Assassins in Chinese History: Jing Ke, Zhuan Zhu & More

A cike (刺客, cìkè)刺客 cìkèIn Chinese history, a retainer who kills a powerful target on behalf of a patron; Sima Qian’s “Biographies of Assassins” (c. 94 BCE) made five of them famous.Glossary → — literally a “stabbing retainer” — was an assassin in ancient China: usually a man who killed for a patron who had honoured him, repaying a debt of gratitude with his life. The classic list comes from Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji, c. 94 BCE), whose chapter 86, “Biographies of Assassins” (刺客列传), profiles five men between 681 and 227 BCE. The most famous is Jing Ke, who came within a sleeve’s length of killing the man who became China’s First Emperor.

The five assassins of the Shiji

Sima Qian links the stories with a chain of dates — “167 years later…”, “more than 70 years later…” — so the chapter reads like a 450-year relay of daggers.

Lists online often add Yao Li (要离), the retainer of Wu who let his own wife and children be burned so that the exiled Prince Qingji would trust him. His story is real classical lore, but it comes from the Lüshi chunqiu (c. 239 BCE), not Sima Qian’s chapter.

Only Zhuan Zhu and Nie Zheng actually killed their targets. Sima Qian honoured all five anyway:

Zhuan Zhu and the fish-gut dagger

In 515 BCE Prince Guang of Wu wanted his cousin King Liao’s throne. The refugee general Wu Zixu introduced him to Zhuan Zhu. Guang hid armoured men in a cellar and invited the king, who came ringed by kinsmen with long blades. Midway through the feast, Guang pleaded a sore foot and slipped out — and the fish course came in:

Zhuan Zhu tore the fish open and stabbed the king dead; the guards killed him, and Guang took the throne as King Helü.

Legend vs history. The Shiji calls the weapon simply a 匕首, a dagger. The name Yuchang (鱼肠, “fish-gut”) first appears in the Western Han Huainanzi as a famous sword, and Han commentators — later joined by the 11th-century polymath Shen Kuo — explained it as the twisting, gut-like pattern on the blade. It was the Eastern Han Yuejue shu that listed Yuchang among five swords forged by the legendary smith Ou Yezi and said King Helü used it to kill King Liao. The “fish-gut sword hidden in a fish” is a later merger of two stories; Chinese opera went further and renamed it 鱼藏剑, the “fish-hidden sword”. See our jian and hidden weapons pages.

Yu Rang and Nie Zheng: dying for the one who knows you

Yu Rang served two noble houses of Jin without recognition, then found a lord, Zhi Bo, who honoured him. When Zhao Xiangzi destroyed Zhi Bo in 453 BCE — and lacquered his skull into a drinking vessel — Yu Rang fled to the mountains and swore revenge in words every Chinese schoolchild knows:

Disguised as a convict, he plastered the palace privy with a dagger hidden on him; Zhao, uneasy, had him seized, then freed him as a righteous man. Yu Rang lacquered his body until it broke out in sores and swallowed charcoal to ruin his voice, then lay in wait under a bridge; Zhao’s horse shied and he was caught again. Granted a last wish, he asked for Zhao’s robe, leapt three times and struck it with his sword, and fell on his blade.

Nie Zheng was a dog-butcher hiding from a vendetta with his mother and sister. The minister Yan Zhongzi, feuding with Xia Lei, chancellor of Han, offered a hundred yi of gold for his mother’s birthday; Nie Zheng refused while she lived. When she died, he went alone, climbed the steps of the chancellor’s hall and stabbed Xia Lei, then killed dozens of guards. To protect his family he “flayed his face, gouged out his eyes and cut open his belly” (自皮面决眼，自屠出肠). Han exposed the faceless corpse and offered a thousand gold for a name. His sister Nie Rong came, named him so his deed would not be lost, cried out to heaven three times and died beside his body.

Jing Ke and the dagger in the map

By 228 BCE Qin had swallowed Han and Zhao and stood on the border of Yan. Crown Prince Dan of Yan, once a hostage in Qin, recruited Jing Ke, a sword-loving scholar from Wey. The plan needed bait the King of Qin could not refuse: the head of Fan Yuqi, a Qin general who had defected — Fan cut his own throat to supply it — and a map of Dukang, Yan’s richest land. Rolled inside the map was a dagger from a man of Zhao named Xu Furen, bought for a hundred gold and tempered in poison: any cut that drew a thread of blood killed instantly.

At the Yi River, his friends dressed in mourning white, Gao Jianli played the zhu zither and Jing Ke sang:

In the Qin throne hall the king unrolled the map, and “when the map was fully unrolled, the dagger appeared” (图穷而匕首见) — the source of the idiom 图穷匕见, “the hidden truth comes out at the end”. Jing Ke seized the king’s sleeve and stabbed; the sleeve tore away. The king’s sword was too long to draw, and Qin law barred courtiers from carrying any weapon in the hall. As the king ran round a pillar, the physician Xia Wuju hurled his medicine bag at Jing Ke and attendants shouted, “Push the sword onto your back!” The king drew and cut Jing Ke’s thigh. Jing Ke threw the dagger, struck a pillar, and, with eight wounds, sat laughing: he had failed, he said, only because he had tried to take the king alive.

Sima Qian adds a historian’s note: tales that Jing Ke wounded the king are false — his account came, through two intermediaries, from Xia Wuju himself. Five years later Qin destroyed Yan. Gao Jianli, blinded by the First Emperor for the sake of his music, later filled his zhu with lead and swung it at the emperor — and missed.

After the Shiji: Li Bai and the Tang assassin tales

The Tang turned the cike into poetry and fantasy. Li Bai’s “Ode to the Knight-Errant” (侠客行), written about two retainers who helped Lord Xinling save the state of Zhao, supplied the most quoted assassin lines in Chinese:

Tang chuanqi stories then invented the professional killer. In Pei Xing’s ninth-century tale Nie Yinniang (聂隐娘), an officer’s daughter is abducted at ten by a Buddhist nun, trained for five years in swordplay and stealth, and sent by the military governor of Weibo to kill a rival governor, Liu Changyi — who wins her over instead. The fiction had real roots: Tang warlords kept assassins, and on 13 July 815 agents of the Pinglu governor Li Shidao murdered the chancellor Wu Yuanheng in Chang’an as he rode to court. Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin (2015), based on Pei Xing’s tale, won Best Director at Cannes.

Cike vs ninja vs hashashin

The English word assassin comes from the Nizaris’ Arabic nickname. The Shiji’s killers worked alone for one patron; wuxia’s shadowy assassin orders owe more to later secret police and secret societies — see The Order and real Chinese secret societies.

Soul, the Order’s assassin

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One reading: Yu Rang and Nie Zheng died for the masters who knew them, while Soul’s story begins by inverting that bargain — he stands accused of killing his. His countdown also echoes the cike’s defining trait, a man who sets out knowing he will probably not come back. More in why 66 days.

Jing Ke never came home from Qin, and Sima Qian made sure no one forgot him. Two thousand years on, the cike’s code — repay the one who knows you, finish the job, expect to die — is still the engine of wuxia, and the reason a hunted assassin with sixty-six days on the clock makes such a natural hero.