Posted in: TV | Tagged: Jin Yong, wuxia

Jin Yong Wuxia Universe: Your Viewing Guide for The 5-Star Epic Series

The new Jin Yong Universe series, The Legend of Heroes, and its prequel miniseries form a sprawling wuxia saga. Here's what you need to know.

The novels of Jin Yong helped define the entire wuxia genre as we know it. Chinese TV endlessly makes them right now in watered-down derivatives, but with the 100th anniversary of his birth, Tencent has produced an ambitious new adaptation of Legend of the Condor Heroes under the banner The Legend of Heroes and four prequel miniseries under the banner title Duel on Mount Hua. The four miniseries tell origin stories of the key supporting characters. The confusing thing is, The Legend of Heroes: Hot Blooded was released first in 2024, and the miniseries premiered this summer in a slightly confusing order. You can watch them in any order, but it makes more sense to watch them in the order of the story's timeline. If you want to check out the series, here's a handy guide for what order to watch them in.

The Jin Yong Wuxia Universe Viewing Order

Eastern Heretic and Western Venom

The earliest story in Jin Yong's timeline, this 8-part miniseries sets the stage for the whole wuxia saga leading to the Legend of the Condor Heroes saga. Set in an era before legends and codes of chivalry amongst martial artists became the norm, Huang Yaoshi and Ouyang Feng are two eccentric newcomers to the martial world. Huang Yaoshi emerges from years of seclusion and training and drifts like an untethered immortal, uninterested in the warring factions and fights, but is completely unsettled when he falls in love with the imperilled Feng Heng, who would eventually become his wife and play a significant part in the Condor Heroes saga. Ouyang Feng is a cocky young warrior on his first journey west in search of adventure. Neither hero nor villain, they become friends and shatter the martial world's order with their actions, unleashing a storm of unpredictable chaos for decades to come as they begin their journeys to become the Eastern Heretic and the Western Venom, the latter one of the major villains of the novel and sworn enemies. But this tells the story of their initial friendship and sets up their tragedy to come.

Southern Emperor and Northern Beggar

The most conventional story of wuxia chivalry, this tells the story of Duan Zhi Xing, the crown prince of Dali, who flees the palace and an arranged marriage to seek adventure as an anonymous wanderer, where he befriends Hong Chi, a young follower of the Beggar Sect who would become its leader. But first, they each go on comedic journeys of mistaken identity and screwball romantic comedy, where Yi Huo, the princess of the rural tribe, abducts Hong Chi, thinking he's Duan, the prince she's supposed to marry. At the same time, Prince Duan travels with a beggar and con man of the Beggar Sect, whose looming leadership contest will bring them all together. But nothing stays happy for long when the sins of their fathers come knocking and force them into a tragic confrontation as Duan and Hong Chi go on their journeys to become the Emperor of Dali and the leader of the Beggar Sect. This story deviates the most from Jin Yong's original story for the characters.

Duel on Mount Hua: The Five Masters, aka The Five 

Years after the previous stories, this six-part story features the characters coming together to fight a duel to establish who the most incredible martial artist of their era is, and the winner would control the Nine Yin True Sutra. This manual teaches the ultimate martial arts technique. The subplots between the characters as they plot and vie for leverage leading up to the duel are new stories not in the novel, and several of the characters are rewritten in ways they weren't in the book. The climax is the equivalent of an Avengers or Justice League gathering for the first time, but Jin Yong didn't write the plots that lead to the duel. It's an original storyline created for the series.

Nine Yin True Sutra

This was the first prequel miniseries to premiere this year, but the latest down the timeline before Legend of the Condor Heroes begins. Nine Yin True Sutra takes place years after the duel on Mount Hua and tells the origin story of Mei Chao Feng, one of the deadliest women in the saga. Her family slaughtered and taken in as Huang Yaoshi as a disciple, she vows revenge on the men who slaughtered her family and steals the Nine Yin True Sutra with her lover and fellow disciple Chen Xuan Feng to master its martial arts techniques. The darkest and most tragic of the prequels, this leads directly into the main story. Mei Chao Feng's origin story is another retcon by the TV series to make her more of a tragic antiheroine than a villainess.

The Legend of Heroes: Hot Blooded

This is the main story, adapting the first half of Legend of the Condor Heroes into 30 episodes. The focus is on hero Guo Jing, his love story with the street smart Huang Rong, the daughter of Huang Yao Shi and Feng Heng, his training to become a martial artist, his discovery of the Nine Yin True Sutra, the treachery of Prince Yang Kang, Ouyang Feng's continuous and increasingly murderous quest for the Nine Yin True Sutra, and, of course, lots of wuxia fights.

I'll be reviewing each of these series separately. They're not perfect; they have some of the usual issues with TV drama tropes that get repetitive, including sexism, but there's a bit more ambition in the wuxia choreography and an attempt to create complex characters. You can stream them across multiple platforms, including Viki, Wetv, and Tencent's official YouTube channels.

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