Jianghu (江湖; jiānghú; gong1wu4; 'rivers and lakes') 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 rural historical China (usually using loose influences from across the ~1000 BC–280 AD period); 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.
