featured-image

Standing in his “18 dragon subduing palms” stance, a large sculpture of Guo Jing – one of the best-known protagonists in Chinese wuxia martial arts fiction – has welcomed new arrivals at Hong Kong International Airport since March. Another of those novelists – Chen Wentong, better known by his pseudonym Liang Yusheng – is also having the centenary of his birth celebrated this year. Born into a scholarly family in Haining, in China’s Zhejiang province, in 1924, Cha was always an avid reader.

It is said that he discovered the wuxia genre, which was very new at the time, at the age of eight, after reading (The Swordswoman of Huangjiang) by Chinese novelist Gu Mingdao (1897-1944). In 1948, Cha graduated from Soochow University in Shanghai at the age of 24 with a degree in international law, before moving to Hong Kong to join the Chinese-language newspaper Ta Kung Pao. Two years later, he became an editor of the New Evening Post, the evening edition of Ta Kung Pao, and met Chen.



Like Cha, Chen was also born into a scholarly family, and grew up in a village in Mengshan county, in Guangxi province. He, too, moved to Hong Kong, in 1949, and quickly found work in Ta Kung Pao. As colleagues, Cha and Liang pioneered a new era of wuxia interest in the mid-1950s as they prolifically published serials in their shared column “Three Swords House” in the New Evening Post.

When the column ceased in 1957, both organised their published stories and released them as novels, whil.

Back to Beauty Page