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| Wuxia |
Wuxia: The Imaginary World of Kung Fu
Kung fu has two histories.
One belongs to people who actually practiced martial arts: teachers, soldiers, militia members, performers, bodyguards, rebels, athletes and ordinary people who trained for many different reasons.
The other belongs to imagination.
Flying swordsmen leap across rooftops, mysterious masters disappear into the mountains, secret manuals contain forgotten techniques, a touch to an acupuncture point can paralyze an opponent, and decades of internal cultivation can transform an ordinary person into an almost superhuman fighter.
This is the world of wuxia (武俠).
The two worlds should not be confused. Wuxia is fiction, not a documentary record of Chinese martial arts.
But they have never been completely separate either.
For centuries, Chinese martial culture has influenced literature and popular entertainment. In return, stories, novels, opera, cinema and television have influenced how people imagine kung fu itself.
Understanding wuxia therefore helps us understand something important about Chinese martial arts culture.
What Does Wuxia Mean?
The term wuxia (武俠) combines two important ideas.
Wu (武) refers broadly to the martial.
Xia (俠) is more difficult to translate. English translations include “knight-errant,” “chivalrous hero” and “martial hero,” but none captures the concept perfectly.
The xia is generally someone willing to act according to a personal conception of justice and righteousness, sometimes outside conventional political and social authority.
This idea is much older than the modern wuxia novel.
Early Chinese historical literature already contains accounts of wandering retainers, assassins and youxia (遊俠)—figures admired or criticized for courage, loyalty, independence and willingness to use violence in pursuit of personal obligations or justice.
One famous early source is Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian (史記), compiled more than two thousand years ago, which contains biographies of wandering knights and assassins.
These ancient figures were not modern wuxia heroes.
But they provided part of the cultural soil from which the later idea of the martial hero developed.
From Ancient Tales to Martial Arts Fiction
There was no single moment when somebody invented wuxia.
Instead, different literary traditions gradually contributed elements that later became characteristic of the genre.
During the Tang dynasty, chuanqi (傳奇), or “tales of the marvelous,” included stories involving extraordinary swordsmen, assassins and supernatural events.
Later literature continued developing themes of wandering heroes, loyalty, revenge and resistance to corrupt authority.
One particularly important work was the Ming-dynasty novel Water Margin (水滸傳).
Water Margin should not simply be called the first wuxia novel. The history of the genre is more complicated than that. But its enormous cast of outlaws, warriors and rebels living according to loyalties outside ordinary political authority profoundly influenced later Chinese martial storytelling.
By the late Qing and especially the Republican period, martial-arts fiction had developed into a recognizable commercial literary genre.
Cheap printing, newspapers, magazines and expanding urban readerships allowed martial stories to reach enormous audiences.
The imaginary martial world was becoming modern mass entertainment.
Welcome to the Jianghu
One of the most important concepts in wuxia is jianghu (江湖).
Literally, the characters mean “rivers and lakes.”
But translating them literally tells us almost nothing about their meaning in martial fiction.
Jianghu is not simply a physical location, nor should it be understood as a historical place where Chinese government and law did not exist.
In wuxia it becomes an imagined social world existing partly outside ordinary institutions.
Martial artists, wandering swordsmen, beggars, merchants, assassins, monks, bandits, secret societies, clans and mysterious masters move through this world according to relationships and obligations that do not always correspond to official law.
Within the jianghu, reputation matters.
So do loyalty, obligation, revenge, promises and personal relationships.
A character may break the law while still being presented as righteous. Conversely, a government official may possess legal authority while being portrayed as corrupt and immoral.
This tension is central to many wuxia stories.
The hero must decide:
What happens when law and justice are not the same thing?
That question is much older and more interesting than flying kung fu masters.
The Martial Hero
The ideal wuxia hero is not simply the person who can fight best.
The concept of xia (俠) carries moral expectations.
Particularly important is yi (義)—righteousness, loyalty to moral obligation, or doing what one believes should be done regardless of personal benefit.
The precise moral world varies enormously between authors and historical periods, but familiar themes repeatedly appear.
The hero protects the weak, repays debts, keeps promises, helps friends, confronts injustice and accepts personal danger rather than abandoning an obligation.
Of course, wuxia characters do not always live up to these ideals.
That is often where the story becomes interesting.
A martial artist may possess extraordinary skill while being selfish, cruel or cowardly. Another may be physically weaker but demonstrate greater courage or righteousness.
Wuxia therefore asks a question familiar to martial arts themselves:
What makes someone worthy of possessing power?
When Kung Fu Becomes Superhuman
Wuxia borrows heavily from real Chinese martial culture.
Punching, kicking, wrestling, weapons, training methods, breathing practices, traditional medicine, martial terminology and ideas about internal cultivation all appear.
But wuxia transforms them.
Real skills become extraordinary skills.
A fighter's agility becomes qinggong (輕功), allowing fictional heroes to leap impossible distances, run across rooftops and, in cinema, appear almost to fly.
Training concerned with internal cultivation becomes fantastic neigong (內功) or neili (內力) capable of producing extraordinary strength, healing injuries or projecting devastating power.
Real traditions involving attacks to vulnerable anatomical areas contribute to fictional dianxue (點穴), where touching precisely the correct point can instantly paralyze, disable or even kill an opponent.
Real martial manuals become mysterious secret books containing techniques capable of making whoever possesses them nearly invincible.
There is usually a recognizable martial idea underneath the fantasy.
But wuxia deliberately pushes that idea far beyond ordinary human ability.
That exaggeration is not a mistake.
It is part of the genre.
The Secret Manual
Few objects are more characteristic of wuxia than the lost martial arts manual.
The formula is familiar.
A powerful master develops an extraordinary system. His knowledge is recorded in a manuscript. The manuscript disappears. Generations later someone discovers it in a cave, monastery, grave, abandoned temple or secret chamber.
Suddenly everyone in the jianghu wants it.
Possessing the book may mean possessing the greatest martial art in China.
This makes wonderful fiction because the manual provides a reason for alliances, betrayals, murders, journeys and battles.
It also touches something real in traditional martial culture.
Martial knowledge historically could be transmitted through relatively small social networks. Manuscripts existed. Teachers did not necessarily teach every student identically. Family traditions and closed teaching relationships were real phenomena.
Wuxia takes these realities and amplifies them dramatically.
A teacher withholding certain material becomes:
The last secret technique was never transmitted.
A rare manuscript becomes:
The lost manual containing the supreme martial art.
A forgotten teacher becomes:
The last master who possessed the complete system.
And here the boundary between fiction and martial folklore can become surprisingly thin.
The Rise of Modern Wuxia
The twentieth century transformed wuxia.
Martial-arts fiction flourished in commercial publishing during the Republican period, particularly in major urban centres. Writers developed what scholars later called the Old School of martial-arts fiction.
War and political upheaval disrupted this literary world, but wuxia returned spectacularly after the middle of the century.
Beginning in the 1950s, Hong Kong and Taiwan became major centres of what became known as New School wuxia. Martial-arts novels appeared in newspapers and magazines and attracted enormous readerships.
Among the most influential writers were Liang Yusheng (梁羽生) and Jin Yong (金庸) in Hong Kong, while Taiwan developed its own extraordinarily rich wuxia literary culture.
One of Taiwan's greatest figures was Gu Long (古龍), whose concise prose, mysterious characters and cinematic approach created a markedly different atmosphere from Jin Yong's historically elaborate novels.
Taiwan was therefore not simply a place where wuxia was suppressed. It became one of the major centres of modern Chinese martial-arts fiction, with writers including Wolong Sheng, Sima Ling and Gu Long helping shape the genre. Research has even traced wuxia publishing and local wuxia writing in Taiwan back into the Japanese colonial period.
Wuxia Goes to the Cinema
Wuxia was ideally suited to cinema.
Sword fights, revenge, mysterious masters, spectacular landscapes and extraordinary martial abilities provided filmmakers with almost unlimited visual possibilities.
Chinese cinema experimented with martial fantasy early in its history, but Hong Kong's film industry eventually brought wuxia to enormous international audiences.
Different periods produced very different approaches.
Some films emphasized swords and fantasy.
Others moved toward harder physical combat.
Still others combined wuxia conventions with kung fu cinema, historical drama, comedy or supernatural fantasy.
Film technology also changed what martial heroes could do.
Trampolines, wire work, editing and eventually digital effects transformed literary qinggong into the spectacular airborne combat now recognized throughout the world.
For many Western viewers, Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) became their first major encounter with the aesthetics of wuxia.
But by then the genre already possessed centuries of literary ancestry and decades of enormously successful Chinese-language cinema.
Wuxia and Xianxia Are Not the Same Thing
Today another term is increasingly familiar outside China:
xianxia (仙俠).
The two genres overlap, but they should not simply be treated as synonyms.
Wuxia normally places martial heroes at the centre of its world, even when their abilities become wildly unrealistic.
Xianxia moves much further into supernatural territory.
The character xian (仙) refers to transcendent or immortal beings associated with long traditions of Chinese religion, mythology and immortality practices.
Xianxia therefore draws heavily on a much larger cultural reservoir involving immortality, cultivation, gods, demons, spirits, magical objects, supernatural realms and transformations of the human body.
A wuxia hero might leap impossibly high.
A xianxia protagonist might cultivate for centuries, become immortal, fly through supernatural realms and fight demons with magical weapons.
Modern novels, television series, comics and online fiction have blurred the boundaries further, so individual works do not always fit neatly into one category.
But xianxia should not be understood simply as a recent invention produced by modern censorship. Its literary ancestry reaches considerably further back into Chinese traditions of supernatural and immortality literature.
When Fiction Returns to Martial Arts
For Martial Custodian, this is perhaps the most interesting part of the story.
We normally imagine the relationship like this:
Martial arts → stories
Real martial arts inspire fictional martial arts.
But cultural influence can travel in both directions:
Martial arts → fiction → martial culture
A novelist borrows something from martial tradition.
The novelist exaggerates it.
The story becomes enormously popular.
Later generations grow up surrounded by that fictional representation.
Eventually some elements can return to martial culture as expectations about what traditional kung fu was supposedly capable of doing.
This does not mean that every extraordinary martial claim comes from wuxia.
Nor does it mean that traditional martial culture was purely practical before modern fiction appeared. Stories of extraordinary warriors, supernatural abilities and legendary weapons are much older.
The important point is simply that popular culture and martial culture continually influence one another.
This makes historical research difficult.
When we encounter a story about an invincible ancestor, a lost manual, a secret technique, extraordinary internal power or a mysterious master who defeated countless opponents, we cannot automatically assume that the story preserves historical fact.
But neither should we automatically assume that a novelist invented it.
We have to ask the same question every time:
Where is the earliest evidence?
The Imaginary World Matters
Wuxia is fantasy, but that does not make it irrelevant to the study of kung fu.
Quite the opposite.
It preserves and transforms ideas about martial virtue, justice, loyalty, teachers, students, secret knowledge, personal cultivation and the responsibilities that supposedly accompany martial power.
It has also profoundly influenced how Chinese martial arts are imagined around the world.
For many people, their first encounter with kung fu was not inside a martial arts school.
It was through a novel, comic book, television series or movie.
Some eventually began practicing martial arts because they wanted to enter, in some small way, the world they had encountered in those stories.
The real world of Chinese martial arts is not the jianghu.
People cannot fly across rooftops. Secret manuals do not turn beginners into invincible fighters. Internal training does not give someone supernatural powers.
But the imaginary world and the historical world have existed beside each other for a very long time.
And occasionally they exchange ideas.
Understanding that relationship helps us appreciate wuxia for what it is while also becoming more careful when somebody tells us what kung fu supposedly was.
Wuxia does not give us a reliable history of Chinese martial arts.
But it is unquestionably part of their cultural history.
References and Further Reading
John Christopher Hamm, Paper Swordsmen: Jin Yong and the Modern Chinese Martial Arts Novel. University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt6wqnh9
James J. Y. Liu, The Chinese Knight-Errant. University of Chicago Press, 1967.
Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian (史記), particularly the biographies of wandering knights (遊俠列傳) and assassins (刺客列傳).
Patrick Pahlberg, Study on “Wuxia” Novels in Taiwan during the Japanese Colonial Period, National Taiwan University, 2008.
https://scholars.lib.ntu.edu.tw/entities/publication/534d0600-89a8-4238-a3ed-bdd5506e8aa6
Ryan Kueck, Wuxia as Fantasy: An English Translation of Juedai Shuangjiao, National Taiwan Normal University, 2013.
https://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/cgi-bin/gs32/gsweb.cgi?o=dnclcdr&s=id%3D%22102NTNU5526002%22.&searchmode=basic