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Yang Jie (centre) talks with cast and crew during production of “Journey to the West”. Photo: Handout

Director of China’s ‘Journey to the West’, Yang Jie, dies aged 88

Director-producer only completed television adaptation after a 17-year break

Yang Jie, director of the popular and critically acclaimed TV adaption of the Chinese literature classic Journey to the West, died of a heart attack in Beijing on Saturday. She was 88.

In China’s 30 years of TV production, few Chinese dramas match the influence of Yang’s adaptation of the 16th-century novel, which accounts the arduous westward pilgrimage of a Tang dynasty Buddhist monk, in the company of three disciples including the Monkey King, Pig Demon and Water Buffalo, in search of Buddhist sutras.

Since its first episode aired on the Chinese mainland in 1983, the first mythology-themed show in China has lit up domestic TV screens almost every year with avid followers that cross generations, and inspired many global adaptations. The story of its success often overshadows the difficulties behind the production, which took Yang two attempts to complete the full 41 episodes, with 17 years between them.

Yang Jie is shown in an undated picture. Photo: Handout

In an autobiography published in 2014, Yang wrote, “I once refused to watch Journey to the West for a decade, because it reminded me of too much disappointment and sadness, agony and anger.”

At the end of 1981, Chinese reformist leader Hu Yaobang, then general secretary of the Communist Party, green lighted state-run Chinese central television to dramatise Chinese literary classics, at a time when TV production had just started to pick up in China.

Yang, a radio host-turned-director of Chinese opera at CCTV at the time, took the job of adapting Journey to the West as a TV series. When a deputy director at CCTV told her she only needed to do better than the Japanese TV adaption of the novel, Yang replied, “Sir, your standard is too low,” according to a 2012 interview she gave Shaanxi-based newspaper China Business View.

The show’s started production in early 1982 and it took six years to finish shooting the first 25 episodes, five episodes short of the initial plan due to budget restraints and numerous production hurdles.

Staging stunts proved the most difficult issue, as the technology was barely known in China in the 1980s. Instead of hanging actors from wires to film simple fighting scenes, Yang had to hire young athletes from local sport schools to jump on a trampoline while cinematographers filmed high angle shots, according to a report from Xinhua News Agency in 2012.

As the show’s director and producer, Yang’s determined embrace of real scenery as background for the production also engulfed herself in controversy over her “extravagance,” which led the central government to organise an investigation team to follow her crew. The team later found the claim unsubstantiated and even added 1 million yuan to her production fees, the Xinhua report said.

“Because of her [stubborn] character, she has offended many leaders and experts,” Yang’s husband Wang Chongqiu, the cinematographer of the show’s first 25 episodes, told Chinese magazine New Weekly in 2006.

CCTV later stopped funding the production because it found it too costly, at 3 million yuan for 15 episodes. Although Yang managed to raise 3 million yuan on her own, increased inflation at the time forced her to cut five planned episodes, which she described as a great pity.

In 2000, the show’s sequel, or more precisely its completion, was picked up by CCTV for an investment of 13 million yuan, according to Yang’s autobiography. However, the new episodes weren’t as well received as the first 25.

“It’s mainly because the stories don’t feel exciting anymore,” Yang told Xinhua in 2012. “They all look the same, not like the previous 25 episodes that have complete story lines. In the sequel, it’s always the monk being caught, the monkey looking for saviours, and the demons being beaten away.

Yang, who was born in Macheng, Hubei province, is survived by her husband.

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