Wuxia: The Complete Guide to the Martial World

Ang Lee took a genre that Chinese audiences had loved for generations and framed it so that everyone could feel it: the weightless rooftop chases, the bamboo-forest duel, the tragic restraint of two masters who love each other and cannot say so. It won four Academy Awards and remains the highest-grossing foreign-language film in American history. For millions of viewers it was the first time gravity became optional and a sword fight became a love scene.

Zhang Yimou built his story out of pure color, telling each version of the same events in its own saturated palette, red, blue, white and green, until the film becomes an argument about truth conducted in light. The lake duel and the storm of arrows are among the most beautiful images in action cinema. Whatever you make of its politics, Hero proved wuxia could be high art without losing an ounce of spectacle.

Adapted from Mo Xiang Tong Xiu's novel, The Untamed took the xianxia world of sword-wielding immortal clans and centered it on a friendship so tender it launched a worldwide fandom. It is fifty episodes of intricate flashback structure, gorgeous costuming and slow-burn devotion, and it did more than any single work to introduce the cultivation genre, and the wider world of Chinese web-novel fantasy, to an international audience.

Louis Cha, writing as Jin Yong, is to Chinese popular fiction what Tolkien is to fantasy: the author whose imagined world became the shared language of a culture. His Condor Heroes trilogy and The Deer and the Cauldron have been adapted into dozens of films, series and games, and virtually every wuxia and xianxia story since owes him its map of the jianghu. English translation arrived shockingly late, but A Hero Born finally opened the door.