Jin Yong (10 March 1924 – 30 October 2018), born Zha Liangyong in Yuanhua, Haining, Zhejiang, came from a scholarly family of the Zha clan; his pen name was formed by splitting the character yong in his given name. The Zha clan had produced many officials and writers since the Ming and Qing dynasties, headed in the Qing by the poet Zha Shenxing, whose family produced seven Hanlin academicians. Growing up among a large family library, he read widely and encountered old-style martial arts fiction such as The Heroine of the Wilderness River as a boy. His schooling was disrupted by war; he studied at several provincial secondary schools, was expelled for writing a satirical piece, entered the diplomatic department of the Central Political Institute in Chongqing in 1944 and later transferred to the law faculty of Soochow University in Shanghai. He joined the Shanghai Ta Kung Pao as a wire translator in 1947 and was posted to Hong Kong when its Hong Kong edition was revived in 1948, settling there thereafter. In 1950 he travelled to Beijing hoping to join the foreign service, without success, and returned to journalism; in 1952 he moved to the evening paper Xin Wan Pao, working alongside Liang Yusheng, and also wrote film scripts. In 1954 Liang Yusheng's novel Riding the Tiger and Leaping the Dragon Gate started a craze for the new wuxia fiction, prompting the paper to invite him to write; the result was his first wuxia novel, The Book and the Sword, published under the pen name Jin Yong in 1955, which was an immediate success. In 1957 he left Ta Kung Pao to become a screenwriter at Great Wall Movie Enterprises, writing scripts including The Peerless Beauty. On 20 May 1959 he and Sham Po-sun founded Ming Pao, later launching Ming Pao Monthly (1966) and Ming Pao Weekly (1968) and building it into an influential Hong Kong media group; in its early days sales were limited and it relied on his serialised fiction to attract readers. Between 1955 and 1972 he wrote fifteen wuxia novels, among them The Legend of the Condor Heroes, The Return of the Condor Heroes, The Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre, Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils, The Smiling, Proud Wanderer and The Deer and the Cauldron. Blending history, the martial world and human nature, usually set against real dynasties and enriched with poetry, music, painting and Confucian, Daoist and Buddhist thought, they became immensely popular across Chinese-speaking communities and were repeatedly adapted into films, television series, comics and video games; the opening characters of the fifteen titles form a well-known couplet that readers often recite. After finishing The Deer and the Cauldron in 1972 he announced he would stop writing, and over the following decade revised each novel for a collected edition. He received the OBE in 1981 and was received by Deng Xiaoping. From 1985 he served on the committee drafting Hong Kong's Basic Law and was one of those responsible for its political system sub-group, and in 1988 he and Cha Chi-ming put forward the 'mainstream proposal', which proved highly controversial. He was appointed an honorary professor at Peking University in 1994 and was dean of humanities at Zhejiang University from 1999 to 2005. In his later years he studied at the University of Cambridge, receiving an honorary doctorate of letters in 2005, and then read history at St John's College, earning a PhD in 2010 at the age of eighty-six. He also held French honours and honorary doctorates from several universities. He was awarded the Grand Bauhinia Medal in 2000 and died in Hong Kong on 30 October 2018, aged 94.
Between 1955 and 1972 Jin Yong completed fifteen wuxia novels that fused history, the martial world and human nature, giving rise to the saying that 'wherever there are Chinese, there is Jin Yong'; the novels became a shared cultural memory across Chinese-speaking communities and were endlessly adapted for film, television and games. The newspaper he founded, Ming Pao, grew from a small venture into a major Hong Kong media group and an influential forum for opinion during the transition years. He also took part in drafting Hong Kong's Basic Law, and the 'mainstream proposal' he put forward in 1988 provoked fierce controversy, reflecting his influence in both cultural and political life.
Achievements
- 1955 · Published his first wuxia novel, The Book and the Sword, under the pen name Jin Yong
- 1959 · Co-founded the newspaper Ming Pao with Sham Po-sun on 20 May
- 1972 · Announced he would stop writing after finishing The Deer and the Cauldron