Jianghu () is a Chinese term that generally refers to the social environment in which many Chinese wuxia, xianxia, and ''gong'an stories are set. The term is used flexibly, and can be used to describe a fictionalized version of imperial China (usually using loose influences from across the 221 BC – 1912 AD period of time); a setting of feuding martial arts clans and the people of that community; a secret and possibly criminal underworld; a general sense of the "mythic world" where fantastical stories happen; or some combination thereof. A closely related term, wulin'' (武林; wǔlín; 'martia
Jianghu () is a Chinese term that generally refers to the social environment in which many Chinese wuxia, xianxia, and ''gong'an stories are set. The term is used flexibly, and can be used to describe a fictionalized version of imperial China (usually using loose influences from across the 221 BC – 1912 AD period of time); a setting of feuding martial arts clans and the people of that community; a secret and possibly criminal underworld; a general sense of the "mythic world" where fantastical stories happen; or some combination thereof. A closely related term, wulin'' (武林; wǔlín; 'martial forest'), refers exclusively to the community of martial artists that inhabit a jianghu setting. The term wulin has been borrowed into Korean as murim (무림) to refer to fiction set in Chinese-inspired martial arts worlds.
== Etymology == The term originates from the Daoist classic Zhuangzi, where it is used several times; most notably, in the chapter "The Great and Most Honoured Master" (da zongshi): When the springs are dried up, the fishes collect together on the land. Than that they should moisten one another there by the damp about them, and keep one another wet by their slime, it would be better for them to forget one another in the rivers and lakes. （出泉涸，魚相與處於陸，相呴以濕，相濡以沫，不如相忘於江湖。）[...]
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).