Anyone read wuxia novels?

I don't know if you could find these, but when I was a child, I used to read some of the Jin Yong works.
Here are some classic ones you might interested in:
The Legend of the Condor Heroes
Heavenly Sword Dragon Slaying Saber
Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils
The Book and the Sword
Sword Stained with Royal Blood
The Smiling, Proud Wanderer
And It's a pity that people don't like this WuXia genre anymore, so there are few good works of Wuxia in recent years. Not mention the ones good enough to be translated into English, and here is a relatively new one called Walking in the Snow with a Fierce Sword . Hope you can find a good book. :giggle:
 
I’ve only read The Water Margin, which I think qualifies as Wuxia. I ultimately enjoyed it but I found it a difficult read. The story tends to meander a lot.

Love Wuxia movies so maybe I should make an effort to read more of the genre.
 
The Legend of the Condor Heroes is getting a brand new translation into English right now. I read the first and it was fun.

There's a few wuxia-esque English original language floating around right now too. The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water is a fun little novella, although short on action for my tastes. Jade City isn't quite traditional wuxia as I understand it, but borrows a lot particularly when it comes to the action.

彐ildHunter - are there any particular recent works you recommend people look out for in case they get translated?
 
The Big Peat said:
The Legend of the Condor Heroes is getting a brand new translation into English right now. I read the first and it was fun.

There's a few wuxia-esque English original language floating around right now too. The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water is a fun little novella, although short on action for my tastes. Jade City isn't quite traditional wuxia as I understand it, but borrows a lot particularly when it comes to the action.

彐ildHunter - are there any particular recent works you recommend people look out for in case they get translated?
Click to expand...
So glad to see so many foreign readers enjoyed our culture, and so far as I know, the traditional paper media is going to it's end in China, and there is no WuXia magazines in China anymore. believe it or not, if a literature genre lost its magazine in China, it means an end in this genre.
But, there is a silver lining in this, we have this type of small forums called TieBa, and a small group of people had founded the forum of WuXia. So basically, the new Wuxia ficitons could only be found in this forum, and most of them were written by some amateur WuXia fans. These ficions are not bad though, but not good enough to match the classic ones.
And Chinese netizens who read online now likes a new genre called XuanHuan, It's a genre which mixed Wuxia with fantasies and Chinese traditional legends or Taoism mythology. And for this genre I could recommend several good works, but I'm afraid they are too long to read, since the writers tends to use a lot of modifiers to enlarge the quantities of words, cause they're payed by the number of words.
So If you're interested, here are some works:
I Shall Seal the Heavens
A Will Eternal
Coiling Dragon
Douluo Dalu
Stellar Transformations
 
彐ildHunter said:
So glad to see so many foreign readers enjoyed our culture, and so far as I know, the traditional paper media is going to it's end in China, and there is no WuXia magazines in China anymore. believe it or not, if a literature genre lost its magazine in China, it means an end in this genre.
But, there is a silver lining in this, we have this type of small forums called TieBa, and a small group of people had founded the forum of WuXia. So basically, the new Wuxia ficitons could only be found in this forum, and most of them were written by some amateur WuXia fans. These ficions are not bad though, but not good enough to match the classic ones.
And Chinese netizens who read online now likes a new genre called XuanHuan, It's a genre which mixed Wuxia with fantasies and Chinese traditional legends or Taoism mythology. And for this genre I could recommend several good works, but I'm afraid they are too long to read, since the writers tends to use a lot of modifiers to enlarge the quantities of words, cause they're payed by the number of words.
So If you're interested, here are some works:
I Shall Seal the Heavens
A Will Eternal
Coiling Dragon
Douluo Dalu
Stellar Transformations
Click to expand...

I've read a translation of I Shall Seal the Heavens and will forever remember it for it's love of demon butt exploding (I've no idea if there's any greater history behind it). I've usually heard it referred to as Xianxia in the west - is there a difference between that XuanHuan? Xianxia often tends to be cited as the main influence behind what's called Cultivation or Progression fantasy, which is a growing trend in the indie fiction market.

Incidentally, bit of a tangent - are English works by Chinese diaspora authors read much in China? Or is there not much demand/access?
 
Foxbat said:
I’ve only read The Water Margin, which I think qualifies as Wuxia. I ultimately enjoyed it but I found it a difficult read. The story tends to meander a lot.

Love Wuxia movies so maybe I should make an effort to read more of the genre.
Click to expand...
Water Margin is one of the four masterpieces of Chinese novels.
Actually Water Margin could be seen as the origin of Wuxia, and if you know Chinese history, the Ming and Qing dynasty are the best era for novels, and you could find a lot of excellent works at that time, it's just that they are in ancient chinese and no one ever tried to translate them into Englsih.
BTW, the other three masterpieces are The Journey to the West( Fantasy ), Romance of the Three Kingdoms（Historical tales）and
Dream of the Red Chamber ( realism)
 
The Big Peat said:
I've read a translation of I Shall Seal the Heavens and will forever remember it for it's love of demon butt exploding (I've no idea if there's any greater history behind it). I've usually heard it referred to as Xianxia in the west - is there a difference between that XuanHuan? Xianxia often tends to be cited as the main influence behind what's called Cultivation or Progression fantasy, which is a growing trend in the indie fiction market.

Incidentally, bit of a tangent - are English works by Chinese diaspora authors read much in China? Or is there not much demand/access?
Click to expand...
Well, the boundary between XuanHuan and Xianxia are vague.
For Xian Xia, Xian means God or celestial being, Xia means people with their own sense of justice and always beat the bad people. So XianXia emphasis those works whose protagonist became immortal by Xiulian( learn the immortal power though certain ways ) and kick all the ass of anyone who gets in his way.:ROFLMAO: So it's not strange that yo can find little connection with history in I Shall Seal the Heavens, because It's just a ShuangWen( novels intended to make the readers fell excited through reading and need almost no brain to read )
But for XuanHuan, the Xuan means Chinese metaphysics, it contains the Taoism theories and western metaphysics; and Huan means fantasy.

And for the question, the English works are rarely read in China, because most of Chinese can't read English and some just don't want to read at all, since many aged people think reading novels are useless and is a waste of time. Actually I still remember the days when I have to hide all my SF magazines under the bed sheets to avoid been punished by my teachers.:cry:(Yes we lived in the school dormitory, and techers could search our stuffs)
 
彐ildHunter said:
I don't know if you could find these, but when I was a child, I used to read some of the Jin Yong works.
Here are some classic ones you might interested in:
The Legend of the Condor Heroes
Heavenly Sword Dragon Slaying Saber
Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils
The Book and the Sword
Sword Stained with Royal Blood
The Smiling, Proud Wanderer
And It's a pity that people don't like this WuXia genre anymore, so there are few good works of Wuxia in recent years. Not mention the ones good enough to be translated into English, and here is a relatively new one called Walking in the Snow with a Fierce Sword . Hope you can find a good book. :giggle:
Click to expand...

Is Wuxia no longer that popular in China anymore?

My old Chinese teacher recommended Legend of the Condor Heroes, but I never picked up a copy whilst I was in China. I didn't realise until just now that Jin Yong / Louis Cha had died. I'd love to pick up a dual English / Chinese version. She did give me a copy of 三体 but it's waaay above my level!
 
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