About Wang Dulu 王度庐

Wang Dulu(王度卢Wáng Dùlú 1909–1977), who was a famous Chinese author whose novel Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was made into a successful feature film by director Ang Lee.

Wang Dulu was born into a poor Manchu Banner family in Beijing as Wang Baoxiang(王葆祥Wáng Bǎoxiáng), his style Xiaoyu (霄羽). He tried several jobs: editor for a small newspaper, clerk for a merchant association, and writer. He lived through the New Culture Movement and the May Fourth Cultural Revolution, and began writing novels during the 1930s. His early work was mostly detective novels. He switched to writing wuxia novels after he moved to Qingdao (Tsingtao). In the eleven years from 1938 until 1949 he wrote 16 martial arts novels. In 1949, when the People's Liberation Army (the Chinese Communist Party's military) won the Chinese Civil War he stopped writing and became a school teacher. During the Cultural Revolution, like many other Chinese intellectuals, he was forced from his job and sentenced to farm labor. In 1975, towards the end of the Cultural Revolution, he was able to live with his son but died from an illness just two years later. He had written a total of 30 novels. He was married and had at least three children. His widow, Li Danquan, was still alive and able to meet with Ang Lee during the filming of the Crouching Tiger movie in 1999.

Wang Dulu is most famous for his wuxia-romance tragic novels (武侠言情悲剧小说) and social romance novels (社会言情小说). He is considered by many to be one of founders of the modern genre of wuxia, and within that genre he has secured a place as one of the "Ten Great Authors" (十大家) and one of the "Four Great Authors of the Northern School" (北派四大家) along with Li Shoumin, Gong Baiyu, and Zheng Zhengyin.