Wisely 卫斯理
Wisely (卫斯理, Wei Sili) is the most famous hero of twentieth-century Chinese science fiction. The Hong Kong writer Ni Kuang wrote a long-running series of novels in his voice, in which the adventurer again and again encounters the inexplicable. For Hong Kong cinema of the 1980s and 1990s, Wisely was a ready-made hero for a sci-fi action film, and he was played by stars of the first magnitude — from Chow Yun-Fat to Andy Lau Tak-Wah.
Ni Kuang's Wisely series is written in the first person: the narrator is Wisely himself. The first novel, The Diamond Flower (鑽石花), was serialized from March to July 1963, and the last was the novel For Old Friends Only (只限老友). Over the decades the series grew enormously, and in nearly every book Wisely confronts a mystery whose solution lies beyond the familiar world.
Cinema turned to him in the mid-1980s. In Lam Nai-Choi's film The Seventh Curse (1986), Wisely was played by Chow Yun-Fat; in The Legend of Wisely (1987) by Teddy Robin – by Samuel Hui; and in the film A Chinese Ghost Story (1990) the character appeared in a cameo played by Ni Kuang himself. Then came Bury Me High (1991) with Chin Ka-Lok, The Cat (1992) with Waise Lee, the two-part Young Wisely series with David Wu (1993, 1994), and The Wesley's Mysterious File (2002) by Andrew Lau, in which Wisely was played by Andy Lau.
Television proved even more generous to the character. As early as 1983, Taiwan's CTV aired a series with Yang Guang-You as Wisely (represented on this site by the episodes of Ke Huan Ju Chang: Tou Ming Guang); in 1998 there was the Singaporean series The New Adventures of Wisely; in 2003, the Hong Kong TVB series and the mainland Shao Nian Wang with Nicky Wu; and in 2018, the web series The Great Adventurer Wisely with Shawn Yu.
Wisely is a hero whom every era dresses up in its own way. In the 1980s he was the hero of big-star science-fiction action films; in the 1990s cinema told the story of his youth; and in the twenty-first century he moved almost entirely to television and web series. Only his curiosity and his mysteries, which never have simple answers, remain unchanged.
