§@ªÌ/Robert L. Chard
Institute for Chinese Studies,Oxford

The imperial Chinese state claimed authority over all military activity, and often took measures to prohibit the ownership of weapons, private armies, and even martial arts training among the populace at large. It is obvious that this met with limited success: a wide range of martial training and organized fighting groups thrived outside official control, particularly during the late imperial period. The world portrayed in such detail in the novels of Jin Yong (Louis Cha) was to a considerable extent real. The whole tradition of wuxia ªZ«L literature going back more than a millennium deserves closer scrutiny by scholars of Chinese military history.

The wuxia genre, the work of Jin Yong above all, is at last beginning to receive serious attention in the fields of Chinese literary and cultural studies. This paper will offer preliminary observations on wuxia fiction from a historian’s perspective, and will argue that the genre, though fictional, is an essential source for understanding the martial side of Chinese life, especially at grass-roots level. From the standpoint of cultural history, significant aspects of the wuxia tradition still survive in modern China, not just within the underworld and young male culture, but also as a general familiarity with the wuxia ethos and values across society at large. Jin Yong’s work strikes a deep chord in the Chinese psyche, which has been described as an essential “Chineseness,¡¨ leading some to doubt whether his extraordinary success in China and elsewhere in Asia can ever be duplicated in the West.

Early China up through the Spring and Autumn Period was ruled by a warrior aristocracy which placed a premium on martial valor and success on the battlefield, and adhered to values which in some respects were not unlike those of the later xia «L tradition. Considerable changes took place during the Warring States period, when states sought to regiment their populations and establish centralized control over armies and warfare on a much larger scale, reflected in the arts of command as set out in the Sunzi ®]¤l and other bingfa §Lªk literature. It was at this time that the basic pattern of military administration of the imperial period was established. And yet, although the documentary record of the early and medieval periods reveals little of life at the grass-roots level, already there are signs of local martial activity outside official control.

Early sources such as the Shiji ¥v°O describe individuals from the Warring States period onward—some explicitly described as xia «L, others not—possessing remarkable fighting skills, often shunning public life, and adhering to an ethos of rigorous honor, bravery, loyalty to friends, chivalry, and revenge; in short, very like the fighters in the novels of Jin Yong today. In contrast to the theories propounded in the bingfa §Lªk texts, one finds that feats of individual valor and single combat were still to be found on the battlefield; the Shiji ¥v°O “Annals of Xiang Yu¡¨ (¶µ¦Ð¥»°O) contain striking examples of this.

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