The Wuxia Road to Star Wars A long time ago, in a country far, far away, martial-arts heroes took on the forces of evil. All they lacked were lightsabers.
By John Zipperer
O
ut on the sparsely populated frontier of a large and ancient empire, a young man has his quiet life disturbed and learns that he has powers that set him apart from the people around him. This naive but brave man will train and learn to use his skills to defend the innocent and attempt to right the wrongs that are occurring throughout his native land. Through the course of the epic story, and with the help of a warrior class of monks and ruffians, the man learns that he has a long-lost sibling, who was raised in circumstances vastly different from his own humble upbringing. All of that will come into play when the man discovers who his true father is, in a realization that will change his life. By the end of the story, our hero uses his powers to take on a seemingly lost cause against a ruthless power that is spreading itself over his beloved land. Is this young man Luke Skywalker? No,
it’s Guo Jing, the protagonist of The Legend of the Condor Heroes, the first of a trilogy of wuxia books written in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Jin Yong. Set against the collapse of the Song Dynasty as it is invaded and eventually taken over by Mongol invaders, Condor Heroes and its two sequels, Return of the Condor Heroes and The Heavenly Sword and Dragon Saber, became wildly popular and have been filmed numerous times in Hong Kong and in mainland China. They even share something else with George Lucas’ Star Wars creation: They have been revised more than once by Jin Yong. One can easily make too much of the parallels between the Star Wars saga and the Condor Heroes trilogy. For example, Photos, left to right: The DVD cover from TVBBI’s release of The Return of the Condor Heroes; the cover of the Star Wars Trilogy novel collection; The Heavenly Sword and Dragon Saber is the third part of the Condor Heroes trilogy.
Guo Jing’s long-lost sibling is not a princess; instead, the sibling is a man raised as a prince—a prince who hates Guo Jing and would be happy to see him dead. And instead of being raised by his uncle as his surrogate father, Guo Jing’s paternal standin is none other than Mongolian warlord Genghis Khan, who (and this must surely rank as science fiction) is largely a good guy in the story. Star Wars is by no means a copy of any wuxia story, but it does owe a debt to the wuxia model in terms of some themes, philosophies, and lessons. In both, an honorable cast of heroes wields special—even magical—powers in a mission to right great wrongs. Both draw heavily from Buddhist teachings; a web search for Lucas will find countless religious sites that refer to Lucas calling himself a Buddhist Methodist. And the Jedi have more in common with Shaolin’s famous kung-fu monks than with anyone else. The Chinese wuxia connection is only noteworthy because George Lucas has weimar.ws Galaxis
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