Prince Dan of Yan: The First Assassin's Tale / 燕丹子 (English Edition)

Before there was wuxia, there was this.

In 227 BCE, a swordsman named Jing Ke walked into the throne room of the most powerful man in China - the future First Emperor - with a poisoned dagger hidden inside a rolled map. What happened next became the founding legend of Chinese assassin literature, retold for two thousand years in opera, film, and fiction.

But the version you think you know isn't the original.

Prince Dan of Yan predates the famous account in Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian. Where the official history stripped away the supernatural and stuck to verifiable facts, this anonymous narrative kept the strange and the mythic: a crow whose head turns white, a horse that sprouts horns, omens that bend the natural world to the weight of human loyalty.

This is the story as it was first told - not as history, but as legend. A prince betrayed by his childhood friend, now king of a devouring empire. A swordsman who tests his patron's worthiness before agreeing to die for him. A mission everyone knows will fail, undertaken anyway, because some debts can only be paid in blood.

Scholars have called Yandanzi the first work of fiction in Chinese literature and the origin of the wuxia tradition.