Zhuge Silang: How the Red-Clothed Boy Survived Censorship and Returned to Taiwanese Childhoods

30-Second Overview: Ye Hongjia blended the fears following the White Terror, the loyalty found in episodic novels, the intricate mechanisms of Japanese mystery, and the reality of Taiwan's publishing scene to create a youth named Zhuge Silang. His works once swept across Taiwan but disappeared due to censorship and market shifts. Re-examining him today is not just about reclaiming a character, but about seeing how Taiwanese comics once developed their own unique grammar.

In 1958, Ye Hongjia began serializing Zhuge Silang Battles the Devil Party in the Taipei-based weekly magazine Manhua Dawang. He was 34 years old that year, more than a decade after his imprisonment for political cartoons. Readers sent over 10,000 guesses, desperate to know the true identity of the leader of the Devil Party. Zhuge Silang was originally planned as a short series of about ten installments, but the influx of letters and market demand kept it alive. ^{1 2}

There is something counterintuitive about this starting point: while Zhuge Silang looks like a swordsman stepped out of ancient China, he was actually a character forged within Taiwan's post-war publishing scene—a product of Japanese manga, cinema, rental bookstores, and local printing. He was not merely a "traditional hero," but a Taiwanese product born from a hybrid culture.

📝 Curator's Note: The most worthwhile aspect of revisiting Zhuge Silang is not how well he can fight, but how he allows us to see how an island deconstructs foreign forms to recompose its own heroes.

Ye Hongjia Did Not Draw Heroes First

Ye Hongjia was born in 1924 in Hsinchu’s South Gate. As a youth, he entered paper theater competitions, drawing promotional works on hygiene and air-raid protection. In 1942, he formed the “Xin Gao Manga Group” with fellow manga enthusiasts. After the war, this group helped found Xin Xin magazine, using two-page comics to satirize corruption, inflation, and social issues. ³

Xin Xin ceased publication after the February 28 Incident. At age 26, Ye Hongjia was imprisoned during the White Terror; his family spent their entire fortune to secure his release. Years later, Ye’s eldest son, Ye Jialong, recalled: “My grandparents spent their entire fortune to rescue him. This was the greatest hardship of Ye Hongjia’s life, but also the spark that inspired him to create the heroic story of Zhuge Silang. He hoped there would be a hero to help the weak and fight evil forces.” ²

This statement should not be taken as the sole answer to the work. To directly label Zhuge Silang as an allegory of the White Terror would reduce a long-running, continuously rewritten comic into a single symbol. A more accurate description is: the imprisonment experience gave Ye Hongjia an emotional question, while the publishing market, genre culture, and reader letters transformed that question into a character capable of continuing adventures.

After the launch of Xueyou (Student Friend) magazine in 1953, children’s comics gradually became a draw in the publishing market. In 1958, Manga King became one of Taiwan’s first publications entirely focused on comics. Ye Hongjia used this platform to promote himself, and Zhuge Silang truly made his entrance. ⁴

Ancient Names, Taiwanese Methods

Zhuge Silang’s name itself bears traces of拼接 (splicing). English-language reports summarize research indicating that the character mixes the name and virtues of Zhuge Liang and Yang Silang, borrowing the imagined world of ancient China while incorporating mysteries, masks, mechanisms, and transformation tropes common in Japanese detective manga and tokusatsu films. ^{4 5}

Hsinchu City’s Cultural Bureau’s profile of Ye Hongjia lists even broader sources: chapter novels, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, Eastern ninja tales, monster movies, and Western detective suspense films all entered his creative nutrients. Zhuge Silang and Zhenping therefore did not win solely through force, but advanced by investigating identities, solving traps, and distinguishing truth from falsehood. ³

This also explains why Zhuge Silang’s enemies often wore masks. Masks gave the story a mystery to solve, allowing the characters’ moral alignments to remain unresolved beyond the first panel. For children readers at the time, what truly drove page-turning might not have been loyalty and filial piety, but the question: “Who exactly is this person?”

📝 Curator’s Note: The modernity of Zhuge Silang lies in his constant demand to prove his identity. Every mask is a small publishing suspense, mirroring post-war Taiwan’s repeated questioning of “who represents us.”

Fame, Then Forced Compliance

In the 1960s, Zhuge Silang became a familiar hero for children. Hsinchu City Cultural Bureau records note that the Zhuge Silang series eventually grew to nine volumes and 55 issues. Ye Hongjia and his wife Chen Jinlian established Hongjia Publishing House in 1964 to continue publishing the work in single volumes. ³ The National Taiwan Museum of Comics’ exhibition data also indicates that the work swept the island between 1958 and 1970, and was later adapted into TV dramas, stage plays, and films. ¹

Success brought pressure. In 1962, the Executive Yuan passed the Guidelines for Editing and Printing Comic Books, pushing comic publishing into a stricter censorship environment. By 1967, censorship restrictions on supernatural abilities, character behavior, and story content stripped wuxia comics of the exaggerated imagination that originally attracted readers. ^{3 4}

Ye Hongjia did not stop drawing immediately. He established a publishing house, took on apprentices, and taught many young people from impoverished families to draw, sustaining production through reprints and new works. However, institutional restrictions and the import of Japanese manga simultaneously changed the market. Taipei Times reports indicate that Zhuge Silang was forced to lose his supernatural abilities in 1968 works, reader interest declined, and Hongjia Publishing House ultimately closed in 1973. ⁴

This history cannot be written solely as “censorship killed comics.” Censorship indeed compressed creativity, but the market also faced issues of plagiarism, declining quality, and cheap reprinting. Academic research places Zhuge Silang within the political, economic, and livelihood dilemmas of the 1950s and 1960s, noting that heroic comics were both children’s imagination and texts reflecting society. ⁵

Thus, Zhuge Silang’s disappearance was not a sudden loss of popularity for a character, but the result of changes in authors, readers, publishing rules, and the cultural market.

A Wangzai Card Preserved Readers’ Hands

The National Taiwan Museum of History holds a Zhuge Silang wangzai (paper) card produced after 1965. It is only 4.8 cm in diameter. The front depicts Zhuge Silang in red ancient attire; the back features a traffic sign reading “Beware of Bicycles.” ⁶

This small paper card reminds us that a character’s life exists not only in comic books. It entered children’s games of exchanging, fanning, and striking cards, and was printed alongside popular movie characters, opera actors, and comic figures on children’s toys. The work was taken out of bookstores by readers, becoming something tangible, winnable, and pocketable.

Equally important are the manuscripts. The 2024 Ye Hongjia Centennial Memorial Exhibition displayed original manuscripts, personal items, and a hundred collections. The exhibition used Ye Jialong’s oral guided tour to allow audiences to approach the work anew through the artist’s desk, classical music, and family memories. ^{1 2}

Ye Jialong said: “Ordinary people can also do extraordinary things.” ¹ If taken merely as an inspirational slogan, this is too light. Placed back in the context of the exhibition, it refers to how a creator suppressed by the times relied on family preservation, museum curation, researcher organization, and new-generation adaptations to bring the work back into the public eye.

From Memory Back to Public Culture

Zhuge Silang was adapted into films in the 1970s and television series in the 1980s, and a 3D animated film titled Zhuge Silang: Hero of Heroes was released in 2022. ¹ In 2024, the National Taiwan Museum of Comics presented three exhibition series—Zhuge Silang 100, Becoming Zhuge Silang, and Heroic Soul—bringing original manuscripts, animation, reader memories, and comic book history together within the same campus. ^{1 7}

These adaptations do not equate to the complete preservation of the original work. Every instance of recoloring, adaptation, exhibition, or commercialization involves a new selection of which characters, tones, and values are to be retained. The "filial piety, righteousness, wit, and courage" cited by academic researchers form an important ethical backbone of the work, but they are not everything. Zhuge Silang also encompasses masks, mistaken identity, cross-cultural borrowing, publishing labor, and the gaps left behind by censorship. ⁵

The photograph of the National Taiwan Museum of Comics on Wikimedia Commons depicts a preserved building from the Japanese colonial period. It is not an original Zhuge Silang manuscript, nor can it serve as historical evidence of the work itself. In this article, it serves only to point toward one thing: comic book preservation requires space, and that space reconfigures how works are viewed. ⁸

_Image caption: Photo by Ralff Nestor Nacor, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. The image is used only to illustrate the setting of the National Taiwan Museum of Comics and is not intended to misrepresent the building as an original Zhuge Silang work. Source: Wikimedia Commons image page._

Not Sealing Childhood in Amber

Zhuge Silang’s return today is most easily written as “our childhood is back.” But childhood does not return intact. Republished versions, museum display cases, and animated film lenses allow readers to see things they previously missed: Ye Hongjia was once imprisoned, comics were censored, publishing houses once supported apprentices, manuscripts once faced potential loss, and a small wangzai card preserved the character’s outline for a generation of children.

Therefore, Zhuge Silang is not merely a red-clothed boy hero. He is more like a ruler measuring Taiwanese cultural memory: when society only remembers the sword and the Devil Party, we see entertainment. When we place Ye Hongjia’s imprisonment, his wife’s support, apprentices’ labor, and institutional restrictions back into the picture, we see how a comic preserved imaginative freedom for readers in an unfree era.

The 2024 exhibitions brought audiences close to manuscripts again; the 2022 animation brought the character into new visual grammars; the museum turned an old building into a public space for preserving Taiwanese comics. Zhuge Silang need not be frozen into the title of “earliest” or “most classic.” He is more like a mask still asking questions: when the next Taiwanese creator faces restrictions, will we allow them the opportunity to finish drawing their own hero?

Further Reading

• Ye Hongjia Centennial Memorial Series Exhibition: Following Zhuge Silang into the Classic Journey of Taiwanese Comics: Official Ministry of Culture compilation of exhibitions, work adaptations, and curation contexts.
• On the Scene: Drawing Heroes Due to White Terror, Ye Hongjia Centennial Memorial Exhibition: Interweaves exhibition scenes, family oral histories, and comic history to tell the character’s story.
• Taiwan in Time: Taiwan’s first comic book hero: English-language report supplementing character creation, censorship systems, and cross-cultural sources.
• Manufacturing Heroes: Centered on Ye Hongjia’s Comic Series _Zhuge Silang_: Thesis abstract providing context on heroic imagery and socio-cultural frameworks.

References