Lion Dance in Phantom Blade Zero: The Real Roots

A lion dance (舞狮, wǔshī) is a Chinese folk performance in which dancers inside a lion costume — usually two, one working the head and one the tail — bring the animal to life to the beat of drums, gongs and cymbals, scaring off evil and calling in good fortune. It has been part of Chinese festivals for well over a thousand years, and its Southern, Guangdong form is the raw material for one of Phantom Blade Zero’s most talked-about bosses.

Mild spoilers: the game section near the end describes a late-game boss’s design, arena and music. It reveals nothing about the story.

Where the lion dance comes from

There were never wild lions in China. The animal arrived as a diplomatic gift: envoys from Central Asia and the Parthian Empire presented lions to the Han court, and the word for lion, shizi (狮子), first appears in Han-dynasty texts. A third-century commentary on the Hanshu already mentions “lion acts”, which may be the earliest record of the dance. Under the Northern Wei, a chronicle of Luoyang’s Buddhist temples describes a lion leading a parade of statues to drive away evil spirits — an early hint of the dance’s exorcist job.

By the Tang dynasty (618–907) the lion dance was court spectacle. The encyclopedia Tongdian (801) describes the “Five Directions lion dance” (五方师子舞): five lions, each in the colour of its direction, each handled by two men with rope and whisk, while 140 singers performed the “Music of Great Peace”. The poet Bai Juyi watched a smaller, two-man version and wrote down exactly what it looked like:

Carved head, moving ears, gilded eyes: the costume Bai Juyi describes is recognisably the ancestor of today’s lion. In the Song dynasty the dance moved from palace banquets to the streets and settled into the two-person festival act it still is.

Northern lion vs Southern lion

Two great families of lion dance survive among Han Chinese, and they look and move very differently.

The Southern lion comes in two main head shapes. The Foshan style has a big, round head and a wide mouth; the Heshan style is flatter and longer, with a duck-bill mouth. Southern lions also borrow faces from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms: a yellow Liu Bei lion with a white beard leads the dance, a red-faced Guan Yu lion with a black beard stands for loyalty (and, for Cantonese merchants, wealth), and a black Zhang Fei lion — the brawler — was traditionally the one sent to challenge rival schools.

The Southern style’s own origin stories, such as a lion scaring off the Nian beast or a dream of the Qianlong Emperor, are folklore. Historians generally see it as an adaptation of the older Northern lion, reshaped in Guangdong during the Ming and Qing dynasties.

Eye-dotting, plucking the greens and plum-blossom poles

Eye-dotting (dianjing (点睛, diǎnjīng)). A new lion is not alive until its eyes are opened. Before its first performance, a guest of honour dabs cinnabar onto its eyes with a brush, symbolically giving it life and spirit. The Southern name xingshi (醒狮) literally means “awakened lion”, and a performance often opens with the lion waking, stretching and blinking.

Plucking the greens (cai qing (采青, cǎiqīng)). The most famous Southern routine. A head of lettuce tied to a red envelope of money is hung above a shop door or set on a table. The lion approaches warily, “eats” the green, shreds it and spits the leaves out as blessings, keeping the envelope as the troupe’s fee. The puns do the work: cǎi (pluck) sounds like cài (vegetable) and cái (wealth), and lettuce, shēngcài, sounds like shēngcái, “make money”. Since the late Qing it has been a fixture of shop openings and New Year in South China, performed on the ground or as a “high green” hung almost out of reach.

Plum-blossom poles (meihua zhuang (梅花桩, méihuāzhuāng)梅花桩 méihuāzhuāngTall posts for balance training and high-pole lion dance; the arena of the game’s lion-dance boss.Glossary →). Kung fu students have long trained their balance on posts set in the ground, and both lion styles took the idea up. Northern lions walk plum-blossom poles as part of their acrobatics; the modern Southern high-pole lion dance (高桩) turned it into a sport, with steel poles up to about 2.8 m high and gaps of up to 1.8 m under international competition rules. Malaysia became its powerhouse: the Genting World Lion Dance Championship began there in 1984, and Malaysia listed high-pole lion dance as national heritage in 2007.

Kung fu schools and Wong Fei-hung

The Southern lion grew up inside martial-arts schools. Holding a lion head for minutes at a time demands deep stances and strong legs, so in the Foshan tradition only advanced students were allowed to dance, and the lion’s steps are built from kung fu footwork. A troupe was a school’s public face — and sometimes its fighting arm. In the 1950s and 60s lion troupes had a gangster-like reputation, rival troupes clashed in the street, and Hong Kong at one point banned the dance outright; troupes there still need a permit.

No one embodies the link better than Wong Fei-hung (黄飞鸿, 1847–1925), the Foshan-born Hung Ga master and physician who ran the Po Chi Lam clinic in Guangzhou. Chinese sources remember him as the “Lion King of Guangzhou” for his lion dancing; a Wong Fei-hung Lion Dance Martial Arts Museum opened in his Foshan hometown in 1996, and more than 100 films and TV series have been made about him since 1949.

The most famous of those films is the reason a lion boss exists in a 2020s action game. In Tsui Hark’s Once Upon a Time in China III (黄飞鸿之三：狮王争霸), released in Hong Kong in February 1993 after premiering abroad in December 1992, Jet Li’s Wong Fei-hung travels to Beijing for a lion-dance contest staged by the Empress Dowager Cixi and Li Hongzhang. The troupes brawl before it even begins, and the finale is a fight up a scaffold through dozens of rival lions, one of them carrying a huge, deadly lion head. Soulframe Liang told Jiefang Daily that this film came back to him while the team was researching lion-dance troupes. For the other films behind the game, see the kung fu films that inspired Phantom Blade Zero.

The Lion Dance Grandmaster in Phantom Blade Zero

S-GAME treated the tradition as fieldwork. A Xinhua short film reported by Jiefang Daily shows the team visiting inheritors of Guangdong’s Southern lion, and the studio’s own account is blunt: “when we needed lion dance choreography, we brought in lion dance masters from Guangdong.” Liang lists Guangdong lion dance among the folk traditions the game recasts in kungfupunk form.

The result is Flame, the Lion Dance Grandmaster (Flame (舞狮尊主 烈焰, Wǔshī Zūnzhǔ Lièyàn)), a late-game boss. Liang has said the design pairs traditional dao-and-shield technique with a chainsaw and fire-breathing, aiming for a lion that is 似像非像 — “like a lion, and not like a lion”. Lead combat action director Yang Liu captured the lion’s waking rhythm, the waves running through its body, its blinking and its mouth movements.

The music bends tradition the same way. Composer Bo Caisheng wrote the lion-dance theme in 2023, before the boss had even been designed. Phase one was recorded with a real lion-dance troupe; phase two switches to hard electronic music with 808 drums layered over the percussion. Elsewhere in the arsenal, a Phantom Edge called the Flaming Mane shoots fire “out of a giant mask”. Chinese coverage calls a fire-spewing Phantom Edge 烈焰狮头, “flaming lion head”, which we take to be the same weapon — and the China-only Collector’s Edition includes a necklace shaped like that lion head. Its fire has real ancestors too: see the Song flamethrower in our Tiger Cannon dossier.

What it takes to be the world's best lion dancers

A ritual made to be reinvented

The lion dance has never stood still. A Tang court spectacle became a street act, a Guangdong kung fu school’s calling card, a Hong Kong film climax and a Malaysian pole sport. Each version kept the core — a lion woken with cinnabar, fed its greens, driven by drums — and changed everything around it. Phantom Blade Zero’s chainsaw lion is one more turn of that wheel: unmistakably a xingshi, just one that breathes fire.