China Martial
Martial Arts and Chinese Literature
The wuxia novel is a genre of Chinese literature, which features martial arts heroes, for example, swordsmen and those related to them, with the plot dedicating to the intricate relationships of honor, loyalty, love and hatred between individuals in the world of martial arts. There’s usually a thread of martial arts practice and demonstration running through the plot.
In most cases, wuxia novels are set in ancient China. And these novels have their unique cultural background with martial arts at the core, involving ancient Chinese medicine, Buddhism, Taoism, Yishu which is the art of living with changes and various types of occultism etc. So, the concepts of values held by the characters in wuxia novels as well as the main spirit of the whole work are based on the basic ideas of martial arts.
“Martial arts” means “to stop fighting” in ancient Chinese, in other words, to end conflicts with force. This means that the aim of martial arts practicing is to stop oppressing the weak by sheer strength. Guided by this thought, wuxia novels are created in a way that justice and evil are clear and definite.
The earliest literature work on the martial art or chivalrous characters was Records of the Grand Historian, a masterpiece from Sima Qian, the great historian in Western Han Dynasty. In the book, the sections such as Biographies of Knights-errant and Biographies of Assassins recorded the legendary characters including Jing Ke, Zhu Jia and Guo Jie in the form of historical biography.
It was not until the emergence of romantic novel in Tang Dynasty when the literature of martial arts came into being. The characters recorded in legends of Tang Dynasty were widespread in both government and the public, such as those in The Bearded Warrior, Nie Yin Niang and The Kunlun Slave.
Besides the Tang legends, the Wushu-related contents are also commonly seen in other styles, such as the poem A Song of Dagger-Dancing to a Girl Pupil of Lady Gongsun by Du Fu in Tang Dynasty. The “Legendary Weapons of China” is also frequently mentioned in Yuan drama, and the martial art described in the famous classical novels Outlaws of the Marsh, Romance of Three Kingdoms and Journey to the West should be familiar to the ears of the readers.
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