How Sun Wukong Was Rewritten for Four Hundred Years: From Temple God to Black Myth (Part 2)

Part one ended in 1592, the year the hundred-chapter Journey to the West was printed and the Monkey King's shape was fixed. This is what happened next.

Fixing his shape did not stop the rewriting; it changed what was being rewritten. From 1592 onward the question was no longer who is he but what does he mean. Qing scholars read him as a manual for self-cultivation. Late-imperial revolutionaries read him as a call to overthrow the state. Animators in the 1960s drew him as a class warrior. A 1995 film made him a man who loses the woman he loves. And in 2024 a video game handed him to the entire world.

Here is the whole span at a glance.

1. The Qing dynasty: from a character in a book to a god in a temple

Commentators turned a monkey into a discipline

The Qing was the golden age of Journey to the West commentary, and the striking thing is how differently the same monkey could be read.

The earliest commentary edition appeared in the late Ming, published under the name of the famous iconoclast Li Zhi — Chinese scholarship has since established that the actual author was the writer Ye Zhou. Working from the idea of the "childlike mind," Ye read Sun Wukong as innocence embodied: the assault on Heaven is spontaneity, an expression of a sincere nature, and a rebuke to the false moralists of the day.

In the Qing proper, readings turned philosophical and ethical, splitting along Confucian and Daoist lines.

The Confucian reading is represented by Zhang Shushen's New Commentary on Journey to the West, from the Qianlong era. His claim was extreme: the book is not a supernatural novel at all but an exposition of the Confucian classic The Great Learning. Sun Wukong is simply "the mind," and the pilgrimage is the process of reining that mind in — the rampage in Heaven is the mind running loose, the five centuries under the mountain are its restraint, and the demons killed on the road west are greed, anger, delusion, arrogance and doubt.

The Daoist reading has two major texts that are constantly confused with each other. The True Explanation of Journey to the West was written by Chen Shibin in the Kangxi era. The Original Purport of Journey to the West was written by Liu Yiming, a Quanzhen Longmen Daoist of roughly 1734–1821 — a different author, a century later.

Liu read the novel as a manual of internal alchemy from beginning to end. Sun Wukong is the "metal lord," the lead of the alchemical process, primordial yang energy; the transformations are the art of change, the somersault cloud is the circulation of that primordial breath, and the golden circlet is a technique for gathering the spirit. The pilgrimage as a whole is the refining of essence into breath, breath into spirit, and spirit into emptiness.

The net effect of these editions was to convert a literary hero into a container capable of holding philosophy — and it reached far beyond the literate, since the stage and the storytellers passed on a diluted version of the same ideas.

Court monkey, village monkey

Qing opera in every form — Peking opera, Kunqu, and regional traditions — produced a huge body of "monkey plays." The court version and the folk version are almost opposites.

At court the text was The Precious Raft of the Peaceful Age, compiled by the official Zhang Zhao during the Qianlong reign and running to 240 acts, the longest pilgrimage work in the history of Chinese theatre. Its handling is revealing: the rebellion is downplayed, the assault on Heaven is framed as insubordination, the legitimacy of the celestial court is asserted repeatedly, and the pilgrimage becomes a story of reform and repentance. In compensation, the costuming and combat choreography were pushed to a level that set the technical standard for every monkey performer afterwards.

What the imperial household wanted, in other words, was a guardian who had once erred and then submitted.

In the villages the emphasis inverted. In staples such as Havoc in Heaven, Three Strikes at the White Bone Demon, Flaming Mountain and The True and False Monkey King, the traits audiences loved were amplified — hatred of injustice, overwhelming power, nerve, and comic charm — while the flaws were quietly removed, leaving a working-class champion who exists to right wrongs.

Folk performers also built the craft: stance, gait, eye movement, cudgel technique, and a stage vocabulary for the transformations. By the end of the Qing, Peking opera monkey roles had split into schools, with performers such as Yang Xiaolou, Gai Jiaotian and Hao Zhenji each emphasising something different — heroic bearing, animal agility, or humour.

People actually worshipped him

The Qing was also the high point of the Great Sage cult. Temples were built across the country, most densely in Fujian, Guangdong and Taiwan.

The reason people prayed to him is worth noting: not because he was a Buddha, but because he was powerful, hated injustice, and could drive off calamity. Local gazetteers record the spread — the Fujian Gazetteer notes Great Sage temples in nearly every county around Fuzhou, Quanzhou and Zhangzhou, and the Taiwan Prefecture Gazetteer records that the cult arrived from Fujian, with dozens of temples by the mid-Qing.

The ritual calendar was fully developed too: monkey plays staged on his birthday, processions and sacrifices, worshippers asking for safety, health and children, and disputants swearing oaths before his altar to have him judge between them. Folk storytelling generated a matching body of tales in which Sun Wukong defeats local bullies and drives away plague.

For a novel character, this is a genuine border crossing — from literature into religion. In Chinese literary history it is close to unique.

2. The late nineteenth century and the Republic: revolt, enlightenment, saturation

The rampage becomes a political manifesto

Under the national crisis of the late Qing, the character was revalued.

Liang Qichao made the connection first. In his essay on fiction and the governance of the people he called for a "revolution in fiction," argued that novels were the best instrument for reforming a population, and treated Sun Wukong's revolt against Heaven as exactly the quality the Chinese public most lacked.

Revolutionaries then used him directly. Zhang Taiyan and Zou Rong both reached for the assault on Heaven as a figure for resistance to the Qing state: the government was the decayed celestial court, and the revolutionaries were the monkey wrecking it.

The illustrated press followed. The Dianshizhai Pictorial, the best-known of the era, ran many Monkey King illustrations — some showing him beating foreigners, others showing him defying corrupt officials.

In this round his defiance was maximised while his religious and literary identities receded. He became a purely political sign.

1919: from "mind-monkey" to individualism

After the May Fourth movement the theme changed again.

The first thing Hu Shi did in his Textual Study of Journey to the West was demolish the philosophy the Qing commentators had piled on top of the book. He stated flatly that it was at most an entertaining comic and mythological novel with no profound hidden meaning. For him the character reduced to two things: defiance of authority and a demand for freedom. He called the assault on Heaven a world-shaking revolution.

Lu Xun praised the book on different grounds. His formulation was that its gods and demons have human feelings and its spirits understand worldly affairs — that is, the non-human characters are written as people. What he was identifying is precisely the layering described in part one.

Guo Moruo, Mao Dun and Zheng Zhenduo all offered readings in the same general direction: pull the character out of both the Confucian ethical frame and the religious one, and let him stand for personal liberation.

How he reached everyone

Mass media is what made him universal.

Opera peaked in the Republican period, with performers including Yang Xiaolou, Gai Jiaotian, Li Wanchun and Li Shaochun. Yang, called the grandmaster of martial roles, played the monkey as a hero learning to be human, emphasising dignity and force; Gai emphasised animal agility, with movement that genuinely reproduced how a monkey carries itself; Li Wanchun and Li Shaochun leaned respectively lively and grave, forming the two branches of the northern school. Regional theatre added its own: face-changing in Sichuan opera, acrobatic combat in Qinqiang, comedy in Yuju.

Film began here. In 1927 the Shanghai Yingxi (Shadowplay) Company produced The Cave of the Silken Web, among the earliest Chinese Journey to the West films. It was lost in China for decades; a print was identified at the National Library of Norway in 2011 and repatriated, which is the only reason it can still be discussed today.

In 1941 the brothers Wan Laiming and Wan Guchan completed Princess Iron Fan, the first animated feature made in China and the first in Asia. Its influence crossed borders: Osamu Tezuka repeatedly credited this film with setting him on the path to animation.

Comics were the other channel. One correction is needed here, because the date is widely misreported: the most famous Three Strikes at the White Bone Demon comic — drawn by Zhao Hongben and Qian Xiaodai — is not a Republican-era work. It was published in 1962 by the Shanghai People's Fine Arts Publishing House and took first prize at the first national comics awards the following year. It is beautifully drawn, sold in enormous numbers, and belongs to the People's Republic period, not the Republic.

Republican-era comics had already spread Journey to the West material widely. The single most iconic volume simply arrived twenty years later.

3. The modern era: taken apart, then rebuilt repeatedly

The red hero

After 1949 the novel was read as a depiction of peasant uprising against class oppression. Heaven was the ruling class, Sun Wukong the leader of the revolt, the rampage the uprising itself, and the demons on the road west the landlords and reactionaries.

In 1961, after watching a Shaoxing opera production of Three Strikes at the White Bone Demon, Mao Zedong wrote a poem in reply to Guo Moruo. Two of its lines circulated everywhere: the golden monkey raising his mighty cudgel, and the jade firmament clearing of dust for ten thousand li. The "golden monkey" was the revolutionary fighter, the cudgel his weapon, and the White Bone Demon the reactionaries at home and abroad. Publication of the poem sealed the reading.

The defining image of the period came from the Shanghai Animation Film Studio's Havoc in Heaven, directed by Wan Laiming and Tang Cheng and released in two parts, 1961 and 1964. Its Monkey King — yellow tunic, tiger-skin kilt, red trousers, black boots, cudgel, blazing eyes — faces a hundred thousand celestial troops without flinching. The film won prizes internationally and became a calling card for Chinese animation.

1986: the standard face

In 1986 CCTV broadcast the 25-episode Journey to the West directed by Yang Jie. It took six years to shoot, across more than twenty provinces, with location work as far as Thailand.

Sun Wukong was played by Zhang Jinlai, known as Liu Xiaolingtong. He comes from a monkey-performer dynasty: his father Zhang Zongyi, stage name Liu Lingtong, was a Shaoxing opera monkey master called the Southern Monkey King. Zhang trained in the craft from childhood and carried the stage technique into television.

The result is that all three layers appear on screen: the animal restlessness, the divine authority, and the human feeling — loyalty to his master, attachment to his companions, and visible hurt when he is wrongly accused.

No Chinese series has been rerun more often. The audience share is routinely quoted as 89.4%, though early ratings methodology differs from today's, so that figure is best treated as a marker of how total the phenomenon was rather than a precise measurement. Its real consequence is simpler: for most Chinese viewers since, this is what Sun Wukong looks like.

Postmodern: he was finally allowed to fail

In 1995 Jeffrey Lau's two-part A Chinese Odyssey, starring Stephen Chow, was released. It did unremarkable business in Hong Kong and then became a phenomenon on mainland university campuses years later via pirated VCDs.

What it did was total. Until then, hero or deity, Sun Wukong had been above ordinary desire. In this film he begins as a mortal named Joker who does not want to be the Great Sage, does not want the pilgrimage, and only wants to be with the woman he loves. He is cowardly, evasive, and full of regret.

The film's central bind is a dilemma: wearing the golden circlet means he cannot love her, and refusing it means he cannot protect her. He puts it on, becomes the invincible hero, and loses her permanently.

This gave the character a cost for the first time. Wanting absolute freedom when young, then having to shoulder obligations and give up part of yourself — audiences recognised their own lives in the monkey. In four hundred years of rewriting, nobody had read him that way before.

In 1999 Jin Hezai's web novel Wukong Zhuan raised the target again: not Heaven, but fate. Its Sun Wukong refuses the enlightenment the gods have assigned him, and will not yield even after his body is shattered and his memory erased. Its defiant declarations — that the sky will no longer block his eyes — became a generation's slogans.

After these two works he stopped being a fixed character and became an open interface. Devoted lover, isolated hero, rebellious teenager, resigned but unreconciled middle-aged man: all of them attach.

The new century: from Chinese animation to Black Myth

Monkey King: Hero Is Back (2015) was a turning point for Chinese animation. Its Sun Wukong has spent five hundred years under the mountain, lost his powers, and gone slack and despondent; he is freed by accident by a child version of Tripitaka, and it is the boy's courage that wakes him up.

Its hook is the slump: someone who used to be capable of anything, afraid he is no longer that person. It took 956 million yuan, a record for a domestic animated film at the time, and pulled a wave of Chinese animation behind it.

Plenty of live-action films followed, of wildly varying quality, each reading him as a lone demon king, a gentle protector, or a man overturning his own destiny. In web fiction and mobile games he has been broken down into an endless supply of builds and skins.

Then, on 20 August 2024, Black Myth: Wukong did something none of the earlier adaptations managed: it handed the monkey to players worldwide. On launch day its concurrent player count on Steam passed two million, putting it among the very highest concurrents ever recorded for a single-player game on the platform.

Its framing is also pointed. You do not play Sun Wukong; you play the Destined One, gathering the six relics he left scattered behind him. That adds one more layer to a thousand years of rewriting: the Monkey King stops being the subject of the story and becomes an inheritance that has to be put back together.

Where the thousand years leaves him

Read this together with part one and the line is clear.

In the Tang he was a water demon in chains. In the Southern Song, a bodyguard who wrote poems. At the Yuan–Ming transition, a demon king with a stolen wife. In 1592, a Buddha. The Qing read him as a self-cultivation manual and an alchemical diagram; the late Qing turned him into a revolutionary manifesto; May Fourth freed him into an individualist; the 1960s painted him red; the 1980s gave him a definitive face; the 1990s let him lose; and today he is a property the whole world can reassemble.

Every generation took the part it needed and left the rest for the next one. What changes is the meaning assigned to him. What does not change is the refusal to lose — which is why, a thousand years on, he is still being rewritten.

Sources: The Li Zhuowu commentary edition was published under Li Zhi's name but is attributed by scholarship to Ye Zhou. Zhang Shushen's New Commentary on Journey to the West dates to the Qianlong era. The True Explanation of Journey to the West is by Chen Shibin (Kangxi era); The Original Purport of Journey to the West is by Liu Yiming (c. 1734–1821) — different authors and periods, frequently conflated. The Precious Raft of the Peaceful Age was compiled by Zhang Zhao in the Qianlong era in 240 acts. Great Sage temple distribution is recorded in the Fujian Gazetteer, the Taiwan Prefecture Gazetteer and other local histories. Liang Qichao's argument appears in his essay on fiction and the governance of the people; Hu Shi's in his Textual Study of Journey to the West; Lu Xun's remark in A Brief History of Chinese Fiction. The Cave of the Silken Web (1927) was produced in Shanghai; a print was identified at the National Library of Norway in 2011. Princess Iron Fan (1941) was the first animated feature made in China and in Asia; Osamu Tezuka described its influence on him. The Zhao Hongben and Qian Xiaodai Three Strikes at the White Bone Demon comic was published in 1962 by Shanghai People's Fine Arts Publishing House and won first prize at the first national comics awards the following year — it is not a Republican-era work. Mao Zedong's poem in reply to Guo Moruo was written in 1961; only two lines are paraphrased here. Havoc in Heaven was released by Shanghai Animation Film Studio in two parts, 1961 and 1964. The 1986 Journey to the West ran 25 episodes; the 89.4% figure is a commonly cited contemporary number measured by methods unlike current ones. Monkey King: Hero Is Back grossed 956 million yuan. Black Myth: Wukong released on 20 August 2024.

Images: Havoc in Heaven (Shanghai Animation Film Studio); the 1986 television Journey to the West; A Chinese Odyssey; Monkey King: Hero Is Back; Black Myth: Wukong promotional art. Screenshots and promotional material used for the purpose of commentary.