Jin Yong's Two Jianghu, and His Hong Kong Miracle

Farewell, Knight-Errant Jin.

On the afternoon of October 30, 2018, Louis Cha — the wuxia novelist known by the pen name Jin Yong, founder of Hong Kong's Ming Pao, and one of the drafters of Hong Kong's Basic Law — died after an illness at the age of 94.

Bao Shu, who once paid tribute to Jin Yong with A Cambridge History of the Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber (《剑桥倚天屠龙史》) and who also writes under the name Xinyuan Ping, said he was "taken completely by surprise." Novel after novel came back to him, and he felt bereft. "Jin Yong, for me, is youth. He is my boyhood."

The Hong Kong writer Ma Ka-fai was teaching a class when he heard. "I'd only just heard it, and strangely, the first person I thought of was Ni Kuang, Uncle Kuang. They'd been old friends all these years, and Uncle Kuang's health isn't good either; he's old now. He carries himself lightly, but I think deep down he'll be grieving."

Wang Xiaolei, who writes the column "Liu Shen Lei Lei Reads Jin Yong," did not know what to do with himself. The calls kept coming and he didn't dare pick up, because he hadn't worked out what he thought. "I walked around and around, couldn't decide where to sit, and in the end I sat down on the toilet. The toilet felt safe."

Nick Frisch, a doctoral student in East Asian studies at Yale's Graduate School, conducted Jin Yong's last interview four years ago. Told the news, he said Jin Yong's work counts among the most precious things twentieth-century Chinese culture produced. "Jin Yong was a very unusual talent. He respected the aesthetics of traditional culture and at the same time invented a fresh, thoroughly modern way of telling a story."

Fu Guoyong, author of A Biography of Jin Yong, was "out walking in the dark." He thought back fifteen years, to a scorching summer and the epitaph Jin Yong wrote for himself: "Here lies a man who, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, wrote several dozen wuxia novels, and these novels were loved by hundreds of millions of people." "Now he really is gone. There's no question this is something to grieve over. It's the end of an era."

Hong Kong Sanatorium & Hospital — the place where "an era ended" — was where Louis Cha died. Local Hong Kong reporters had gathered long before; then came the mainland correspondents posted in Hong Kong, some still in gym clothes, having set off the moment they heard. After them, in batches, came mainland reporters who happened to be in Hong Kong for family visits, holidays, or other assignments. By a little after 9 p.m. the crowd had thickened. Lights were tested, microphones were tested, and the noise rose.

The hospital gave the press nothing more, and on social networks anything tagged with Jin Yong's name multiplied. People remembered the first Jin Yong book they read and thanked him for setting their sense of right and wrong straight; actors who had appeared in Jin Yong adaptations thanked him for the one role their careers would never shake off.

Jin Yong spent almost his entire life on one cultural island or another, and carried the deepest attachment to a greater China. His newspaper and his novels owed their success to Hong Kong's commercial society, and yet, on his own, he built a world of swift vengeance and full-blooded feeling that fit that society not at all.

All his life Jin Yong showed the world two faces, moving between conservative and radical, between engagement and retreat, between saving the world and saving only oneself, between Guo Jing's duty to country and home and Wei Xiaobao's drift through a fleeting world. He built an unusually rich store of material that anyone can draw on — and everyone reads a different world out of it.

Seen whole, most of what Jin Yong achieved was built in a strange, fast-growing stretch of Hong Kong's history. As Fu Guoyong put it: "There's no doubt he is part of the Hong Kong myth, part of the Hong Kong miracle."

The Mainland and Hong Kong

Jin Yong was born in 1924 in Haining, Zhejiang, into a scholar-official family. The calm did not last long; the upheavals of the age reached the whole household. After the war with Japan began, his mother fell ill and died while the family was in flight. His father was killed in the class struggle after 1949. Jin Yong had already been posted to Hong Kong in 1948, so he did not see his father executed, and he escaped the same fate.

Before he left the mainland for Hong Kong, Jin Yong was disciplined at least twice. In 1941 he mocked his school's dean of studies as a man ready to surrender to Japan, in a piece called Alice's Travels (《阿丽丝漫游记》) posted on the wall newspaper, and was expelled. In 1944 he complained that student Party members at Chongqing's Central University of Political Affairs were behaving improperly, and was thrown out of its diplomacy department.

An alertness to current affairs and a willingness to hit back stayed with him for the next thirty-odd years.

Those early experiences, Fu Guoyong believes, also gave Jin Yong a footing in both Chinese and Western traditions. And he was lucky: he landed in "an environment of press freedom full of possibility."

Jin Yong came to Hong Kong as a newspaperman first. In 1946 he joined Shanghai's Ta Kung Pao to translate international wire copy — his first proper newspaper job, after a spell as a temporary field reporter at Hangzhou's Southeast Daily. In 1948 the paper transferred him to its Hong Kong office.

In 1952 he moved to the New Evening Post to edit its supplement. In Hong Kong papers of the 1950s and 1960s, the supplement was the main lever for lifting circulation — and also where many Hong Kong writers made their names. Liu Yichang was then editing the "Repulse Bay" supplement of the Hong Kong Times; his novel The Drunkard became the raw material for Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love and 2046, and Chow Mo-wan, played by Tony Leung, is a Hong Kong newspaperman of the 1960s.

The pen name Jin Yong was first used in those New Evening Post years. His The Book and the Sword and Liang Yusheng's Dragon and Tiger Battle in the Capital (《龙虎斗京华》) caused a sensation. When Liang Yusheng died in 2009, Jin Yong wrote him a mourning couplet: "Same trade, same office, same birth year — my elder; wild, chivalrous and literary at once — my good friend."

When Jin Yong founded Ming Pao in 1959, he kept the same formula. The supplement and the serialized novel carried the paper. He serialized Return of the Condor Heroes there, to enormous success. He picked the writers himself; no one else had a say. Whatever people criticized about the way he ran things, he knew talent and he knew how to use it. The writer Chip Tsao described it on a video program a month ago: "The moment he stopped writing, he went straight to Gu Long. Put him in the top-right corner of the page, with the best Yunjun illustration. Wen Rui'an started in the bottom-left corner, just to see if he worked; if he did, he got moved up to the top right. He was always looking for the next successor."

These writers produced novels, essays and editorials alike. He read all of it himself, and usually asked for no changes. Eunice Lam and Ni Kuang, author of the Wisely series, both remembered that. Writing in 2010, Lam recalled that even on editorials about major events Jin Yong left his writers entirely free. He was glad to run every kind of opinion in Ming Pao; the one thing he could not accept was saying nothing at all.

His close friend Ni Kuang, now 83, talked about Jin Yong with Chip Tsao on that same program a month ago. At cards, Ni said, Jin Yong was extremely careful — he could go half an hour without touching a tile. Ni was the opposite; people called him "Ni Always-Calls." Jin Yong never minded trouble: thorough, by the book. He revised his own work again and again and collected other people's opinions widely. Two Taoist priests once came down from Mount Qingcheng to demand an answer: why do you always make Qingcheng the villains? Jin Yong said, I'll change it, I'll change it. If it were me, Ni Kuang said, I'd have said I just like making Qingcheng the villains. Are there no bad men on Qingcheng?

"He wasn't a reckless man," Fu Guoyong said.

Wang Xiaolei sees two sides to Jin Yong. One is the pragmatist, who had no time for the extreme or the impractical and would not meet force with force. That followed from his position: he was near the top of society, a man who made decisions, and his words had consequences. The other is the humanitarian, which is why he threw himself into the argument with the leftists during the 1967 riots. Freedom mattered enormously to him. "Only a humanitarian can write first-rate wuxia. Only a humanitarian opposes absolute power, feels for the living, and pities us mortals," Wang said.

Jin Yong was also, of course, a very successful novelist. Ming Pao became the first Hong Kong outlet to land an exclusive interview with Deng Xiaoping, reportedly because Deng liked his novels. His fiction gathered everyone in one place, even if no two people took the same thing away. Ma Ka-fai believes the novels were, for some Hong Kongers, both the earliest source of feeling for country and home and an education in emotion during adolescence. Ma lives in Wan Chai; he says he deliberately holds himself back from sinking into Jin Yong's world.

Regina Ip, one of Hong Kong's best-known women in politics, is a fan — she loves the love stories. The American journalist Nick Frisch, writing in The New Yorker, argued that Legend of the Condor Heroes, written in the late 1950s, spoke directly to Jin Yong's Hong Kong generation: whether to flee south and live as a migrant, all the while carrying the wound of a lost homeland.

The people who banned him read the books the same way. In the 1970s Jin Yong's work was banned on the mainland, because some took the novels to be full of political allegory. Taiwan banned it too.

Once the ban lifted, Jin Yong became enormously popular on the mainland; he and Qiong Yao were the popular novelists every young person had to read. His books were full of the tradition and moral code that political campaigns on the mainland had worked hardest to crush, and full of clever modern narrative technique too. The story of the Wan Chai boy reading Jin Yong repeated itself endlessly: some let themselves go and failed their exams; those who tried for restraint finished a few volumes and did not dare start another.

After all the film and television adaptations, everyone knows how slippery and lovestruck Wei Xiaobao is; and when someone says a man is like Yang Guo, everyone knows it is not entirely a compliment — it may mean he loves too many people and keeps trapping himself between them. Ma Ka-fai calls this Jin Yong becoming a set of linguistic signs inside Chinese culture.

Employees at Alibaba are asked to choose a character from Jin Yong's novels to stand for them, and to take that name as their nickname inside the company. Jack Ma's own is Feng Qingyang, the peerless master in The Smiling, Proud Wanderer.

Jin Yong wrote no new novels after 1972, but he never stopped revising the old ones. Wei Xiaobao was one of his major revisions, because too many people had attacked the character as immoral.

Jin Yong's own public role shifted as well. Long before entertainers began queuing up to have asteroids named after them, minor planet No. 10930 was named for Jin Yong in 2001, an honor conferred by China's National Astronomical Observatories in recognition of his "outstanding talent and enormous achievement in carrying forward traditional Chinese culture and advancing contemporary Chinese literature, and of his contribution to the country's development and to world culture."

He also spent a period teaching at a mainland university. It did not go well; critics said he lacked the scholarship and the teaching ability, and he eventually left Zhejiang University's history department. Dong Jian, dean of the School of Humanities at Nanjing University, said the resignation "ended a mismatch."

Ma Ka-fai thinks the episode does not deserve mockery. "He felt he'd been underrated, and he had the ability and the chance to get people to dig out the deeper meaning of his work. I think that's fair enough." What Ma regrets is something else: Jin Yong could have done far more on the mainland, and didn't.

Later still, Jin Yong appeared as a tireless old student. He was reported to have declined an honorary doctorate in literature from Cambridge, choosing instead to take courses like any other student and to write a master's thesis and a doctoral one.

Wang Xiaolei thinks Jin Yong is the mainland, the West and Hong Kong put together. The mainland gave him his learning, his experience, his sense of scale. The West fed him — he loved Hugo and Balzac, and something modern runs through his ideas. Hong Kong gave him the freedom to write and the ground to work.

Popular and Serious

While the reporters waited outside Hong Kong Sanatorium & Hospital for the next announcement, the people sitting around began reciting the couplet Jin Yong made out of the titles of his 14 books: "Flying snow drifts across the sky, shooting the white deer; laughing, I write of the divine knight leaning on green lovebirds." It stands for the wuxia novels he serialized from the 1950s to the early 1970s in Ta Kung Pao, the Hong Kong Commercial Daily, Ming Pao and elsewhere, until he announced in 1972 that he had put down his pen for good. Those 14, plus The Sword of the Yue Maiden, which the couplet leaves out, make up the Jin Yong everyone knows.

Wuxia fiction was born out of market calculation from the start, and never more so than the "new school" of Jin Yong, Gu Long and Liang Yusheng. In 1954 the two big schools of Hong Kong martial arts, Tai Chi and White Crane, fell out and agreed to settle it in the ring. Once the affair blew up, the editor of the New Evening Post suggested that Liang Yusheng — real name Chen Wentong — try writing a wuxia novel, and it made him famous overnight. To keep an installment coming every day, Liang goaded Jin Yong into writing The Book and the Sword.

Where the old-school wuxia of the Qing and Republican years had stayed within its own conventions, Liang Yusheng, Jin Yong and their peers folded Western narrative technique into the traditional material. "Take A'zi giving Qiao Feng a bowl of water, and after he drinks it he can fall in love with her. That's straight out of Greek tragedy," Wang Xiaolei told QDaily. "There's a lot of Western technique in Jin Yong's novels — devices lifted from Balzac, from The Count of Monte Cristo, from Greek tragedy."

Wang thinks the value of Jin Yong's work comes down to two lines. One is "the greatest knight serves the country and the people," the duty to country and home: Guo Jing defending Xiangyang, the fight against the Yuan army in The Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber. The other is "Pity us mortals, our sorrows are many," a humane compassion. "He pities every one of his characters — the ones twisted by power, like Ren Woxing and Dongfang Bubai; the ones twisted by love, like A'zi and He Hongyao; the ones twisted by revenge, like Lin Pingzhi and You Tanzhi," he said.

Xinyuan Ping thinks Jin Yong's books shaped a generation's values. Ma Ka-fai says a good many young Hong Kong men learned to write decent Chinese by reading him, and that "Jin Yong's work isn't only a literary classic to read, it's a store of material inside the symbols of Chinese culture, still waiting to be mined and used. Whatever kind of Chinese you are, from whatever era, you can find your own shadow in Jin Yong, and your friends and your lovers. That's the real force that made him a shared language for Chinese people everywhere. And then there's the way he stages some of China's core traditional values inside invented history. What is a knight? What is righteousness? What is love?"

Jin Yong himself thought the greatest value of his novels lay in their sense of right and wrong. In a conversation with The Paper, he said: "The value of my novels is that they insist on right and wrong — that a person should have the chivalric spirit, should step forward when he sees injustice, should side with the weak, act bravely for what is right, and not do what should not be done."

In that period the Chinese revolution had only just settled, a new social order still had to be built, and no one agreed on what a good society looked like. In something close to the manner of a fairy tale, Jin Yong restated the simplest distinctions between right and wrong and let good people come out well, which gave his readers a measure of comfort. That is why, mourning him on social networks, people kept saying that his wuxia was the ground on which they built their view of the world.

Which raises the next question: what is Jin Yong's wuxia worth in the history of literature? Hsia Tsi-an and Hsia Chih-tsing — T. A. Hsia and C. T. Hsia, brothers and both literary critics — split badly over exactly this. The elder was a devoted fan; the younger refused to read Jin Yong at all. "If you're going to read wuxia, how many are there to read? If you read Jin Yong, you'd have to read the early stuff too, Tales of Strange Knights-Errant (《江湖奇侠传》) and the rest — where would it end? Wuxia novels: I don't read any of them."

Critics have always felt that Jin Yong's wuxia cannot get clear of genre formula, and have turned up their noses at it. In a Jin Yong story there is always an unpromising young hero who stumbles into a miraculous encounter, masters some supreme art, is swept into questions of country and nation, and makes his choice. In the late The Deer and the Cauldron Jin Yong created Wei Xiaobao, the exact reverse — but the reversal was still a genre move built on the formula it inverted.

"I can't remember any of those stories or characters now. What's left is an impression: repeated plots, wordy prose, a fight every time two people meet, nothing ever said plainly that could be said in one sentence, and nobody ever managing to kill anybody — the moment a death is due, someone drops out of the sky to get in the way. Every character has some vague blood feud, and the whole plot runs on it. What's new about that? All the old Chinese novels, historical romances and pornography alike, work the same way; in the end it's karma and nothing else." That was Wang Shuo's verdict.

On the other side, people who love Jin Yong's wuxia cannot wait to defend it and to raise him into the temple of literature. What Fu Guoyong values is his place in literary history and his language. He told QDaily: "In colonial Hong Kong from the 1950s to the 1970s, he took the new wuxia tradition further and carried it to its highest point. His prose is so clean, so alive, that it can stand as a model of the language. Even against a hundred years of Chinese vernacular literature, Jin Yong belongs in the top hundred beyond argument."

As for the charge that his books are merely popular and unfit for serious company, Ma Ka-fai, Xinyuan Ping and Wang Xiaolei all call it a prejudice: Shakespeare and Jane Austen were "popular" in their day too, and it has done nothing to their greatness. There is no clean line between serious and popular literature. "Our heads have been formatted by a lot of received ideas. In the 1980s and 1990s, whenever people talked about Jin Yong and about literature, they got stuck on one question: are you new literature or old literature? Plenty of people attacked Jin Yong by saying, you're old literature, not new. And what is new literature? Everything after May Fourth is new literature, and only that is good. Old literature is to be criticized, new literature promoted. People were tied up by those ideas then. Now we're tied up by 'classic or popular.' That's normal. A writer has to take being doubted; it doesn't matter. Leave it to time," Wang told QDaily.

Chen Shih-hsiang, a literary critic and a close friend of T. A. Hsia, tried instead to dig for depth in the books. On Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils, Chen said that once you hold on to the theme announced in the prologue — sin, entanglement and deliverance — you can see that "no character in the book is without grievance, and no love in it is free of sin; to carry that to its limit, ordinary people and ordinary feelings all have to be written as the bizarre. The world of the book is a bright, clear world with demons hiding everywhere in it, exposed and mocked at every turn to startling effect... and behind these characters, this plot and this world stands the boundless deliverance of the Buddhist dharma, showing itself now and then."

David Der-wei Wang, the most representative literary critic of our time and a professor at Harvard, offers instead a reading grounded in social context. In 1956, he notes, Mao Zedong put forward "let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend." The New Evening Post, where Jin Yong worked, wanted to keep left-wing thought alive inside a capitalist colonial society, and to suit the tastes of ordinary city readers it revived the wuxia novel. Jin Yong himself held a left-wing position. "We don't usually think of Jin Yong's The Book and the Sword as having anything to do with the left's attempt to break the Cold War deadlock from outside."

Jin Yong stayed detached from all the readings loaded onto his novels. In interviews he tended to say, "I think my novels are simply lively and entertaining. If people find them tolerable in their spare time, that's enough." And when the study of his work was given a name of its own, "Jinology," on the model of the "Redology" built around Dream of the Red Chamber, he wanted none of it: "'Jinology' is too much to claim. It isn't worth studying. Better that people just talk about the books if they enjoy them."

Politics and Literature

Besides novelist, Jin Yong's other important identity was newspaperman.

What he achieved in fiction — something he began almost by accident — ended up eclipsing what he achieved in the newspaper business. He himself seemed not to weigh the wuxia novelist very heavily. Asked about the ambitions of his life, apart from the general ones of studying hard and building knowledge, working hard and doing society some good, and passing his old age in peace and ease, the only thing he named that had to do with his work was this: "I founded Ming Pao, and I believe this enterprise does society good. I hope it lasts a long time, keeps growing, and goes on serving the public."

Ma Ka-fai points out that Jin Yong's editorials made him a famous opinion leader in the Hong Kong of that period. What people remember most are his attacks on the Cultural Revolution on the mainland and on the leftists during the 1967 riots in Hong Kong. The second nearly cost him his life.

Fu Guoyong points to a more complicated side. Mainland readers for a long stretch did not know Ming Pao existed and had never seen a copy, and yet Ming Pao was watching the mainland of that era, watching the mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and watching the wider world. The editorials Jin Yong wrote in his own hand shaped a great many readers.

"He arrived in Hong Kong in 1948 and went to work in the press. Most of his life — his best and most valuable years — went into newspapers. Hangzhou's Southeast Daily, Shanghai's Ta Kung Pao, Hong Kong's Ta Kung Pao and the New Evening Post, and then his own Ming Pao, which he built into a newspaper group. Across most of a century, from the 1940s to the 1990s, Jin Yong became a newspaperman who stood on his own in the Chinese-speaking world. His mark on the history of the press is as important as his mark on the history of wuxia fiction," Fu said.

As a newspaperman, Fu believes, Jin Yong carried on the Chinese tradition of "the scholar who argues politics." Chin-Chuan Lee, chair professor of communication at City University of Hong Kong, describes that tradition this way: for more than a century, Chinese newspapers have tied themselves to the fate of the country and the livelihood of its people through three movements — enlightenment, revolution, and the pursuit of national modernization. A large cast of thinkers, politicians, scholars and journalists worked inside it, spreading new knowledge, rousing public spirit, whipping corruption, and searching for a way forward. Out of the fusion of China's scholar-official tradition and the modern intellectual's temperament came a distinct style of scholarly political argument, with Wang Tao, Liang Qichao and Hu Shih among its exemplars.

Wang Xiaolei makes a similar point: Ming Pao grew from a small paper into a large one on the strength of two commitments Jin Yong held to — one to country and home, one to human beings. Jin Yong had Balzac's body and Hugo's soul; "above the absolutely right revolution there is an absolutely right humanity" (Les Misérables).

Ming Pao's performance during Hong Kong's 1967 unrest is the example. Ivan Choy, senior lecturer in the Department of Government and Public Administration at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, once wrote: "In the 1967 riots, it wasn't only Commercial Radio that criticized the leftists — Ming Pao did too. Louis Cha wrote a series of editorials condemning the violence, which brought a full-scale siege from the left, vicious attacks included. The greater threat came less than a week after Lam Bun was burned to death, when a parcel bomb arrived at the home of the man the leftists sneeringly called 'Cha the Jackal'... And yet at that dangerous moment, when everyone feared for themselves, Ming Pao went on publishing editorials condemning the violence, and never gave an inch."

"During Hong Kong's 1967 unrest, the Ming Pao office was attacked by the leftist struggle committees and the personal safety of the paper's principals was threatened, which only strengthened its image as a paper standing with the majority of Hong Kong's citizens and firmly against the left. Ming Pao's editorials insisted on treating Hong Kong as home and supporting the colonial government, which further established it as a Hong Kong newspaper," Zhang Guiyang wrote in Jin Yong and the Newspaper Business.

Or take April 22, 1973, when Jin Yong ran an editorial in Ming Pao titled "The Greatest Combination of Three," arguing that combining "egalitarian socialism, liberal democracy and compassionate humanism" would be the greatest achievement in human history. That was his own ideal.

By the 1980s, though, Jin Yong "stirred up quite a few storms" over questions concerning Hong Kong and the mainland. "On how Hong Kong's democratic system should develop, on the position Hong Kong should take in planning its future with Beijing, a lot of people were unhappy with how conservative he was. Even Ming Pao's own senior staff burned copies of the paper, and attacked him hard. Of course, Mr. Jin Yong wasn't necessarily acting out of self-interest. He thought Hong Kong basically could not take Beijing on head-on, and could only advance inside the frame reality allowed," Ma Ka-fai recalled.

Asked in an English-language interview about dictators, Jin Yong said a dictator may be reasonable today and mad tomorrow, which was his way of stating his politics. But was he a liberal? How he handled the relationship between Hong Kong and the mainland makes that harder to answer. When the drafting committee for the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region was set up in 1985, Jin Yong was one of its members, serving as the Hong Kong convenor of the subgroup drafting the political system and as a member of the subgroup on the economic system. He and Cha Chi-min put forward a "coordinated plan" for the political system whose arrangements for electing the Chief Executive and the Legislative Council after 1997 were judged far too conservative and accommodating, and drew protests.

Some therefore compared him to Wei Xiaobao, the hero of his last book, The Deer and the Cauldron: slick, and short on principle. Hong Kongers are criticized for the same thing. Hong Kongers understand Wei Xiaobao better than anyone. Jin Yong said he was not Wei Xiaobao.

Many thought Jin Yong ran Ming Pao like an "emperor," and was "rather mean about salaries." But his greatest gift, Ma Ka-fai says, was for using people: he knew who was good, and he knew how to train them. "A great many of the generation now in middle age and older came out of Ming Pao."

By the time mainland readers came to know Ming Pao, the paper had all but changed hands. In 1991 the Ming Pao Group, by then in several businesses, went public; Jin Yong left management and began selling the paper to Yu Pun-hoi. It changed a good deal after that. But the old inheritance holds: "Ming Pao is still a name that carries. Anyone who takes public affairs seriously reads Ming Pao, argues in Ming Pao, publishes his views in Ming Pao," Ma said.

Because he was both newspaperman and novelist, people keep asking whether there is political allegory in his fiction.

Nick Frisch, the Yale doctoral student in East Asian studies, interviewed Jin Yong four years ago. He says Jin Yong admitted that his later novels were indeed allegories of certain events in the Cultural Revolution.

Wang Xiaolei takes a similar view, but thinks that in the end what the books say about human nature outweighs the allegory. "It's true, the allegory in the novels is very obvious. That's hardly a surprise — the Sun-Moon Holy Cult might as well be called the Facing-the-Sun Cult, and why is the manual called the Sunflower Manual? Sunflowers turn toward the sun. But the more valuable material is about human nature. How power twists a person, for instance," he said. Xinyuan Ping also feels that for Jin Yong, art outlives politics in the narrow, immediate sense.

Beyond Chinese politics, Ma Ka-fai thinks what matters in Jin Yong's work is the universal side of it, the recurring question of human fate. In February 2018 Legend of the Condor Heroes appeared in English and reached foreign readers. Its British translator, Anna Holmwood, once told QDaily: "The most remarkable thing about Jin Yong is that reading him gives you the feeling of being back in adolescence."

Fu Guoyong reflected: "Jin Yong, born into that particular stretch of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, still offers a very important model of what an intellectual, a man of letters, can be. He showed the world the limit a person can reach: he could write with both hands, and with both hands he became a blessing to his time and to everyone in it."

On the evening of October 30, Wang Xiaolei posted a piece on his official account, "I No Longer Have Anyone Behind Me," recalling his own encounters with Jin Yong. It passed 100,000 reads almost at once and drew nearly 50,000 likes. As with every famous death, articles of every kind poured out together, and in the flood of remembrance Jin Yong turned abruptly into a sage; everyone seemed to know him, to have been close to him, to hold him up as the standard.

Wang told QDaily that Linghu Chong is the clearest embodiment of what Jin Yong valued. "What is Linghu Chong the model of? Life is dear, love is dearer, but for freedom's sake both can be given up. The head of the Demon Cult tells him, Linghu Chong, you can marry my daughter, but you have to join my cult. Linghu Chong even thought about agreeing — and then he saw what the cult was like inside, everyone hailing the leader, ten thousand years, ten thousand ages, one rule over all the jianghu. Linghu Chong found the whole thing sickening. How could a real man do that? In the end he would rather not marry Yingying than join the cult."

"Those, I think, are Jin Yong's contributions. He created fairy tales for adults, told moving love stories, laughed at how absurd absolute power is, laughed at the face it wears, and sang the praise of freedom."

(Thanks to Xiao Yang and Chen Liya for their help in arranging interviews)

Cover image: Visual China