Before I even found out about the theme for the next Sunset Wave Press anthology (Fire and Ice), I had decided to write a xianxia-style story. I doodled some notes months ago but wasn’t able to start it until the very beginning of November — and was so pleased that the first few scenes just rolled off my fingertips.

[NB: I have recently found out that the Fire and Ice anthology will be pushed back to 2027, so … taking a bit of a pause on working on my submission for now.]

If you’re not familiar with the term “xianxia,” it’s a Chinese fantasy genre, with a setting that’s a vague version of historical China, filled with powerful adventurers. “Wuxia” is a more commonly recognized term here in the west, following the popularity of wuxia movies like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and House of Flying Daggers — basically, wuxia and xianxia are part of the same spectrum, with wuxia being the lowest-fantasy version and xianxia featuring a higher level of magic. Some people have a bit of familiarity with the xianxia genre from popular TenCent drama The Untamed.

I’m not going to pretend to be an expert, but since I’m trying to figure out how to write this story in such a way that I don’t confuse newbies to xianxia while also not annoying any readers who know these tropes already, I figured I would write a brief and basic guide to them. (Which will hopefully intrigue a few people into wanting to check out danmei and baihe, which are Chinese m/m and f/f, respectively.)

Xianxia rests on Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism in the same way that western fantasy with medieval European settings rests on Christianity and a melange of Germanic/Hellenistic/Celtic paganism. I’m certainly not learned enough to explain this in great detail, but religious/philosophical elements usually present include:

• Reincarnation and hell(s) being things that generally happen to souls

• Incense being lit and paper money being burned for the dead

• Qi circulating through the body and affecting its power or healing

• Characters copying or reciting sutras as religious practice or punishment

Characters in xianxia are usually martial artists. While they might be good with weapons in general, they typically have one weapon that’s their calling card, possibly a spiritual weapon with magical properties. They can also stand on top of their swords and fly to travel more quickly than walking, and jump very high and land lightly on things humans usually can’t balance on, like tree branches. Similarly in terms of supernatural abilities, the breeze created when they swing their swords or even the light glinting off of the blades can have an effect like a blow with the sword itself. On top of that, by circulating qi inside themselves or being given qi from another person, they can heal physical wounds quickly.

The way these martial artists gain this power is through “cultivation”, a Daoist concept which in these stories is mostly meditation or working on their fighting skills. Cultivating builds and strengthens a core (also called a golden core), the seat of all that qi and supernatural power, and essentially helps a character level up, so they do it a lot. If a character cultivates enough, they can become extremely long-lived or even, depending on the specifics of the setting, become gods. Cultivator characters that aren’t martial artists, or aren’t letting themselves be seen as martial artists, might be wandering priests (dressed in white and often carrying a whisk), or learned scholars or healers.

Many cultivators are part of cultivation sects, communities organized around practicing and teaching these skills to younger disciples. A member of a sect refers to those of their own age cohort as martial siblings, and the members of their teacher’s age cohort as martial aunts and uncles. It’s a combination of family, school, and corporation. Sects also fight demons and monsters to protect the local countryside. (If they’re good sects. It’s not at all unheard-of for sects focused on evil cultivation to be causing the trouble.)

This feels wholly insufficient to sum up the entire wide world of xianxia, but ultimately as an individual I’ve only read a limited amount of it and don’t want to give a skewed idea of its priorities based on what I’ve looked at. For instance, a lot of it is progression fantasy focused on the hero cultivating to higher and higher levels, gaining new spiritual weapons and artifacts — but this isn’t really represented among danmei fiction.

It’s just a small taste to give you a little bit of background, so that you don’t go in completely cold if you’ve been curious about this genre. If you have a friend who was really into The Untamed during lockdown, or if you saw a shelf of Seven Seas translations at the library, and you picked one story up but the amount of worldbuilding was daunting …

This also feels like a good place to point out that the Chinese writers of queer xianxia face fines and jail time. There’s a lot of digital ink spilled about whether or not romantic fiction can be truly subversive, but it’s pretty clear to me that there is a context where the answer is undoubtedly yes.

And now to go in a completely different direction, because I don’t know enough about hanfu to analyze a premodern Chinese piece of art (unfortunately).

This portrait shows a woman in everyday clothing, as though she just happened to stop by the artist’s studio and had her image captured by chance. She is wearing a white shirtwaist as part of a black suit, with a wide necktie and a boater hat: an ensemble often associated with the New Woman of the period, but really a practical way to dress regardless of political leanings or progressivism.

The shirtwaist was a recent addition to women’s wardrobes, helping to stretch a limited number of garments into more outfits. Often it was made with a narrow band collar that a larger, starched collar could be attached to with shirt studs — another layer of practicality. Straw boaters were completely appropriate for women and fit with the hat aesthetics of the day (upright, on top of the head), but also contributed to the general effect of cross-gender fashions.

The museum did not date the painting, but the tall puffs on the heads of the sleeves of the jacket make it clear that it’s from the early 1890s. Fashionable sleeves were made with large heads that pleated down into, well, this shape in 1890-1891, and then began to swell out into the large forms of the mid-1890s.

And that is all for me this month! Hopefully some thoughts on editing next month, although December is always a difficult time to find spare moments to write in. Thank you, as always, for subscribing and reading.