The Legend of the Condor Heroes
射雕英雄传
A 52-episode wuxia remake from 2017 of Jin Yong's novel, following a slow but steadfast boy and a quick-witted girl through a Song-dynasty world at war; a reasonable first wuxia drama.
Save- Premiere
- Jan 9, 2017
- Episodes
- 52
- Also known as
- She Diao Ying Xiong Zhuan · Legend of the Condor Heroes 2017
About the drama
Jin Yong (金庸) wrote more than a dozen martial-arts novels, and The Legend of the Condor Heroes is where many readers start. It has a hero with no talent but persistence, a heroine who talks circles around everyone, and a war pressing in on both. The 2017 television version, 52 episodes that began on Dragon TV (东方卫视) on 9 January 2017 and ran in parallel on iQIYI (爱奇艺), is a full-length mainland remake of the 1983 Hong Kong series. For anyone who has never seen a wuxia drama, it is a reasonable first door.
Wuxia (武侠, "martial-arts chivalry") is fiction about fighters who live by a code, set in a historical world, with no gods and no magic. Its fantasy cousin, xianxia (仙侠, "immortal heroes"), adds deities and spells; Condor Heroes does not.
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Two sworn brothers, Guo Xiaotian (郭啸天) and Yang Tiexin (杨铁心), are betrayed by a Jin prince, Wanyan Honglie (完颜洪烈). Guo dies and Yang vanishes, each leaving a pregnant wife. The Taoist Qiu Chuji (丘处机) names the two sons Guo Jing (郭靖) and Yang Kang (杨康), after the Jingkang Incident, the 1127 fall of the Song capital.
The boys grow up apart. Guo Jing is raised poor and honest in Mongolia under the protection of Temujin (铁木真), the future Genghis Khan. Yang Kang is raised rich as a Jin nobleman, among the men who ruined his family. Then Guo Jing travels south and meets Huang Rong (黄蓉), the quick, mischievous daughter of the martial master Huang Yaoshi (黄药师), who for a time disguises herself as a beggar boy. Her wit and his single-mindedness drive the book: a love story, but also a training.
The story is set in the Southern Song (南宋), when the Jin dynasty (金) holds the north and the Mongols are rising beyond it. Guo Jing is not a prodigy; his strength is that he does not stop and cannot be talked into betraying anyone. Chinese readers attach a phrase to him: wei guo wei min, xia zhi da zhe (为国为民，侠之大者, "for the country and the people, the greatest kind of hero"). Yang Kang is the counterweight, clever and charming, and forever choosing the comfortable side.
The book is built for adaptation, and Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland studios have made television versions since 1976, including TVB in 1983 and 1994 and mainland versions in 2003 and 2008. The 2017 series cast newcomers in the leads: Yang Xuwen (杨旭文) as Guo Jing and Li Yitong (李一桐) as Huang Rong. Early Chinese coverage praised its fidelity, its locations and its fight scenes; a cooler Jiemian piece called the leads inexperienced. Its Douban (豆瓣) score rose from 6.4 to 7.6 within days, and a 2019 article gave it 8.0.
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Our coverage
The Legend of the Condor Heroes (2017): An Easy First Door into Jin Yong's Wuxia
The 2017 series of Jin Yong's much-adapted novel: a slow, honest boy and a quick-witted girl in a country at war, how this version compares with the classics, and why it reads differently at home and abroad.
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