Yuan Ziyi (simplified: 袁紫衣, traditional: 袁紫衣, pinyin: Yuán Zǐyī, jyutping: jyun4 zi2 ji1) is the name used by Yuanxing (圆性), a young Buddhist nun of the Emei Order, in Jin Yong’s Side Story of the Flying Fox. She is the unacknowledged daughter of the Foshan despot Feng Tiannan. Raised in the Muslim regions, she comes east in a purple dress and a wig to avenge her mother, crosses and recrosses Hu Fei’s path from Guangdong to Beijing, and falls in love with him, but will not break the vow she made to her shifu (SIDE ch. 6–7, 13–14, 19–20).
Biography
Birth and childhood
Her mother, Yingu, surnamed Yuan, was a fisherman’s daughter from the countryside near Foshan, nicknamed the “Black Peony”. Delivering fish to Feng Tiannan’s house at eighteen or nineteen, she caught his eye and was forced by him. She became pregnant; her father went to Feng’s house to protest, was beaten, and died of the illness that followed. Her uncles blamed her for his death and threatened to drown her in a pig basket, so she fled to Foshan town, where she gave birth to a daughter and begged to live. A fishmarket hand who had long cared for her married her and offered to raise the girl as his own. Feng Tiannan, enraged that anyone should take a woman he had had, sent men to wreck the wedding and drive the man out of Foshan, and had him killed on the road. Yingu buried him in the rain and, for her daughter’s sake, did not drown herself (SIDE ch. 14).
She begged her way north to Nanchang in Jiangxi and became a maid in the household of Tang Pei, the celebrated “Seven Provinces Benefactor”, who forced himself on her; she hanged herself in shame. Three days later a nun of high standing in the Emei Order took the child away to the Muslim regions, shaved her head and taught her martial arts (SIDE ch. 14, 19). The nun lived near the Red Flower Society in the Tianshan, and the girl pestered its members for moves: from Chen Jialuo and Huoqingtong down to Xinyan, all taught her something, and the ageing Yuan Shixiao of the Heavenly Lake most of all. At sixteen she swore a solemn vow before her shifu to become her successor (SIDE ch. 19).
The name
“Yuan Ziyi” is not her real name. She explains that “Yuan” is her mother’s surname and also a play on her Buddhist name: Yuanxing (圆性) turned about gives xing Yuan, “surnamed Yuan”; and that “Ziyi”, purple robe, stands for ziyi (缁衣), the black robe of the Buddhist nun. As a lone nun on the long road east she found it easier to travel in lay dress, wearing a wig and keeping to vegetarian food (SIDE ch. 19).
Coming east
After seventeen years she returns to the Central Plains to avenge her mother. Her shifu has told her that her father is bound for a violent end, and that she may save him three times to discharge the debt between father and daughter, after which he is nothing to her (SIDE ch. 14). Luo Bing sends her own white horse with her as a gift for the young Hu Fei, whom Zhao Banshan has praised to the skies; the praise makes her set out determined to test him (SIDE ch. 14, 19).
She goes first to Foshan meaning to kill Feng Tiannan, but on seeing her half-brother Feng Yiming, and her own likeness to Feng, she cannot. When Hu Fei beats Feng at the Beidi Temple and Feng makes to cut his own throat, a ring flung from outside knocks the blade aside: this is her first rescue. She too follows the decoys when they lure Hu Fei away, and when she gets back Feng has murdered Zhong Asi’s family, which she long regrets (SIDE ch. 5, 14).
Riding ahead of Hu Fei in a purple dress, she steals his bundle at an eating house in Hengyang. At the funeral of the Weituo School’s old master she beats his three disciples and his shixiong Liu Hezhen with the Weituo School’s own arts and takes the zhangmen’s seat, giving her name as Yuan Ziyi. The same day she takes the Eight Immortals Jian zhangmen’s seat from Lan Qin on the road, and at Yijiawan she takes the Jiulong School’s from Yi Ji on the mast of his boat, where Hu Fei saves her from the falling spar. The two trade tricks all the way: he makes off with her horse, she whips him across the face, pushes him into a pond and takes his clothes while he bathes (SIDE ch. 6–7).
In a temple to the Xiang consorts (湘妃庙) they shelter together from a storm. When Feng Tiannan’s party arrives and Hu Fei goes for Feng, she knocks out the lights and fights Hu Fei in the dark so that Feng escapes: her second rescue. In the fight Hu Fei holds her about the waist and lets go when she asks. She leaves behind his clothes, washed and mended, and a jade phoenix (SIDE ch. 7, 14, 20).
In Beijing
The white horse is delivered to Hu Fei’s inn with a second jade phoenix, for Cheng Lingsu, and a note: “The horse returns to its rightful master; the phoenix goes to the xianü” (SIDE ch. 13). When Hu Fei at last pins Feng Tiannan in the garden of the Beijing house that Feng had secretly bought for him, she attacks Hu Fei with a dagger and holds him off until Feng is gone: her third and last rescue (SIDE ch. 13–14).
She then outfights three of the capital’s leading masters, Qin Naizhi, Wang Jianying of the Eight Trigrams School and Zhou Tiejiao, and counts the senior disciple of a fourth school, who declines to fight her, as half a zhangmen, styling herself zhangmen-general of “nine and a half schools”. Hu Fei learns that her seizures of zhangmen seats were meant to upset Fuk’anggan’s coming assembly. Cheng Lingsu had poisoned her through a dao she threw to Hu Fei; after Yuan Ziyi tells them her mother’s story, Cheng Lingsu gives her the antidote and the two women make friends (SIDE ch. 14).
The Grand Assembly
She enters Fuk’anggan’s Grand Assembly of Zhangmen under Heaven as the nun Yuanxing, her head shaved, and draws the needles from Hu Fei’s back with a magnet hidden in her horsetail whisk. When the imperial Jade Dragon Cups shatter, she denounces Tang Pei as a Red Flower Society conspirator; she has forged a letter to the society’s chief, sewn it into a copy of his cap and swapped the caps, and it is found in front of Fuk’anggan. Tang, recognising her as Yingu’s daughter, admits to the rape and names her as Feng Tiannan’s daughter, then shoots a needle into her back. When Feng tries to escape, she cries out to Hu Fei, who kills him with a thrown dao, and she thanks him for avenging her mother (SIDE ch. 19).
She had also intercepted the men taking Ma Chunhua to Fuk’anggan and hidden her in a temple outside the city. There she tells Hu Fei she cannot give up her vows, and walks away without looking back (SIDE ch. 19).
Tang Pei and the parting
Guessing that Tang Pei would head home to Nanchang, she catches him at Qingfengdian and kills him in a sorghum field, though she is badly hurt herself. Learning from Zhou Tiejiao that Tian Guinong is laying an ambush for Hu Fei at his parents’ grave near Cangzhou, she rides through the night to warn him. There, coughing blood and not knowing that he is hiding nearby, she says aloud what she has never told him: that had she not sworn her vow she would have followed him through the jianghu. In the fight that follows she seizes Madam Miao, Nan Lan, and throws her to Hu Fei, and Nan Lan whispers to him where the Cold Moon Treasured Dao lies buried by the grave. After the victory Yuanxing kneels, recites a Buddhist verse that ends “If one is free from love, there is no worry or fear”, and rides away west (SIDE ch. 20).
Relationships
- Feng Tiannan (Father): She saves him three times at her shifu’s bidding and then asks Hu Fei to kill him.
- Yuan Yingu (Mother): Driven from Foshan by Feng Tiannan, she died after Tang Pei forced himself on her.
- Feng Yiming (Half-brother): The sight of him stays her hand in Foshan.
- Hu Fei: She loves him but holds to her vow.
- Cheng Lingsu: Hu Fei’s sworn sister; they become friends in Beijing, and she sends her a jade phoenix.
- Tang Pei (Enemy): Exposed at the assembly and killed by her.
- Zhao Banshan: “Third Uncle Zhao” of the Red Flower Society, whose praise of Hu Fei sent her to test him.
Martial arts
Having learnt from her shifu and from a dozen masters in the Tianshan, she commands the arts of many schools and uses a rival school’s own techniques to take its zhangmen’s seat. Her weapon is a soft whip of silver thread with a small gold ball at its tip, more than ten feet long, which she can use to strike acupoints and to send a jian flying like an arrow; worn round her waist it looks like a silver sash. Her qinggong is excellent, and as Yuanxing she carries a horsetail whisk with a magnet in its hair (SIDE ch. 6, 19).