The Five Younger Gallants
1890 literary work by Shi Yukun
The Five Younger Gallants (小五義) is an 1890 Chinese novel and the best known sequel to the hugely popular 1879 novel The Tale of Loyal Heroes and Righteous Gallants (republished as The Seven Heroes and Five Gallants in 1889). It is followed a year later by Sequel to the Five Younger Gallants (續小五義). Both sequels were published by Shi Duo (石鐸) who owned the Beijing publisher Wenguang lou (文光樓). The editor was a "Captivated-Wind Daoist" (風迷道人). It is unknown whether he was the same person as "Captivated Daoist" (入迷道人), an editor of the 1879 novel.
All three novels claim authorship by the famed storyteller Shi Yukun. During the last decade of the 19th century, the first sequel was reprinted 9 times, 7 in Shanghai and 1 each in Beijing and Chongqing.
Authorship controversy
While scholars generally agree that Shi Yukun was the genius behind the original novel (even though he most likely died before 1879), how much he contributed to The Five Younger Gallants and its sequel if at all, is unknown. The 1879 novel (which was published by another Beijing publisher, the Juzhen Tang) does not complete its tale by the final chapter, and readers are told to wait for The Five Younger Gallants. However, none of the "previewed" plotlines at the end of the original was found in the sequel.
The public source identifies “The Five Younger Gallants” as 1890 literary work by Shi Yukun. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Five, Younger and Gallants.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q10259896. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1890, 1879 and 1889.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Five Younger Gallants” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.