Cinemax's Warrior is set during the "Tong Wars," but what is the true history of these events? Currently nearing the end of its second (and likely final) season, Warrior was first developed in the mind of the one and only Bruce Lee, finally debuting on Cinemax in 2019 with Lee's own daughter Shannon Lee along with Jonathan Tropper and Justin Lin executive producing. Set in San Francisco in the 1870's, the Tong Wars are at the center of the show's overall story, and this is an area where Warrior pulls quite a bit from the history books, showing an honest — and often gruesome — glimpse of the past.
The Tong Wars were a series of intergang conflicts in urban American settings in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, with San Francisco being a particular hotspot of tong activity. A "tong" was an organization meant to provide support to Chinese immigrants, who faced significant discrimination. Criminal activities would eventually arise out of this, including drug running and prostitution.
Often, a confrontation among rival tongs arose over one gang dishonoring another, with conflicts over women also being a frequent cause. Battles between rival tongs were violent, with the tongs employing soldiers known as "boo how doy," or hatchet men, so named for wielding bladed weapons — often hatchets — in combat. While obviously a work of historical fiction, Warrior brings a great deal of historicity to its presentation of the Tong Wars.
As seen on the show, drug trading is a big part of the activities of the Hop Wei, along with the brothel run by Olivia Cheng's Ah Toy. The Hop Wei, of course, are not the only tong in San Francisco, and Warrior's very intricate plot is complicated even further by the fact of Andrew Koji's Ah Sahm being employed by the Hop Wei, while his sister Xiaojing, going by the name Mai Ling and played by Dianne Doan, is the wife Long Zii, the leader of his eponymous tong. The characters themselves may be fictional, but with rival tongs competing for power and influence within the same city, Game of Thrones-esque conflicts along similar lines as this were bound to arise out of the Tong Wars.
While the Tong Wars are a central part of Warrior, the show also involves building tensions between the Chinese and Irish communities in San Francisco. Season 2's penultimate (Bruce Lee inspired) episode, "Enter the Dragon," sees this reaching its breaking point in a massive gang fight in the streets of the city. At this point, the Hop Wei and Long Zii set aside their differences to fight side by side, and while they're fighting the Irish community in this case, it parallels instances of different tongs joining forces in conflicts with other tongs.
Compared to other popular martial arts shows like Into the Badlands and Wu Assassins, Warrior is far more adult-oriented, with the role of the Tong Wars in its story being the main reason why. In a dark and uncouth Old Western setting, the series pulls no punches in either its action scenes or its presentation of the conflicts among rival tongs. As with any work of historical fiction, Warrior does take poetic license here and there, but it also captures the essence of what the Tong Wars entailed in a very visceral way.