The Legend of Mando Part 1: a Tale of Quests in New Republic Jianghu

Whenever I wax lyrical about the wonders of Chinese wuxia, of clans, intrigue and swordsmen, I’m often told that people in the West will have a hard time understanding it, and yet, when I sit with my geeky friends, they are more than happy to info dump about old Republics, the Jedi Order, bounty hunters and the shadow organisations of Star Wars. Western nerds, you have been enjoying Wuxia stories, for nearly 50 years.

The main reason I hadn’t originally made the connection, was that I was relatively late to the franchise. I didn’t grow up in a culture where Star Wars was this huge thing, and it wasn’t really till the sequel trilogy came out that I sat down and actually watched the thing, and with 2016’s Rogue One, starring Donnie Yenn and Jiang Wen, I began to see the parallels with the martial arts fantasies I grew up with.

I had originally planned to write this as a two-part piece, the first for May the 4th, and the second for the release of The Mandalorian and Grogu. But the more I delved into the expanded universe, animations and series, the more I found I had to say. In fact, I’d like to begin away from the swords and sorcery of the Jedi’s story, and look at just how Wuxia-coded The Mandalorian’s story is. For a start, it’s three (and a half) season saga, and the imminent film release give it that feeling of modern Wuxia series, which often run to 30+ episodes, giving plenty of room for character growth amongst the battles and betrayals.


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Love and Sword: A Dream of Jianghu

Love and Sword (directed by Cha Zhuanyi, starring Xuan Lu, Gao Weiguang), is a Tencent wuxia romance series released earlier this year. Loosely a chuanyue (Chinese for isekai) story, its protagonist Fang Yi, a young woman in contemporary China, gets transported into a dream world after being in a road accident. The woman with whom she shares her name, whose body she ends up in, is one of the greatest fighters of the land. She is being held to ransom within an inch of her life, and rescued by the dashing swordsman Yanshao (literally “dashing youth”), on a white horse. They make a hazardous journey back to her clan. At first, our heroine is anxious to get home, but as she recovers fragments of traumatic memory of her world and bonds with the people of this one, she begins to like it here, rather a lot.

Sound like a typical wuxia story? Well, it’s meant to be. The show doesn’t hide the fact it’s a dynastic world of the wuxia imagination, adopting an only slightly more sophisticated title of “A Mere Dream of Jianghu” than the novel it’s based on “Sleeping with Yanshao”. And it delivers all the romance, excitement and mystery that we typically find in wuxia novels. This is precisely why I am writing about it, from its archetypal trappings, characterisation and tropey plot developments, we can see much of what makes wuxia storytelling popular, and learn about the genre in contemporary times. As an enthusiast who grew up with wuxia TV, went on the read the novels, and now write about it as an author, I’ll be tapping into my considerable research (recently more focussed and academic). Heads up that because I’m taking the story apart, there will be spoilers.


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