Tributes paid to influential martial arts novelist Louis Cha

Jianghu, or "rivers and lakes", is an imaginary world where knights, hermits and hooligans fight and coexist.

The value upheld there is xia, a combination of courage, justice and self-sacrifice.

This world is never a hideaway from the real one. The heroes fight for the disadvantaged against evil, defend their country in wartime, and even re-examine their narrow nationalism and learn to understand the peoples and cultures that they oppose.

Their social concern is summed up as jiaguo, which literally means "home and country".

What's more, the ups and downs in their love stories can be as sweet and twisted as their relationships can be in real life.

The journalist-turned-novelist who created this world, Louis Cha Leung-yung, better known by his pen name Jin Yong, died in Hong Kong on Tuesday at age 94.

Cha is probably the best-known and most widely read contemporary author in the Chinese-speaking world. His 15 novels have sold at least 350 million copies, while he also has a huge body of adaptations for TV series, films, games and animations to his name.

He was a newspaper editor who filled the pages of supplements with his first stories, and rode the success of his novels to found his own newspaper, Ming Pao, in 1959. Many Hong Kong writers and intellectuals published their first works in this paper, of which Cha was editor-in-chief for 30 years.

His ideals fascinated his publishers abroad more than martial arts. Christopher MacLehose, a veteran of the profession in London, published Legends of Condor Heroes in the United Kingdom in February. He said, "The story he tells is part of his view and opinion. I think it's inaccurate to simply call it martial arts fiction."

Albert Yeung Hing-on, honorary chairman of the Hong Kong Novelist Association, who was Cha's secretary at Ming Pao in the late 1980s, said readers can find Cha's personal values and philosophy in his novels' characters, and Duan Zhengming in The Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils is the one closest to the real Cha.

"Duan is a benevolent and wise monarch from Dali. He is highly skilled in martial arts. In his old age, he abdicates and becomes a monk," Yeung said. Cha himself sought self-improvement over fame and wealth. In his 80s, he enrolled at the University of Cambridge to pursue a PhD in Oriental Studies, Yeung said.