Wuxia can be crudely translated as "chivalrous warrior", and is used as an all-encompassing term to describe a genre of Chinese fiction that deals with knight-errant martial artists in the "Jianghu", or the composite fantasy world, as Eric Yin puts it, of "
lumpen intelligentsia, adventurers, monks, priests, rebels, cultists, unemployed peasants and laborers, itinerant peddlers, beggars, disbanded soldiers, gangsters, smugglers, and other outcasts of society".