Manhua
Also written: 漫画, 漫畫, Chinese comics, manhua comic
Manhua is the Chinese word for comics, and in English it means a comic from mainland China, Hong Kong or Taiwan. Most manhua published today are full colour, read left to right, and released as vertical-scroll episodes on apps rather than as printed books.
One word, three publishing traditions
“Manhua” covers three markets that produced very different comics. Hong Kong manhua of the 1970s–90s were thin, weekly, full-colour martial-arts books with dense muscular figure work — a look nothing like manga, printed in colour decades before anyone else did it routinely. Taiwanese manhua sat much closer to Japanese convention, including right-to-left reading. Mainland manhua is the one most English readers now mean: app-native, full colour, vertical scroll, left to right.
If you are reading an older printed manhua and the panels seem to be in the wrong order, check the spine. Traditional Chinese typesetting ran right to left, and print manhua from Hong Kong and Taiwan often followed it.
Colour, and the studio behind it
Modern manhua is almost always full colour, for the same reason manhwa is: it is made by a studio, not by one artist with assistants. Line art, flats, rendering and backgrounds are separate jobs handled by separate people, which makes a weekly colour episode possible where a weekly colour manga chapter would not be.
The visible signature of that pipeline is a particular kind of rendering — soft airbrushed gradients, strong rim lighting, and backgrounds that are often 3D-assisted or matte-painted rather than drawn line by line. Characters are line-drawn and lit; environments are painted. That split is the fastest way to tell manhua art from manga art at a glance.
Cultivation is the engine
The dominant commercial genres are wuxia and xianxia, and the difference between them matters if you are writing one. Wuxia is grounded: mortal martial artists, the jianghu underworld, honour and revenge. Xianxia is fantastical: cultivators climbing a ladder of numbered realms toward immortality, with gods, demons and sects above them. Korean murim stories come from the same martial-arts root but usually stay closer to the wuxia end.
The realm ladder is why so many manhua read as progression stories. The structure hands the writer a legible scoreboard — the reader always knows exactly how strong the protagonist is and what the next rung costs. It is enormously effective serialised, and it is why chapters can end on a power-up as reliably as on a cliffhanger.
The adaptation is the business model
A large share of manhua are adaptations of web novels, and the successful ones are then adapted again into donghua — Chinese animation. Novel to manhua to donghua is a standard pipeline, not an exception, and it shapes the comics themselves: a manhua adapting a long novel inherits an enormous cast and a plot already plotted, so its craft problem is compression and staging rather than invention.
Related terms
- Manhwa — Manhwa is the Korean word for comics. In English it usually means a South Korean comic, most often a full-colour vertical-scroll webtoon, as distinct from Japanese manga or Chinese manhua.
- Manga — Manga is the Japanese word for comics. In English it means a comic made in the Japanese tradition: black and white, read right to left, serialised chapter by chapter in a magazine before being collected into tankobon volumes. Korean comics are manhwa; Chinese are manhua.
- Webtoon — A webtoon is a digital comic drawn as one continuous vertical strip, meant to be read by scrolling down a phone screen rather than turning pages. The format began in South Korea and is now used worldwide.
- Murim — Murim is the martial-arts world of Korean fiction: the society of sects, clans and wandering fighters that runs parallel to ordinary life, with its own laws and hierarchy. The word (무림) means "martial forest" and names both the world and the genre set in it.