The Order & Real Chinese Secret Societies, Explained

The Order (组织, zǔzhī)组织 ZǔzhīThe “elusive but powerful organization” of assassins Soul served before he was framed.Glossary → is the shadowy organization at the heart of Phantom Blade Zero. S-GAME’s 2023 reveal introduced the hero, Soul, as “an elite assassin serving an elusive but powerful organization known simply as ‘The Order’” — in Chinese coverage simply 组织, “the organization”. The Order is fiction. But late-imperial China really did have secret police answerable only to the emperor, outlawed religious sects and oath-bound brotherhoods, and wuxia has spent a century turning them into stories.

The Order in Phantom Blade Zero: what is official

Beyond that, S-GAME keeps the Order deliberately vague. Earlier games in the series named the patriarch, but current official materials only call him Soul’s “master” or the Order’s “patriarch”, so treat any name you see online as unconfirmed for Zero. Previews describe The Hunt, a former comrade who now hunts Soul for the Order with a chain sickle. Here is how the factions known so far line up, with the strength of the evidence:

Reviews add that factions in the Phantom World pursue Transcension (杀气改造), artificially amplifying Sha-Chi at the cost of their subjects’ sanity — a punk take on the secret society’s forbidden technique.

Phantom Blade Zero — Pre-Order Trailer

Ming secret police: the Embroidered Guard and the Eastern Depot

The closest real match for an all-seeing order of killers is the Ming state’s own security apparatus.

The Embroidered Uniform Guard (锦衣卫, Jinyiwei) grew out of Zhu Yuanzhang’s personal bodyguard and was formally established in 1382, when he ruled as the Hongwu Emperor. Its officers answered only to the throne: they could arrest anyone, nobles included, interrogate them in the guard’s own imperial prison (诏狱) and punish them without going through the regular courts. Hongwu himself burned its torture instruments in 1387 and cut its powers in 1393, after a purge around the general Lan Yu implicated some 40,000 people. His son, the usurping Yongle Emperor, restored it. Guardsmen were known for their flying-fish robes (飞鱼服) and xiuchun dao (绣春刀) sabres.

In 1420 Yongle added the Eastern Depot (东厂), a spy agency run by palace eunuchs and named for its site east of the palace. It watched officials of every rank and handed suspects to the Guard for interrogation; together the two were called 厂卫, “depot and guard”. A short-lived Western Depot (西厂) under the eunuch Wang Zhi operated from 1477 to 1482, with a brief revival until 1510. In the 1620s the eunuch Wei Zhongxian, who controlled the Eastern Depot, became a byword for terror. Both institutions ended with the dynasty in 1644.

White Lotus: the sect that was mostly a label

White Lotus (白莲教) began as Pure Land Buddhist lay societies and, by the Yuan dynasty, had become a catch-all for heterodox movements expecting the future Buddha Maitreya to descend and remake the world. In 1351 the Red Turban rebellion broke out under Han Shantong and his son, who preached that “Maitreya will be born” and “the King of Light will appear”. A former monk named Zhu Yuanzhang rose through the rebel armies to found the Ming — and then banned White Lotus teachings in the Ming code. From the late 15th century, sects worshipped the Eternal Venerable Mother (无生老母), and in the 1790s a vast uprising claiming White Lotus ties engulfed the mountains between Sichuan, Hubei and Shaanxi; the Qing needed until 1804 to crush it.

The historian B. J. ter Haar has argued that “White Lotus” was largely a label that officials stuck on unrelated groups to make them sound like one conspiracy. If he is right, the most famous secret society in Chinese history was partly a creation of the officials who hunted it.

The Heaven and Earth Society, the Green Gang and the triads

The Heaven and Earth Society (天地会, Tiandihui) is what most people mean by “Chinese secret society”. Qing archival research — first published by the historian Cai Shaoqing in 1964 and developed by Qin Baoqi and Dian Murray — dates its founding to around 1761 in Zhangpu county, Fujian, by a monk known as Tixi. Its roots were mutual aid among poor men far from home, bound by blood-oath brotherhood. Only later did members tell a founding legend of Shaolin monks betrayed by the Qing, five survivors and the slogan “Overthrow the Qing, restore the Ming” (反清复明). The society spread under many names, including the Three Harmonies Society (三合会) — the source of the English word triad, in use by 1826 — and the Hongmen (洪门). Sun Yat-sen was a senior Hongmen figure; after the Qing fell in 1911 some branches lost their purpose and turned to crime, giving rise to the modern triads.

The Green Gang (青帮) had different roots: the Luo sect, which spread among the crews of the Grand Canal grain fleets in the 18th century until the Qianlong Emperor banned it in 1768. When canal transport collapsed in the mid-19th century, the boatmen drifted into salt smuggling, and by the 1920s the Green Gang under Huang Jinrong and Du Yuesheng ran Shanghai’s opium, gambling and protection rackets. In April 1927 its men helped Chiang Kai-shek purge the Communists in Shanghai.

Secret orders in wuxia fiction

Wuxia absorbed all three — police, sect and brotherhood — and keeps recycling them:

• The state’s killers. King Hu’s Dragon Inn (1967) and A Touch of Zen (1970–71) pit wandering heroes against Eastern Depot eunuchs and their agents; in A Touch of Zen they hunt the daughter of an official who denounced Wei Zhongxian. New Dragon Gate Inn (1992) and Brotherhood of Blades (2014) kept the Ming secret police on screen, and Donnie Yen, Phantom Blade Zero’s Mó Yuan, played a Jinyiwei captain in 14 Blades (2010).
• The rebel brotherhood. Jin Yong’s first novel, The Book and the Sword (书剑恩仇录, 1955), centres on the fictional anti-Qing Red Flower Society; his last, The Deer and the Cauldron (鹿鼎记), makes the Heaven and Earth Society a major player.
• The assassins’ guild. Films such as Reign of Assassins (2010), in which Michelle Yeoh plays a killer trying to leave her old gang, made the deserter hunted by her own order a stock plot.

That last trope is Phantom Blade Zero’s setup: a framed assassin hunted by the organization he served. The Order belongs to that wuxia tradition — and to the Chinese assassin stories behind it — not to any real archive. For the game’s wider relationship to history, see Is Phantom Blade Zero based on real Chinese history?

Real secret societies were messier than fiction: mutual-aid clubs that grew heroic legends, sects partly invented by the officials who persecuted them, police who served one man’s fear. The Order distils them into a single nightmare with no name but “the organization” — which is exactly what makes it feel real.