Jianghu Meaning: The Martial World of Phantom Blade Zero

Jianghu (江湖, jiānghú)江湖 jiānghú“Rivers and lakes”: the shadow society of martial artists, wanderers, sects and outlaws that exists alongside, and often outside, the law of the court.Glossary → literally means “rivers and lakes”. In Chinese fiction it names the world beyond the court and the law — roads and inns, sects and escort convoys, beggar gangs and outlaw camps — where people settle their affairs by their own code instead of the magistrate’s. It is the stage of every wuxia story, and the world Soul is hunted through in Phantom Blade Zero. Say it 江湖jiānghú, roughly “jyahng-hoo”.

From Zhuangzi’s fish to Fan Zhongyan’s exile

The word begins as a Daoist image. In the Zhuangzi, fish stranded by a dried-up spring keep each other alive with breath and spittle — a picture of desperate dependence — and the text concludes they would be better off apart, free in open water:

Two ironies followed. The phrase 相濡以沫 (“moistening each other with spittle”) now appears on wedding cards to praise a devoted couple, the opposite of Zhuangzi’s point. And “forgetting one another in the jianghu” became the dream of every retiring swordsman.

For the next 1,500 years, jianghu meant distance from power. Sima Qian writes that after helping the state of Yue take its revenge, the minister Fan Li “took a small boat and drifted on the rivers and lakes” (乘扁舟浮于江湖), changed his name and became a merchant. In 1046 the statesman Fan Zhongyan made the opposition explicit:

The court and temple (庙堂) on one side, the jianghu on the other: wuxia still uses that map.

How “rivers and lakes” became an underworld

Over the centuries the word drifted down the social ladder. Poets used it for exile — Bai Juyi describes a musician “drifting among the rivers and lakes” — and a circle of Southern Song poets became known as the Jianghu poets. In everyday speech, zou jianghu (走江湖, “walking the jianghu”) meant making a living on the road: fortune-tellers, acrobats, storytellers and medicine peddlers. A jianghu langzhong (江湖郎中, “jianghu doctor”) is still a quack. Chan Buddhists had their own version: monks “walked the jianghu” between the great monasteries of Jiangxi (江西) and Hunan (湖南).

The jianghu then absorbed bandits and gangs. The 14th-century novel Water Margin (水浒传) gave its outlaws a moral code and a name, the “heroes of the greenwood” (绿林好汉, lùlín hǎohàn). In the 1920s Pingjiang Buxiaosheng put the word into the title of the novel that kicked off the modern wuxia craze, The Peculiar Knights-Errant of the Jianghu (江湖奇侠传), and the martial-world meaning was fixed. Today Chinese triads call their own world the jianghu; a retiring boss “leaves the jianghu” (退出江湖) or, in wuxia ceremony, “washes his hands in a golden basin” (金盆洗手), and a comeback is “re-entering the jianghu” (重出江湖).

A map of the jianghu

The unwritten rules follow from this map: keep your word, repay favours, avenge wrongs yourself, settle disputes by mediation or duel, and never hand a fellow jianghu member over to the magistrate. Hence the genre’s most quoted saying, popularized by wuxia novels and Hong Kong film: 人在江湖，身不由己 — “in the jianghu, you are not your own master.” Debts, loyalties and feuds decide for you.

Jianghu vs wulin (and murim)

The two words overlap but are not synonyms. Jianghu is everyone outside the court, including people who cannot fight: merchants, performers, thieves, hermits. Wulin (武林wǔlín, “martial forest”) is only the community of martial artists inside it, with its sects, rankings and feuds. Every wulin figure lives in the jianghu; not everyone in the jianghu belongs to the wulin. The two fused in 20th-century fiction, which is why translations swap them freely.

A footnote for history buffs: before it meant the martial world, Wulin was a literary name for Hangzhou. Zhou Mi’s Old Affairs of Wulin (武林旧事, completed before 1290) describes life in the Southern Song capital — and contains no sword fights.

For manhwa readers: murim is wulin

Murim (무림) is the Korean pronunciation of 武林, and gangho (강호) is the Korean reading of 江湖. The murim genre — Korean web novels and webtoons such as Return of the Blossoming Blade (화산귀환, serialized from 2019), about a swordsman of the Mount Hua sect — is wulin fiction transplanted to Korea, complete with Chinese sects and secret manuals. If you know murim, you already know Phantom Blade Zero’s world.

The jianghu of Phantom Blade Zero

Phantom Blade Zero’s official English uses the narrower word. Soul, framed for his master’s murder, “roams the Wulin, determined to unravel a conspiracy that has ensnared the martial world”, and the Steam page lists “the Wulin and the Discordance” — in Chinese 表里武林, literally the “outer and inner Wulin”. Fans reading the menus take the Discordance to be the hidden inner Wulin; S-GAME has not spelled it out. The Chinese tagline goes darker still, describing a Wulin “of lost order and the Dharma’s end” (失序末法的武林).

The developers use the jianghu as a design language:

• Bonds. Liang has told Chinese press that the story builds three layers of ties — with villains, with jianghu friends and with ordinary people — as Soul widens his concern from saving himself to protecting commoners.
• Masks. Art director Michael told Gamersky that masks stand for the jianghu’s disguise, confinement and repression: almost every fallen villain wears one, while the unmasked are the xiake who stay true to themselves.
• Red threads. The crimson threads binding characters stand, he says, for the jianghu’s entanglements of love, hate and fate (爱恨纠葛、命运羁绊).
• Sound. Composer Bo Caisheng told ChuApp that to him the erhu is “very jianghu, even wild” (非常江湖，甚至草莽).
• Death. In the Sixty-Six Days mode, running out of days triggers a short ending titled 饮恨江湖 — roughly “dying with a grudge in the jianghu”.

Enter the Wulin: Gameplay & Story Deep Dive of Phantom Blade Zero

The organization that hunts Soul is the jianghu at its most sinister — see The Order and real Chinese secret societies.

Zhuangzi wanted his fish to forget each other in the rivers and lakes. Two thousand years of storytellers did the opposite, filling the jianghu with debts, vows and vendettas that no one can forget. That is the water Soul swims in: a world beyond the law where, as the saying goes, once you are in, you are no longer your own.