Liu Xiao Ling Tong, born Zhang Jinlai in 1959, is a native of Shanghai. He is a Chinese actor best known for his role as the Monkey King (Sun Wukong) in the 1986 television series Journey to the West. He has toured schools and communities to give free lectures on Sun Wukong and the culture related to Journey to the West since 2004.

Liu Xiao Ling Tong, born Zhang Jinlai, grew up in Shanghai. Four generations of Zhang’s family were devoted to performing “monkey opera,” a genre of performance in which at least one cast member portrays a monkey like Sun Wukong.

Zhang’s great-grandfather, Zhang Tingchun, a farmer in Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province, has loved monkey opera ever since he was very young, and gained the stage name of Huo Hou Zhang (“just like a living monkey”).

His grandfather Zhang Yisheng, with the stage name Huo Sai Hou (“better than a living monkey”), led troupes of Shaoxing opera to Shanghai, and performed there, to wide acclaim.

Zhang’s father Zhang Songyi starred in the film Sun Wukong Subdues the White-Bone Demo in 1961, which became a classic opera of the era.

Liu Xiao Ling Tong began learning monkey opera as a child and his name has been synonymous with Sun Wukong since the TV series Journey to the West was first broadcast.

The family’s monkey opera originated in Shaoxing, then spread to Shanghai and Beijing, and then the whole world. In addition to the efforts of the whole family, Liu Xiao Ling Tong credited the success more to the development of the entire nation. “[It was] because we have rich cultural heritage and we are now living in a good era,” he said.

“Young people are said to have no interest in operas. But in my opinion, that’s because they don’t quite understand them,” he said. During a lecture on Chinese monkey opera at the University of Oxford in England, when he asked the student audience whether they liked Chinese operas or whether they had seen any, he received no response. But when he asked whether they liked Sun Wukong, the audience became excited.

“Then I tell them, their affection for this character I performed not only shows the success of my family in the genre of monkey opera, but also shows the greatness of Chinese operas. Because it is a must to understand and accept operas, if you want to be a master in depicting the character well in both operas and plays in general,” he said.

Now, Zhang has become a cultural ambassador dedicated to spreading monkey opera and the culture related to it. He has been to many countries, including those along the route in Journey to the West, finding that many countries have a deeply rooted love for Sun Wukong. He feels he has the duty to transmit the energy embodied in Sun Wukong to the whole world.