Jin Yong: The 'Tolkien of Chinese literature' dies at 94

         

Novelist Louis Cha, who wrote under the name Jin Yong, died on Tuesday at a hospital in Hong Kong at the age of 94.

He had become a household name across many Chinese-speaking parts of Asia, having sold millions of books and inspiring a whole genre of TV shows, comics and even video games.

"I don't think there's another writer that's been read by more people [in the Chinese-speaking world], period," Eileen Chow, a visiting associate professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University in North Carolina, told the BBC