Timeless treasures: How wuxia captured generations on print and screen

From Jin Yong’s 1959 classic The Return of the Condor Heroes, which gave us the iconic line “What, in this world, is love?” (问世间情为何物), to modern xianxia (仙侠; Chinese fantasy rooted in mythology) hits like Eternal Love and The Journey of Flower, each amassing tens of billions of views, the wuxia world has kept evolving. With expertly choreographed fights and sweeping emotional drama, its appeal has never faded.

This year’s City Reading @ SG festival will feature a special exhibition, “From Ink to Blades: A Century of Wuxia Legends”, curated by Singaporean entertainment-history collector Su Zhangkai and SPH Media’s Chinese Media Group. The showcase of rare wuxia novels and printed materials from wuxia films invites readers into the genre’s vast and richly imagined world. Su will also present a talk titled “Blades and Words: Wuxia Novels in Film”.

The exhibition is organised into three thematic sections, tracing the journey from textual origins to their re-creation as visual imagery, before reaching audiences in thousands of households through newspapers, radio, cinema and television.

The wuxia world began with the written word of novels. The first section of the exhibition focuses on the three stalwarts of wuxia — Jin Yong, Gu Long and Liang Yusheng — and will display original serialised pages from Shin Min Daily News alongside first-edition novel volumes from Su’s collection. 

The star exhibits are manuscripts by the two wuxia masters, loaned by former journalist Toh Lam Huat. They include Jin Yong’s The Smiling, Proud Wanderer, written during his 1967 visit to Singapore, when he established Shin Min Daily News, and Gu Long’s celebrated Lu Xiaofeng series — rare pieces not to be missed.

Toh recalled, “In 1981, [Hong Kong novelist and screenwriter] Ni Kuang introduced me to both Jin Yong and Gu Long in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Jin Yong and I talked all afternoon about everything under the sun. We hit it off so well that we happily continued over dinner and became friends”. 

Gu Long also became a close friend until he passed away in 1985 at the young age of 47. Through that friendship, Toh “witnessed and felt the jianghu (江湖; chivalrous) spirit, indulgence and loneliness of literary men.” 

Toh added that he shared a nearly 40-year “mentor–friend” bond with Jin Yong. “Our years of friendship revealed that behind Jin Yong’s scholarly rigour, there was a lively and deeply affectionate side — which is why he could create a character like Wei Xiaobao [the protagonist in The Deer and the Cauldron],” he said.

Toh noted that much of the original manuscripts of Jin Yong’s and Gu Long’s wuxia works have been lost; over the years, only the occasional tattered page has surfaced. The partial manuscripts of Jin Yong’s The Smiling, Proud Wanderer and Gu Long’s Lu Xiaofeng in Toh’s possession are, to date, the largest surviving cache anywhere in the world.

He recounted how he came by these treasures: “In the old days, the authors would hand the manuscripts to the newspaper for publication. They should all have been cut up and discarded in the typesetting room, but by chance, the editor happened to keep some aside.

“Many were rediscovered years later, and after the editor retired, he agreed, in view of my friendship with Jin Yong, to sell them to me,” he said. 

In 2007, for Shin Min’s 40th anniversary, Toh made a special trip to Hong Kong to inform Jin Yong (real name Louis Cha Leung-yung) and offered to return the manuscripts. Toh said, “Mr Cha gladly let me keep them as a token of our bond. Ni Kuang and [Hong Kong columnist] Chua Lam were there as witnesses.”

In 2017, Hong Kong Heritage Museum director Brian Lam came to Singapore to borrow these newspaper-manuscript pages for four days, describing them as the “most precious discovery” for the opening of the Jin Yong Gallery.

Toh said, “These two sets of original manuscripts by Jin Yong and Gu Long, surviving only in Singapore, are crucial for studying their handwriting, writing styles and the earliest textual forms of their novels. They have immense scholarly and collectible value.”

How did the written world of wuxia transform into moving images on the silver screen, and later find its way into homes through television? This journey is illustrated through immersive displays of film and television memorabilia from two collectors.

Renowned Singaporean film memorabilia collector Wong Han Min loaned rare lobby cards that reveal how wuxia novels began to go on-screen and become popular as films from the 1950s and 1960s. The 1958 Cantonese black-and-white adaptation of The Legend of the Condor Heroes by Hong Kong’s Emei Film Company, starring Cho Tat-wah as Guo Jing, was Jin Yong’s first work to be filmed and is regarded as the pioneering wuxia movie. 

Meanwhile, the first on-screen Yang Guo and Xiaolongnü were played by then Cantonese film heartthrob Patrick Tse and screen goddess Nam Hung. Originally shown in cinemas, these films had already been serialised for TV: Condor Heroes was split into two parts, Return of the Condor Heroes into four, and Liang Yusheng’s The Bride with White Hair took three instalments to complete.

Most of the film and TV exhibits come from curator Su’s personal collection. Visitors can see many rare posters of 1970s and 1980s wuxia films adapted from the works by Jin Yong, Gu Long and Liang Yusheng, along with exquisite stills and small posters from the back covers of film magazines. 

Through commemorative magazines on wuxia TV dramas loaned by Su — many of which were printed exclusively in Singapore and Malaysia to promote the series, and were not even available in Hong Kong — we also see how Hong Kong’s television adaptations helped turn wuxia productions into a craze across the Chinese-speaking world.

Su’s vast collection began with one legendary entertainer: Singaporean comedian Wang Sa. Having grown up watching Wang’s comedy sketches, the young fan fervently collected every publication and work related to him. “Anything he was in, I wanted to collect,” Su said. 

Wang had a stint in Hong Kong, having minor roles in several wuxia films. For example, in a still from the Gu Long adaptation The Sentimental Swordsman, Ruthless Sword on display at the exhibition, Wang plays the doctor Mei Er, who cures “Xiao Li Flying Dagger” Li Xunhuan of poisoning.

Su revealed, “Interestingly, my collecting journey is the reverse of this exhibition narrative. I started with film and TV, and only later expanded into wuxia. Wuxia isn’t even my main speciality. I’m sure there are more seasoned wuxia collectors around me. I collect old magazines and newspapers to preserve entertainment news from the 1950s and 1960s. I’m also interested in the newspaper industry itself, so I collect papers and tabloids — it just so happens that you find serialised wuxia novels in them.”

Su suggested that the spread and evolution of wuxia fiction can also be read as a history of media development, as this exhibition illustrates. Wuxia stories began as handwritten manuscripts, then appeared in newspaper serials, where exclusive instalments built loyal readerships and sparked publishing frenzies. Once they reached sufficient length, they were issued as standalone volumes — though rampant piracy meant that even authorised editions sometimes struggled to compete.

Su commented, “Back then, those who couldn’t read would listen to wuxia storytelling on the radio. The storytellers followed the newspaper serials and would often stop at a cliffhanger, leaving the tale ‘to be continued’. Ong Toh of Singapore’s first cable radio service Rediffusion was the first local storyteller to choose Jin Yong’s wuxia as his material.”

From newspapers and novels to radio, opera, film and TV, Su said, “This multi‑institutional, multimedia chain allowed wuxia to flourish and become a form of popular culture that both entertained and educated the masses.”

The exhibition also did not leave out the latest evolutions of wuxia: video games and xianxia dramas. Even in retirement, Toh keeps up with trends, saying, “As times change, wuxia fiction must also evolve. What matters is organically combining cultural spirit with new forms of expression. Black Myth: Wukong, for instance, fuses classic literature, mythic content, gaming technology and visual art — it’s a good example, and something for a new generation of those in the newspaper industry to ponder.”

Familiarity with the old allows one to create the new, Toh added, “Xianxia dramas grew out of neo-wuxia, an amalgamation of heart-wrenching romance with the supernatural. In fact, both classical literature and older wuxia already touched on such elements — think of the spider spirits in Journey to the West or the magical weapons in Legend of the Swordsmen of the Shu Mountains. 

“Whether it’s an extension or a divergent branch of neo-wuxia, as long as it is accepted and recognised by the cultural zeitgeist, there is nothing inherently wrong with it.”

Why is wuxia timeless? Toh opined that it is because it offers “different visions of an ideal world, as well as the possibility that, through struggle and chance, ordinary people can rise to a higher level”.

This article was first published in Lianhe Zaobao as ““纸上江湖”展金庸古龙珍贵手稿 百年想象尽览武侠风云”.

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