The Seven Heroes and Five Gallants

The Seven Heroes and Five Gallants is the 1889 revised retitling, by the philologist Yu Yue, of The Tale of Loyal Heroes and Righteous Gallants, an 1879 Chinese novel based on the oral performances of the storyteller Shi Yukun, which had also been reprinted in 1883 as The Three Heroes and Five Gallants; the story itself was left essentially unaltered across these editions. Set in the eleventh-century Song dynasty, it details the rise of the legendary judge Bao Zheng to high office and follows a group of knights-errant, each with exceptional martial talent and selfless heroism, who help him fight crime, oppression, corruption and rebellion. It was one of the first novels to merge the court-case fiction and chivalric fiction genres, and praised for its humorous narration and vivid characterizations, it spawned two dozen sequels by 1924 and served as the thematic model for over 100 late Qing dynasty novels. The tales continue to be reenacted in oral storytelling, operas, films and television dramas.