The Cleaver and Xinjiang
A tale of Muslim princesses, wuxia derring do, and Qing colonialism.
After I finished reading Liu Jieren’s epic River Trilogy a year or so ago I needed to find a new text for my nightly Chinese study session. I decided to take a break from impossibly ambitious fin-de-siecle social realism, and started zipping through The Book and the Sword, the first martial arts novel written by Jin Yong, the greatest of all modern Chinese martial arts novelists.
I initially felt guilty about indulging in escapist fantasy with no direct connection to Sichuan. But I quickly realized that Jin Yong’s fabulously complicated plot, vivid characters (both male and female), constant action, and deep grounding in traditional Chinese history and culture had a serious upside. I couldn’t stop bingeing! I had to know what was going to happen next. This turned out to be very useful for Chinese vocabulary acquisition!
(HUGE SPOILERS AHEAD)
And then, of course, it turned out that escape was an illusion.
The Book and the Sword pits the Red Flower Society, a gang of ethnically Han chivalric Robin Hood-style heroes led by the young and handsome martial arts master Chen Jialuo, against Qianlong, the Manchu emperor who ruled China for sixty-one years in the 18th century.
In Jin Yong’s telling, Qianlong is a dastardly villain, a lecherous coward who abuses his power, manipulates everyone around him, and is guilty of multiple betrayals. The virtuous Chen Jialuo is driven by patriotic fervor. Throw out the Manchu invaders! Restore the Ming! Anti-Manchu sentiment is not uncommon in Jin Yong novels, and, as has been pointed out by many commenters, is undoubtedly connected to his sense of displacement and exile in Hong Kong after the Chinese civil war
But the story has hardly begun before we meet another set of heroes fighting against the Manchus, a tribe of Muslim Turks living in the region now known as Xinjiang, who are fighting desperately against a Qing invasion. The Turks (who we would now call Uyghurs) and the Red Flower Society make common cause against Qianlong, during which process Chen Jialuo manages to get himself involved in a messy love affair with two sisters who are Muslim princesses, one of whom is herself a martial arts master and brilliant general, and the other a near-godesss-like embodiment of innocent femininity, “Princess Fragrance.”
Qianlong also has the hots for Princess Fragrance. Oh, and did I mention that Qianlong turns out not to be a Manchu at all, but was baby-swapped as an infant and is actually Chen Jialuo’s older brother? It’s complicated.
The currently ongoing repression in Xinjiang orchestrated by Xi Jinping is a running sore derailing anyone with a conscience trying to engage with contemporary China. There have been many moments in the course of writing this newsletter when events in Hong Kong and Xinjiang have made me question why I am focusing on Sichuan instead of single-mindedly reporting on the terrible state of human rights in China (or for that matter, the destruction of democracy and human rights here at home in the U.S.) As I’ve noted before, my entire Sichuan journey often feels like an escapist exercise. What do I actually plan to do with my improved Chinese vocabulary?
With that disconsolate chorus always chirping in the background, I found something refreshing in Jin Yong’s wholehearted embrace of Uyghurs as heroes and heroines, his clear respect for Islam, and his obvious antipathy to unchecked authoritarian rule. It’s not hard to see both the specters of Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong looming in the background behind his portrayal of Qianlong. An obvious reason for why millions of readers all over the world love Jin Yong is his evocation of a “China” where people do the right thing. It opens up a space in our heads that encompasses the possibility of alternate realities where citizens of Hong Kong aren’t arrested for commemorating Tiananmen, or tickets aren’t being sold allowing foreign tourists to visit Uyghur holy places that Uyghurs themselves are prohibited from worshipping at.
After finishing The Book and the Sword, I had to know whether the academic community that studies the so-called “Jin Yong Phenomenon” had anything to say about the novel’s treatment of Uyghurs and Qianlong. The plot line seemed quite relevant to the current moment!
I was not disappointed. As explained in James Millward’s fascinating A Uyghur Muslim in Qianlong’s Court: The Meanings of the Fragrant Concubine, published in the Journal of Asian Studies in 1994, the character of Princess Fragrance is based on a real-life Uyghur concubine who was part of Qianlong’s imperial harem. But the memory of “Princess Fragrance” is contested.
The several versions of her story impart to her a variety of meanings but share a common denominator: as a Uyghur woman whose marriage to the Manchu emperor coincided with the Qing conquest of Xinjiang, she appears a symbol of Xinjiang; her induction in the palace serves as an allegory for the incorporation of Xinjiang within the Qing empire, and later, the Chinese nation. Conversely, her defiance mirrors the perennial resistance of [Xinjiang] to rule from Beijing. The different representation of Xiang Fei in various treatments of the story reflect the authors’ attitudes towards the positions of the Uyghurs and Xinjiang in the Qing empire (or, later, in China).
In Millward’s analysis, the fact that the Fragrant Princess falls in love with a Han hero while despising Qianlong is a rhetorical move that swaps Han for Manchu “thus reinforcing Han involvement in bringing Xinjiang and the Uyghur into the empire.” In other words, in The Book and the Sword Jin Yong is legitimizing post-Qing dynasty PRC control of Xinjiang.
While there is no question that a strong element of Chinese-flavored Orientalism suffuses Jin Yong’s depictions of the Fragrant Princess, I can’t help but feel that Millward does a disservice to Jin Yong by portraying him as a defender of Chinese colonialism. In the novel, the Red Flower Society gives everything they have in the fight for Uyghur independence. The Qing victory is depicted as unambiguously tragic. At one point, Chen Jialuo even comes to the realization that if he wants to marry Princess Fragrance he must convert to Islam. The murky intersections of empire and ethnicity and sexual politics in The Book and the Sword can be read in many ways.
In Paper Swordsmen: Jin Yong and the Modern Chinese Martial Arts Novel, Christopher Hamm explores The Book and the Sword in the context of the time it was being written, serialized day-by-day in a Hong Kong newspaper. The first installment was published on February 8, 1955. The main news story commanding the front page that day was “the American-supported withdrawal of Guomindang troops from the Dachen islands off Zhejiang province and the resulting intensification of the stand-off between the Communist and Nationalist governments.”
Which led to what became known as The First Taiwan Strait Crisis.
It is no accident that the majority of Jin Yong’s novels are set in periods where “China” is under threat of foreign invastion – or has already been conquered, be it by Jin or Mongol or Manchu. Displacement, for an author who grew up in mainland China but ended up in Hong Kong along with millions of other emigrants fleeing civil war and its aftermath, is a consistent theme for his protagonists. The solidarity between the Red Flower Society and the Uyghurs is in part predicated on their common experience of destabilization.
Out of this common ground arrives perhaps the most crucial moment in the novel.
Chen Jialuo and both princesses are hiding in a ruined ancient fortress. Hundreds of years previously the fortress had been the citadel of a tyrant who visited terrible oppression on the ancestors of the Uyghur princesses. The party of three are on the run from Qianlong’s most diabolical henchman, a former knight-errant who betrayed his chivalric values for the gold and glory he could gain by doing dirty deeds for Qianlong. Of all the martial arts masters portrayed in the novel, his skill is most supreme. Chen Jialuo is no gong fu slouch himself but he has barely escaped several showdowns with the villain.
Then, in the rubble of the fortress, a bundle of inscribed bamboo strips is discovered that might possibly indicate how the earlier Muslim freedom fighters overthrew their tyrant. (Translated by Christopher Hamm).
Chen Jialuo’s heart leapt; but then he saw that the first line was:“In the northern darkness is a fish, the name of which is Kun.” Looking over, he saw that the strips all contained the [ancient philosophical work] Zhuangzi. He had thought at first that it might be some wondrous text, but this Zhuangzi was something he had learned by heart as a child. He couldn’t help feeling a bit disappointed. “What’s that?” asked Princess Fragrance. “It’s one of our ancient Chinese books,” said Chen Jialuo. “These bamboo strips are antiques, but they’re of no use to us. Only an antiquarian would be interested in them.” He tossed them to the ground, and the bamboo strips scattered. They saw then that one in the middle looked different from the rest; each character was marked with a tiny circle, and there were several words in an ancient Muslim script as well. Chen Jialuo picked it up and saw that it was the section “Bao Ding Carves the Ox” from the third book of the Zhuangzi. He pointed to the Muslim script and asked Princess Fragrance, “What does this say?” She answered, “Herein may be found the secret to destroying the foe.” Chen Jialuo was puzzled: “What does that mean?” he asked. Huo Qingtong said, “Mamir’s testament says that Ali found a Chinese book and used it to figure out how to defeat the enemy with his bare hands. Maybe it was these bamboo strips that he found.”
“Zhuangzi preaches renouncing desire and obeying Heaven,” said Chen Jialuo. “It has nothing to do with the martial arts.”
But wait! The parable of Cook Ding solves more than the mystery of how to carved meat without ever needing to sharpen one’s cleaver. It is really about how one reaches attunement with the Way, which in turn should answer all questions!
Hamm writes: “He divines the principles embodied by Zhuangzi’s peerless butcher and their relevance to martial practice and realizes further that the postures of the fallen Muslim warriors hold the key to the techniques they used against their foe. Imitating the skeletons’ poses he himself masters the esoteric martial techniques and later uses them to defeat his most formidable opponent.”
Veteran readers of The Cleaver and the Butterfly will understand why I laughed out loud when I encountered Zhuangzi and Cook Ding’s cleaver in the middle of an action thriller written in the 1950s that I was reading because I needed some relatively mindless distraction. There is no escape! It is all one story. It doesn’t matter what path I choose. A cleaver-wielding virtuoso is waiting at the end with important life-lessons to impart.
My favorite part about this latest iteration? Chen Jialuo’s moment of transformation does not happen without the assistance of a Muslim-mediated reinterpretation of Zhuangzi.
As Weijie Song writes in Nation-State, Individual Identity, and Historical Memory: Conflicts between Han and Non-Han Peoples in Jin Yong’s Novels, “The diversity and hybridity of nation-state discourses become a meaningful symptom from the very beginning of Jin Yong’s voluminous writings.”
Diversity. Hybridity. Zhuangzi. In an action thriller love story about the tragic conquest of Xinjiang.
Sichuan angle not required.
Long Beach. But I shouldn't have mentioned it. Getting it would be complicated. There's nothing that valuable or essential.
There is a theory—I'm not sure who's or where—that the concept of "Han" (Han-ness?) was really invented and injected into China's political genome by the Mongols. After the final defeat of the Southern Song in 1279, Kubilai Khan allowed employment of former subjects of the Jin Dynasty in northern China [Jurchens, but also people we would call "ethnic Chinese"—but before there was a term for it] as well as Uyghurs and other peoples who had accepted Mongol overlordship (or been conquered earlier), and of course Europeans (Marco Polo) in government work, but that former subjects of the Southern Song dynasty, referred to in official Yuan documents as "Han"—were banned, and that this was the origin of use of the word to define what would become an ethnic grouping.
I used to have some notes on this, but my China history library has been in storage in California for decades, and is about to be discarded anyway. But it seems consistent with the casual attitude toward ethnicity apparent during the Tang — some argue that the dynastic ruling family (Li) were actually Xianbei (descendants of a proto-Mongolic nomadic people who probably also carried Xioungnu and Turkic genets). An Lushan was of Sogdian and Göktürk origin, and other Tang aristocratic families apparently were of similarly mixed and exotic central Asian extraction.
The paper or article I read goes on to say that pro-Han consciousness and policies were essentially invented during the Ming, fed by the extended and violent military struggle to defeat and displace the Mongol Yuan dynasty and its non-Mongol allies.
It also feels consistent with the unique way that Nurhaci was able to use language and other symbolic features to unify the Jurchens of Jianzhou as the basis of the Manchu state, and the success of the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1735-1796)in exploiting Manchu ethnicity (and Tibetan Buddhism) in the successful expansion of the Manchu Qing Dynasty into Xinjiang, Ili and Tibet and maintenance of Qing control over those non-Chinese territories.