Wuxia武侠
wǔxiá
"Martial heroes" fiction: trained martial artists navigating the jianghu underworld by codes of honor, with skills that bend rather than break human limits.
Wuxia is the older tradition that xianxia grew out of, with roots in classical tales and a modern canon defined by twentieth-century novelists such as Jin Yong and Gu Long. Its heroes fight with swordsmanship, internal energy techniques, and lightness skills (qinggong) that let them run across rooftops, but they do not become gods; stakes stay human: revenge, loyalty, sect rivalry, and the tension between honor and law in the jianghu.
In donghua, pure wuxia is rarer than its supernatural cousins, but its DNA is everywhere: Fog Hill of Five Elements grafts wuxia choreography onto elemental fantasy, and Qin's Moon built the first long-running 3DCG series on a wuxia-in-history frame.
