For 13 years and counting, WuxiaSociety has been building an independent English-language home for wuxia. It brings together translations, cultural and historical context, and reference guides to its novels, authors, characters, adaptations, and storytelling traditions.
WuxiaSociety makes wuxia accessible without losing what makes it wuxia. It helps readers and writers discover, understand, and create wuxia through faithful translation, cultural and historical context, adaptation knowledge, and storytelling guidance drawn from the works themselves.
Whether you grew up with wuxia, discovered it through a drama or film, or are encountering it for the first time, this is a place to read more deeply and understand what you are reading.
One growing archive, organised around five ways into the world of wuxia. New to wuxia? Start here.
Wuxia novels in English, with guides to help you choose where to begin.
Browse translationsLook up any author, character, faction, martial art, or place.
Open the wikiThe history, values, and social world behind the stories.
Learn the basicsSee how films and dramas relate to the novels they adapt.
Compare adaptationsHow wuxia stories are built, drawn from the novels themselves.
Study the craft
WuxiaSociety grew from an online community into a long-running independent archive. Its shape has changed, but its purpose has remained: make wuxia more accessible in English without stripping away the culture and literary traditions that give it meaning.
A group of wuxia enthusiasts came together on Phorumz as Wuxiamania to share their love of Chinese martial arts fiction.
Wuxiamania went offline for unknown reasons. Several failed attempts to revive the community followed.
The community returned under the WuxiaSociety name, with a promised forum relaunch on 9 March 2007 that never happened.
Launched on 2 June 2005, Wuxiapedia closed after running for one year and ten months.
WuxiaSociety was relaunched in its current form and on its current domain.
The archive continues to grow through translations, reference work, cultural explanation, adaptation context, and editorial writing.
I am Jenxi Seow, the founder of WuxiaSociety. I grew up in a Chinese-speaking Malaysian household with wuxia in the background: novels, television dramas, films, and the wider cultural world around them.
Chinese writing and Western fantasy gave me two traditions to read alongside each other. Encountering Demi-Gods and Semi-Devilsin a Chinese textbook changed how I saw wuxia. It was no longer only something adapted for television, but literature worth reading closely.
When translation and reference sites disappeared, valuable work vanished with them. I built WuxiaSociety to preserve what is worth passing on and to give new readers and writers a way into the tradition.
Translation is not a matter of replacing words one at a time. Names, titles, forms of address, martial arts, social roles, historical references, jokes, poems, and moral concepts all carry information about how a character understands the world.
I aim for readable English without flattening those distinctions. Important terms are preserved, explained, or linked to a reference page. Translation notes make the decisions visible, and revision is part of the work.
Basic reference material should remain open to readers. Support helps sustain the independent archive and the time required to maintain its translations and reference pages.
You can also help by sharing a useful page, reporting an error, suggesting a missing reference entry, or joining the conversation in the forum and Discord community.