Why was this kung fu masterpiece banned? - Gladys Mac

Jin Yong was born in 1924 in Haining, China. Jin Yong is the pen name of Louis Cha, who is best known for his martial arts, or wuxia, fiction. Jin Yong relocated to Hong Kong in the 1950s after being assigned to work in the Hong Kong office of a Chinese newspaper. Jin Yong’s fiction writing career began with daily serializations in local newspapers. When Jin Yong and his partners founded their own newspaper, Ming Pao, in 1959, his stories were exclusively serialized in his own newspaper.

Writing from the British colony of Hong Kong, Jin Yong had more creative freedom than his contemporary Chinese writers in Mainland China and Taiwan, where the martial arts genre was banned until the 1980s. While martial arts fiction had been casted as lowbrow by literary elites because it catered to the masses, Jin Yong was able to inject new elements into the long- established genre by incorporating contemporary issues into his fiction. Since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in China, many of Jin Yong’s novels post-1965 all include a cult leader figure that parodies Mao Zedong. As both a fiction writer and a journalist, Jin Yong expressed much of his frustrations regarding national and local politics within his narratives. The rivers and lakes that sprung from Jin Yong’s pen is a multi-ethnic landscape that has intimate ties with the Chinese court and interstate politics.

Jin Yong’s works have been kept alive in the imaginations of younger audiences through their repeated adaptations into drama series, cinema, comics, audio drama, and video games. These characters and plots have permeated the Sinophone mediascape that they have become archetypes, and can easily be found in other literary works and media productions that are not adaptations of Jin Yong’s works. Since the ban on his works have been lifted, all the visual adaptations of Jin Yong’s novels are now only produced in Mainland China. Of course, much of the political messages originally found in the novels have now been forgotten or whitewashed through time.

The first museum exhibition dedicated to Jin Yong opened in the Hong Kong Cultural Museum in 2017. Hong Kong is not only Jin Yong’s adopted hometown, but also the former hub of where Jin Yong’s visual adaptations were produced. This is a permanent exhibition that features many local productions and music, demonstrating how inseparable the literary texts and their adaptations have become when approaching the genre of martial arts. 

Despite the popularity of Jin Yong’s fictional world, there have only been a few English translations and only a handful of published works looking at Jin Yong’s oeuvre. The recent publication of the first few volumes of Legend of the Condor Heroes in English is one step closer to making the world of Jin Yong more accessible to an English reading audience.