Divine Eagle, Gallant Knight

Louis Cha is one of the world's most widely read novelists. He is a household name in every Chinese community—in Hong Kong, Peking, Taipei, Singapore, and in Chinatowns the world over. And yet his novels are little known in the West. Readers of a translation such as this will be curious to know what sort of book they have let themselves in for. Martial Arts? Kungfu? Chinese history and culture? How do these things add up to a Chinese best-seller?

Perhaps the most helpful Chinese starting-point for such readers would be the kungfu movies of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, products that have travelled to the West in a way that the Chinese written word, by and large, has not. But Bruce and Jackie are just the tip of the iceberg. Their films are only a tiny fraction of the vast kungfu film industry, and that industry itself is only one of the most recent growths of a much older tradition of Chinese storytelling that goes back well over a thousand years. Since at least the tenth century crowds have gathered in Chinese teahouses, marketplaces, and parks, to hear stories told of the great heroes of their past, often to the accompaniment of a drum and a musical instrument. 'And if you wish to find out what happens in the next instalment, come back at the same time tomorrow . . .'


Louis Cha writes in this same storytelling tradition. 'Since my childhood I have enjoyed reading Martial Arts fiction. I write it myself first and foremost for my own pleasure, and then for the pleasure of my readers (there is also, of course, the financial reward . . .). I am just a storyteller, like the professional storytellers of the Song dynasty. I believe Martial Arts fiction is like Peking Opera, or ballad-singing, or dancing, or music—its main function is to give pleasure.' The marketplace for Cha's performances, over a period of seventeen years, was his own newspaper, for which he wrote his novels in daily instalments of a thousand words, building up a huge and devoted readership. He is the Master kungfu storyteller of his generation.

Kungfu (it is really pronounced goong-foo) is one of the most Chinese of all Chinese words. Before it acquired its recent meaning of prowess in the Martial Arts, long before David Carradine and the TV series Kung Fu, the word was used to refer to a wide range

of skills or attainments, and to the underlying idea of application, of work and time devoted to a number of activities, from calligraphy to carpentry, from writing poetry to cross-country running, from meditation to statesmanship. Louis Cha's novels are about kungfu and kungfu Masters. They are also themselves a virtuoso kungfu performance, the work of a Master.