Miao Family

The Miao Family (simplified: 苗家, traditional: 苗家, pinyin: Miáo Jiā, jyutping: miu4 gaa1) was the line descended from the Miao bodyguard of the Storming King, Li Zicheng, one of the three sworn brothers who killed the Flying Fox. Its hereditary art was the Miao Family Swordplay, and it handed down, without knowing its meaning, the treasure map to Li Zicheng’s Treasure (ch. 3, 5). With the Fan and Tian families it was at feud with the Hu Family for more than a century (ch. 3). Its head in the Qianlong reign was Miao Renfeng, the Golden-Faced Buddha, who resolved to end the feud by forbidding his descendants to learn martial arts; his only child was Miao Ruolan (ch. 3).

Overview

Family traditions

After their master’s death the Miao, Fan and Tian bodyguards told their sons exactly what had happened and made it a family rule that every generation must pass the story on, so that their descendants would never forget it (ch. 3). The Miao Family Swordplay was the family’s art, and Hu Fei had heard that within the Miao line it was taught to sons and daughters alike (ch. 6), in contrast to the Hus, who passed their bladework to sons and not daughters (ch. 5).

The map to Li Zicheng’s treasure passed down in the Miao family, but the family did not know what it was the key to, and so never went looking (ch. 5). It was eventually hidden in a phoenix-head pearl hairpin, which Miao Renfeng’s wife Nan Lan called a Miao family possession (ch. 7).

Standing in the jianghu

The Miao, Fan and Tian families were numerous, had many allies, and enjoyed the sympathy of the wulin, which shunned the Hus as traitors (ch. 3). In Side Story of the Flying Fox the Miao Family Swordplay was held to be without equal under heaven (SIDE ch. 2), and the four families were remembered as renowned for their martial arts since the end of the Ming (SIDE ch. 11, 18).

History

The porter

The Miao bodyguard was one of the four guards the army called Hu-Miao-Fan-Tian. Besieged on Jiugong Mountain, Li Zicheng sent him, with the Fan and Tian bodyguards, to break out by night and bring help, but when they returned their master was reported dead (ch. 3). Hunted by the new dynasty, the three disguised themselves; the Miao bodyguard, the strongest of the three, went as a porter (ch. 3). Miao Ruolan, telling the tale as her father had told it to her, called him Grandpa Porter.

The three broke into Wu Sangui’s residence in Kunming to kill him and found the Flying Fox guarding him. The porter was captured. He cursed Wu Sangui to his face for handing the empire to the Manchus, and Wu Sangui had his legs broken and threw him in prison, from which the Flying Fox secretly released him (ch. 3). When the Flying Fox, mortally wounded at Dian Lake, cut his own throat, it was the porter who could not bear it and caught him in his arms, crying “Big Brother!” (ch. 3). A year later the Flying Fox’s son spoke with the three in a closed room, and the porter took his own life before the assembled guests with the other two (ch. 3). The Hu family’s secret, which they had learned in that room, died with them (ch. 5).

Swordplay and the map

The three families’ children were raised by jianghu heroes. Having already learned their families’ arts from their fathers, they later mastered them and each set up a line of their own: the Miao family’s art became known as the Miao Family Swordplay (ch. 3). The treasure map, which had passed briefly from the Flying Fox to the three sworn brothers before his son took it back, came in the end to be handed down in the Miao family (ch. 5). Early in the Yongzheng reign the Miao, Fan and Tian families quarrelled over custody of Li Zicheng’s dao, before joining to kill two Hu brothers (ch. 3).

Miao Renfeng’s father

Miao Renfeng’s father taught him the swordplay with great severity. When Miao Renfeng was eleven, a flea bit him in the middle of a lesson, and his father beat him for fidgeting; ever after, his back gave a small shrug before one particular move (ch. 5). Miao Renfeng’s father and Tian Guinong’s father, Tian Anbao, were good friends. More than ten years before the Cangzhou duel they set out beyond the Pass together in high spirits and were never seen again, and the jianghu blamed Hu Yidao (ch. 5, 8). The treasure hunters later found both men in the treasure cave near Jade Brush Peak, locked together, each having stabbed the other (ch. 8).

Miao Renfeng

Miao Renfeng came from a poor family (SIDE ch. 2). Unable to find Hu Yidao, he spread the epithet He Who Has Fought All Under Heaven and Found No Equal to provoke him into coming south (ch. 4). While he was away in Lingnan, Shang Jianming of the Eight Trigrams School came to challenge him and killed his two brothers, his sister and his brother’s wife. Because the Hu feud was not yet settled, Miao did not go after Shang, and Hu Yidao killed Shang for him with a move of the Miao Family Swordplay (ch. 4).

Miao Renfeng was close to Guild Chief Fan but thought little of Tian Guinong, and refused to go with them to Liaodong to seek revenge. He agreed at their invitation to stop Hu Yidao at Cangzhou, meaning first to learn the truth (ch. 5). The five-day duel made the two men friends; a poisoned dao, supplied by Tian Guinong, killed Hu Yidao, and Miao Renfeng mourned him ever after (ch. 5, 7). Miao Renfeng concluded that in more than a century of vengeance no generation of the four families had died in peace, and that martial arts brought disaster rather than protection. He made it a family rule that no Miao descendant after him would learn martial arts, and he took no disciples, so that the Miao Family Swordplay would end with him (ch. 3).

He married Nan Lan, an official’s daughter whose life he had saved (ch. 10; SIDE ch. 2). She left him and their three-year-old daughter for Tian Guinong, who, Miao Ruolan believed, was really after the Miao family’s treasure map (ch. 10; SIDE ch. 2). In Side Story of the Flying Fox he had lived in seclusion in southern Zhejiang for about ten years when he met her (SIDE ch. 2). Tian Guinong later blinded him with a poisoned letter, and Miao entrusted his small daughter to the young Hu Fei without knowing who he was (SIDE ch. 8). Guild Chief Fan, a friend of the Miaos of long standing, later seized him on Jade Brush Peak with his Dragon Claw Grasping Hand for Commander Sai (ch. 9).

Nan Lan and the hairpin

Nan Lan became Tian Guinong’s second wife. She fell ill, refused medicine and food until she died, and asked him to return her phoenix-head pearl hairpin to Miao Renfeng or his daughter as a Miao family possession; Miao Ruolan believed she had seen through Tian at last (ch. 7, 10). Miao Renfeng opened it before Tian’s eyes and showed him the map that had been hidden in it all along (ch. 7). Miao Ruolan wore the hairpin to Jade Brush Peak, where Liu Yuanhe pulled it from her hair and the map led the treasure hunters to the cave (ch. 7, 8).

Miao Ruolan

Miao Ruolan, about seventeen, knew no martial arts because of her father’s rule (ch. 3, 5). She heard the family’s story from her father at the age of seven and grew up praying that Hu Yidao’s lost child was alive (ch. 3, 5). On Jade Brush Peak she met that child, Hu Fei, and they pledged themselves to each other; he gave her his mother’s keepsakes as a betrothal gift (ch. 10). The novel ends with her waiting in the snow while Hu Fei and her father fight on a ledge of a nearby peak (ch. 10).

Martial arts

Miao Family Swordplay (苗家剑法): the family’s hereditary art. Over thousands of moves in the duel Hu Yidao found no flaw in it, except Miao Renfeng’s habitual shrug before one move, and he killed Shang Jianming with a move of it he had picked up from Miao Renfeng the day before (ch. 4, 5).
Bladework: Miao Renfeng had practised the single dao in his youth and was versed in all the eighteen arms (ch. 5). He learned the Hu Family Bladeworks from Hu Yidao and used it against the Zhong brothers and against Tian Guinong’s men (ch. 5; SIDE ch. 2, 11).

Notable members

The Miao bodyguard: Li Zicheng’s guard, disguised as a porter (ch. 3).
Miao Renfeng’s father: died in the treasure cave with Tian Anbao (ch. 5, 8).
Miao Renfeng’s brothers, sister and sister-in-law: killed by Shang Jianming (ch. 4).
Miao Renfeng: the Golden-Faced Buddha, head of the family.
Nan Lan: Miao Renfeng’s wife, who left him for Tian Guinong.
Miao Ruolan: Miao Renfeng’s only child.

Relationships

Hu Family: hereditary enemies. Miao Renfeng and Hu Yidao became each other’s closest friend in the course of their duel, and Miao Renfeng later named Hu Yidao as one of the only two friends of his life, the other being a young stranger he did not know was Hu Fei (ch. 4; SIDE ch. 8).
Tianlong School and the Tian family: allies in the feud. Tian Anbao was Miao Renfeng’s father’s friend, but Tian Guinong took Miao’s wife and kept Hu Yidao’s message from him (ch. 5, 7, 8).
The Fan family: allies in the feud. Guild Chief Fan was an old friend of Miao Renfeng’s, until Commander Sai turned him (ch. 5, 9).
Du Ximeng: Miao Renfeng’s friend of more than twenty years, who helped trap him (ch. 2, 9).

Behind the scenes

Jin Yong noted in his afterwords that Side Story of the Flying Fox was written as a prequel to Flying Fox of the Snowy Mountain but that the two novels, though linked, are not entirely consistent. In the later book Hu Fei meets Miao Renfeng more than once, and these episodes were not reconciled with Flying Fox of the Snowy Mountain when it was revised.