Okay, I asked this on the "What have you been watching lately?" thread, but questions like this tend to get lost there. Apparently, the Shaw Bros. trilogy consisting of TEMPLE OF THE RED LOTUS, TWIN SWORDS and THE SWORD AND THE LUTE is based on a "famous Chinese classic," according to the TWIN SWORDS original trailer. Which classic? What's the original, who wrote it and where can I find info on it?

A general plot outline may not help since who knows how much was changed for these films and the spellings in the subs vary from film to film in these editions. Suffice to say that it's got the Scarlet Maid, a superheroine of sorts who frequently helps out the young married swordfighting couple at the heart of the story. The couple elopes in the first film, with the bride having to fight her way by degrees past specific family members in order to be allowed to leave. Then, in the second film, the bride, Lianzhu, gets captured by the fake monks at Red Lotus Temple and her feckless young husband, the nephew of the Scarlet Maid, has to run back to the family with his tail between his legs in order to ask for help. The temple is filled with traps that the bad guys have installed. They've got the real monks hidden in a dungeon below the temple.

There's a Phoenix Lute which shoots out lethal needles; a Seven Stars Stone, which heals the wounds caused by those needles; and an Invincible Sword that the youngest member of one of the families featured is given that can chop through iron very easily. There's a fighting Granny, too.

I hope this little bit helps.

Thanks.

Hello Brian (and everyone else),

Transatlantic moving hasn't allowed me be online much but I'm surprised no one else has answered this one already. The three films you mention were adapted from the serialised novel _Marvelous Warriors of the Jianghu_ and subsequent follow-up works by Hunanese author Pingjiang Buxiao Sheng (lit. "someone from the insignificant Ping River.") The sobriquet is obviously a pen name--and, indeed, an ironic pun on the opening lines of the sixty-seventh chapter of Lao Tzu's _Tao Te Ching_--for Xiang Kairan (1889 - 1957) who started writing in the early 1920s.

Unlike most of his genre contemporaries, Xiang was actual martial artist himself and wrote both practical fighting manuals and treatises on martial arts. He studied abroad for several years in Japan and picked up considerable expertise on Judo, Kendo, and Geisha house culture. This augmented his own formidable knowledge on Chinese martial arts and tea house/opera houses. Due to such a thorough background, much of the conventions of the martial chivalry genre owe a considerable debt to Xiang's body of work, both fictional and non-fictional.

_Marvelous Warriors_ can be found on-line here (in simplified Chinese):

http://www.oklink.net/wxsj/other/jianghu/index.html

If you prefer tangible books in Chinese, check out:

_The Representative Writings of Pingjiang Buxiao Sheng_ (Beijing: Huaxia Press, 1999) [ISBN: 7-5080-1794-3]

_Marvelous Warriors of the Jianghu_ (Changsha: Yuelu Publishers, 1986) [ISBN: 7-80520-090-4]