The Chinese Brotherhood of Assassins, also known at various points as the Beijing or Shanghai Brotherhood and the Great Ming Brotherhood, is the branch of the Assassin Order located in China, one of the few to have existed for more than a thousand years. Like other divisions throughout the world, it operated as an Assassin Guild from the time of Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad's reforms until that system was superseded in the 20th century by that of decentralized cells. For more than a thousand years, the Chinese Brotherhood of Assassins known to history as the Great Ming Brotherhood, and later by the names of the cities they whispered through, Beijing and Shanghai waged a secret war. It was a war fought not for thrones, but for the soul of a nation, mirroring the turbulent rise and fall of dynasties. Their eternal enemy was the Order of the Ancients and then the Templar Order that succeeded it, known locally as the Chinese Rite. Where the Templars sought absolute control through the iron fists of emperors, the Assassins answered with the hidden blade. The Brotherhood’s legacy was forged in the blood of tyrants who traded the freedom of their people for the illusion of eternal order. It was the legendary Assassin Wei Yu who struck the first monumental blow against the Ancients, piercing the defenses of Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor, whose obsession with immortality and absolute control threatened to enslave the land. Centuries later, when the An Lushan Rebellion tore the Tang dynasty apart, it was the hidden blade that silenced An Lushan himself, cutting the head off a serpent that sought to build a new world order on a mountain of corpses. When the Mongol hordes swept across the steppes under the Song dynasty, the Brotherhood stood as the final wall. They fought alongside patriots to defend the nation from total subjugation. In a desperate, brilliant strike, they personally slew the Great Khan, Möngke, halting the unstoppable war machine in its tracks. Yet, even the Assassins could not stop the tide of history; they ultimately failed to prevent the conquest of Kublai Khan, retreating into the shadows to bide their time. The Ming dynasty brought both the zenith of the Brotherhood's influence and the deepest abyss of its despair. The Templars had infiltrated the forbidden depths of the imperial court, manipulating the Yongle Emperor and his successors. The Assassins struck back, orchestrating the death of Yongle, but the retaliation was catastrophic. During the reign of the Jiajing Emperor, the Templars unleashed the Great Rites Controversy a political purge transformed into a systematic slaughter of the Assassin Guild. The sanctuaries were burned, the records reduced to ash, and the hidden blades broken. When the smoke cleared, the ancient Chinese Brotherhood was gone, save for a single, unbroken spirit. Shao Jun (great-granddaughter of Chung Kwon) fled west, seeking the wisdom of the legendary Mentor Ezio Auditore da Firenze. Returning to her homeland armed with new tactics and an unyielding resolve, she hunted the Eight Tigers, the Templar cabal ruling China from the shadows. Beside her stood an unexpected ally, Chung Kwon, the great-granddaughter of the Yongle Emperor, who chose the freedom of the Creed over the tyranny of her bloodline. Together, they systematically dismantled the Chinese Rite, assassinated the Jiajing Emperor, and built the Brotherhood anew from the ashes of the old world. But peace in China is a fleeting season. With the rise of the Manchu Qing dynasty, the Templars adapted, wrapping themselves in the banners of the new conquerors. Once more, the Brotherhood suffered devastating persecution. A new, ruthless purge swept through their rebuilt sanctuaries, stripping them of their power, their recruits, and their influence until they were a ghost of the faction Shao Jun had restored. The British Assassin Edward Kenway and his allies in the Zhang Wei Union actively opposed these efforts, rejecting any plan to use the Pieces of Eden for personal or political gain. By the year 1725, the remaining Chinese Assassins, battered but unbowed, gathered under the grim leadership of Mentor Xiao Han. They no longer possessed the armies or the network to fight a conventional war against the Qing state. Survival, and the liberation of China, now required a different kind of power. Xiao Han turned the Brotherhood’s gaze toward the myths of the past: a legendary set of three Pieces of Eden, relics of the First Civilization hidden deep within the vast geography of the empire. The plan was as desperate as it was grand. With these artifacts of absolute power, the Assassins intended to break the Templar stranglehold on the Manchu court, collapse the Qing dynasty from its foundations, and guide the birth of a new era, one of the people of China might finally live free from the shadows of tyrants. In the 19th century, the First Opium War (1839–1842) led by the United Kingdom to declare war on the Qing Empire for the fate of East Asia, which fought not just between empires, but between the Templar Order and the Assassin Brotherhood. For decades, the Assassin-backed Qing Dynasty maintained strict control over foreign influence through the Canton System. Under the guidance of the Brotherhood, the Daoguang Emperor sought to preserve China's isolation and protect its people from external manipulation. However, the British Empire, heavily steered by the Templar Order through the machinery of the East India Company, found a devastating weapon to breach China's walls on opium by flooding the Chinese market with the addictive narcotic, the Templars systematically eroded the social fabric of the nation, generating immense wealth to fund their global operations. Recognizing the existential threat, the Emperor appointed the incorruptible Assassin ally, Commissioner Lin Zexu, to eradicate the trade. In 1839, Lin acted decisively, seizing and destroying over 20,000 chests of British opium in Canton. This bold stroke forced the Templars' hand, prompting the British government to declare war under the guise of defending free trade. The conflict that followed exposed the deep fractures within the region. British Templar agents, including Commodore Sir James John Gordon Bremer and Plenipotentiary Sir Charles Elliot, utilized superior naval technology and coordinated strategy to systematically dismantle Qing coastal defences. Behind the scenes, these Templar figures orchestrated a brilliant campaign of political subversion. They manipulated high-ranking Chinese officials, including the pragmatic diplomat Qishan, who was caught between his loyalty to the Emperor and the overwhelming might of the British fleet. Through subtle persuasion and psychological pressure, Elliot and Bremer convinced Chinese negotiators that ceding a small, barren island named Hong Kong was the only way to appease Queen Victoria’s government and save the mainland from total destruction. As the war ground on, the Templars deployed a ruthlessly efficient administrator to consolidate their gains: Sir Henry Pottinger. Arriving with a mandate to replace the more compromising Elliot, Pottinger pushed the British military campaign up the Yangtze River, threatening the ancient capital of Nanjing had faced with total military collapse and internal betrayal, the Daoguang Emperor was forced to capitulate. In August 1842, aboard the HMS Cornwallis, the Treaty of Nanking was signed. This unequal treaty formally ceded Hong Kong to the British Crown, forcing open China's ports and securing a permanent stronghold for the Templar Order in the Far East. Following the ratification of the treaty, Sir Henry Pottinger assumed total control of the newly acquired territory. He served first as Britain's chief representative and administrator, before being formally appointed as Hong Kong's first Governor in June 1843. Under his governance, the island was transformed into a bustling commercial hub and a heavily fortified sanctuary, ensuring the Templars held a vital geopolitical anchor from which they could project power across Asia for the next century. Following the first Opium War and the landmark Treaty of Nanking in 1842, Shanghai was designated as one of five original treaty ports forced open to foreign trade. This opened the gates for a flood of European and American merchants, diplomats, and military forces seeking economic hegemony in East Asia. By 1854, the British, American, and French enclaves established the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC) to standardise infrastructure, security, and trade policies. However, this unified front fractured in 1862 when the French concession unilaterally withdrew from the council to maintain its political autonomy. The very next year, in 1863, the British and American settlements formally merged to create the Shanghai International Settlement. This was not a colony, but something far more useful to an organization seeking systemic control: a corporate state-within-a-state. Under the terms of the unequal treaties extracted from a staggering Qing dynasty, foreign nationals within the settlement enjoyed complete extraterritoriality. They were entirely immune to Chinese law, subject only to the consular jurisdiction of their own governments. Behind the scenes, the Templar Order watched this legal anomaly with quiet satisfaction. While the Assassins focused their efforts on embedding themselves within local secret societies and traditional guilds, the Templars targeted the machinery of international law. To them, extraterritoriality was the ultimate tool, a borderless, unaccountable sanctuary where capital could be manipulated, intelligence gathered, and technology developed without the interference of any sovereign state or monarch. The scope of this control expanded exponentially with the brutal conclusion of the Second Opium War. The conflict reached its horrifying climax when Anglo-French forces advanced on the capital and set the old summer palaces on fire—a calculated act of cultural destruction meant to utterly break the spirit of the imperial court. In the shadow of these smoking ruins, the allies forced the signing of the Convention of Peking in 1860, backed by Britain, France, Russia, and the United States. With the Qing dynasty thoroughly humiliated and destabilised, the floodgates opened. The Templars utilized the newly signed treaties to systematically pull more foreign powers into trade relations with China. Each new treaty brought another nation into the fold, and subsequently, their nationals became part of the complex, multi-tiered administration of the International Settlement. Italians, Germans, Japanese, and Danes all took their seats on the boards and in the police forces of the enclave. It became a glittering, cosmopolitan Babel of banking houses, grand hotels, and heavily guarded warehouses, all operating under a patchwork of flags that served as a perfect shield for the Order's global operations. For nearly eight decades, this corporate fortress held. The International Settlement grew into the financial powerhouse of Asia, remaining entirely autonomous through the fall of the Qing dynasty and the chaotic rise of the Republic of China. Even when the clouds of war darkened the continent and the Imperial Japanese Army invaded the surrounding Chinese sectors of Shanghai in 1937 (the same year where Abstergo was established by Henry Ford and Ransom Eli. Olds), the International Settlement remained untouched a surreal, prosperous haven of jazz clubs and stock exchanges surrounded by a sea of devastation. But no sanctuary lasts forever. The geopolitical landscape fractured permanently on the fateful dawn of 8 December 1941, as the Japanese struck Western targets across the Pacific, their troops simultaneously marched across the bridges of Suzhou Creek, invading and occupying the rest of the International Settlement without firing a single shot. The illusion of Western immunity evaporated overnight. Recognizing that the old colonial era was dead, the Western allies pivoted. In 1943, the International Settlement was de jure returned to Chinese sovereignty as part of historic transition was codified through the British–Chinese Treaty for the Relinquishment of Extra-Territorial Rights in China and its American counterpart, signed alongside the Nationalist Government of the Republic of China under Chiang Kai-shek. The legal anomaly that had protected the Templar enclave for eighty years was dissolved, leaving behind a legacy of grand architecture on the Bund and a blueprint for modern corporate globalization. The heart of the Chinese Brotherhood, however, rested with the legendary Master Assassin and Mentor, Hu Sheng. Originally from Shanghai, Sheng moved to Peking (Beijing) and joined the Brotherhood in late 1917. It was there that he crossed paths with Vladimir Lenin, convincing the Bolshevik leader that a parallel revolution in China inspired by Russia's own October Revolution was inevitable. This mirrored the actions of the Russian Assassin Nikolai Orelov, who had recently retrieved a vital Precursor box from the doomed Romanov family. This ideological clash set the stage for decades of secret warfare. In the shadow of the Chinese Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, and World War II, the United States and the newly established Abstergo Industries founded by Templar visionaries Henry Ford and Ransom E. Olds backed Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang. Conversely, the Soviet Union and the Assassin Brotherhood quietly aided the Chinese Communist Party (CPC). This secret war reached a turning point on 1 October 1949, when Mao Zedong officially proclaimed the establishment of the People's Republic of China. Through the decades that followed, Sheng guided the Brotherhood through the strictures of the Mao era including the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution into the Deng Xiaoping era, witnessing the tragedy of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and finally the 1997 Handover of Hong Kong, which led Sheng passed away peacefully in Shanghai in 1998 at 96.