Ode to the Gallant

Ode to the Gallant is a full-length wuxia novel written by Jin Yong in 1965 and included in The Collected Works of Jin Yong. Its title and opening mood are drawn from Li Bai's ancient-style poem Ode to the Gallant—“A knight from Zhao wears a rough frontier band; his curved blade gleams like frost and snow... Who will write in the tower, and grow white-haired over the Taixuan Classic?”—and the mystery of the entire book hinges on that poem. The protagonist, Shi Potian, grows up in a desolate mountain and is called “Dog Bastard.” He cannot read, knows nothing of the world, and can only chop wood and cook. After his foster mother and a yellow dog disappear together, he goes down the mountain to look for them. At Houjian Market, starving, he picks up a discarded flatbread and unexpectedly obtains the Dark Iron Token that everyone covets, and from then on is drawn into the conflicts of the martial world: the villain Xie Yanke carries him off, and in his ignorance he is taken for the leader of the Changle Gang and forced to accept the Decree of Reward for Good and Punishment for Evil on the gang's behalf, setting out for Gallant Island, which once every ten years invites the masters of the Central Plains martial world to a feast. Legend says that no one who goes to the island is ever heard from again, yet Shi Potian, with the pure heart of an almost foolish innocent, keeps pressing forward. The book has no clear historical era, and both its scenes and its cast of characters are deliberately restrained; through a boy ignorant of human affairs it reflects the vanity, greed, and obsession of the people of the martial world, and at last closes with the mystery of the martial arts on the stone walls of Gallant Island, coming to rest on the question “Who am I?” It is unusual in style among Jin Yong's works, regarded by scholars as his work of “returning to simplicity and truth,” and is also a text often cited in discussions of changes in Jin Yong's idea of the gallant.