Cultural Context
Like most xianxia, The Untamed does not recreate a single historical period. It uses a composite visual language built from real Chinese material culture: ritual music, jade tokens, sword prestige, clan halls, funeral rites, painted screens, and mountain hermitage imagery. The result is not archaeology, but it is not arbitrary fantasy either. The series works because its props and settings carry recognizable historical weight. Bronze bells help explain why music can be ritual power; jade explains why tokens and pendants matter; ancient swords explain why a blade can stand for lineage and moral identity.
Real Artifacts Behind the Work
4 direct connections to Chinese cultural heritage.
The Connection
The show's named swords inherit the Chinese idea of the blade as biography. The Sword of Goujian is the clearest surviving object that joins technical perfection, royal identity, and legend.
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The Connection
The Untamed's use of music as spiritual technology fits a much older Chinese belief that tuned bronze sound could order bodies, courts, and the cosmos.
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The Connection
Jade tokens, pendants, and protective objects in cultivation fiction descend from the same belief system that made Han elites wrap their dead in jade.
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The Connection
The show's market towns and bridges use a familiar Chinese pictorial grammar of crowded streets, shops, and river crossings that reaches back to Song urban scrolls.
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Warriors, Weapons, and Empire
The material culture of conquest, defense, and military memory
Chinese military heritage is not only swords and soldiers. It includes bronze technology, mass production, tomb armies, court ritual, and the stories later dynasties told about heroic violence.
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Music, Ritual, and Performance
Sound, ceremony, and spectacle from Bronze Age courts to Tang banquets
Ancient Chinese performance culture linked music, ritual, drinking, procession, and court display into a single sensory world preserved in bells, cups, paintings, and tomb goods.
4 artifacts →
Jade and the Quest for Immortality
Why emperors were buried in stone suits sewn with gold
The Chinese believed jade could preserve the body, guide the soul, and command respect from heaven. These beliefs produced some of the most extraordinary funerary art in world history.
1 artifact →
Song City Life and Painting
Markets, bridges, scrolls, and the invention of urban China
The Song dynasty made everyday life worthy of monumental art. Its scrolls preserve streets, bridges, shops, boats, workers, and festival crowds with astonishing documentary density.
3 artifacts →
Frequently asked questions
What real Chinese artifacts inspired The Untamed?+
The Untamed draws on multiple real Chinese artifacts and traditions, most notably: Sword of Goujian, Bianzhong of Marquis Yi of Zeng, Jade Burial Suit of Prince Liu Sheng, Along the River During the Qingming Festival. Each is documented in a Chinese museum and many are visible to the public today. See the connections section above for specific scene-by-scene references.
Where can I see the artifacts that inspired The Untamed?+
The artifacts referenced by The Untamed are held by: Hubei Provincial Museum, National Museum of China, The Palace Museum. Most have public galleries with regular visitor hours; a few have travelled to international exhibitions.
Who created The Untamed?+
The Untamed was developed by Tencent Penguin Pictures / New Style Media and released in 2019. It is a tv series produced in China.
Is The Untamed historically accurate?+
The Untamed is a creative work, not a documentary. It draws inspiration from real Chinese material culture but adapts and dramatises freely. Our role at China Heritage is to identify which historical references the work is drawing on, with citations to museum primary sources, so curious viewers can separate the historical core from the creative invention.
Where can I learn more about Chinese material culture beyond The Untamed?+
Browse our Topics index for cross-museum themes (bronze ritual, jade and immortality, blue-and-white porcelain) and our Treasures Abroad index for the 28 great Chinese masterpieces in Western museum collections. Each theme links back to specific artifacts you can read about in detail.