Jin Yong

He hailed from the scholarly Zha clan of Haining (海寧查氏), whose members included notable literati of the late Ming and early Qing dynasties such as Zha Jizuo (1601–1676), Zha Shenxing (1650–1727) and Zha Siting (查嗣庭; died 1727).

His grandfather, Zha Wenqing (查文清), obtained the position of a tong jinshi chushen (third class graduate) in the imperial examination during the Qing dynasty.

Louis Cha Leung-yung (10 March 1924 – 30 October 2018), better known by his pen name Jin Yong, was a Chinese wuxia ("martial arts and chivalry") novelist and essayist who co-founded the Hong Kong daily newspaper Ming Pao in 1959 and served as its first editor-in-chief.

He was Hong Kong's most famous writer, and is named along with Gu Long and Liang Yusheng as the "Three Legs of the Tripod of Wuxia".

He is also known as one of the "Four Great Talents of Hong Kong".

His wuxia novels have a widespread following in Chinese communities worldwide.

Born on March 10, 1924, in Haining, Zhejiang in Republican China, Cha was named Zha Liangyong and is the second of seven children.

In 1937, Cha studied at Jiaxing No. 1 Middle School.

In 1938, the Japanese army invaded Zhejiang, and the Jiaxing Middle School had to move thousands of miles south to Lishui city in order to survive.

Cha, as one of the students, only carried a quilt and a change of clothes, and the students had to trek on foot for 60 to 70 miles a day.

Cha was later expelled in 1941 after he wrote an article called "Alice's Adventures" which satirized the training director sent by the Kuomintang for being vicious towards the students.

Cha later reflected on this period as one of the most significant crises in his life.

The expulsion not only deprived him of the opportunity to pursue his studies but he suddenly faced the issue of finding food and accommodation.

Fortunately, with assistance from the principal, Zhang Yintong, Cha resumed his high school education at Quzhou No. 1 Secondary School and graduated in 1943.

Cha was admitted to the Department of Foreign Languages at the Central University of Political Affairs in Chongqing.

Cha later dropped out of the school.

He took the entrance exam and gained admission to the Faculty of Law at Soochow University, where he majored in international law with the intention of pursuing a career in the foreign service.

To help support his studies, he began work in 1947 as a journalist and translator for the Ta Kung Pao newspaper in Shanghai.

He moved to Hong Kong in 1948 to work for the paper's office in the city.

His father, Zha Shuqing (查樞卿), was arrested and executed by the Communist government for allegedly being a counterrevolutionary during the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries in the early 1950s.

When Cha was transferred to New Evening Post (of British Hong Kong) as Deputy Editor, he met Chen Wentong, who wrote his first wuxia novel under the pseudonym "Liang Yusheng" in 1953.

His 15 works written between 1955 and 1972 earned him a reputation as one of the greatest and most popular wuxia writers ever.

By the time of his death he was the best-selling Chinese author, and over 100 million copies of his works have been sold worldwide (not including an unknown number of pirated copies).

According to The Oxford Guide to Contemporary World Literature, Jin Yong's novels are considered to be of very high quality and are able to appeal to both highbrow and lowbrow tastes.

His works have the unusual ability to transcend geographical and ideological barriers separating Chinese communities of the world, achieving a greater success than any other contemporary Hong Kong writer.

His works have been translated into many languages including English, French, Catalan, Spanish, Finnish, Korean, Japanese, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Thai, Burmese, Malay and Indonesian.

He has many fans outside of Chinese-speaking areas, as a result of the numerous adaptations of his works into films, television series, comics and video games.

The asteroid 10930 Jinyong (1998 CR2) is named after him.

Chen and Cha became good friends and it was under the former's influence that Cha began work on his first serialised martial arts novel, The Book and the Sword, in 1955.

In 1957, while still working on wuxia serialisations, he quit his previous job and worked as a scenarist-director and scriptwriter at Great Wall Movie Enterprises Ltd and Phoenix Film Company.

In 1959, Cha co-founded the Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao with his high school classmate Shen Baoxin (沈寶新).

Cha served as its editor-in-chief for years, writing both serialised novels and editorials, amounting to some 10,000 Chinese characters per day.

His novels also earned him a large readership.

Cha completed his last wuxia novel in 1972, after which he officially retired from writing novels, and spent the remaining years of that decade editing and revising his literary works instead.

Zha Shuqing was later posthumously declared innocent in the 1980s.

Zha Shuqing used to read him excerpts from the wuxia Huangjiang Nüxia (荒江女侠; "Woman Warrior of the Wild River") by Gu Mingdao (顧明道) every day, which aroused Cha's strong interest in the genre.

Later, Cha took the initiative to read other works like Water Margin and The Seven Heroes and Five Gallants, which laid the foundation of his future as a wuxia novelist.

In 2005, Cha applied at Cambridge University for a doctorate in Asian Studies, which he obtained in 2010.

In 2009, Cha applied for another doctorate in Chinese literature at Peking University, which he earned in 2013.

Cha was a journalist.