshen). . . .
Xiaoshuo: wuxia xiaoshuo must be fiction (xiaoshuo). . . . with fiction’s power of fas-
cination (xiyinli).” The English term “martial arts fiction” is admittedly inadequate
in that it translates the wu but not the xia of the Chinese original. I follow John
Minford in choosing it over other equally misleading or awkward renditions such
as “chivalric fiction,” “knight-errant fiction,” “gallant fiction,” et cetera: see his
“Translator’s Introduction,” 1–3, especially notes 2 and 10.
2. For a characterization of the scope of the Jin Yong phenomenon in its liter-
ary aspect, see Yan Jiayan, Jin Yong xiaoshuo lun gao, 8–13; for an account and analy-
sis of its multimedia and extraliterary dimensions, see Song Weijie, Cong yule xing-
wei dao Wutuobang chongdong, 11–59.
3. The following account is based on reports in Xin wanbao, Xingdao ribao, and
Hong Kong Standard.
4. Great Britain Colonial Office, Colonial Reports: Hong Kong 1953, 117.
5. Ming Kwan Lee, “Hong Kong Identity—Past and Present,” 156f.
6. “‘Battle to Death’ Terminated by Seven Judges in Second Round Following
an Emergency Decision,” Hong Kong Standard, January 18, 1954, 7.
7. See Andrew David Morris, Cultivating the National Body.
8. “‘Battle to Death.’” The exact meaning of the article’s claim is unclear, and
its factual validity dubious; it is useful, though, in pointing out that one aspect of
the Republican elevation of the martial arts was the purging of elements (“super-
stitious” or “unscientific” training methods, “backwards” social practices) unsuited
to the modernizing project.
9. See “Charity Boxing Tournament Staged in Aid of Shumshuipo Fire Vic-
tims’ Fund Proves Great Success,” Hong Kong Standard, January 15, 1954, 7.

261
 10. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities; Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing His-
tory from the Nation.
11. “Xinhuayuan li baixia leitai” [Leitai erected in Xinhua Park], Xin wanbao,
January 3, 1954, 4.
12. Liang Yusheng, “Taiji quan yi ye mishi” [A page from the secret history of
taiji quan], Xin wanbao, January 17, 1954, 4.
13. Drawing heavily on published studies of the genre, I make no claims to
originality. The earliest full-length study of martial arts fiction, and still the only
one in English, is James J. Y. Liu’s The Chinese Knight-errant. It is largely an anthol-
ogy of translations and summaries with notes and commentary, and is strongest on
the earlier material. In Chinese, Ye Hongsheng’s “Zhongguo wuxia xiaoshuo shi
lun” provides an excellent overview. Wang Hailin’s Zhongguo wuxia xiaoshuo shi lüe,
Luo Liqun’s Zhongguo wuxia xiaoshuo shi, and Cao Zhengwen’s Zhongguo xia wenhua
shi offer narrative histories within sometimes limiting interpretive frameworks.
Among the most perceptive analytical studies are Chen Pingyuan’s Qiangu wenren
xiake meng and the essays in Xu Sinian’s Xia de zongji. Specialized studies of various
periods, works, and authors abound; a few are mentioned in the notes that follow.
14. Zhang Gansheng, Minguo tongsu xiaoshuo lungao, 338; Ye Hongsheng,
“Zhongguo wuxia xiaoshuo shi lun,” 11–14. On the Japanese fiction to which the
term wuxia (bukyö) was applied, see Okazaki Yumi, “Wuxia yu ershi shiji chuye de
Riben jingxian xiaoshuo.”
15. Han Fei Tzu: Basic Writings, 105.
16. Ping-ti Ho, “Records of China’s Grand Historian: Some Problems of Trans-
lation: A Review Article,” 176–182.
17. Ssu-ma Ch’ien, Records of the Grand Historian of China, 2:453.
18. Ssu-ma Ch’ien, Records of the Historian: Chapters from the Shih chi of Ssu-
ma Ch’ien, 48.
19. Ibid., 67.
20. Gong Pengcheng and Lin Baochun provide in Ershisi shi xiake ziliao huibian
a useful compendium of relevant materials from the histories.
21. Yu Yingshi’s “Xia yu Zhongguo wenhua” and Lin Baochun’s “Cong youxia,
shaoxia, jianxia dao yixia” provide analysis of the historical roots and development
of the xia image. Attempts to survey the extraliterary dimensions of “xia culture”
include Chen Shan, Zhongguo wuxia shi, and Wang Yonghao, Zhongguo youxia shi.
22. Most studies of xia and wuxia xiaoshuo contain analyses of the “essential,”
“defining,” or “ideal” qualities of the xia. James Liu, for example, defines them as
altruism, justice, individual freedom, personal loyalty, courage, truthfulness and
mutual faith, honor and fame, and generosity and contempt for wealth (The Chi-
nese Knight-errant, 4–6). Xu Sinian pares his own list down to “disdain for wealth”
and “disdain for [one’s own] life” (“Yuanxia ji qi jingshen,” 2). Most important for

262 Notes to Pages 10–14

literary study, however, is the point that all such essentializing definitions are
abstractions that should not be confused with the xia’s specific and contingent
manifestations in particular works. As Y. W. Ma puts it, “One would expect that dif-
ferent periods have brought forth different chivalric figures who in turn appear dif-
ferently in their literary representations, the shaping of which is further governed
by the particularity of generic forms and the cumulative effects of traditions” (“The
Knight-errant in hua-pen Stories,” 266–267).
23. Sima Qian’s biography of Jing Ke refers to fabulous stories already in cir-
culation, and the classical-language tale Yan Danzi has often been presumed to be
of pre-Qin origin. But scholars since the nineteenth century have argued that the
extant text is of considerably later origin. See Y. W. Ma, “Yen Tan-tzu,” and DeWos-
kin, “The Six Dynasties Chih-kuai and the Birth of Fiction,” 47 n. 54.
24. Translation from Liu, The Chinese Knight-errant, 68.
25. Studies of the “swordswoman” figure include Lin Baochun, “Zhongguo
gudian xiaoshuo zhong de ‘nüxia’ xingxiang,” and Altenburger, “The Sword or the
Needle.”
26. “Zhao Taizu” is the twenty-first tale in Feng Menglong’s (1574–1646) 1624
collection Jingshi tongyan [Comprehensive words to warn the world]; “Cheng
Yuanyu” is the fourth in Ling Mengchu’s (1580–1644) 1628 Pai’an jing qi [Slapping
the table in amazement]. Both are discussed in Ma, “The Knight-errant in hua-pen
Stories,” and in Cui Fengyuan, Zhongguo gudian duanpian xiayi xiaoshuo yanjiu,
among other places. On the second story see also Altenburger, “The Sword or the
Needle,” 117–144.
27. See Ge, Out of the Margins, for a recent review and reappraisal of scholar-
ship on the novel’s development.
28. Chen Pingyuan, Qiangu wenren xiake meng, 192–200. Chen actually makes
a threefold distinction between the reclusive “hills and woods,” the politically
charged “Rivers and Lakes,” and the criminal “greenwood” (lülin). His distinctions
are invaluable for identifying the conceptual issues at stake, although particular
works—The Water Margin included—more often than not conflate several of these
categories.
29. Almost every study of wuxia xiaoshuo discusses The Water Margin. For a
focused and informed study of the novel’s influence on the tradition, see Ma You-
yuan, “Shuihu zhuan yu Zhongguo wuxia xiaoshuo de chuantong.” For an intro-
duction to the novel’s place within the broader study of traditional Chinese fic-
tion, see C. T. Hsia’s essay in The Classic Chinese Novel, and Andrew Plaks’ analysis
and reviews of the scholarship in The Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel.
30. Yu’s “Shuihu zhuan (Water Margin) as Elite Cultural Discourse” studies the
novel’s interpretation over the centuries, and Widmer’s Margins of Utopia addresses
the Shuihu houzhuan and other sequels.

Notes to Pages 14–19 263

 31. For further discussion of Shengchao ding sheng wannian qing, see chapter 2.
On Jigong zhuan, see Meir Shahar, Crazy Ji.
32. Xu Sinian and Liu Xiang’an, “Wuxia danghui bian.” In addition to Xu and
Liu’s work, Ye Hongsheng’s “Zhongguo wuxia xiaoshuo shi lun” and Zhang Gan-
sheng’s Minguo tongsu xiaoshuo lungao are particularly valuable on Republican-era
martial arts fiction.
33. Chen Pingyuan, Qiangu wenren xiake meng, 7. See also Zheng Shusen,
“Dazhong wenxue, xushi, wenlei,” 114: “Do the traditional ethics and Rivers and
Lakes morality that appear so often in martial arts fiction represent a kind of attach-
ment to or nostalgia for the old order and the old ethics? In other words, are they
a way of expressing the psychological anxieties and external pressures brought by
modern industrial civilization and society?”
34. See especially Perry Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies; Chow, “Mandarin
Ducks and Butterflies”; Fan Boqun, ed., Zhongguo jin xiandai tongsu wenxue shi; and
on a slightly earlier period, Denise Gimpel, Lost Voices of Modernity.
35. Mao Dun, “Ziranzhuyi yu Zhongguo xiandai xiaoshuo.” Contemporary
critiques of Mandarin Ducks literature can be found collected in Wei Shaochang,
ed., Yuanyang hudie pai yanjiu ziliao, and Rui Heshi et al., eds., Yuanyang hudie pai
wenxue ziliao. For discussion of May Fourth attitudes and criticisms see also Perry
Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies.
36. Mao Dun, “Fengjian de xiao shimin wenyi,” 360.
37. I have not yet been able to establish the exact provenance or earliest appear-
ance of this application of the term “New School”; it was in circulation by at least
the beginning of the 1960s.
38. For example, Chen Pingyuan, Qiangu wenren xiake meng, 98; Ye Hong-
sheng, “Zhongguo wuxia xiaoshuo shi lun,” 62–63.
39. Chen Pingyuan, Qiangu wenren xiake meng, 98.
40. Chen Mo, Xin wuxia ershi jia, 5, 7.
41. Thus Wang Hailin, Zhongguo wuxia xiaoshuo shi lüe, 174–177, attributes the
New School’s appearance to the internal evolution of the tradition of martial arts
fiction, the genre’s capability for dominating the literary field of commercialized
societies, and Hong Kong and Taiwan literary circles’ relative acceptance of popu-
lar literature. Luo Liqun, Zhongguo wuxia xiaoshuo shi, 276–278, explains that New
School fiction “fits the requirements of economic competition and accords with
the entertainment consciousness of the social psychology [of Hong Kong, Taiwan,
and overseas Chinese communities],” and that “Chinese martial arts fiction as a
unique literary form has long made a place for itself deep in people’s hearts; its
source is in the people (minjian), and it has a powerful life force.”
42. Chen Mo, Xin wuxia ershi jia, 5.
43. C. T. Hsia, The Classic Chinese Novel, 30: “Probably, in their impotence to

264 Notes to Pages 19–24

relieve the suffering of their compatriots under Communist rule, these readers [in
Hong Kong and Taiwan] have turned to a simpler world of fantasy where the cham-
pions of justice have never failed to punish the oppressors.” Lin I-Liang (Stephen
Soong) similarly refers to the view that the popularity of martial arts fiction is due
to the “extreme spiritual dejection” of “Chinese intellectuals overseas”; see his “Jin
Yong de wuxia shijie” [The martial arts world of Jin Yong], in Wuge fangwen, 52.
44. See Ma Kwok-ming, “Hong Kong Martial Arts Novels: The Case of Louis
Cha,” and, for an earlier and more telegraphic exposition of portions of the argu-
ment, “Jin Yong de wuxia xiaoshuo yu Xianggang.”
45. Lin Linghan, “Wenhua gongye yu wenhua rentong.”
46. The phrasing quoted here is from Song Weijie’s article “Minzu guojia,
geren shenfen, lishi jiyi,” 74; the argument is restated in revised and expanded
form in chapter 4 (138ff.) of his Cong yule xingwei dao Wutuobang chongdong.
47. Song Weijie, Cong yule xingwei dao Wutuobang chongdong, 146–148; see on
the same pages his remarks on Ma’s and Lin’s interpretations of this novel.
48. In Wu Aiyi’s introduction to her Jin Yong xiaoshuo de nanzi, 1–5.
49. For accounts and critiques of the culturalism-to-nationalism thesis see
James Townsend, “Chinese Nationalism,” and Prasenjit Duara, “De-Constructing
the Chinese Nation.”
50. Tu Wei-ming, “Cultural China: The Periphery as the Center,” 34. For an
overview of recent conceptualizations of a global Chinese culture, see Harry Hard-
ing, “The Concept of ‘Greater China’: Themes, Variations and Reservations.”
51. Rey Chow, “Between Colonizers.”
52. These readings are meant to supplement the internal and appreciative
readings that have dominated the secondary literature on Jin Yong to date. They
do not, of course, claim to be definitive or exhaustive. To posit that reading Jin
Yong’s novels against their historical context may both illuminate certain aspects
of the novels and allow the novels in turn to shed some new light on the thought
and society of their era (I hope the process is not tautological) is not meant to sug-
gest that the historical context is the sole generative impulse behind the novels or
their most important “meaning.”
53. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic
World Reversed.”
54. Ibid., 51.

Chapter 2: Local Heroes

1. “Wuxia mingzhu jingxuan” is further discussed in chapter 6.
2. See Ye Hongsheng’s “Zhongguo wuxia xiaoshuo shilun,” 60–62, and
“Xianggang ‘xinpai’ wuxia xiaoshuo fazhan gaikuang,” 483–484.
3. In some editions the last character of the title is rendered as the name of the

Notes to Pages 25–34 265

 dynasty (qing /Qing). The novel has circulated under a variety of other titles as well,
including Wannian qing qicai xinzhuan [The new tale of the marvelous hero of the
everlasting Qing], Qianlong xunxing Jiangnan ji [An account of Qianlong’s proces-
sion through Jiangnan], and Qianlong huang you Jiangnan [The Qianlong emperor’s
travels in Jiangnan]. Citations here will be to the Beijing shifan daxue chubanshe
1993 edition. I am indebted to Ng Ho for suggesting this novel as the starting point
for inquiry into Guangdong School martial arts fiction. I have also profited from
consulting Lin Baochun’s “Huashuo Fang Shiyu,” an article provided in manuscript
by the author.
4. The novel presumably draws on legends that grew up around the six official
processions through the Jiangnan region made by the historical Qianlong emperor
(r. 1736–1795); see the foreword to the 1989 Shanghai guji chubanshe edition of
Qianlong xunxing Jiangnan ji. For an overview of the legends of the Southern Shao-
lin heroes, see Ng Ho, “Dang chuanshuo siwang de shihou.”
5. David Wang’s rereading of late Qing chivalric fiction in chapter 3 of his Fin-
de-siècle Splendor is perhaps relevant here. He argues that rather than expressing, as
most critics have suggested, a co-optation of the spirit of altruism and resistance
by the forces of orthodoxy and repression, these novels’ portrayal of a complicitous
relationship between law and violence suggests a profound questioning of the
parameters of imperial and ideological legitimacy.
6. Editions of Shaolin xiao yingxiong include Shanghai: Dada tushu gongying
she, 1935, and Shanghai: Xinmin shudian, 1936. For a modern edition, see Hei-
longjiang renmin chubanshe, 1987.
7. Liu Xinfeng et al., eds., Zhongguo xiandai wuxia xiaoshuo jianshang cidian,
544.
8. At a later date the text was again revised to present the Guangdong heroes
in a more favorable light. Their use of unfair tactics is minimized; much of the
responsibility for the continuation of the feuds is shifted from them to their foes;
in the final chapter Fang Shiyu is betrothed to a pair of young warrioresses atten-
dant upon Wumei, transformed from the middle-aged nuns of the earlier version.
It is not clear when this revision first appeared. Editions in circulation include Fang
Shiyu da leitai [Fang Shiyu fights on the leitai], in Zhongguo minjian tongsu xiaoshuo,
and Woshi Shanren (a spurious attribution?), Fang Shiyu zhengzhuan [The true story
of Fang Shiyu].
9. It was not only the writers of martial arts fiction who employed pen names
declaring local allegiance. Wu Woyao (1866–1910), the region’s most famous late
Qing novelist, styled himself Wo Foshanren (“A Native of Foshan”), and our
authors’ pseudonyms must be understood in part as honoring this renowned lit-
erary precursor.

266 Notes to Pages 34–38

 10. Li Jiayuan, Xianggang baoye zatan, 121, 129–131; Cheung Kwai-Yeung, Jin
Yong yu baoye, 19–20.
11. Li Jiayuan, Xianggang baoye zatan, 133.
12. Fang Jigen and Wang Guangming, Gang Ao xinwen shiye gaiguan, 71–72.
13. Woshi Shanren’s novels of the late 1940s and 1950s are the only Guang-
dong School works to have remained in print. They were reprinted in the 1970s by
Hong Kong’s Nanfeng chubanshe, and in the 1980s by Chen Xiang ji shuju. The
latter editions were widely available in Hong Kong bookstores during the 1990s.
14. See the author’s preface in Woshi Shanren, Sande heshang.
15. Li Jiayuan, Xianggang baoye zatan, 111–112.
16. Woshi Shanren, Hong quan dashi Tieqiao San, 2. The preface is undated, and
the publication referred to here unidentified. The preface to Woshi Shanren’s Shao-
lin shi hu nao Yangcheng is dated August 1955 from the offices of Wushu zazhi [Mar-
tial arts magazine], and it seems likely that Tieqiao San was first serialized in this or
a similar publication.
17. See Li Heiweng, “Ji Nanhai Zhu Yuzhai.” On Lin Shirong, see Lin Zu, Lin
Shirong xianshi teji, and “Xianshi Lin Shirong xiansheng shilüe,” printed as a pref-
ace to Zhu Yuzhai’s Hu he shuangxing and Tiexian quan.
18. The boxing manuals Hu he shuangxing [Tiger-crane double form] and Tie-
xian quan [Iron thread boxing] are illustrated with drawings, apparently rendered
from photographs, of Lin Shirong himself executing the various forms. Zhu’s news-
paper serializations included the column “Wushu sancao” [Casual notes on the
martial arts], which began publication in Hong Kong’s Gongshang ribao on Octo-
ber 28, 1947, and later moved to the Gongshang wanbao. The first installment men-
tions a similar column carried in the Gongshang wanbao some ten years previous.
19. On the Huang Feihong films, see Hu Peng, Wo yu Huang Feihong. On the
historical Huang Feihong and the dissemination of his legend, see Ng Ho, “Huang
Feihong: yingxiong? caomang?”
20. Ng Ho, “Huang Feihong,” 148–149.
21. Li Gucheng discusses, in his Xianggang baoye bainian cangsang, “thwarted
literati” of the late Qing and their experiences with the press in Hong Kong,
79–116, and Sun Yatsen and the Zhongguo ribao, 117–152. Among the most help-
ful entries into the considerable literature on Wang Tao are Paul A. Cohen, Between
Tradition and Modernity, and Elizabeth Sinn, “Fugitive in Paradise: Wang Tao and
Cultural Transformation in Late Nineteenth-Century Hong Kong.” On the revolu-
tionary and Republican periods see also Li Jiayuan, Xianggang baoye zatan, 25–29,
and Fang Jigen and Wang Guangming, Gang Ao xinwen shiye gaiguan, 23–33. And
on the early history of the press in Hong Kong and China generally, see Roswell S.
Britton, The Chinese Periodical Press 1800–1912.

Notes to Pages 38–41 267

 22. The activities of the South-bound Authors constitute the most thoroughly
studied topic in the spottily covered terrain of Hong Kong literary history. Useful
works include Lu Weiluan, Xianggang wenzong; and Zheng Shusen et al., eds., Guo
Gong neizhan shiqi Xianggang bendi yu nanlai wenren zuopin xuan and Guo Gong nei-
zhan shiqi Xianggang wenxue ziliao xuan. For an account from the perspective of
mainland literary history, see e.g. Liu Denghan, Xianggang wenxue shi, 105–133,
149–174. For consideration of the implications and various interpretations of the
term, see Lu Weiluan, “‘Nanlai zuojia’ qianshuo.” For an interesting reevaluation
of South-bound Authors’ contributions to Hong Kong literature as such, see Wong
Wang-chi et al., Foxiang Xianggang: lishi, wenhua, weilai, 105–115. And for an
account of the South-bound Authors’ activities in the wider context of the rela-
tions between Hong Kong and Shanghai, see Leo Ou-Fan Lee, Shanghai Modern,
324–331.
23. See Fang Jigen and Wang Guangming, Gang Ao xinwen shiye gaiguan, 63–66
for Dagong bao, and 33–35 on Hong Kong newspaper activity during the period of
the Sino-Japanese War more generally; also Li Gucheng, Xianggang baoye bainian
cangsang, 153–188.
24. Fang Jigen and Wang Guangming, Gang Ao xinwen shiye gaiguan, 26–27,
76–82.
25. Cheung Kwai-Yeung, Jin Yong yu baoye, 18–19.
26. Poshek Fu, “Between Nationalism and Colonialism,” 207–208. This essay
adopts the contemporary phrase “Central Plains syndrome” to elucidate attitudes
toward Hong Kong’s film and culture on the part of both wartime émigrés and
subsequent critics. I have benefited from personal communications from Profes-
sor Fu on the subject as well.
27. Li Gucheng, Xianggang baoye bainian cangsang, 156–157.
28. Xingdao ribao, August 1, 1938.
29. Population figures from Hong Kong Annual Report 1952, 27, and Hong Kong
Report 1966, 2.
30. Fang Jigen, Gang Ao xinwen shiye gaiguan, 43–46. Other newspapers, less
prominent and/or directly backed by the Japanese administration, also published
during this period.
31. Ibid., 48–49. The source for these figures is not cited. The 1948 through
1950 editions of the Xianggang nianjian [Hong Kong yearbook] published by Hua-
qiao ribao list 18 dailies in 1946, 13 in 1947, 18 in 1948, and 23 in 1949; subse-
quent editions, unfortunately, lack corresponding listings.
32. On the affiliation of newspapers and other publications, and on the back-
ground of Hong Kong’s postwar literary activity in general, see William Tay, “Colo-
nialism, the Cold War Era, and Marginal Space.” On political affiliations see also
Cheung Kwai-Yeung, Jin Yong yu baoye, 11–17.

268 Notes to Pages 41–44

 33. Fang Jigen, Gang Ao xinwen shiye gaiguan, 29, 71–72; Cheung Kwai-Yeung,
Jin Yong yu baoye, 20–21. On the paper’s history see also the commemorative vol-
ume Cheng bao sishi zhounian jinian, 1939–1979, and the articles published in the
fifty-fifth anniversary issue of the newspaper, May 1, 1994.
34. The term “supplement” (fukan) here refers not to physically separate addi-
tions to a newspaper (such as the New York Times Book Review) but rather to regu-
larly published subsections within the paper. I give the romanized titles of Chinese
newspaper supplements in roman type within quotation marks, to distinguish
them from the names of newspapers. Li Jiayuan traces the flourishing of serialized
fiction in Hong Kong to Tianguang bao’s (est. 1933) presentation of the works of
Jie Ke (Huang Tianshi), Wang Yun (Zhang Wenbing), and Ping Ke (Ceng Zhuo-
yun) in his Xianggang baoye zatan, 125–128. On the history of China’s newspaper
supplements generally, see Wang Wenbin, ed., Zhongguo baozhi de fukan.
35. Fiction already running, respectively: an historical novel by Hu An, a series
of mini-mysteries, and an erotic historical tale by Xia Bo (San Su; see the next
chapter).
36. On Mou Songting see Ye Hongsheng, “Zhongguo wuxia xiaoshuo shi
lun,” 74.
37. Mr. Stephen Teo has suggested (in an e-mail message dated September 19,
2001) that the term may be a derogatory refererence to South Asian (particulary
Tamil) immigrants to southeast Asia.

Chapter 3: The Marshes of Mount Liang Beyond the Sea

1. Hong Kong Report 1952, 7.
2. Compare the sketches of postwar Hong Kong’s separation from China in
Eric Kit-wai Ma, Culture, Politics, and Television in Hong Kong, 25–28, and in Ming-
kwan Lee, “Hong Kong Identity—Past and Present.” Ng Ho, “Ai hen Zhongguo: lun
Xianggang de liuwang wenyi yu dianying,” analyzes representation of post-1949
exiles in literature and film. The “railway station” metaphor is from (ex-governor)
Alexander Grantham, Via Ports (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1965),
112, as cited in Ming-kwan Lee, “Hong Kong Identity,”159.
3. Eric Kit-wai Ma, Culture, Politics, and Television in Hong Kong, 25–27; see also
Poshek Fu, “Between Nationalism and Colonialism.”
4. One-day stories were frequently labeled as such (yitian wan xiaoshuo), sug-
gesting that the form carried a certain novelty value.
5. Jin Guangyu writes of reading serialized wuxia xiaoshuo during his school
days in Taiwan in the 1960s and 1970s: “The loyalty of readers in those days was
something that the best-selling authors of today can only dream about. A single
full-length wuxia novel would be serialized over the span of two or three years, and
we would read it without missing a single day. Wolong Sheng’s epic Jinjian diaoling

Notes to Pages 44–51 269

 [Golden sword, eagle’s plume] stretched out even further, to some six or seven
years. A sixth grader could read it up until the time he entered college; before he
knew it, the grim months and years of the awkward age would have passed in an
airy fantasy of struggle and bloodshed.” “Yingxiong de yiqian mian,” 24–25.
6. Robert Allen, Speaking of Soap Operas (Chapel Hill: University of North Car-
olina Press, 1985), 79, as cited in E. K. Ma, Culture, Politics, and Television in Hong
Kong, 198.
7. On the role of the newspaper in facilitating the joint imagining of a com-
munity, see Anderson, Imagined Communities, especially 32–36.
8. Jin Yong’s Book and Sword was the successor in Xin wanbao’s pages to Liang
Yusheng’s second martial arts novel, Caomang longshe zhuan [Dragons and serpents
outside the law], which had run from August 11, 1954, through February 5, 1955.
Liang’s next work, Qi jian xia Tianshan [Seven swords from Tianshan], began seri-
alization in Dagong bao on February 15, 1956.
9. Xianggang xiaojie riji (the title can also be read as “The Diary of Miss Hong
Kong”) was the novel that established the reputation of Xia Yi (Chen Xuanwen,
1922– ), one of Hong Kong’s first successful female writers. Her fiction (romances
and social melodramas set in contemporary Hong Kong), essays, and reviews
appeared in various newspapers into the 1980s.
10. San Su is the pen name by which the writer born Gao Dexiong (1918–
1981) is most commonly known. San Su, born in Guangzhou, came to Hong Kong
in 1944 and soon began working as an editor for Xinsheng wanbao’s fukan supple-
ment. His popular and prolific works appeared in this and other papers for over
three decades, at times in as many as fourteen different newspapers on a given day.
Certain of his serials also ran for astounding lengths of time: Shigougong ziji contin-
ued for more than ten years, with the June 1, 1965, issue of Xin wanbao carrying
installment 3085. Some of San Su’s writings will be discussed later in this chapter.
See Luo Fu, “Gao Xiong: Xiaosheng Xing Gao.”
11. Hu An was a pen name of the painter and novelist Ren Zhenhan (1907–
1993). His historical romances appeared in Xianggang shangbao and other newspa-
pers during the 1950s and 1960s. Like his better-known contemporary Nangong Bo
(Ma Hanyue, 1924–1983), the author specialized in tales of the tragic heroines and
femmes fatales of Chinese history. The choice of subject matter for Tianguo ying-
xiong may have been influenced by the sudden popularity of martial arts fiction.
12. Tang Ren (Yan Qingshu, 1919–1981), originally on the staff of the Shang-
hai Dagong bao, was transferred to the fledgling Taiwan branch in 1947 and then
to Hong Kong in 1949; there he soon moved to the staff of Xin wanbao. His nov-
elizations of modern Chinese history (patriotic in tone, uncompromisingly leftist
in viewpoint, and styled on the model of traditional zhanghui fiction) and his

270 Notes to Pages 51–54

“social realist” novels of Hong Kong life were nearly the only fiction from the
colony circulated on the mainland prior to the liberalization policies of the 1980s.
13. Compare Leo Ou-fan Lee and Andrew Nathan’s remarks on the periodical
press of the first half of the century: “The public . . . read the news much as they
read fiction, for gossip and sensationalism. Their own political history as it
occurred was perceived by many as a tale of duplicity and revenge no different from
the ancient legends of the Three Kingdoms or Water Margin.” “The Beginnings of
Mass Culture,” 394.
14. Ng Ho, “Dang chuanshuo siwang de shihou,” 49, 59.
15. Precedents for the psychological and interpersonal dimensions of Jin
Yong’s novels can be found in both Liang Yusheng and in certain Old School
works, particularly the martial arts melodramas of Wang Dulu. That readers none-
theless saw these aspects of Jin Yong’s work as both distinctive and valuable is sug-
gested by a letter entitled “Shujian enchou lu du hou” [After reading Book and Sword],
which appeared in Ming Pao on June 23, 1959. Even allowing for the promotional
aspect of its publication, this piece is useful as an early articulation of responses
to Jin Yong’s work. It lauds the novel’s exaltation of the chivalric xia spirit, the
excitement of its plot, and the variety and lifelikeness of the characters’ personal-
ities. Over a third of its (brief ) length is devoted to discussion of the romantic
plots: “An additional point is the portrayal of the romantic aspect; this is a unique
characteristic of Mr. Jin Yong’s martial arts novels.”
16. Shujian enchou lu appeared with this title in Taiwan editions, both unau-
thorized and authorized, in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
17. The opening sequence provides an exception that proves the rule. Li
Yuanzhi, a secondary character, discovers her tutor’s martial abilities and begs him
to accept her as a disciple. The narrative then summarizes her five years of training
and progress in two brief paragraphs.
18. Poshek Fu, “Between Nationalism and Colonialism,” 208.
19. Xianggang shangbao, September 5, 1956; the corresponding passage appears
in the Ming Ho edition of Bixue jian (Hong Kong, 1975) on pp. 486–487.
20. In its original version, the novel begins with a callow scholar who sets out
from his home to see the empire and becomes embroiled with rapacious Ming
troops and valiant rebels; this opening constitutes an entry into the Rivers and
Lakes, though not from outside the empire’s borders (Xianggang shangbao, January
1–7, 1956). The revised text transforms the young scholar into an overseas Chinese
visiting the mainland for the first time—a change that reinforces the paradigm
here proposed. For further discussion of this revision see chapter 7.
21. See Ralph C. Croizier, Koxinga and Chinese Nationalism.
22. The original text states that Yuan Chengzhi sets off to “establish a new

Notes to Pages 54–66 271

 kingdom overseas” (Xianggang shangbao, December 31, 1956), while the revised
version relates that the enterprise involves first driving off the Dutch (Hongmao-
guo) pirates infesting the islands (Bixue jian, 736)—an elaboration that reinforces
the allusion to Zheng Chenggong.
23. Although Royal Blood avoids the endorsement of Marxist historiography
that can be found in Liang Yusheng’s early work, it is certainly possible to read
Yuan Chengzhi as a hero concordant with the left’s ideals and interpretations of the
past. He supports the common people’s rebellion against a corrupt regime, thwarts
the oppressors’ attempts to deploy foreign assistance, and wars against another
invading power. He departs the motherland only when all hope of instituting a just
and native government seems to have failed. On the other hand, it is noteworthy
that Jin Yong offers a less positive picture of Li Zicheng’s uprising than is common
in postliberation mainland historiography and historical fiction, portraying it as
sliding toward tyranny and debauchery even before the Manchu victory. In this
sense Royal Blood may be seen as carrying premonitions of Jin Yong’s later break
with the left in both his fiction and his commercial and political careers.
24. See Ng Ho’s suggestion, in relation to Guangdong School martial arts fic-
tion and film, that “certain authors (and film-makers) [may] find in the allegiances
sworn at the Red Flower Pavilion a political metaphor for the Communist takeover
in China and the consequent rise of ‘underground’ groups dedicated to the restora-
tion of the Republic,” in “Dang chuanshuo siwang de shihou,” 49, 59.
25. I borrow the term “chronotope” from M. M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and
of the Chronotope in the Novel,” though my usage here is not strictly in line with
his theoretical model.
26. Yun Jun’s (Jiang Yunxing) work first appeared in Xianggang shangbao with
his illustrations for Royal Blood’s predecessor, Mou Songting’s Highwaymen of Shan-
dong, the illustrating of which he took over from one Huang Shan. Yun Jun’s illus-
trations thereafter accompanied the serializations and book publications of almost
all of Jin Yong’s novels.
27. Classic early works in this vein include Huang Guliu (1908–1977), Xiaqiu
zhuan [The tale of Xiaqiu], first serialized in Huashangbao in 1947; Lü Lun (Li Lin,
1911–1988), Qiong xiang [The slums], serialized in the same paper in 1947–1948;
and Luo Feng (another pen name of Yan Qingshu, i.e., Tang Ren), Mou gongguan
sanji [Notes from a certain villa], serialized in Xin wanbao in 1950 and published
in book form as Renzha [Dregs of mankind].
28. E.g., Zhao Zifan (1924–1986), Ban xialiu shehui [A half-degenerate soci-
ety], first published in 1953.
29. Jingji riji was serialized in Xinsheng wanbao beginning in 1947. A portion

272 Notes to Pages 66–68

was republished in book form by Dagong shuju, 1953, and a short selection can
be found in Huang Jichi et al., eds., Xianggang xiaoshuo xuan, 1948–1969, 1–13.
30. Li Jiayuan, Xianggang baoye zatan, 40–41, traces the use of Cantonese-fla-
vored prose in Hong Kong newspapers (a feature, as we have seen, of some Guang-
dong School martial arts fiction) to the work of Zheng Guangong (1880–1906) in
Zhongguo ribao and other papers during the first decade of the century. Liu Yichang,
“Xianggang wenxue de qidian,” 81, argues that the tradition goes back to Wang Tao
and the late-nineteenth-century Xunhuan ribao. The postwar sanjidi style is com-
monly attributed to San Su, though Luo Fu, Nandou wenxing gao, 70–71, argues that
San Su’s colleague Liang Houfu deserves equal credit for the innovation.
31. I am indebted to Karen Chan of the Programme in Hong Kong Cultural
Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong for illuminating discussions on
San Su and Jingji riji.
32. Huang Zhongming, “Zhu Bajie xiafan ji: Gao Xiong de ‘jie xian feng jin’
xiaoshuo,” surveys Gao Xiong’s (i.e., San Su) work in this genre and mentions
related fiction by other authors.
33. According to Mr. Rong Ruo in a letter published in Ming bao yuekan 33.9
(September 1998), 114. I am grateful for the information.
34. Yu Wanchun’s 1851 Shuihu zhuan sequel Dangkou zhi also begins its chap-
ters with 71. The narrator of Beyond the Sea mentions this and other sequels in his
self-mocking prefatory remarks: Xianggang shangbao, June 1, 1953.
35. The resonance between this scene and the Xingdao ribao editorial cited in
the previous chapter was of course unintended by either author; in the context of
the present argument, nonetheless, it offers a suggestive and unifying image of the
“harbor of exile.”
36. Scenes in nightclubs, strip bars, and brothels are the sine qua non of this
genre, with some tales staging variations on the situation every few episodes.
37. See Wang, Fin-de-siècle Splendor, 271–275.
38. Huang Zhongming “Zhu Bajie xiafan ji,” 204–210.
39. Luo Fu, “Gao Xiong: Xiaosheng Xing Gao,” 72–73.
40. Appearing in Xinsheng wanbao, Guailun lianpian was one of the features
that established San Su’s reputation, and inspired numerous imitations.
41. Displacement comedies featuring martial arts heroes are far fewer than
those featuring characters such as Sun Wukong or Lü Dongbin; apart from Red
Flower Society and Fang Shiyu Journeys to the South Seas, the few examples I have
seen include Zhang Yufeng, Yunlei chu nao yezonghui [Yun Lei first raises a ruckus
in a nightclub], Dagong bao, January 10, 1960, which stars the heroine of Liang
Yusheng’s Pingzong xiaying lu, currently in serialization in the same paper. Leg-
endary characters’ relatively greater affinity for displacement comedy may be due

Notes to Pages 68–74 273

 to the deeper sense of cultural familiarity they carry and to their traditional asso-
ciation (in many cases) with tales of fantasy and satire. It also stems from the fact
that, as I argue here, while the New School heroes may be borrowed for comedy
of this type, their raison d’être has more to do with nostalgia and idealized cul-
tural values than with burlesque as such.
42. See the scene where Yuan Chengzhi and his companions have captured
several pistols from the foreigners: “Chen Qingzhu said, ‘Gunpowder was origi-
nally a Chinese product. We’ve used it for hunting and making firecrackers, but
since these Westerners learned about it they’ve used it to go and kill people. There
are a hundred or more foreign soldiers in this troop; a hundred or more guns fir-
ing is no joke.’ They all realized that the power of these firearms was more than a
match for the martial arts, and they fell silent, searching for a plan” (482). The
original version in Xianggang shangbao, September 2, 1956, puts the spoken lines
in Yuan Chengzhi’s mouth, and omits the explicit statement that “the power of the
firearms was more than a match for the martial arts”; the implication, however, is
the same.
43. Poshek Fu, “Between Nationalism and Colonialism,” 213.
44. For Xin Yan as narrator, see the first installment, Ming Pao, February 21,
1960, where his voice is strongest; he actually fades from the text rather quickly,
leaving his supposed amanuensis Mai Xuan to take over narratorial responsibility.
For the characters’ linguistic difficulties, see, for example, in the February 27 install-
ment, Zhou Qi’s conversation with a bellhop. Note that upon arriving in Hong
Kong, the heroes do speak Cantonese (which of itself produces the same humor-
ous incongruity as does Xin Yan’s narration) but are confounded by new coinages
and Hong Kongisms.
45. The Guangdong heroes have also enjoyed continuous rebirth in Hong
Kong’s television serials and film, up through (and presumably not ending with)
the Huang Feihong movies and serials of the 1990s.

Chapter 4: National Passions

1. John Durham Peters, “Exile, Nomadism, and Diaspora,” 20.
2. Ibid.
3. “Exile,” “diaspora”—both the terms themselves and the various formations
they have referred to are deeply implicated with the classical and Judaeo-Christian
traditions of the West. Among the Chinese terms carrying related associations is
of course that with an intimate affinity with the genre of martial arts fiction: the
Rivers and Lakes (jianghu). The implications of political misfortune, geographic
removal from the political and cultural center, and yearning for a lost home car-
ried by the term “exile” are all associated with the notion of the Rivers and Lakes
in its early usages. Associations later accruing to the Rivers and Lakes, in turn, bear

274 Notes to Pages 75–80

some resemblance to aspects of the modern usage of “diaspora.” The “brother-
hood of the Rivers and Lakes” of Chinese fiction and the popular imaginary was
rarely, if ever, conceived of as existing outside the geographical limits of the Chi-
nese empire as a whole. Nonetheless, this community’s intrinsic mobility, and its
reliance on lateral bonds of association to create a society functioning by its own
rules in geographical and discursive spaces neglected by or inaccessible to the cen-
ters of orthodox authority, endow it with structural and metaphoric similarities to
modern models of diaspora. On the history of the meanings and associations of
the Rivers and Lakes, see Chen Pingyuan, Qiangu wenren xiake meng, 187–228.
4. A locus classicus for comments on both points is Ni Kuang, Wo kan Jin Yong
xiaoshuo, 23–29. Jin Yong himself defends the ending in the 1976 afterword to the
revised edition.
5. Besides discussion within the works of Ni Kuang, Chen Mo, and others,
Flying Fox has inspired at least two monographs to date: Wen Ruian, Xi Xueshan
feihu yu Yuanyang dao, and Kai Portmann, Der Fliegende Fuchs vom Schneeberg. An
abridged translation of the novel by Robin Wu appeared in the New York–based
bimonthly Bridge in 1972; a full translation by Olivia Mok, Fox Volant of the Snowy
Mountain, was published by Hong Kong’s Chinese University Press in 1993. For
comparison of the English versions, see Sharon Lai, “Translating Jin Yong: A Review
of Four English Translations.”
6. This version of the historical background is offered by the extra-diegetic
narrator in the first day of the novel’s newspaper serialization, and provided in a
somewhat different form by a storyteller within the diegetic world in the revised
version of the novel.
7. The characters’ ancestries also, of course, make a claim for the literary and
generic ancestors of the novel in which they appear, asserting its affiliation with
The Water Margin and with Shuo Yue quan zhuan [The complete story of Yue Fei], a
Qing novelization of the patriotic general’s career.
8. In the fates of the two protagonists’ mothers, likewise, we see the projec-
tion of this equivalence of personal morality and patriotic loyalty onto the domain
of female virtue. Yang Tiexin’s wife, Bao Xiruo, becomes the concubine of a foreign
prince, only to discover that her husband is still alive; though she abandons the
usurper’s household, she and her husband end up committing suicide in shame
over their son’s disloyalty. Guo Xiaotian’s wife, Li Ping, leads the life of a virtuous
widow among the Mongols, and finally kills herself before the Mongol Khan to
protest his plans to invade her homeland.
9. In the afterword to the revised edition (864), Jin Yong asserts that the “true
protagonist” of the novel is not Yuan Chengzhi but “Yuan Chonghuan, and after
him the Young Lord of the Golden Serpent—two characters who do not actually
appear in the book,” that is, who are present only through analeptic narration.

Notes to Pages 81–87 275

 10. Discussions of the martial arts within Jin Yong’s novels naturally abound
in the secondary literature. Among the most perceptive is Yan Jiayan, “Bianhuan
baiduan bi sheng hua”; see also the extended treatments in Chen Mo, Jin Yong
xiaoshuo zhi wuxue; Ni Kuang, Zai kan Jin Yong xiaoshuo; and Pan Guosen, Wu lun
Jin Yong.
11. Jin Yong’s afterword to Dragon Sabre, 1661.
12. Chen Mo, Langman zhi lü, 88–93, offers a perceptive comparison of the
two novels, which addresses several of the points discussed here.
13. The original, together with the preface that narrates the story of the geese,
can be found, for example, in Yuan Haowen shi ci ji, 636–637.
14. In this sense Companion can be seen as reviving or reinventing a popular
subgenre of Qing vernacular fiction, the ernü yingxiong xiaoshuo (lover/hero novel),
named for Wen Kang’s 1878 Ernü yingxiong zhuan and often characterized as a
cross-grafting of caizi jiaren (scholar-beauty) romance with xiayi chivalric fiction.
For a recent study of this subgenre, see Martin Huang, “From Caizi to Yingxiong.”
15. The phrases cited here derive from the Analects and Mencius respectively.
16. An analysis of Companion’s characterizations and treatment of romance,
Zeng Zhaoxu’s “Jin Yong bi xia de xingqing shijie” [The emotional world of Jin
Yong’s fiction] appears as a special appendix to Ni Kuang’s Wo kan Jin Yong xiao-
shuo, the first published volume of Jin Yong commentary. Subsequent discussions
of the topic are too numerous to detail here.
17. See, for example, Denton, Modern Chinese Literary Thought, 5–12.
18. The technique takes its name from the first line of Jiang Yan’s (444–505)
Rhapsody on Separation: “Of the things that bring gloom and dissolve the soul, /
Nothing can match separation!” (Translation by David R. Knechtges from Xiao
Tong, Wen Xuan, 3:201). The allusion expressly marks the grief of parting as Yang
Guo’s primary psychic motivation; given the role of other erotic energies in his
development, however, it is not inappropriate to note that in the idiom of Hong
Kong’s popular fiction the phrase “soul-dissolving” (xiaohun) often connotes sex-
ual climax.

Chapter 5: The Empire of the Text

1. Zhongguo shibao (Taipei), November 4, 1998, 5. The description of the con-
ference is based on my own observations and on reports published in Zhongguo
shibao and Lianhe bao, November 4–8, 1998. For an overview of the conference and
of the Jin Yong phenomenon in Taiwan, see also Teng Sue-feng, “Jianghu lushang
bu duxing: Huashan lun Jin Yong,” and “Yijiujiuba Jin Yong lai Tai quancheng
zhuizong baodao.” Papers from the conference have been published in Wang Qiu-
gui, ed., Jin Yong xiaoshuo guoji xueshu yantaohui lunwen ji.

276 Notes to Pages 91–114

 2. Wang Rongwen, “Jin Yong yanjiu de xin qidian,” 4.
3. The Taipei conference was not the first of its kind. Academic conferences
devoted to Jin Yong and his works were held in March 1998 at Dali and Hangzhou
and in May of that year at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Conferences on
the martial arts novel more generally began with the Chinese University of Hong
Kong’s 1987 International Conference on Chinese Martial Arts Fiction and a sim-
ilar meeting at Taiwan’s Tamkang University in 1990. Of the 1998 Jin Yong confer-
ences, the Boulder meeting has figured most prominently in subsequent reports, in
part because of the international prestige suggested by its setting and participants;
see Ming bao yuekan 33.8 (1998), 21–50, and the conference papers published as Jin
Yong xiaoshuo yu ershi shiji Zhongguo wenxue, ed. Lin Lijun. While in session, none-
theless, it attracted fairly little on-site attention, and I have chosen the Taipei con-
ference for discussion here because the “native” setting allowed for a much fuller
display of the intersection of academic, commercial, media, and fan elements char-
acteristic of the Jin Yong phenomenon.
4. The duelling broadcasts of Companion within Taiwan were only one facet of
the wider circulation of Jin Yong–based serials throughout the Chinese-speaking
world. “At present,” noted Jiang Xuewen in a November 2, 1998, article in Beijing
wanbao, “Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the mainland are all broadcasting the television
serial The Giant Eagle and Its Companion, based on the work of Jin Yong. The ver-
sions apparently differ, with the mainland watching a Hong Kong production,
Hong Kong watching a Taiwan production, and Taiwan watching one from Singa-
pore—rather an interesting phenomenon.” The Companion broadcasts in Taiwan
had ended before the opening of the conference, but TTV was now rebroadcasting
its 1993 production of the novel’s sequel, Dragon Sabre.
5. On the comic adaptations see Zhongguo shibao, November 4, 1998, 3; Zhong-
guo shibao, November 8, 1998, 11; and Lianhe bao, November 8, 1998, 14.
6. Translator’s note in Jin Yong and Ikeda Daisaku, Tanqiu yige canlan de shiji,
473.
7. Zhongguo shibao, November 4, 1998, 3.
8. Ibid.; see also Lianhe bao, November 4, 1998, 14.
9. The Jin Yong Web site, “Jin Yong chaguan,” http://jinyong.ylib.com.tw/.
10. Zhongguo shibao, November 4, 1998, 3; November 8, 1998, 11.
11. Zhongguo shibao, November 4, 1998, 5.
12. Jin Yong withdrew from editorial and financial control of Ming Pao in a
gradual and complex series of maneuvers beginning with the announcement of his
retirement in 1989 and the company’s going public in 1991. His sale of control-
ling interest to the relatively unknown Yu Pun-hoi (Yu Pinhai) excited considerable
rumor and speculation, some of which is recounted in Jianying Zha, China Pop,

Notes to Pages 115–119 277

 168–169. In October 1994 Yu was investigated by the Hong Kong Stock Exchange
for concealing a criminal record, and this scandal and subsequent financial diffi-
culties led to the sale of the controlling stake in Ming Pao Enterprises to Malaysian
timber magnate Tiong Hiew King (Zhang Xiaoqing) in 1995. See Jonathan Karp,
“Yu Should Know,” and Faith Keenan, “Heir to Misfortune,” as well as the relevant
sections of Cheung Kwai-Yeung, Jing Yong yu baoye.
13. There exists no authorized or fully researched biography of Jin Yong. The
earliest effort, Leng Xia’s Jin Yong zhuan, published in Hong Kong in 1994 and sub-
sequently in revised editions in the mainland and Taiwan, is sometimes cited here
as a source or example of “common knowledge”; it recycles previously published
material and has been repudiated by its subject. Yang Lige’s Jin Yong chuanshuo
offers some new information and a less uniformly hagiographic perspective but is
otherwise largely derivative of Leng Xia’s volume. Other publications representa-
tive of the “legend” include Fei Yong and Zhong Xiaoyi’s Jin Yong chuanqi; Guiguan
gongzuoshi’s Xia zhi dazhe: Jin Yong pingzhuan; and Sun Yixue’s Jin Yong zhuan. The
latter is useful for its coverage of more recent events and incidents. Cheung Kwai-
Yeung’s Jin Yong yu baoye, though focused on Jin Yong’s journalistic career, sets new
standards for original research. I have just received Fu Guoyong’s Jin Yong zhuan,
which despite the limits of its access to archival materials appears exemplary in its
thoroughness and careful documentation.
14. Cheung Kwai-Yeung, Jin Yong yu baoye, 40–41.
15. Jin Yong and Shen Baoxin subsequently revived their original plan, pub-
lishing the fiction magazine Yema from 1962 to 1969. See ibid., 169.
16. For an analysis of the economics of tongren bao in 1950s Hong Kong, see
ibid., 21–23.
17. Circulation figures here and elsewhere are from ibid., 414–415. Cheung’s
account of the early Ming pao (44–82) is made particularly valuable by the
author’s success collecting early issues of the newspaper absent from, or present
only in mutilated form within, the available microfilms. He gives a complete
(although illegibly reduced) reproduction of the first issue on pages 62–65.
18. The bulk of the June 6, 1959, editorial is quoted in Leng Xia, Jin Yong
zhuan, 82–83.
19. Ibid., 84. Often the sensationalist elements of the early Ming Pao are over-
looked or simply not known, as in a Hunan Television reporter’s question in a
September 2000 interview with Jin Yong reprinted in Jiang Di and Yang Hui, eds.,
Jin Yong: Zhongguo lishi dashi, 35: “Ming Pao, which you established, is universally
recognized as a clean and serious newspaper. Today competition in the media is
extremely fierce, and a tendency toward disregard for the truth and malicious hype
is on the rise. What is your opinion of this unfortunate atmosphere?”

278 Notes to Pages 121–122

 20. I have not identified the source or specific referent of the “catch-phrase
borrowed from the left.” The comment, on its face unremarkable, had perhaps
recently been employed by some leader or spokesman of the Communist Party.
21. A 1950 journey to Beijing in hopes of joining the foreign service evidenced
Jin Yong’s enthusiasm for the promise of the new China. But problems with his
family background and wartime education at the KMT’s Central Political Academy
in Chongqing apparently thwarted his plans; and this disappointment, together
with his father’s subsequent execution as a member of the landlord class, presum-
ably added a personal color to his evolving assessment of the Communist regime.
Criticism of his work at Great Wall as “bourgeois” in 1957 encouraged his with-
drawal from the film world and stoked his interest in leaving the left’s newspapers
to found his own publication. See Leng Xia, Jin Yong zhuan, 39–44, 73–78, and
Cheung Kwai-Yeung, Jin Yong yu baoye, 26–41.
22. Cheung Kwai-yeung, Jin Yong yu baoye, 107–110; Leng Xia, Jin Yong zhuan,
97.
23. Summaries of the “atom bombs and britches” controversy and of the edi-
torial wars of 1964, together with excerpts from a number of the relevant columns,
can be found in Cheung Kwai-Yeung, Jin Yong yu baoye, 126–133, and Leng Xia, Jin
Yong zhuan, 108–137. Much of this material is missing from the Ming Pao micro-
films generally available.
24. Quoted in Cheung Kwai-Yeung, Jin Yong yu baoye, 150–151.
25. Ian Scott, Political Change and the Crisis of Legitimacy in Hong Kong, 104.
26. On the local, “Cantonese” flavor of the early Ming Pao, and Jin Yong’s
emulation of Sing pao in particular, see Cheung Kwai-Yeung, Jin Yong yu baoye, 69,
89–90.
27. The term “nonprofit” indicated the publication’s ideals rather than its
financial or institutional basis and was subsequently removed from the masthead
as potentially misleading.
28. Cheung Kwai-Yeung, Jin Yong yu baoye, 172.
29. Jin Yong’s afterword to the revised edition of A Deadly Secret gives the date
of the original serialization in Southeast Asia Weekly as 1963. Cheung Kwai-Yeung,
Jin Yong yu baoye, 173, dates Southeast Asia Weekly from 1964. I have not obtained
the access to the original publications, which would resolve this discrepancy in
dates.
30. For overviews of Ming Pao’s sister publications see Cheung Kwai-Yeung, Jin
Yong yu baoye, 168–177, and Leng Xia, Jin Yong zhuan, 140–144, 162–167.
31. Huo Jingjue makes this general point in Jinxue da chendian, 48–49. Cheung
Kwai-Yeung’s Jin Yong yu baoye introduces a number of the figures involved in Jin
Yong’s various publications.

Notes to Pages 125–133 279

 32. See Hugh D. R. Baker, “Life in the Cities: The Emergence of Hong Kong
Man,” and Lau Siu-kai and Kuan Hsin-chi, The Ethos of the Hong Kong Chinese, 2.
33. On the political framework, see Ian Scott, Political Change and the Crisis of
Legitimacy in Hong Kong, and on its implications for identity formation, Ming Kwan
Lee, “Hong Kong Identity—Past and Present.” Eric Kit-wai Ma’s Culture, Politics, and
Television in Hong Kong gives a useful overview of discussions of Hong Kong iden-
tity formation as well as detailed analysis of the role of television.
34. “Fakan ci” [Inaugural remarks], Ming bao yuekan 1.1 (January 1966): 2. For
similar sentiments see also, in the same issue, the editor’s remarks on page 101, and
Chen Wanru, “Haiwai xuyao yiben sixiangxing de kanwu” [The overseas Chinese
need an intellectual journal], 3–8.
35. Jin Yong and Jiang Jingkuan, “Qiao he lu” [A bridge and a road], Ming bao
yuekan 1.1 (January 1966): 10.
36. “Fakan ci,” 2.
37. See, for example, Jin Yong’s remarks on the magazine’s thirty-fifth anniver-
sary in “Qunxing canlan yue huaming.”
38. Letter from Li Liming, Ming bao yuekan 2.8 (August 1967): 97.
39. Ming bao yuekan 2.8 (August 1967): 100.

Chapter 6: Beyond the Rivers and Lakes

1. The narrative involves two different locations named “Hengshan,” repre-
sented by different initial characters but homophonous in Mandarin and identi-
cal in pinyin romanization. For the sake of clarity in this English-language discus-
sion, I will refer to the first (the southern Hengshan, in modern Hunan province)
as Heng Shan and the second (the northern Hengshan, in modern Shanxi) as
Hengshan.
2. For a reading of this story’s treatment of the theme of revenge, see Leo Ou-
fan Lee, Voices from the Iron House, 34–37.
3. The trope of blindness, a leitmotif throughout the work, is a central figure
in the last of the climactic combats as well, the chaotic and aimless slaughter in a
lightless cavern beneath Huashan that annihilates three of the Five Mountain
schools.
4. For an example of such an interpretation, see Lin Baochun, Jiegou Jin Yong,
13–19.
5. For a recent study of the theme of reclusion and an introduction to the vast
literature on the topic, see Berkowitz, Patterns of Disengagement. In the preface to a
collection of essays on his fiction, Jin Yong identifies (Confucian /Mohist) action
and (Buddhist /Daoist) reclusion as two fundamental paths available to men in the
Chinese tradition, and attributes his characters’ overall predilection for the latter

280 Notes to Pages 134–150

to his own views and life experiences; see “Xiao xu: nan zhujue de liangzhong lei-
xing.” The aim of the present discussion is to read Linghu Chong’s choice of reclu-
sion in the light of Wanderer’s specific thematic agenda.
6. One version of the story of Xi Kang’s death can be found in the fifth-cen-
tury collection of anecdotes Shishuo xinyu [A new account of tales of the world],
6/2. The novel gives its account of Xi Kang in Qu Yang’s voice on pp. 266 and
275–276. For a study of this figure, see van Gulik, Hsi K’ang and His Poetical Essay
on the Lute.
7. The retreat is located outside Luoyang, the site of the bamboo grove made
famous by Xi Kang and his companions; Linghu Chong and Ren Yingying’s meet-
ing in this setting is thus another element in the novel’s recasting of the traditions
of homosocial reclusion into the revised context of heterosexual romance.
8. The role of music in Linghu Chong and Yingying’s relationship is mirrored
by its role in that of Lin Pingzhi and Yue Lingshan: Yue Lingshan’s humming of a
folk song from Lin’s Fujian home is the first sign of their budding intimacy, and
she dies with this tune still on her lips.
9. Chen Pingyuan, Qiangu wenren xiake meng, 192.
10. One distinction between the perspectives of Ode to Gallantry and Wanderer
is that the former work represents the martial arts as a practice retaining the poten-
tial for transcendence. Vanished champions of the Martial Grove, presumed victims
of the strife of the Rivers and Lakes, are discovered in the caverns of a mysterious
island, blissfully lost in the unending exegesis of a poem by Li Bo carved upon the
walls and understood to conceal the key to martial mastery. The protagonist’s solv-
ing of the riddle induces an ecstatic enlightenment. In Wanderer the martial secrets
inscribed in the caves beneath Huashan lead to an orgy of blind slaughter; the
martial arts as a practice have become functionally equivalent to the Rivers and
Lakes as a milieu, and similarly represent the irredeemable viciousness of the quest
for power.
11. The authorized mainland edition published by Sanlian in 1994 omits the
text commencing with (in my translation) “During the years . . .” and ending with
“. . . intentionally allude to the Cultural Revolution.” The 1998 commentary edi-
tion from Wenhua yishu chubanshe omits most of the same text but includes
within Feng Qiyong’s comments on relevant passages of the novel itself many
pointed references to “the events of thirty years ago.”
12. Huters, “Lives in Profile,” 269.
13. “Obsession with China: The Moral Burden of Modern Chinese Literature,”
in Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 533–554.
14. Compare Theodore Huters’ perception of a parity between literature and
politics hidden at the heart of the Chinese realist project, inherent in the sharing
of “an ideal of the powers of representation to bring imagined worlds into exis-

Notes to Pages 151–166 281

 tence” (“Ideologies of Realism in Modern China,” 161), and his coeditors’ more
general reflections on the distribution of discursive power, in the introduction to
Huters et al., Culture and State in Chinese History.

Chapter 7: Revision and Canonization

1. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature.
2. See the historicized account in Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Struc-
ture of the Literary Field. For an exploration of the applicability of Bourdieu’s theo-
ries to twentieth-century China, see Michel Hockx’s introduction to The Literary
Field of Twentieth-Century China, and other essays collected in this volume.
3. See Chen Pingyuan, “Literature High and Low: ‘Popular Fiction’ in Twenti-
eth-Century China.”
4. Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World
Reversed,” 45, 51.
5. Wendy Larson, “Liu Yichang’s Jiutu: Literature, Gender, and Fantasy in Con-
temporary Hong Kong,” 89.
6. “Foreword,” in Xianggang duanpian xiaoshuo xuan (wushi niandai), ed. Liu
Yichang, 5.
7. In the “Friends of Ming Pao” (“Ming bao zhi you”) letter column, which
had started publication two days earlier, on July 1.
8. Shediao yingxiong zhuan, er ji, from Emei Studios, directed by Hu Peng from
a screenplay by Yu Fei, starring Cao Dahua and Rong Xiaoyi, released June 3, 1959.
9. Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production,” 42; “The Production of
Belief: Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods,” 76–77.
10. Huo Jingjue, Jinxue da chendian, 50, makes the simpler but equally cogent
point that the poor scripting and production values of many of the television and
film adaptations may encourage readers to perceive the more polished novels as
“higher quality” works of art.
11. Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production,” 51.
12. Ni Kuang first voices these suspicions concerning the novel’s resolution—
which he sees as a betrayal of its properly tragic essence—in Wo kan Jin Yong xiao-
shuo, 34–36.
13. See Jin Yong, “Man tan Shujian enchou lu,” and “Xueshan feihu you meiyou
xiewan?”
14. Luo Fu identifies Liang Yusheng as the author in Liu Su (Luo Fu), “Xiaying
xia de Liang Yusheng,” 141–142.
15. Tong Yanzhi (Liang Yusheng), “Xinpai wuxia xiaoshuo liang da mingjia,”
149.
16. I am grateful to Mr. Liao Futian for allowing me to examine his bound col-
lections of the original newspaper printings of Xiake xing and Tianlong babu.

282 Notes to Pages 169–181

 17. A danxing ben edition of Jin Yong’s Tianlong babu from Wushi chubanshe
(the publisher of Martial Arts and History) provides the exact date of publication for
most of its thirty-five volumes, and so gives evidence of the speed with which book
publication followed the appearance of the text in the newspapers. Volumes appear
at regular four-week intervals. Volume 7, for example, dated March 20, 1964, pre-
sents material that ran in Ming Pao between February 18 and March 16. The final
volume is dated June 3, 1966, only a week after the novel’s conclusion in the news-
paper on May 27.
18. The account in this chapter of early editions is based primarily on my own
research in Hong Kong. See also Lin Baochun, “Jin Yong xiaoshuo banben chakao”
for invaluable information on early Taiwan editions.
19. Xianggang shangbao, October 19, 1956, 6.
20. Ye Hongsheng gives examples of variant editions of Shediao yingxiong zhuan
in “Zhongguo wuxia xiaoshuo shilun,” 108–109 n. 66. For a more detailed table of
pirated and altered editions in Taiwan, see Lin Baochun, “Jin Yong xiaoshuo ban-
ben chakao,” 203–206.
21. Xianggang shangbao, December 18, 1956.
22. Leng Xia, Jin Yong zhuan, 136.
23. Xianggang shangbao, December 15, 1956.
24. The January 1, 1970, edition of Ming bao wanbao carries installment 32 of
the “Completely New Revised Edition: Book and Sword, Gratitude and Revenge: All
Rights Reserved: With Additions and Deletions, Rewritten and Revised.” Although
I have not been able to consult the previous month’s issues, the revised edition’s
serialization evidently began on December 1, 1969. Unlike the serialization of sub-
sequent revised texts, the presentation of the revised Book and Sword seems not to
have been continuous; the novel is absent from the March and September issues of
the paper that I have seen, and the March 1, 1971, Ming bao wanbao carries install-
ment 152. Access to a more complete run of Ming bao wanbao would allow clarifi-
cation of the timetable of Book and Sword’s revision and republication; in any event,
the situation seems somewhat at odds with Jin Yong’s statement in the afterword
of The Deer and the Cauldron (2132) that he began the entire project of revision in
March 1970.
25. The second revision of Book and Sword was published in a deluxe large-
print edition by Taiwan’s Yuanliu in 2001, and the Ming Ho edition was a center
of attention at the 2002 Hong Kong Book Fair. In early 2003 Guangzhou chuban-
she, which took over the mainland rights from Sanlian, published a Collected Works
containing the “final revised editions” (zhongdingben) of both Book and Sword and
Royal Blood.
26. See, for example, Ni Kuang, Wo kan Jin Yong xiaoshuo, 14–18; and Yang
Xing’an, Jin Yong xiaoshuo shi tan, 93–107. Ye Hongsheng views the “literarization”

Notes to Pages 181–184 283

 of Jin Yong’s novels as unfair to the practice of other martial arts authors: see his
“‘Toutian huanri’ de shi yu fei.”
27. Li Yijian, “Yi jingdian wenxue ‘gaixie’ de Jin Yong xiaoshuo.”
28. In general, Jin Yong seems to have revised his early works more extensively
than the later ones, a circumstance presumably reflecting reconsideration of his
early efforts in the light of standards and preferences developed over the course of
his writing career. (This point awaits verification through systematic studies of all
of the revisions.) With regard to Royal Blood in particular, Jin Yong has several times
remarked on the extent of his revisions. The revised text was first serialized in Ming
bao wanbao beginning May 24, 1971. Here the novel is entitled Bixue Jinshe jian,
and in his introductory remarks to the first day’s installment, the author describes
the process of revision as follows: “The conclusion to the original work was far too
perfunctory and has been completely rewritten. A few secondary characters, such as
Hou Fangcheng, Zu Dashou, Zu Zhongshou, and others, have also been reworked.
Internal discrepancies and careless language have been polished and revised. The
original book’s twenty-five chapters have been changed to twelve, and the chapter
titles also altered.” In the afterword to the Ming Ho edition of 1975, the author
explicitly states that “Royal Blood has undergone two fairly major revisions, which
have added some 20 percent to its length. The effort I have put into revision has
been greatest for this book” (864).
29. See Jin Yong’s afterword for Shujian enchou lu, 869.
30. Yang Xing’an, Jin Yong xiaoshuo shi tan, 94–97, points out how the revised
ending is integrated with the new episode set in Shengjing—at the price, he deems,
of weakening the original’s characterizations and thrillingly precipitous plotting.
31. See Lin Baochun, Jiegou Jin Yong, 181–183, 211, 231.
32. Ma Kwok-ming makes mention of this aspect of the revision in “Jin Yong
de wuxia xiaoshuo yu Xianggang,” 91.
33. On the affinity between the perspectives of Sword of Loyalty and The Deer
and the Cauldron, see also Song Weijie, “Minzu guojia, geren shenfen, lishi jiyi,” 77,
and the discussion of The Deer and the Caldron in chapter 8 of this book.
34. When I presented this portion of my research as a paper at the Interna-
tional Conference on Jin Yong’s Novels in Taipei, November 1998, Jin Yong, who
was present in the audience, commented that his reworking of the opening of the
novel was inspired in part by his acquaintance with several overseas Chinese from
Indonesia who returned to China with idealistic hopes of aiding in the rebuilding
of the nation, only to run afoul of the Cultural Revolution’s purges and paranoia
toward outside influences.
35. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 142–143. In Jin Yong’s case, of course, the risks
commonly associated with the long production cycle were actually quite small;
the popularity and commercial value of his fiction were already proven, and even

284 Notes to Pages 184–194

during the course of his ten years of labor, he offered the fruits to his readers on a
daily basis through serialization in Ming bao wanbao.
36. “‘Toutian huanri’ de shi yu fei,” 333; see likewise Yang Xing’an, Jin Yong
xiaoshuo shi tan, 106.
37. On the “fetishization” of traditional Chinese culture in the Ming Ho edi-
tions, see Lin Linghan, “Wenhua gongye yu wenhua rentong,” 232–236. Huo Jing-
jue, Jinxue da chendian, 27, derides the revised edition’s “elevation” of Jin Yong’s
work through the expenditure of effort on factors (binding, illustrations, poetic
chapter headings, historical footnotes, etc.) extrinsic to the texts themselves. Lin
Boachun, Jiegou Jin Yong, 212–221, offers a detailed analysis of Jin Yong’s rework-
ing of his chapter titles, which he judges a virtuoso display of literary talent not
entirely harmonized with the body of the texts. Wu Hongyi, “Jin Yong xiaoshuo
zhong de jiu shici,” argues that the pains Jin Yong took in this regard were a
response to the criticisms of his early use of verse advanced in Tong Yanzhi’s “Xin-
pai wuxia xiaoshu liang da mingjia.”

Chapter 8: Beyond Martial Arts Fiction

1. The relevant articles are “Zhonggong zhongyang fu zhuxi Deng Xiaoping
de tanhua jilu,” and Zhe Hui, “Zhongguo zhi lü: Zha Liangyong xiansheng fang-
wen ji.” See also the accounts of this trip in Cheung Kwai-yeung and Leng Xia.
2. Jin Yong’s editorials on the Hong Kong question from this period are col-
lected in Jin Yong, Xianggang de qiantu.
3. For Jin Yong’s account of this meeting see Jin Yong /Zha Liangyong, “Bei-
guo chuchun you suo si.”
4. In this case I make an exception to my general use of the Ming Ho editions’
English titles for Jin Yong’s works, adopting instead the title of John Minford’s
translation, published by Oxford University Press, Hong Kong, beginning in 1997.
Translations from the novel included in this chapter are nonetheless my own unless
otherwise indicated.
5. Jin Yong, “Wei Xiaobao zhe xiao jiahuo!” The essay has been frequently
reprinted, for example, in Ni Kuang, San kan Jin Yong xiaoshuo, and Liu Tianci, Wei
Xiaobao shengong. Citations of the essay in this chapter are keyed to the Ming bao
yuekan publication.
6. Jin Yong, afterword to The Deer and the Cauldron, 2131.
7. Ni Kuang, Wo kan Jin Yong xiaoshuo, 73.
8. Ibid., 80.
9. Ibid., 92–93, 130–133.
10. Jin Yong, “Wei Xiaobao zhe xiao jiahuo!” 26.
11. “Luoji shan xia zhengshuo Wei Xiaobao,” 27.
12. Another index of the unique interest, affection, and controversy aroused

Notes to Pages 194–201 285

 by the figure of Wei Xiaobao is the continued appearance within the field of appre-
ciative “Jinology” of monographs devoted to him alone, including Liu Tianci, Wei
Xiaobao shengong; Feng Liangnu, Chuangye yu Luding ji; Jin Ge, Wei Xiaobao qishi lu;
and Zhang Mu, Keyi de xiaolian: huashuo Wei Xiaobao. These are popular rather than
scholarly works; several of them expound upon Wei Xiaobao’s lessons for the con-
duct of business and life.
13. Jin Yong, “Wei Xiaobao zhe xiao jiahuo!” 26.
14. This aspect of my reading takes inspiration from (though it does not pre-
tend to the theoretical rigor of ) Bourdieu’s analysis of Flaubert’s Sentimental Edu-
cation as a work that “reconstitutes in an extraordinarily exact manner the struc-
ture of the social world in which it was produced and even the mental structures
which, fashioned by these social structures, form the generative principle of the
work in which these principles are revealed” (The Rules of Art, 31–32). It is inspired
also by Lin Linghan’s approach to The Deer and the Cauldron in his “Wenhua gongye
yu wenhua rentong.”
15. The material included in chapter 1 of the 1981 revised edition was desig-
nated a prologue (xiezi) in the 1969 newspaper serialization. Minford returns to
the latter usage in his 1997 translation.
16. Biographical information about the historical Huang, Gu, and Lü can be
found in Hummel, Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period, 351–354, 421–426, and
551–552 respectively; a sketch of the Ming History incident appears on 205–206.
On Gu and Lü’s views in the context of seventeenth-century anti-Manchuism, see
Frank Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China, 25–26, and the references
therein.
17. The novel Yinglie zhuan, known under a variety of titles, recounts the over-
throw of the Mongol Yuan dynasty and the establishment of the Han Ming
dynasty by Zhu Yuanzhang (who reigned as the Hongwu emperor, 1368–1399)
and his generals. Extant editions of the novel date from as early as the late sixteenth
century; The Deer and the Cauldron represents this material as a favorite theme of
seventeenth-century storytellers.
18. Wei Xiaobao’s practice resembles the creation of “popular culture” in the
sense outlined by (among others) Fiske: ephemeral, situational, and functional,
constructed by individuals out of the materials made available to them by the
“culture industries.” See John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, 103ff. Whether
Fiske’s model or others of cultural production can be properly applied to the his-
torical conditions of early Qing China is of course not at issue in the present analy-
sis of Jin Yong’s fictional representation of a cultural terrain.
19. This narrative path also recalls that of Royal Blood, which leads a young
scholar through encounters with marauders, with a righteous goodfellow, and
finally with a Ming loyalist organization and the novel’s protagonist.

286 Notes to Pages 202–205

 20. Wei himself tries in vain to tally up his services to the emperor (Luding ji,
2092):

“I’ve already done the seven great deeds,” he thought to himself. “The first
was killing Oboi; the second was saving the old Emperor; the third was sav-
ing his Majesty by throwing myself in front of his body on Wutaishan; the
fourth was saving the Empress Dowager; the fifth was hooking up with Mon-
golia and Tibet; the sixth was destroying the Divine Dragon Sect; the seventh
was capturing Wu Yingxiong; the eighth was recommending Zhang Yong and
Zhao Liangdong for the quelling of Wu Sangui; the ninth was the taking of
Albazin—too many, there are too many! If I don’t count the small deeds,
there are exactly seven great ones, no more and no less.” At this point he
couldn’t be bothered to say exactly which seven of these deeds should be the
great ones. . . .

21. The details of his first appearance are telling: Mao Shiba, confronted by a
salt-smuggler within the Vernal Delights brothel, insults him by challenging his
paternity and his mother’s virtue: “Have you forgotten your own father’s name?”
One of the prostitutes present laughs out loud at this barb, and receives a slap from
another of the smugglers—at which point a youth of twelve or thirteen years dashes
out, spouting obscenities at the man who has assaulted his mother.
22. Minford points out a fundamental association between the (loss of the)
penis and Wei Xiaobao’s name (“Trinket” in Minford’s rendition): “Castration [of
the court eunuchs] was performed by a specialist for a fee of six taels, and both the
scrotum and the penis were removed. The severed parts, known as the bao or ‘treas-
ure’ (it is interesting to note that Trinket’s Chinese name, Xiaobao, means ‘little
treasure’), were processed, placed in a container, sealed, and then placed on a high
shelf.” Jin Yong, The Deer and the Cauldron: the First Book, trans. John Minford, xxvi.
23. Thus Wei, on 1957: “Toward Your Majesty I maintain loyalty (zhongxin),
and toward my friends I maintain honor (yiqi). But you can’t have your cake and
eat it too, so all your servant could do was put his tail between his legs and go off
fishing on Winner Takes All.”
24. The emperor evidences this understanding of Wei’s motives in their final
interview, when Wei pledges money for the relief of typhoon victims on Taiwan.
Kangxi praises his “loyalty to the sovereign and love of the people” while musing
to himself that “he’s honoring our friendship (yiqi), but I doubt that there’s any
real love of the people involved” (2101, 2102).
25. The scene thus recapitulates an earlier conversation between Wei and the
Kangxi emperor. Enthusiastic over the emperor’s plan to dedicate a shrine to the
Ming loyalist Shi Kefa, Wei offers that “according to the storytellers, the greatest of
the ‘loyal subjects and righteous men’ were Lord Yue Fei for one and His Lordship

Notes to Pages 208–212 287

 Guan Di for another.” When he proposes that Kangxi dedicate shrines to these two
heroes as well, the emperor patiently explains that “Yue Fei’s foes were the Jin
troops. The Qing was originally called the Latter Jin; Jin is the same as Qing, and
the Jin troops are the same as Qing troops. We’re not going to concern ourselves
with a temple for Lord Yue” (1547–1548). The tales that constitute Wei’s stock of
learning have failed to equip him with what the emperor’s formal schooling has
provided, an understanding of recent events’ historical and ideological context.
26. Wei Xiaobao’s mangling of proverbs (chengyu) is perhaps the most char-
acteristic expression of his position in the cultural system—his illiteracy, his gleeful
willingness to (mis)appropriate, ape, and distort the cultural practices of his social
superiors. Nor is it by chance that the two proverbs he most frequently miscites—
niaosheng yutang for Yao Shun Yu Tang, and si ma nan zhui (“a dead horse cannot
overtake [a true man’s word]”) for si ma nan zhui (“a team of horses cannot over-
take [it]”)—refer respectively to enlightened kingship and to the code of yiqi, the
two imperatives between which he finds himself suspended. The fact that the
Kangxi emperor, for his part, has mastered the usage of Chinese proverbs is one
indication of his assimilation of Chinese literary culture in general. It also suggests
the imbalance of power between literate culture and the oral culture of the market-
place: while Wei’s appropriations of proverbs and other artifacts of “high” culture
are limited to comic misconstructions, the emperor’s accomplishments in literary
culture are matched by a successful study of Wei’s arts of vulgarity and invective.
27. See Jin Yong’s own notes on this point at 40 ff. and 232.
28. As an exposition of Wei’s attitude toward the crucial problem of Manchu
domination, a passage on page 624 is worth quoting at some length. A loyalist foe
of the Qing has just explained the secret of the scriptures and declared that “to
allow the Manchu barbarians to continue to rule the mountains and rivers of the
Han would be the ultimate crime”:

[Wei] thought to himself, “Not to have a chance to take those heaps of silver,
gold, and jewels on a spending spree—that would be the ultimate crime.” He
was quite young; he had heard from the mouths of his elders how the
Manchu troops had slaughtered the Han population, but he had not seen
these events himself. During these months in the palace, only the Empress
Dowager had treated him badly. . . . But everyone else, from the emperor on
down, had treated him really quite well, and he didn’t see the Manchus as all
that ruthless or cruel. He understood, of course, that if he hadn’t happened to
be favored by the emperor, these Manchu nobles and ministers would never
treat him with such warmth and respect. All in all, though, he’d met with
much more kindness than abuse, and so it was that he had no deep feelings
for “the shame of the nation” or “the vengeance of the race.”

288 Notes to Pages 213–217

 29. The association of the Scripture in Forty-Two Sections with the earlier novels’
martial arts manuals is further reinforced through a direct linkage with the charac-
ters and events of Royal Blood. At the point in the tale at which Wei Xiaobao has
collected several copies of the Scripture in Forty-Two Sections but not yet solved the
secret of the map they jointly contain, he receives assistance from a white-robed
nun who is in fact the Changping Princess, daughter of the last Ming emperor, one
of several characters from Royal Blood who reappear in The Deer and the Cauldron.
The nun /princess, puzzling over the volume in her hand, “suddenly remembered
how Yuan Chengzhi obtained the Secret Scroll of the Golden Serpent those many
years ago” (1037), and so discovers the map fragments concealed within the vol-
ume’s binding.
30. The final page of the novel demonstrates how Wei personally embodies
(inevitably in the mode of vulgar burlesque, rather than that of high principle) the
“Brotherhood of the Five Races” and, furthermore, how the apparent transcen-
dence of race through cultural unity is actually predicated upon the distinction of
the Chinese from the racial and cultural other. When Wei, returning to Yangzhou,
asks his mother who his father was, she replies that she has no idea which of her
many customers might have sired him. When he asks if her customers were all Han
Chinese, she admits that they included Han, Manchu, Mongolian, Muslim, and
Tibetan. “Wei Xiaobao asked, ‘There weren’t any foreign devils, were there?’ ‘Do
you think I’m some filthy slut?’ snapped Wei Chunfang. ‘You think I’d even enter-
tain foreign devils? Hot mama, if some Russian devil or hairy Dutchman ever
showed up at Vernal Delights, your old mom would beat him out the door with a
broom!’ Wei Xiaobao breathed a sigh of relief: ‘That’s all right then!’” (2120). Song
Weijie reads this passage in terms of Homi Bhabha’s notions of colonial hybrid-
ity, in Song Weijie, “Minzu guojia, geren shenfen, lishi jiyi,” 79–81.
31. Lin Baochun argues in his “Jin Yong xiaoshuo banben chakao,” 225–226,
that the original serialized versions of early episodes of the novel suggest, as orig-
inally conceived, Wei Xiaobao was to mature from ignorance to adventitious mas-
tery; the figure of the completely nonmartial Wei crystallized as the serialization
proceeded, and was then rewritten into the early episodes during revision. Ni
Kuang suggests this possibility, without offering specific textual evidence, in Wo
kan Jin Yong xiaoshuo, 75.
32. See Jin Yong, “Xiao xu: nan zhujue de liangzhong leixing.”
33. Wu Aiyi, Jin Yong xiaoshuo de nanzi, 1–5. My comparison here of Chen Jia-
luo, Chen Jinnan, Linghu Chong, and Wei Xiaobao is much indebted to Wu’s
remarks.
34. Heroes, 1620. Lin Linghan discusses this passage in “Wenhua gongye yu
wenhua rentong,” 245.

Notes to Pages 218–221 289

 35. Ye Hongsheng points out the excision of these formulae, in “‘Toutian
huanri’ de shi yu fei,” 336. For a discussion of the “storyteller’s manner” in tradi-
tional fiction, see Patrick Hanan, The Chinese Vernacular Story, 20–22 passim.
36. For a biography of Zha Shenxing (1650–1727), see Hummell, Eminent
Chinese of the Ch’ing Period, 21–22.
37. Chen Yuanyuan is absent from the original serialized version of Royal Blood
but appears as a character in the revised edition; besides strengthening the novel’s
portrait of the failure of Li Zicheng’s rebellion (as previously discussed), her
appearance serves to link the revised work more closely with The Deer and the Caul-
dron and its representation of history.
38. Liu Shaoming (Joseph S. M. Lau), “Jin Yong xiaoshuo yu qiaojiao,”444.
39. Lin Linghan, “Wenhua gongye yu wenhua rentong,” 242.
40. Song Weijie, “Minzu guojia, geren shenfen, lishi jiyi,” 81–82.
41. Lin Linghan, “Wenhua gongye yu wenhua rentong,” 235–236, 247–251.
42. Ibid., 233, citing Matei Calinescu, Faces of Modernity: Avant-garde, Deca-
dence, Kitsch (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977).
43. Wei muses to himself: “When she alternates singing and reciting like this,
it’s just like when the Yangzhou storytellers sing tanci [a prosimetric narrative
form]. And when I chime in, moving things along by swapping a few remarks back
and forth, I’m like the storyteller’s assistant. If the two of us were to set up shop
in a teahouse in Yangzhou, we’d turn the town upside down—that teahouse
would be packed so full it would split! I could make quite a name for myself if I
hitched my wagon to her star” (1314).

Chapter 9: Coming Home

1. Gold, “Go With Your Feelings: Hong Kong and Taiwanese Popular Culture
in Greater China,” 922–923.
2. For overviews of developments in popular fiction in the 1980s, see Kaikon-
nen, “From Knights to Nudes: Chinese Popular Literature since Mao”; Wang
Chungui, “Bashi niandai dalu wuxia xiaoshuo re”; Wang Chungui and Liu Bingze,
Zhongguo tongsu xiaoshuo gailun; and Wang Xianpei and Yu Kexun, eds., 80 niandai
Zhongguo tongsu wenxue.
3. Hu Wenbin, “Lun Zhongguo wuxia xiaoshuo zhi chuban ji qi yanjiu,” 229.
4. Feng Yu’nan, “Qiantan wuxia xiaoshuo zai dalu shengxing zhi yinsu,”
396–398.
5. Most histories of martial arts fiction briefly attribute its disappearance from
the mainland to “political reasons”; Yan Jiayan’s “Wenhua shengtai pingheng yu
wuxia xiaoshuo mingyun” gives a somewhat fuller (if polemic) account of postlib-
eration evaluations of the genre.

290 Notes to Pages 221–229

 6. See Perry Link, “Hand-Copied Entertainment Fiction from the Cultural
Revolution.”
7. See Hegel, “Making the Past Serve the Present.” Link, The Uses of Literature,
228, also notes evidence of the “strong and enduring appeal of xia stories in Chi-
nese culture” in such “surrogates” as modern military novels and the Soviet spy fic-
tion popular in the 1950s. Chen Ying’s Zhongguo yingxiong xiayi xiaoshuo tongshi
represents an unusual attempt to construct an integrated history of premodern and
postliberation “heroic and chivalric” fiction.
8. See Link’s “Introduction” to Roses and Thorns, 19–24, and his more detailed
sketch of the period 1976–1983 in The Uses of Literature, 15–36.
9. Link, Roses and Thorns, 24.
10. Wang Xianpei and Yu Keshun, 80 niandai Zhongguo tongsu wenxue (here-
after Wang and Yu), 182.
11. Marja Kaikonnen, “Stories and Legends,” 134. For a brief account of the
pingshu fad see Wang and Yu, 270–271.
12. Wang and Yu, 282, give the example of Gu Long’s Lu Xiaofeng, included
in a set of Gang-Tai wenxue yanjiu ziliao [Materials for the study of Hong Kong and
Taiwan literature] published by Zhongshan University in 1980 and widely circu-
lated among the university’s students.
13. Wang and Yu, 281 n. 1. Copies of Wulin I have examined contain the first
four chapters of Heroes in issues 1–8 (July 1981–May 1982). Wang and Yu state that
the novel serialized in Wulin was Liang Yusheng’s Baifa monü zhuan [The legend of
the white-haired demoness]. Jin Can gives the date of the Wulin serialization of
Heroes as October 1980 in his “Zhongguo dalu Jin Yong wuxia xiaoshuo yanjiu
qianshu,” 96.
14. Link, The Uses of Literature, 15, notes that Guangzhou editors were also the
first to experiment with the new freedoms in the realm of “serious” literature.
15. Jin Can, “Zhongguo dalu Jin Yong wuxia xiaoshuo yanjiu qianshu,” 96.
Other accounts are broadly similar: Wang and Yu, 281–282, describe a high tide in
1985 and a leveling off by 1987; Wang Chungui, “Bashi niandai dalu wuxia xiao-
shuo re,” 78, recounts that the martial arts fiction craze began on a nationwide
scale in 1984 and had reached even higher levels by 1987.
16. Kaikonnen, “Stories and Legends,” 148; Feng Yu’nan, “Qiantan wuxia xiao-
shuo zai dalu shengxing zhi yinsu,” 402.
17. Wang and Yu, 182. See also Feng Yu’nan’s own remarks in his “Qiantan
wuxia xiaoshuo zai dalu shengxing zhi yinsu,” 405, 410–413.
18. Jin Can, “Zhongguo dalu Jin Yong wuxia xiaoshuo yanjiu qianshu,” 96.
19. Wang Chungui, “Bashi niandai dalu wuxia xiaoshuo re,” 77.
20. Jin Can, “Zhongguo dalu Jin Yong wuxia xiaoshuo yanjiu qianshu,” 96.

Notes to Pages 229–231 291

 21. Jin Yong, “Jin Yong zuopin ji ‘Sanlian ban’ xu” [Preface to the Sanlian edi-
tion of The Collected Works of Jin Yong], 2.
22. Hu Wenbin, “Lun Zhongguo wuxia xiaoshuo zhi chuban ji qi yanjiu,”
238–257, gives a checklist of Hong Kong and Taiwan martial arts fiction reprinted
in the mainland (up through 1987) and personally seen by the author. Of the over
150 titles listed, 85 are attributed to Jin Yong, of which only 9 are titles from the
author’s oeuvre (although some may represent alternate titles for actual Jin Yong
texts).
23. Letter of November 12, 1970, reprinted in The Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils,
2129.
24. Letter of April 22, 1966, in ibid., 2127.
25. Letter of November 12, 1970, in ibid., 2129.
26. Letter of April 22, 1966, in ibid., 2128.
27. Shi Chengzhi, “Taoli chengxi nanshan hao: dao Chen Shixiang jiaoshou.”
An article in memory of Chen in the literary journal Chun wenxue also mentions
his fondness for Jin Yong’s fiction, but only in passing: see Ye Shan, “Bokelai: huai-
nian Chen Shixiang xiansheng,” 77.
28. E.g., Taipei: Yuanliu, 1990.
29. Wang Rongwen, “Jin Yong yanjiu de xin qidian,” 2. Yuanliu’s 1987 Jinxue
yanjiu ji [Collected studies in Jinology] was a reissue and extension of the Jinxue
yanjiu congshu [Collectanea of studies in Jinology] published by Yuanjing beginning
in 1980. In its latest incarnation, as Yuanliu’s Jin Yong chaguan [Jin Yong teahouse],
the series currently numbers nearly forty titles. Beijing’s Wenhua yishu chubanshe
now publishes the series on the mainland.
30. The minor exceptions include a note appended by C. T. Hsia (Hsia Tsi-an’s
brother) to his discussion of the figure of the swordsman in traditional fiction:
“Most aficionados consider the postwar period to be the golden age of wu-hsia
hsiao-shuo [wuxia xiaoshuo] and the Hong Kong author Chin Yung [Jin Yong] to be
the reigning practicioner of the genre. Many readers of cultivated taste compare
him seriously to Alexander Dumas, père.” C. T. Hsia, The Classic Chinese Novel, 331
n. 49.
31. Again, with exceptions. Lin I-Liang (Stephen C. Soong, b. 1919), for
instance, himself associated with the intellectual circles that included Chen and
Hsia, mentions these scholars’ esteem for Jin Yong in a 1969 interview with the
author independently published in 1972. Lin I-Liang, Wuge fangwen, 70.
32. The Guomindang government mounted several campaigns against mar-
tial arts fiction in general but maintained a particular ban against the works of Jin
Yong and Liang Yusheng because of their associations (early in Jin Yong’s case,
continuing in that of Liang Yusheng) with newspapers sponsored by the Commu-

292 Notes to Pages 231–234

nist Party. These policies stimulated the circulation of Jin Yong’s novels as contra-
band imports and in disguised pirate editions; see Lin Baochun, Jiegou Jin Yong,
201–206. When the general ban against Jin Yong’s work was rescinded, difficulties
remained with The Eagle-Shooting Heroes because of the title’s perceived reference
to the “eagle-shooting” (shediao) in a poem by Mao Zedong. Even distribution of
the novel under the revised title Damo yingxiong zhuan [Legend of the heroes of the
great desert] failed for some years to resolve the problem. See Shen Dengen, “Wo
yu Jin Yong xiaoshuo,” written during the midst of the controversy.
33. Quoted in Shen Dengen, “Wo yu Jin Yong xiaoshuo,” 214.
34. On the blurring of the distinction between “elite” and “popular” literature
in Taiwan’s newspaper supplements, see Weng Wenxin, “Cong fukan lianzai kan
wuxia de wenxue huodong.”
35. In his capacity as journalist and at the invitation of the ruling Nationalist
Party, Jin Yong had traveled to Taiwan in 1973. He published his account of his
travels and interviews in Zai Tai suo jian, suo wen, suo si. See also Leng Xia, Jin Yong
zhuan, 211–223.
36. Ni Kuang, Wo kan Jin Yong xiaoshuo, ii.
37. Chen Mo, “‘ Jinxue’ yinlun,” 10. It is noteworthy that one of the most
extended discussions of martial arts fiction produced outside of the Yuanjing series
during this period, and one of the most academically rigorous, takes a markedly
different view of the genre. Hou Jian, in his “Wuxia xiaoshuo lun,” confesses him-
self to be an avid reader of martial arts fiction, and names Jin Yong as his favorite
author. He grants that martial arts fiction is “literature” in the broad sense of being
a work of the imagination in the medium of the written word. “The mansion of lit-
erature has many rooms; not all of them, however, are on the same floor.” Unless
an extraordinary talent should appear, martial arts fiction is unlikely to escape the
contingent defects of careless workmanship and the more intrinsic generic defects
of escapism and encouragement of unhealthy spiritual tendencies. This judgment
obviously denies Jin Yong the “transcendence of the genre” that Chen Shih-hsiang
grants him.
38. Fan Zhihou, “Wuxia xiaoshuo chu deng xueshu diantang.”
39. For a general account of the conference see ibid. Many of the conference
papers, some in revised form, supplemented with additional articles and essays,
are collected in Liu Shaoming and Chen Yongming, eds., Wuxia xiaoshuo lun juan.
40. Jacques Pimpaneau, “Chinese Wu-hsia hsiao-shuo and Their Western
Counterparts,” 374.
41. Huang Weiliang, “Tongmeng ke du ci er xue wen: Jin Yong wuxia xiaoshuo
yuyan de chouyang fenxi.” Huang’s illustrative “translations” of several brief pas-
sages from Jin Yong’s novels into May Fourth–style prose (661–662) are delightful.

Notes to Pages 234–236 293

 42. Liu Shaoming, “Jin Yong xiaoshuo yu qiaojiao,” 434–465.
43. For the Ming Pao Monthly reports, see Fan Zhihou’s article and its compan-
ion piece, Kuang Jianxing’s “Tupo yu buzu.” For the conference papers see Liu and
Chen, eds., Wuxia xiaoshuo lun juan.
44. Wu Aiyi, Jin Yong xiaoshuo de nüzi and its three sequels.
45. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic
World Reversed,” 34.
46. Link, The Uses of Literature, 4–5, 13–14, passim, on “the socialist Chinese
literary system,” and 15–33 on the fluctuations of the literary “weather” over this
period. For a historical overview see also Hong Zicheng, Zhongguo dangdai wenxue
shi, 225–255.
47. For an overview of the course and major topics of the discussions of pop-
ular literature in the 1980s, see Wang and Yu, 62–86, and the invaluable bibliog-
raphy in Appendix 4 (696–714) of this same volume; also Wang Chungui, Zhong-
guo tongsu xiaoshuo gailun, 286–308.
48. Thus Yao Xueyin (b. 1910), author of the Maoist-era historical novel Li
Zicheng, writing in 1987 and quoted in Wang and Yu, 74: “In recent years [popu-
lar literature] has abandoned the socialist road, and with profit as its motive has
catered to readers through vulgarity and low taste. It consists primarily of filth,
slaughter, violence, superstition, oddities and absurdities, and has corrupted the
spirit of the masses. It is an amalgam of the dregs of colonial culture. . . . [and rep-
resents] a tide of rightist thought.”
49. On intellectuals’ responses to the popular literature craze, see Kaikkonen,
“Stories and Legends,” 154–158; on the vicissitudes of the élite during the 1980s
more generally, Jing Wang, High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in
Deng’s China.
50. Ding Jin, “Zhongguo dalu Jinxue lunzhu mulu (1985–1996),” 105, iden-
tifies Feng’s article as “an important early contribution to Jinology” and lists only
one earlier article published on the mainland: Zhang Fang, “Jin Yong xin wuxia
xiaoshuo chutan” [A preliminary investigation of Jin Yong’s new martial arts fic-
tion], Keshan shizhuan xuebao 1985 no. 4. I have not yet seen this latter article.
51. Yu Yingshi is part of the network of Jin Yong fans described in Shi Cheng-
zhi, “Taoli chengxi nanshan hao: dao Chen Shixiang jiaoshou,” 16–18, and pre-
sented the paper “Xia yu Zhongguo wenhua” at the Chinese University conference.
52. Liu Su (Luo Fu), “Jinse de Jin Yong,” 139. Other articles mentioning over-
seas Jinology include Zhang Xun, “Tai-Gang ‘Jinxue’ yipie,” and Qiu Xiaolong et al.,
“Jin Yong wuxia xiaoshuo sanren tan.” Liu Su’s article is the only one among these
to explicitly acknowledge a commercial motive behind the Yuanjing Jinology
series.

294 Notes to Pages 237–240

 53. These sketches are collected in Luo Fu, Nandou wenxing gao: Xianggang zuo-
jia jianying.
54. Zhang Peiheng, “Jin Yong wuxia xiaoshuo yu Yao Xueyin de Li Zicheng.”
55. This is similar to the argument that Yan Jiayan makes more explicitly in
his “Wenhua shengtai pingheng yu wuxia xiaoshuo mingyun.” It also anticipates
in some respects the position taken with regard to the novelist Wang Shuo, and
popular culture in general, by Wang Meng in his controversial “Duobi chonggao.”
56. He Ping, “Xiayi yingxiong de rong yu shuai: Jin Yong wuxia xiaoshuo de
wenhua jieshu,” 46.
57. Ibid., 55. Chen Pingyuan’s “Ye yu wuxia xiaoshuo jieyuan” [A fated affin-
ity with martial arts fiction], published in the same volume of Dushu as He Ping’s
article (pp. 56–61) and serving as a preface to his 1992 Qiangu wenren xiake meng,
strikes similar notes, though it deals with martial arts fiction as a whole rather
than Jin Yong’s novels in particular. In this essay the author recounts how he had
never understood the appeal of the genre until the summer and fall of 1989 when,
with time heavy on his hands, he began reading Jin Yong and others and learned
to appreciate their novels’ dreams of a righteous and powerful savior as expres-
sions of the helplessness against fate felt by all human beings, and especially keenly
by Chinese intellectuals in the twentieth century.
58. See Barmé’s remarks on the tour in In the Red, 179–181.
59. For an excellent case study, see Shuyu Kong, “Between a Rock and a Hard
Place: Chinese Literary Journals in the Cultural Marketplace.”
60. Barmé, In the Red, 283: “Kong-Tai [Hong Kong and Taiwan] investors were
not only interested in financing pop and alternative culture. Capital was also avail-
able for patriotic theme parks, film projects, and exhibitions. In particular, Hong
Kong businesspeople were investing in an accommodation with the Beijing author-
ities [in the lead-up to 1997], and in the process they became an integral part of
the cosmetic reconstruction of the face of Chinese socialism. Party culture was
thus enmeshed in a dynamic of being both the colonizer of imported and avant-
garde popular culture and also being colonized by it.”
61. For overviews of cultural and intellectual trends during the 1990s, see ibid.;
Liu Qingfeng, “The Topography of Intellectual Culture in 1990s Mainland China:
A Survey”; Qi Shuyu, Shichang jingji xia de Zhongguo wenxue yishu; and Jianying
Zha, China Pop.
62. Wang Meng, “Duobi chonggao.” For a discussion of Wang Meng’s activi-
ties during this period, including this essay, see Barmé, In the Red, 287–301.
63. On Wang Shuo and his work, see Barmé, In the Red, 62–98; Qi Shuyu,
Shichang jingji xia de Zhongguo wenxue yishu, 85–99; and Jing Wang, “Wang Shuo:
‘Pop Goes the Culture?’,” in High Culture Fever, 261–286.

Notes to Pages 240–243 295

 64. Jing Wang, High Culture Fever, 266.
65. The Jin Yong Academic Research Society (Jin Yong xueshu yanjiu hui),
established in Haining in the summer of 1996.
66. Wang Yichuan, ed., Ershi shiji Zhongguo wenxue dashi wenku: xiaoshuo juan.
On the anthology’s conception and aims, see the general preface, “Shiji de kuayue:
chongxin shenshi 20 shiji Zhongguo wenxue” [Straddling the century: a reevalua-
tion of 20th century Chinese literature], i–vi, and Wang Yichuan’s preface to the
fiction volumes, “Xiaoshuo Zhonguo” [Fictional China], i–vii.
67. Tian Li, “Jin Yong keneng dang dashi?”
68. Chen Liao, “Qie shuo ‘Wenxue Dashi.’” Peng Jingfeng, “Paipai zuo chi
guoguo? Ye shuo ‘Wenxue dashi’” is a response to Chen’s article, even more dis-
missive of the anthologists than he; Peng defends Shen Congwen against Chen’s
aspersions, but more fundamentally rejects the whole notion of rankings in liter-
ary history.
69. Yan Jiayan, “Yichang jingqiaoqiao de wenxue geming.”
70. Yan Jiayan’s essays on Jin Yong’s fiction are collected in Jin Yong xiaoshuo
lun gao.
71. The text of this speech is published as Jin Yong, “Jin Yong de Zhongguo
lishi guan.”
72. According to comments in Zeng Chufeng, “Jin Yong zhi zheng,” in an
untitled article by Jin Yongquan in Zhongguo qingnian bao, October 28, 1994, and
elsewhere; I have not seen a full text of this speech.
73. Yan Jiayan, “Da ‘Jujue Jin Yong.’”
74. Wang Xihua, “Ye shuo Jin Yong ‘deng tang.’”
75. See Chen Pingyuan’s remarks on the cultural politics of Beijing Univer-
sity’s recognition in “Literature High and Low,” 113–115.
76. By Taipei’s Yuanliu and, as Wentan xiasheng: Jin Yong zhuan [The divine
knight of the literary world: a biography of Jin Yong] by Guangzhou’s Guangdong
renmin chubanshe.
77. Guiguan gongzuoshi, Xia zhi dazhe: Jin Yong pingzhuan, 2.
78. Ibid., 2–3.
79. For an example of a contrary voice, see the critique of Jin Yong’s remarks
on freedom of the press in the mainland and Hong Kong in Hu Ping, “Jin Yong
jianghua zixiang maodun.”

Chapter 10: Jin Yong at the Century’s End

1. Widely reprinted, including in Liao Kebin, ed., Jin Yong xiaoshuo lunzheng ji,
3–7 (page citations refer to this edition), and Wang Shuo, Wuzhi zhe wuwei,
73–78.

296 Notes to Pages 243–250

 2. The precise meaning of su here is indefinite—deliberately, one presumes.
The monosyllable equally suggests tongsu, “vernacular” or “popular”; yongsu,
“crass” or “vulgar”; and meisu, which Barmé (In the Red, 281ff.) renders as “kow-
towing to the vulgar.”
3. Reprinted in Liao Kebin, Jin Yong xiaoshuo lunzheng ji, 8–9.
4. Mencius IV.1.21: “Mencius said, ‘There is unexpected praise; equally, there
is perfectionist criticism.’” Mencius, trans. Joseph Lau, 155.
5. Reprinted in Liao Kebin, Jin Yong xiaoshuo lunzheng ji, 43–46. See also the
essays reprinted on pp. 38–42 and 47–51 of this collection.
6. Zhang Feng, ed., Wang Shuo tiaozhan Jin Yong.
7. A Beijing chenbao article of November 11, 1999, reproduced by Sina.com at
http://dailynews.sina.com.cn/culture/1999-11-11/30734.html (accessed December
21, 1999), cites “a certain website’s” survey of 3000 individuals, of whom 56 per-
cent considered Wang Shuo’s remarks groundless and excessive, 7 percent expressed
agreement, and the remainder declined to offer an opinion.
8. Liao Kebin’s introduction, Jin Yong xiaoshuo lunzheng ji, vi.
9. This position maintained a steady presence (and an immunity to appeals
for relevance and logical consistency) in the ensuing debate, represented most
prominently in one of the academy’s first entries into the fray, the article by Yuan
Liangjun (a researcher at the Academy of Social Sciences) entitled “Zai shuo yasu:
yi Jin Yong wei li” [More on the elite and the popular: Jin Yong as an example],
reprinted in Liao Kebin, Jin Yong xiaoshuo lunzheng ji, 70–75. Yuan asserts that
“martial arts fiction’s [intrinsically] low grade and low caliber are in the end Mr.
Jin Yong’s fatal flaws”; also that “literary value as such has always stood in inverse
proportion to an author’s wealth and social status.” For a broader view of the neo-
conservative response to popular culture in the 1990s, see Geremie R. Barmé,
“Kowtowing to the Vulgar,” in In the Red, 281–315.
10. See for instance Ge Hongbing, “Butong wenxue guannian de pengzhuang:
lun Jin Yong yu Wang Shuo zhi zheng” [A collision between different literary views:
on the dispute between Jin Yong and Wang Shuo], in Liao Kebin, Jin Yong xiaoshuo
lunzheng ji, 127–128: “Jin Yong accommodates the philistine (yongsu) tastes of the
masses and intellectuals by using an ostensibly elevated approach, while Wang
Shuo does exactly the opposite, using an ostensibly philistine approach to chal-
lenge the masses’ and the intellectuals’ philistine tastes.”
11. As quoted in Chen Xin, “Wang Shuo: Wo wuyi dui Jin Yong renshen
gongji,” in Liao Kebin, Jin Yong xiaoshuo lunzheng ji, 15–16.
12. Thus Ge Hongbing in his “Butong wenxue guannian de pengzhuang”:
“From the perspective of the influence of Hong Kong literary thought and style on
mainland literature, Jin Yong’s transition from not being recognized by the main-

Notes to Pages 251–255 297

 stream literary system to being praised as a master is an extremely significant token.
It signifies southern commercial culture’s infiltration of the cultural system of the
central plains: a leisure-style aesthetic culture, which is inseparably linked with the
ancient Chinese tradition and at the same time even more closely linked with
modern commercial culture, has begun to travel north from Hong Kong island to
the central plains and to be accepted by mainland culture.” Liao Kebin, Jin Yong
xiaoshuo lunzheng ji, 124.
13. Jin Yong, “Zhejiang Gang Tai de zuojia: Jin Yong huiying Wang Shuo,” in
ibid., 10–14.
14. The title of an article published in Guangzhou ribao, November 4, 1999,
and reprinted in Zhang Feng, Wang Shuo tiaozhan Jin Yong, 43–45.
15. For the latter terms in each pair, see Song Yuan et al., “Ta zou ta de lu, wo
zou wo de lu: Jin Yong Shanghai tan Wang Shuo,” in Liao Kebin, Jin Yong xiaoshuo
lunzheng ji, 17–18.
16. Each reveals an appreciation of his opposite’s role as well as of his own.
Jin Yong remarks in a phone interview that he does not take Wang Shuo’s out-
spokenness personally, since a certain exaggeration is essential to Wang Shuo’s
style; see Wan Runlong, “Jin Yong: Wo yu Wang Shuo meiyou geren enyuan.” Wang
Shuo in turn remarks on the “poise” (fengdu) of Jin Yong’s response: “I can’t imag-
ine that he would respond any differently.” See Zhang Ying, “Wang Shuo: Jin Yong
he tongsu xiaoshuo,” in Liao Kebin, Jin Yong xiaoshuo lunzheng ji, 19–20.
17. Several critics have pointed out the affinity between Wei Xiaobao and Wang
Shuo’s hoodlums: see John Minford, “Translator’s Introduction” to Louis Cha, “The
Deer and the Cauldron: The Adventures of a Chinese Trickster,” especially pp. 10–12
and notes 28–30; and Geremie R. Barmé, “Trinket, A Common Property.”
18. Hong Zicheng both notes this model and cautions against the oversimpli-
fications it embodies: Zhongguo dangdai wenxue shi, 386.
19. See for example Zhou Wei, “Pinglun: Wang Shuo de jiaosheng tingqilai
shengsi lijie.”
20. See the selection in Tan Fei and Lin Yongbing, “Jia Ping’ao, Liu Xinwu
deng mingjia pingdian ‘Wang Shuo feidao.’”
21. Ge Hongbing, in Ge Hongbing et al., “Jin Yong: bei baogao de ‘dashi,’” in
Liao Kebin, 78. For a more extended discussion of these issues see also Chen Hong
and Sun Yongjin, “Shiji huishou: Guanyu Jin Yong zuopin jingdianhua ji qita.”
22. Zhang Jiong et al., eds., Zhonghua wenxue tongshi.
23. Wang Guangdong in Xu Junxi et al., “Piping, you hua haohao shuo,” in
Liao Kebin, Jin Yong xiaoshuo lunzheng ji, 118.
24. Wang Xiaoming in ibid., 120–121.
25. Bruce Gilley, “King vs. Commoner,” 36.

298 Notes to Pages 255–259

 26. For examples, see Liao Kebin, Jin Yong xiaoshuo lunzheng ji, 329–333, and
Zhang Feng, passim. Taiwan, somewhat ahead of the mainland in the develop-
ment and social penetration of Internet culture, has taken the lead as well in the
co-optation of fan culture by the commercial media. Yuanliu, Jin Yong’s Taiwan
publisher, runs one of the major Jin Yong–oriented Web sites (http://jinyong.ylib
.com.tw), and in its Jin Yong Teahouse series has published two volumes based
largely on Internet-generated material: Jinmi liaoliao tian [Jin Yong fan chat], vols.
1 and 2.
27. On fan culture’s internal economy and its relation to Bourdieu’s model of
the cultural field, see John Fiske, “The Cultural Economy of Fandom.”

Notes to Pages 259–260 299

 Select Glossary of
Chinese Characters

In order to include as many unfamiliar names and terms as possible in this glos-
sary, I have economized by omitting a number of more commonly known items
(Hangzhou, Deng Xiaoping, Lu Xun, Qing dynasty, Kangxi, etc.). With the excep-
tion of Jin Yong and the titles of his novels, authors and literary works for which
characters are supplied in the bibliography are also omitted from this list.
Terms are romanized by Hanyu pinyin. In a few cases where published
sources employ an alternate romanization, that spelling is given precedence and
the Hanyu pinyin is placed in parentheses following the Chinese characters.

Anran xiaohun zhang ï6·BŒ Bujie 

Bai YuÈ }½ Buke Bujie ï 
Baifa monuÈ zhuan }îTs³ Buxiaosheng –
baiguan yeshi ˜Îò caizi jiaren MPsº
Baihe quan }´ó Canningren ²çº
Baimao nuÈ }Ûs Cao Dahua ùTï
Baimei Daoren } Sº Cao Mei ù«
Ban xialiu shehui J A> Caomang longshe zhuan I½Ç³
Bao Xiruo Ü1 Ceng Zhuoyun ‘Sò
Baxian nao Xianggang kÙ'™/ Changcheng huabao wÎk1
Bei Jia  Chaoran bao 61
bi § Chen Chen sñ
biaoju â@ Chen Guang sI
Bixue jian §@ Chen Jialuo s¶
Bixue Jinshe jian §@ÑǍ Chen Jin sÁ
Bo Ya /Y Chen Jinnan sÑW
bu yu zhi yu he qiu quan zhi hui ^K Chen Kaige sñL
}ŒBhKÀ Chen Kefu sK+

301
 Chen Shih-hsiang sd (Chen Dongnan ribao qWå1
Shixiang) Dongnanya zhoukan qWžh
Chen Wentong s‡q Du Guangting \I­
Chen Xiang ji shuju sXø@ Duan Zhixing µz
Chen Xiazi sP Duanjing hou yuÈlu ïlž
Chen Xuanfeng s„¨ Dugu jiu jian hd]
Chen Xuanwen sb‡ Dugu Qiubai hdBW
Chen Yuanyuan s duikai ‹
Chen Zude sV· ``Dushi xiao jingtou'' ýá-
Cheng Yuanyu diansi dai shang qian, Shiyi ErnuÈ yingxiong zhuan Rsñij
niang Yungang zong tan xia C‰ Ershi shiji Zhongguo wenxue dashi wenku
—†ã"
A ò¡1Zà ŒA - ‡x'+‡«
chengyu ž fakan ci | ^
chuanqi ³G Fang De ¹·
chushi ú Fang Shiyu ¹‰
ci ^ Fang Shiyu da leitai ¹‰SÂð
Cike liezhuan :¢³ Fang Shiyu xia Nanyang ¹‰ W
Cuihua à± Fang Yanfen ³w¬
Cuiwen Louzhu ‡; fanhua Íï
``Da gongyuan'' 'l Feihu waizhuan Ûг
Da Ming yinglie zhuan 'ñȳ Feng Jicai ®eM
da zhongyuan xingtai '-ŸbK Feng Menglong ®"
Dagong bao 'l1 Feng Qiyong ®v¸
Dagong shuju 'lø@ Feng Yu'nan ®²`
Dahua Xiyouji 'qJ fengdu ¨¦
Dai Zhaoyu 4-‡ fukan o
``Dajia tan'' '¶Ç Gang-Tai /ð
Damo yingxiong zhuan ' ñij Gao Dexiong Ø·Ä
Dangkou zhi iÇ× Gao Xiaofeng Øð
danxing ben ®L, Gong Zhuxin ®ùÃ
Daode jing S·“ Gongshang ribao åFå1
daomao anran SŒ¸6 Gongshang wanbao åFZ1
Daquan Didan '0½ gongzheng, shanliang, huopo, meili
Deng Lijun '— lc
„o
;Q
Ž—
Deng Yugong '½l Gu Long ä
Dianfu Jin Yong [†Ñ¸ Gu Mingdao gS
dianmai Þ Gu Yanwu gŽf
dianxing x‹ Guailun lianpian *Ö#Ç
Dong Wu faxueyuan q3Õxb Guan Di Ü
Dongfang Bubai q¹ W Guangdong shangbao ãqF1

302 Glossary of Chinese Characters

Guangdong yingxiong Yuan Manzi: Yuan Hong Xiguan *™˜
Chonghuan pingzhuan ãqñÄ Honghuahui ±
;PeU³ Honghuahui qunxiong nao Xiangjiang
Guangling san ãuc ±¤Ä'™_
Guangpai wuxia xiaoshuo ã>fઠHongluÈ ribao  å1
``Guanyu wuxia xiaoshuo de jige Hongmaoguo Û
wenti'' ܼf઄~ OL Hongxian Ú
gujin Zhongwai, kongqian jue hou äÊ Hongxue x
-zMUŒ Hou Chaozong ¯—
Gumu pai ä“> Hsia Tsi-an ߉ (Xia Ji'an)
Guo Fu í™ Hu An ýµ
Guo Jing íV Hu Bingwen áɇ
Guo Sheng íÛ Hu Fei áS
Guo Xiang íD Hu Juren áʺ
Guo Xiaotian í/) Hu Peng ál
guominxing ' Hu Wenhu á‡N
guoshu S Hua Qiao ï¬
guoshu heyan S huaben q,
guoxue x Huang Feihong shifu zhuan ÃÛ;+
guoyu ž ³
Gushu hanqie ji ä Ò Huang Feihong zhengzhuan ÃÛ;c³
Guxing xuelei d@Ú Huang Guliu Ã7ó
Haiguang wenyi wI‡Ý Huang Hanxi Ã"™
Haijiao Liangshanbo wҁqÊ Huang Jian Ãe
Hanfeizi Ó^P Huang Lizhou ÃÎ2
Hanren de shu "º„ø Huang Rong ÃÉ
hao ë Huang Shan Ãq
haohan }" Huang Taiji ‡*u
He Hongyao Uå Huang Tianshi Ã)ó
He Tieshou U5K Huang Yaoshi Ãå+
He Wenfa U‡Õ Huang Yulang ÉÎ
He Zhiwen Uׇ Huang Zhanming ÃUô
heding ben , Huang Zongxi ײ
Heifeng shuangsha ѨÙ^ Huanqiu bao °1
Heng Shan aq Huanzhu Louzhu „à;
Hengshan Fq Huaqiao ribao ïÑå1
Hong * Huaren shehui ïº>
Hong Qigong *l Huaren yebao ïº1
Hong quan dashi Tieqiao San *ó'+ Huashan ïq
5K Huashan lunjian ïq֍

Glossary of Chinese Characters 303

 Huashangbao ïF1 Jinmen daxia Huo Yuanjia %€'à
Huazi ribao ïWå1 C2
huigui Þx Jinshe Langjun ÑÇÎ
Huo Qingtong RP Jinshe miji ÑÇU
Huoshao Hongliansi kÒîú Jinxue Ñx
Huosiren mu ;{º“ Jinxue yanjiu congshu Ñxvâø
Jia Dao Èö Jinxue yanjiu ji ÑxvÆ
Jiang Diedie _‹‹ jiupai >
jiang yiqi ©# Jiuyin zhenjing ]p“
Jiang Yunxing ÜòL jizhang shi 3
jianghu _V Jueqing gu UÅ7
Jianghu qixia zhuan _VGà³ juezhan z0
Jiangnan qi guai _W* Junzi jian P
jiangshan _q Kangle tiyu hui ·Ô²
jianke ¢ Kanshangqu hen mei »ˆŽ
Jianquan taiji she QÉ*u> Keji chubanshe ÑÊúH>
``Jiating'' ¶­ Kong Dong Ò
Jie Ke ‘K Kongming quan zó
jie xian feng jin Ù÷Ê Kuihua baodian N±öx
Jigong xinzhuan ßl°³ Lan Fenghuang Íóð
Jigong zhuan ßl³ Lao wantong
å
Jin Shengtan ÑV Laopo huangdi
F‡
Jin Yong Ѹ Lei Laohu ÷
N
Jin Yong chaguan Ѹ6( Lei Weipo ÷Ra
``Jin Yong xinxiang'' Ѹᱠleitai Âð
Jin Yong xueshu yanjiu hui ѸxS Leizhu Louzhu ÷à;
v li 
Jin Yong zuopin ji Ѹ\ÁÆ Li Jing NV
Jindai xiayi yingxiong zhuan Ñãà© Li Kui N5
ñij Li Liming Η
Jing Ke Jû Li Lin N
Jing Ke ci Qin wang Jû:æ‹ Li Mochou N«

jingdianhua “x Li Ping N
Jingji La “ É Li Shimin N
Jingji riji “ å Li Shoumin Ný
Jingkang V· Li Yan N©
Jingshi tongyan f li yi zhi bang ®©K¦
Jinjian diaoling эpÎ Li Yuanzhi N ·
Jinling chunmeng Ñu%" Li Zhiqing N×
Jinlun Fawang Ñ*Ջ Li Zicheng Nê

304 Glossary of Chinese Characters

Liancheng jue #Î# Ma Rongcheng ¬®
Liang Houfu š+ Mai Xuan ¥Ë
Liang Qichao _ Mao Shiba Ak
Liang Yongheng 8¨ Mei Chaofeng ¨
Liang Yusheng ½ meisu š×
liangong IŸ Miao ×
Liangshan po qÊ Miao Renfeng ׺ó
Lianhe bao o1 Miao Xian ×o
Liaozhai zhiyi JKŒp ``Ming bao julebu'' 1ñè
Libailiu pai ®Üm> Ming bao wanbao 1Z1
Libao Ë1 Ming bao yuekan 1
Lichunyuan —%b ``Ming bao zhi you'' 1KË
Lin Haifeng —wð Ming bao zhoukan 11
Lin Huan —a Ming Ho ³ (Minghe)
Lin Pingzhi —sK Ming Pao 1 (Ming bao)
Lin Shirong —® Minghe chuangwenshe gongsi ³
Lin Zhaoying —ñ u‡>lø
Ling Mengchu ÌÛ Minghe she chuban youxian gongsi
Linghu Chong äЖ ³>úH Plø
Liu Junxiang ‰ûd minjian “
Liu Wenying ó^¯ Mo jiao TY
Liuhu xiayin óVà± Mou gongguan sanji Ðl(c
longhu dou N% Mou Songting _~­
Longhu dou jinghua N%¬ï Mu Gaofeng (Øð
Lu x Mu Renqing Fº
LuÈ Dongbin xiafan BÓ á muwu (K
Lu Feiqing xòR Nanfeng chubanshe W¨úH>
Lu Junyi ìÊ© Nangong Bo W®
LuÈ Liuliang BYo Nanlai zuojia W†\¶
LuÈ Lun ¶+ Nanyang shangbao W F1
Lu Xiaofeng x+¨ neidi g0
Luding gong l Ni Kuang *!
Luding ji  Nianfo Shanren õ[qº
Ludingshan q niaosheng yutang åZo
luÈlin — Nie Yinniang v±
Luo Feng ¨ Nie Yunlan vòP
Luo Fu Z nuÈxia sà
Luo Guanxi « Ouyang Feng P}Ò
Luo Guanzhong «- Pai'an jing qi ÍHZG
Ma Hanyue ¬"½ Pan Yuesheng Xµ

Glossary of Chinese Characters 305

 Pei Xing ôv Sanlian shudian oø—
Ping Ke sï shangpinxing FÁ'
pingdian Ux shanlin q—
pingshu Uø Shaolin —
Pinguo ribao œå1 Shaolin xiao yingxiong —ñÄ
Pingzong xiaying lu dàq Shaolin yingxiong xuezhan ji —ñÄ
pipa 56 @0
Pixie jianfa ŸªÕ Shediao yingxiong yan pñÄ´
Qi J Shediao yingxiong zhuan pñij
Qi jian xia Tianshan  )q Shen bao 31
Qianlong huang you Jiangnan ~†‡J Shen Baoxin ˆö°
_W Shenbian ^®
Qianlong xunxing Jiangnan ji ~†áx Shendiao xialuÈ ^pà¶
_W Shengchao ding sheng wannian qing V
Qianqiu wanzai, yitong jianghu CË Û,tR()
, q_V Shenlong jiao ^Y
Qianqiu wanzai, yong wei fufu CË Shenlongdao ^ö
, 8º+f Shenxing baibian ^L~Š
qie shuo ª sheping >U
qigong #Ÿ Shi ji ò
qin 4 Shi Naian ½µ
qing Å shi wei zhi ji zhe si ëºåñ{
qinghua ű Shi Yukun ó‰
Qiong xiang ®÷ Shier jinqian biao AŒÑ"â
Qiu Chuji U_ Shigougong ziji ó×lê
Qiu Qianren ØCÞ Shishuo xinyu ª°ž
Qiuran ke zhuan o Shisui Վ
Quanzhen h Shu shan jianxia zhuan qà³
Ren Woxing û' Shuihu houzhuan 4øŒ³
ren zei zuo fu Ê\6 Shuihu zhuan 4ø³
Ren Zhenhan û" Shujian enchou lu øiÇ
Renzha º# Shujian enchou lu xuji øiÇŒÆ
Riyue shenjiao å^Y Shujian jiangshan ø_q
Rong Xiaoyi ¹ Shuo jian ª
Ru  Shuo Yue quan zhuan ª³h³
rushi e ``Shuodi'' ª0
San Su  ``Shuoyue'' ª
San xia wu yi à”© si da su Û'×
Sanfa Sheng cî si ma nan zhui ß({)¬ãý
sanjidi Ê, sikai ۋ

306 Glossary of Chinese Characters

Sing pao 1 (Cheng bao) Wan e yin wei shou ,á뺖
Sishier zhang jing ÛAŒà“ Wang Baoxiang ‹Fe
Song Jiang ‹_ Wang Chongyang ‹Í}
Song Yu ‹‰ Wang Dulu ‹¦ì
Songshan iq Wang Guangdong ‹Iq
su × Wang Sima ‹ø¬
Su Dongpo qa Wang Xiangqin ‹™4
Suxin jian Í Wang Xiaoming ‹É
Ta si zai di er ci y{(,Œ! Wang Yun ò
taiji quan *uó Wannian qing qicai xinzhuan ,t
Taiping shan *sq GM°³
Taishan ðq Wanyan Honglie ŒO*È
Taishan ðq wei min wei guo, xia zhi da zhe º
Taishan jianshen xueyuan ðqe« º àK'
xb Wei Xiaobao Ëö
``Tanfeng'' Ǩ Wei Xiaobao fengdu Ëö¨¦
Tang Ren º weiqi Ë
Tanhai deng ¢wÈ wen ‡
``Tantian'' Ç) wen ding O
Taohua dao C±ö Wen Qing «R
ti Tian xing dao ÿ)LS Wen Qingqing «RR
Tianchi guaixia )`*à Wen Tailai ‡ð†
Tiandihui )0 wenchang ‡<
``Tianfang yetan'' )¹Z wengai ‡
Tianguang bao )I1 Wenhui bao ‡/1
Tianguo yingxiong ) ñÄ Wenkang ‡·
``Tianxia shi'' ) ‹ wenyi ‡Ý
tianxia taiping ) *s Wo Foshanren [qº
Tiong Hiew King 5É (Zhang Wohu canglong åNύ
Xiaoqing) Wolong Sheng å
Tong Yanzhi _oK Woshi Shanren /qº
Tongchidao ö wu f
tongren bao Á1 Wu du ”9
tongsu × wu fa wu tian !Õ(î)!)
tongsu re ×± Wu Gongyi 3l
tongsu wenxue ׇx Wu Hao zhi jian jK
tongsu xiaoshuo ת Wu Jianquan 3QÉ
Tuo Lei Ö÷ Wu Meicun 3 Q
waisheng baozhi 
1 wu qiao bu cheng shu !ç ø
waishengren 
º Wu Quanyou 3hQ

Glossary of Chinese Characters 307

 Wu Woyao 3ƒ/ xiaobao 1
Wu Yue chunqiu 3Š%Ë xiaoren º
Wu Zhaozhong 3‡~ Xiaosheng Xing Gao ÓØ
Wu Zhirong 3K® ``Xiaoshuo mi'' ª
Wuchen !u ``Xiaoshuo tiandi'' ª)0
Wudang fv Xiaqiu zhuan f³
wulin f— ``Xiawu chazuo'' H6§
Wumei ”š xiayi gongan xiaoshuo à©lHª
Wushi chubanshe fòúH> xiayi jingshen ੾^
``Wushu sancao'' fScx xie ª
Wushu zazhi fS܌ xiezi TP
wutai ð xin ganjue pai °º>
wuwei !º Xin Jiaxuan ›<Ò
``Wuxia mingzhu jingxuan'' fà W ``Xin leyuan'' °
¾x Xin Mazai °¬Ô
wuxia xiaoshuo fઠXin Qiji ›Ä¾
Wuxia yu lishi fàwò Xin Sanguo yanyi ° ©
wuxue dashi, Wulin mengzhu fx Xin shitou ji °ó-
'+
f—ß; Xin wanbao °Z1
Wuyue ”³ Xin Yan Ão
Xi Kang G· Xingdao ribao öå1
xia à Xingdao wanbao öZ1
Xia Bo / Xingming ribao å1
Xia Yi  Xingzhou heihu 2ÑN
xiahai w Xingzuo §
Xiang Kairan 76 Xinhuayuan yezonghui °±=
Xiang Wentian O) xinpai wuxia xiaoshuo °>fàª
Xianggang shangbao ™/F1 Xinsheng wanbao °Z1
Xianggang shibao ™/B1 Xixing dafa 8'Õ
Xianggang xiaojie riji ™/Ðå xiyinli 8›
Xianggangren ™/º Xu Kairu 1ñ‚
Xiangwei long ÿ> Xu Tianhong )
Xiangwei she ÿ>Ç Xueshan feihu êqÛÐ
Xiangxiang gongzhu ™™l; Xunhuan ribao ª°å1
Xiangyang D} Yan Danzi Õ9P
xianuÈ às Yan Qing ÕR
xiao + Yan Qingshu ´v
Xiao Feng mð Yang Daming J'
Xiao LongnuÈ s Yang Guo JN
Xiaoao jianghu ²_V Yang Kang J·

308 Glossary of Chinese Characters

Yang Luchan J2ì ``Yuanyuan qu'' ò
Yang Mei Ú Yue Buqun ³ ¤
Yang Pengju Jl Yue Chuan ³Ý
Yang Tiexin J5Ã Yue Fei ³Û
Yang Zaixing J Yue nuÈ Šs
``Yanlin'' — Yugong bao ½l1
Yao Fulan Ú¥- yulexing '
Yao Shun Yu Tang /¹o Yumian hu ‰bÐ
Yao Xueyin Úê Yun Jun ò
yasu Å× Yunlei chu nao yezonghui ò~'
Ye Chucang IZ– =
Ye Qin I YunuÈ xinjing ‰sÓ
Ye Xiaofeng Ió Zha Liangyong åoÞ
Yema ά Zha Shenxing åNL
yi © Zhai Gong Kl
yi wenhua qijia de jufu å‡w¶„ Zhang Chaotang 5
èÌ Zhang Henshui 5h4
Yilin 3 Zhang Kuoqiang 5ô7
yingxiong ñÄ Zhang Menghuan 5"„
Yingying ÈÈ Zhang Wenbing 5‡³
Yingzhua wang ù*‹ Zhang Wuji 5!Ì
yiqi ©# Zhang Yimou 5Ý
Yitian tulong ji )` Zhang Yufeng 5èð
yitian wan xiaoshuo )Œª zhanghui xiaoshuo àÞª
yongsu ¸× zhanqie bu biao « h
You Cao }I Zhao Huanting ™e­
``You ganqing de wuxia pian'' Å Zhao Taizu qian li song Jingniang ™*V
„fàG CÌ
¬
``Youxia lie zhuan'' 8à³ Zhao Zifan ™ËC
Yu Canghai YÄw Zhenben Shandong xiangma quanzhuan
Yu Fei ŽÛ ,qqÿ¬h³
Yu Jiaolong ‰ß zheng c
Yu Rang k“ zheng 
Yu Wanting Ž,­ Zheng Chenggong -Ÿ
Yu Yingshi YñB Zheng Guangong -«l
Yu Yutong YZ Zheng Zhenduo -/8
Yuan Chengzhi × Zheng Zhengyin -Ià
Yuan Chonghuan e zhi ji åñ
Yuan Jiao Ê Zhi qu Weihushan zÖ
Nq
yuanyang hudie pai &tv> zhiguai ×*

Glossary of Chinese Characters 309

 Zhishan ó„ zhongyi à©
Zhishan san you Nanyue ji ó„ J Zhongyi Xiangren à© º
WŠ Zhou Botong h/
zhong à Zhou Qi hº
Zhong Ziqi ~P Zhou Riqing håR
zhongdingben B, Zhu Bajie you Xianggang lkJ™/
Zhongguo qingnian bao - Rt1 Zhu jian D
Zhongguo ribao - å1 zhu lu 
Zhongguo shibao - B1 Zhu Yuzhai 1K
Zhongguo zhi wushi dao - KfëS Zhuangzi ŠP
Zhonghua minzu -ïÏ Zhuge Liang ø[®
zhongli -Ë Zhuo Wenjun S‡
Zhonglian -o Zuo Lengchan æ·ª
Zhongnanshan BWq

310 Glossary of Chinese Characters

 Bibliography

Jin Yong zuopin ji Ѹ\ÁÆ [The collected works of Jin Yong]

Jin Yong's works of martial arts fiction are listed below in the order in which they
appear in the 36-volume Jin Yong zuopin ji published by Ming Ho Publica-
tions in Hong Kong. Following the volume numbers within the set are
the title in Hanyu pinyin; the title in Chinese characters; (in brackets) the
English title provided by the publisher; (in parentheses) the abbreviated or
alternate title (if any) used in the body of this study; and the copyright date
of the Ming Ho revised edition. Also provided are notes on the original
serialization, other contents of the volumes in question, and published
English translations.

Volumes 1±2: Shujian enchou lu øiÇ [Book and Sword, Gratitude and Re-
venge] (Book and Sword); (1975.
Serialized in Xin wanbao, February 8, 1955±September 5, 1956.
The Book and the Sword. Translated by Graham Earnshaw. Hong Kong: Ox-
ford University Press, 2004.

Volumes 3±4: Bixue jian §@ [The Sword Stained with Royal Blood] (Royal
Blood); (1975.
Serialized in Xianggang shangbao, January 1, 1956±December 31, 1956.
Volume 4 also includes Yuan Chonghuan pingzhuan eU³ [A critical
biography of Yuan Chonghuan], originally serialized in Ming Pao, May
23±June 28, 1975, as Guangdong yingxiong Yuan Manzi: Yuan Chonghuan
pingzhuan ãqñā;PeU³ [The Guangdong hero: Yuan
the Barbarian].

311
 Volumes 5±8: Shediao yingxiong zhuan pñij [The Eagle-Shooting Heroes]
(Heroes); (1978.
Serialized in Xianggang shangbao, January 1, 1957±May 19, 1959.

Volumes 9±12: Shendiao xialuÈ ^pàB [The Giant Eagle and its Companion]
(Companion); (1976.
Serialized in Ming Pao, May 20, 1959±July 5, 1961.

Volume 13: Xueshan feihu êqÛÐ [Flying Fox on Snowy Mountain] (Flying Fox);
(1976.
Serialized in Xin wanbao, February 9, 1959±June 18, 1959.
Flying Fox of Snowy Mountain. Translated by Robin Wu. In four installments
in Bridge, a magazine from the Asian-American Resource Center (New
York), 1972.
Jin Yong. Fox Volant of the Snowy Mountain. Translated by Olivia Mok. Hong
Kong: Chinese University Press, 1993.
Volume 13 also includes Baima xiao xifeng }¬/¨ [The white horse
neighs in the western wind] and Yuanyang dao & [Mandarin duck
blades], both serialized in Ming Pao, 1961.

Volumes 14±15: Feihu waizhuan Ûг [The Young Flying Fox]; (1976.
Serialized in Wuxia yu lishi magazine, 1960±1961.

Volumes 16±19: Yitian tulong ji )` [The Heaven Sword and the Dragon
Sabre] (Dragon Sabre); (1976.
Serialized in Ming Pao, July 6, 1961±September 2, 1963.

Volume 20: Liancheng jue #Î# [A Deadly Secret]; (1978.

Serialized in Dongnanya zhoukan, 1963, under the title Suxin jian Í.

Volumes 21±25: Tianlong babu )kè [The Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils] (Semi-
Devils); (1978.
Serialized in Ming Pao, September 3, 1963±May 27, 1966.

Volumes 26±27: Xiake xing à¢L [Ode to Gallantry]; (1977.

Serialized in Ming Pao, June 11, 1966±April 19, 1967.
Volume 27 also includes YuenuÈ jian Šs [Sword of the Yue maiden] and
Sanshisan xiake tu A ࢠ[Illustrations of the thirty-three swords-
men], originally published in Ming bao wanbao, January±February,
1970.

312 Bibliography
Volumes 28±31: Xiaoao jianghu ²_V [The Smiling, Proud Wanderer] (Wan-
derer); (1978.
Serialized in Ming Pao, April 20, 1967±October 12, 1969.

Volumes 32±36: Luding ji  [The Duke of the Mount Deer] (The Deer and the
Cauldron); (1981.
Serialized in Ming Pao, October 24, 1969±September 23, 1972.
The Deer and the Cauldron. Translated by John Minford. 3 vols. Hong Kong:
Oxford University Press, 1997±2003.

Works Cited
The body of secondary literature on martial arts fiction is large, and growing
rapidly; the literature on Jin Yong and his works is even more voluminous. The
bibliography that follows is by no means an exhaustive guide to this literature,
but only an index of works directly used in the preparation of this study. Useful
bibliographies of secondary literature on Chinese martial arts fiction include
those in Cao Zhengwen, Zhongguo xia wenhua shi, 289±299; Hu Wenbin, Zhong-
guo wuxia xiaoshuo cidian, 963±982; Luo Liqun, Zhongguo wuxia xiaoshuo shi, 376±
381; and Ning Zongyi, Zhongguo wuxia xiaoshuo jianshang cidian, 750±758. For
bibliographies specifically of ``Jinology'' see Lin Baochun and Wu Huizhen, ``Jin
Yong xiaoshuo lunzhu mulu,'' and (for mainland material) Ding Jin, ``Zhongguo
dalu Jinxue lunzhu mulu (1985±1996).'' Details on these publications appear
below.
Items are listed by the name under which they were published; added in
brackets in some instances are the given names of authors publishing under
pen names, or the anglicized names by which the authors are commonly known
in the Western academy. An exception is made for the works of Jin Yong/Louis
Cha/Zha Liangyong, which for convenience's sake are all listed under ``Jin Yong,''
with the name under which they were published, if different, provided in paren-
theses.
Hanyu pinyin is used for the romanization of Chinese. In cases where
published sources employ an alternate romanization, that spelling is given pref-
erence, and the Hanyu pinyin appears in parentheses following the Chinese char-
acters. In the publication information, Taipei is used rather than Taibei; Hong
Kong is used for English-language publications, Xianggang for publications in
Chinese.
English translations of Chinese titles, in brackets following the characters,
are my own if unitalicized and using sentence-style capitalization, and based on
a published source if italicized and capitalized in headline style.

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Xø@, n.d. (reprint of 1923 edition).
ÐÐÐ. Yuepai dashi Huang Feihong biezhuan µ>'+ÃÛ;%³ [The unofficial
history of the Guangdong school grandmaster Huang Feihong]. Xianggang:
Guoshu congshushe Sâø>, 1934.

Bibliography 339
 Index

Agent’s Diary, An (San Su), 68, 70, 71, Cantonese language: in Guangdong
73 School fiction, 37–38, 47, 77; in
Ah Q, 201, 202. See also Lu Xun “local” Hong Kong newspapers, 50;
Anderson, Benedict, 10, 28, 29 in Ming Pao, 124, 129; in work of
San Su, 54, 68
Bai Yu, 21, 32, 173, 174, 228 Central Plains syndrome, 42, 50, 66,
Beyond the Sea, 68–72, 74 129, 134, 255
bildungsroman, 60, 93, 113, 172. Cha, Louis. See Jin Yong
See also Jin Yong’s fiction: focus Chen Jialuo: in Red Flower Society,
on character in 73–74. See also Book and Sword
Bixue jian. See Royal Blood Chen Kefu. See Chen-Wu match
Book and Sword, 3, 26, 52, 55–64, 85, Chen Mo, 23–24, 235
87; anti-Manchu resistance in, 55,
Chen Pingyuan, 23, 158, 195 n.57
56–57; context of serialization,
Chen Shih-hsiang, 232–233
52–55; gender in, 62–63; geo-
Chen Wentong. See Liang Yusheng
graphic imaginary of, 58–60,
Chen Xiazi, 68–69
62–64, 157, 162; and Guangdong
School fiction, 56; Han and non- Chen Yuanyuan, 188, 224–226, 237
Han in, 58–59, 62–63, 161; main- Chen-Wu match, 3–11, 249, 255
land editions, 230, 231; martial arts Chinese cultural heritage: in Book and
in, 60–62, 90; spurious sequels to, Sword, 61–62; in The Deer and the
182; texts and textuality in, 60–62 Cauldron, 203–205, 206–207,
Book and Sword, Gratitude and Revenge. 211–214, 218–226; in Heroes,
See Book and Sword 91–92, 94–95, 155–156; Jin Yong’s
Bourdieu, Pierre, 30, 169, 170, 176, fiction as vehicle for, 193–197,
194, 235, 236, 237, 239, 256–257 219–226, 236–237, 246, 253–254;
Buxiaosheng, 20 in Royal Blood, 191–197; in Wan-
derer, 150–151, 155–156,
canonization. See Jin Yong’s fiction: 160–162
status and critical reception of Collected Works of Jin Yong, The, 30,

341
 116, 131, 180, 181–197, 200, 234: political allegory in, 215–217;
mainland edition, 231, 244; Taiwan popular culture represented in,
edition, 234 204–205, 211–214, 221–226; and
“comedies of displacement,” 50, Royal Blood, 185, 190–191, 289
67–75; and Red Flower Society, n.29, 290 n.37; subversion of
73–74 genre in, 200–201, 218–219, 220;
Companion, 26–27, 79–80, 95–113, texts and textuality in, 217–218
149; Chinese cultural identity in, Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils, The. See
79–80; geographic imaginary of, Semi-Devils
98–99, 107–108; martial arts in, Deng Xiaoping, 30, 198, 200, 227,
100–103; patriotic and nationalistic 229, 242
themes in, 98–99, 104–113, 161, Deng Yugong, 37, 38
162; romantic and erotic themes diaspora, 27–28, 79–80, 134–136,
in, 96–97, 101–104, 106–108, 195–197. See also overseas Chinese
111–113; serialization of, 170–172, Dragon and Tiger Vie in the Capital
176–179, 182 (Liang Yusheng), 3, 7–8, 11
Complete Works of Jin Yong. See Col- Dragon Sabre, 26, 81–82, 162, 234
lected Works of Jin Yong, The Drunkard, The (Liu Yichang), 168–170,
Cultural Revolution, 198, 227, 228, 236
238, 242; coverage in Ming Pao Duke of the Mount Deer, The. See Deer
family publications, 119, 128–129, and the Cauldron, The
134–136, 163, 164; in The Deer and
the Cauldron, 215–216; in Wanderer, Eagle-Shooting Heroes, The. See Heroes
163–165, 166 Everlasting, 19, 34–37
“Curly-Bearded Stranger, The,” 16, 65,
75 Fang Shiyu Journeys to the South Seas,
46, 47–48
Deadly Secret, A, 132; publication in Fang Shiyu xia Nanyang. See Fang Shiyu
Taiwan, 234 Journeys to the South Seas
Deer and the Cauldron, The, 25, 28, 29, Fang Shiyu: in Everlasting, 35–36; in
200–226; anti-Manchu resistance Fang Shiyu Journeys to the South Seas,
in, 203–211, 217–218; Chinese 47–48; in Young Heroes from Shaolin,
cultural heritage in, 203–205, 36
206–207, 211–214, 218–226; Feihu waizhuan. See Young Flying Fox,
Cultural Revolution and, 215–216; The
gender in, 209–210; geographic Feng Qiyong, 239–240, 246
imaginary of, 214–215, 217–218; Flying Fox on Snowy Mountain. See
Han and non-Han in, 75, 209–210, Flying Fox
217–218; martial arts in, 218–219; Flying Fox, 80–81, 87, 130, 181

342 Index
Fox Volant of the Snowy Mountain. derer, 161–162. See also Manchus,
See Flying Fox resistance to
haohan (“goodfellow”), 17–19, 83;
gender: in Book and Sword, 62–63; in in Everlasting, 35–36
The Deer and the Cauldron, 209–210; He Wenfa, 38, 44
in Wanderer, 146–148, 153–155 Heaven Sword and the Dragon Sabre,
geographic imaginary: of Book and The. See Dragon Sabre
Sword, 58–60, 62–64, 157, 162; of Heroes, 25, 26, 27, 79–95; Chinese
Companion, 98–99, 107–108; of cultural heritage in, 91–92, 94–95,
The Deer and the Cauldron, 214–215, 155–156; film adaptation of,
217–218; of Guangdong School 174–176; geographic imaginary
fiction, 58; of Heroes, 83–84, 85, of, 83–84, 85, 87–88, 93–95; Han
87–88, 93–95; of Royal Blood, and non-Han in, 83–85, 87–88;
65–67, 93; of Wanderer, 138–139, martial arts in, 88–92; patriotic
157–159, 161–162 and nationalistic themes in,
Giant Eagle and Its Companion, The. 83–85, 93–95, 161–162; published
See Companion in mainland, 230; romantic and
Gu Long, 130, 230 erotic themes in, 95; texts and
Guangdong School fiction, 26, 32–48, textuality in, 91–93
230; anti-Manchu resistance in, 56; Hong Kong: cultural identity, 9–10,
and Book and Sword, 56, 58; Can- 24–25, 32–33, 40–43, 49–51,
tonese language in, 37–38, 47, 77; 128–129, 133–134 (see also Central
and “comedies of displacement,” Plains syndrome); newspapers (see
47–48; cultural context of, 33, Hong Kong press); representation
37–40, 47–48; geographic imagi- in postwar fiction, 67–68 (see also
nary of, 58; literary origins in “comedies of displacement”);
Everlasting, 34–37; and New School retrocession (1997), 2, 28, 134,
fiction, 33, 50, 76–78 199–200
Guo Jing: as role model, 117–118, 172, Hong Kong press, 10–11; develop-
247, 256; and Wei Xiaobao, 201, ment of, 38–39, 40–45; fiction in,
256; and Yang Guo, 95–96, 112, 44–46, 51; “local” and “outland”
113. See also Companion; Heroes distinction, 41–42, 50. See also
Ming Pao; Sing pao; Xianggang
Haijiao Liangshanbo. See Beyond the Sea shangbao; Xin wanbao; Xingdao
Han and non-Han: in Book and Sword, ribao
58–59, 62–63, 161; in The Deer and Honghua hui qunxiong nao Xiangjiang.
the Cauldron, 75, 218; in Heroes, See Red Flower Society
83–85, 87–88; in Royal Blood, 75; Hsia, C. T., 165–166
in Semi-Devils, 161–162; in Wan- Huang Feihong, 37, 39, 40, 46, 78

Index 343
 Huanzhu Louzhu, 21, 32, 76, 173, 29–31, 114–120, 168–197, 201,
174, 228 231–249, 250–260; thematic evolu-
huigui. See Hong Kong: retrocession tion of, 24–28, 79–80, 90, 95–97,
(1997) 137–138, 156–157, 161–162, 172,
189–191, 203, 214, 219, 241–242;
Jiang Zemin, 199 as vehicle for cultural transmission,
jianghu. See Rivers and Lakes 193–197, 219–226, 236–237, 246,
Jin Yong: biographies of, 278 n.13; 253–254. See also Collected Works of
career, 1–3, 80–82, 113, 120–121, Jin Yong, The; and the titles of indi-
198–200, 241; image and status, vidual works
1–3, 116–117, 241, 246–249, Jin Yong zuopin ji. See Collected Works of
255–256, 260; and the “Jin Yong Jin Yong, The
phenomenon,” 1–3, 115, 118, 260; Jingji La, 68, 70. See also San Su
and mainland regime, 28, 125–129, Jingji riji. See An Agent’s Diary
198–200, 279 n.21; source of Jinology (Jinxue), 232–237, 239–241,
pseudonym, 32. See also Jin Yong’s 247–248, 250, 260. See also Jin
fiction; Ming Pao; Ming Pao publica- Yong’s fiction: status and critical
tion family reception of
Jin Yong’s fiction: the academy and, Jinxue. See Jinology
30, 176, 201, 233–234, 235–237, Jiutu. See Drunkard, The
257–259; adaptation into other
media, 1, 115–116, 118, 171, Kangxi emperor. See Deer and the
174–176, 250, 260; conferences on, Cauldron, The
114–118, 201, 236–237, 240, 277 knight-errant. See xia
n.3; focus on character in, 57–58, Koxinga (Zheng Chenggong), 65–66,
96, 271 n.15, 172–174, 176–179, 216
185, 189; in mainland China, 28,
30–31, 227–232, 238–249, Lau, Joseph, 224, 236–237
250–260; narrative strategies of, Li Zicheng, 64, 65, 81, 187–189, 224,
80–81, 86–87, 140, 141–142; 241
pirated and spurious editions, Liancheng jue. See Deadly Secret, A
181–183, 231, 252; promotion of, Liang Yusheng, 3, 7–8, 11, 32, 46, 75,
30, 118–119, 129–131, 201–202, 77, 180, 230, 231, 240, 270 n.8
233–235, 237, 247, 257, 259; publi- Lin Linghan, 25, 225
cation and circulation of, 29–30, Linghu Chong. See Wanderer
52–55, 121, 129–131, 181–184, Liu Yichang, 168–170
196–197, 229–231, 234–235; revi- Longhu dou jinghua. See Dragon and
sion of, 183–197, 260, 283 n.25; Tiger Vie in the Capital
status and critical reception of, 1–2, Louis Cha. See Jin Yong

344 Index
Lu Xun, 1, 124, 145, 201, 244. Ming bao yuekan. See Ming Pao Monthly
See also Ah Q Ming bao zhoukan. See Ming Pao Weekly
Luding ji. See Deer and the Cauldron, Ming Ho Publications, 183–184,
The 194–195, 200, 232, 237. See also
Luo Fu, 70, 180, 240–241 Collected Works of Jin Yong, The;
Ming Pao publication family
Ma Kwok-ming, 24–25 Ming Pao, 2, 120–129: editorials, 119,
Manchus, resistance to: in Book and 121–122, 123–129, 198–199; his-
Sword, 55, 56–57; in The Deer and tory of, 81, 113, 119–120, 121–122,
the Cauldron, 203–211, 217–218; in 168; Hong Kong identity in,
Guangdong School fiction, 56; in 123–129; linguistic register of,
Royal Blood, 187, 189–190, 206 124, 129; and mainland regime,
Mao Dun, 22, 42, 244, 245 125–129, 198–200; role in promo-
Marshes of Mount Liang Beyond the Sea, tion of Jin Yong’s fiction, 30, 168,
The. See Beyond the Sea 170–180. See also Hong Kong press;
martial arts: in Book and Sword, 60–62, Jing Yong: career; Ming Pao publica-
90; in Companion, 100–103; in The tion family
Deer and the Cauldron, 218–219; in Ming Pao Daily News. See Ming Pao
Heroes, 88–92; in Royal Blood, 90; in Ming Pao Monthly, 131–132, 134–136,
Wanderer, 143–150 198–200. See also Ming Pao publi-
Martial Arts and History, 129–131, 171, cation family
182, 183, 195 Ming Pao publication family, 2, 27;
martial arts fiction: definition and ori- Chinese cultural identity in, 119,
gins of term, 1, 11–12, 261 n.1; 133–136; growth and status of, 119,
Guangdong School of (see Guang- 120, 129–133; and mainland
dong School fiction); in Hong Kong regime, 119, 135–136, 198–200;
and Taiwan (see New School fic- role in promotion of Jin Yong’s fic-
tion); late Qing and Republican, tion, 119, 130–131. See also Ming
19–21, 173–174; literary status of, Ho Publications; Ming Pao; Ming
21–23, 130–131, 165–167, Pao Monthly; Ming Pao Weekly
168–170, 173–174, 179–180 (see Ming Pao Weekly, 130, 132. See also
also Jin Yong’s fiction: status and Ming Pao publishing family
critical reception of ); in PRC, 23, Minghe she chuban youxian gongsi.
228–231; pre-modern history of, See Ming Ho Publications
11–19
May Fourth, 238, 245, 246; critiques nationalism. See patriotic and nation-
of popular culture by, 21–23, alistic themes
169–170, 254, 255 New School fiction, 1, 23–24; and
Ming bao. See Ming Pao Chen-Wu match, 3–11; chronotope

Index 345
 of, 67, 72–75; cultural context of, Princess Fragrance, 161; in Red Flower
33–34, 46–47, 50–51, 75–78; and Society, 73–74. See also Book and
Guangdong School fiction, 33, 50, Sword
76–78; linguistic register of, 77; in
mainland China, 230–231; and Qianlong emperor: in Book and Sword,
prewar “Old School” fiction, 55–59; in Everlasting, 34–36, 56
23–24, 32–33 Qiong Yao, 250, 252
Ni Kuang, 130, 182, 200–201, 235, 250 “Qiuran ke zhuan.” See “Curly-
1997. See Hong Kong: retrocession Bearded Stranger, The”
(1997)
Red Flower Society, 73–74, 77
Ode to Gallantry, 159, 196, 234, 281 Rivers and Lakes (jianghu), 17–19, 83,
n.10 88, 274–275 n.3; in Book and
overseas Chinese: circulation of Jin Sword, 59, 62, 63–64; as chrono-
Yong’s fiction among, 171, tope of New School fiction, 67,
195–197, 236–237, 240; in Jin 72–76; in The Deer and the Caul-
Yong’s fiction, 191–193. See also dron, 200, 203–206, 209; in Heroes,
diaspora 82, 83, 87–88, 93–94; in “Old
School” and Taiwan martial arts fic-
Pan Yuesheng, 121, 132 tion, 75–76; referenced in non-fic-
patriotic and nationalistic themes: in tional contexts, 118, 174, 255; in
Companion, 98–99, 104–113, 161, Royal Blood, 65, 191; in Wanderer,
162; in Heroes, 83–85, 93–95, 137, 138–139, 143, 150–151,
161–162; in Wanderer, 160–162. 156–160. See also geographic
See also Chinese cultural heritage; imaginary
Manchus, resistance to romantic and erotic themes: in Com-
Peach Blossom Spring, 94, 108, 155 panion, 96–97, 101–104, 106–108,
Personal Diary of Shigougong, The (San 111–113; in The Deer and the Caul-
Su), 54, 68, 70 dron, 209–210; in Heroes, 95; in Jin
political allegory: in Book and Sword, Yong’s fiction generally, 172, 271
56–57; in The Deer and the Caul- n.15; in Wanderer, 137, 152–157
dron, 215–217; in Royal Blood, 66; Royal Blood, 26, 64–67, 74, 75, 85, 87;
in Wanderer, 163–165 anti-Manchu resistance in, 187,
popular culture: May Fourth critiques 189–190, 206; Chinese cultural
of, 21–23, 169–170, 254, 255; in heritage in, 191–197; and The Deer
post-Mao PRC, 227–232, 238–249, and the Cauldron, 185, 190–191,
251, 254–260; represented in The 289 n.29, 290 n.37; geographic
Deer and the Cauldron, 204–205, imaginary of, 65–67, 93; historical
211–214, 221–226 and political themes in, 187–191;

346 Index
 martial arts in, 90; publication and tabloid (xiaobao): early Ming Pao as,
revision of, 181–197, 219 121, 122, 124–125; in Hong Kong
and Guangzhou, 38; in mainland
San Su, 54, 68, 70, 121 China, 228, 230
San xia wu yi. See Three Heroes and texts and textuality: in Book and Sword,
Five Gallants 60–62; in The Deer and the Caul-
Semi-Devils: Chen Shih-hsiang’s evalu- dron, 217–218; in Heroes, 91–93; in
ation of, 232–233; contributions of Wanderer, 143, 147, 150–151, 160
Ni Kuang to, 235; Han and non- Three Heroes and Five Gallants, 19, 35,
Han in, 161–162; Wang Shuo’s cri- 228
tique of, 251–252 Tianlong babu. See Semi-Devils
serialization: in Hong Kong newspa-
pers, 44–46; literary status of, 170, Wanderer, 27, 28, 136, 137–167; Chi-
194; as reading context, 51–52, nese cultural heritage in, 150–151,
178–179, 194 155–156, 160–162; Cultural Revo-
Shaolin xiao yingxiong. See Young Heroes lution and, 163–165, 166; gender
from Shaolin in, 146–148, 153–155; geographic
Shaolin: in Book and Sword, 56; in imaginary of, 138–139, 157–159,
Everlasting, 34–36; in Guangdong 161–162; Han and non-Han in,
School fiction, 37, 38; in Wanderer, 161–162; martial arts in, 143–150;
138, 139 patriotic and nationalistic themes
Shediao yingxiong zhuan. See Heroes in, 160–162; political allegory in,
163–165; reclusion in, 137,
Shen Baoxin, 121
140–142, 150–156; representation
Shendiao xialü. See Companion
of political life in, 137, 143,
Shengchao ding sheng wannian qing.
160–162, 166; Rivers and Lakes in,
See Everlasting
137, 138–139, 143, 150–151,
Shigougong ziji. See Personal Diary of
156–159; romantic and erotic
Shigougong, The
themes in, 137, 152–157; texts and
Shuihu zhuan. See Water Margin, The
textuality in, 143, 147, 150–151,
Shujian enchou lu. See Book and Sword 160
Sing pao, 38, 42, 43, 44, 46, 68, 77 Wang Dulu, 21, 230, 271 n.15
Sino-British Joint Declaration (1984). Wang Meng, 243
See Hong Kong: retrocession (1997) Wang Shuo, 243, 249; critique of Jin
Smiling, Proud Wanderer, The. See Yong, 250–260
Wanderer Wang Yichuan, 245
Song Weijie, 25–26, 225 Water Margin, The, 17–19, 35, 36, 83,
Sword Stained with Royal Blood, The. 204, 229; and Beyond the Sea,
See Royal Blood 69–72

Index 347
 Wei Xiaobao, 25, 28, 200–202, 173, 179, 180, 240; Book and Sword
241–242, 256. See also Deer and the in, 3, 46, 52–54; Chen-Wu match
Cauldron, The and Liang Yusheng’s fiction in, 3, 7,
Woshi Shanren, 37, 38–39, 40, 77 11, 46; Flying Fox in, 80
Wu Aiyi, 26, 219, 237 Xingdao ribao, 41–43, 44, 45, 122, 126
Wu Gongyi. See Chen-Wu match Xueshan feihu. See Flying Fox
wuxia xiaoshuo. See martial arts fiction
Wuxia yu lishi. See Martial Arts and Yan Jiayan, 245–246
History Yang Guo, 95, 161, 176–179; com-
pared with Guo Jing, 95–96, 112,
xia, 11; female (nüxia, xianü), 15; in 113. See also Companion
history and historiography, 11–14; Ye Hongsheng, 33, 37
in literature (see martial arts Yitian tulong ji. See Dragon Sabre
fiction) Young Flying Fox, The, 130
Xiake xing. See Ode to Gallantry Young Heroes from Shaolin, 36
Xianggang shangbao, 44, 45–47; come- Yuanliu Publishing, 114, 115, 116–117
dies of displacement in, 68–69; Yun Jun, 67, 131, 176, 182, 195
Fang Shiyu Journeys to the South Seas
in, 46; Heroes in, 77, 80; Royal Blood Zha Liangyong. See Jin Yong
in, 64, 67, 74, 181, 191 Zheng Zhenduo, 239
Xiaoao jianghu. See Wanderer Zhongguo qingnian bao, 250, 252, 257
xiaobao. See tabloid Zhu Yuzhai, 37, 39–40, 46, 78
Xin wanbao, 44, 51, 68, 121, 123, 126,

348 Index