Seven Elite Assassins of the Si-Fan

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Real Name:

Si Fan Qi Sha (Chinese: 死 番 七 杀, Pinyin: Sǐ Fān Qī Shā, English: Seven Killers of the Foreign Death).

Known to British Intelligence as the Seven Elite Assassins of the Si-Fan.

Aliases:

Erroneously identified in certain Marvel publications as the Council of Seven.

Membership:

Unnamed. Seven at any given time. Membership is an office within the Celestial Order of the Si-Fan, not a fixed roster of known identities. Those who fail are replaced before the next blow is struck. A member who fails Fu Manchu does not live to fail him twice.

Objective:

To serve as the Si-Fan's seven foremost instruments of death. To kill those whom Fu Manchu has condemned.

Affiliations:

Celestial Order of the Si-Fan. Fu Manchu. Ducharme, who reported their failures.

Enemies:

Shang-Chi.

Base of Operations:

International Headquarters - New York City, New York. Mobile within that city.

Methods:

Si-Fan robes. Traditional weapons, including the knife, nunchaku, mace, shuriken, spear, sword, staff, axe, dagger, and the dragon dagger. Garrote. Poison capsules, carried on the person and used without hesitation when capture or failure would mean facing Fu Manchu. Sawdust effigies dressed in the quarry's garments, employed as Fu Manchu's calling-card and as a running insult to the intended victim.

History:

1974

On Shang-Chi's birthday, Fu Manchu employed the Seven Elite Assassins of the Si-Fan to kill his son. Each attempt was announced to the quarry by a sawdust mannequin dressed in Shang-Chi's garments.

Shang-Chi found the first effigy hanging from a streetlamp at the corner of Madison Avenue and 57th Street, New York. A knife followed, its hilt wound with a written message. He pursued the thrower. A second assassin ambushed him from above. The two discarded their robes and attacked with a knife and nunchaku. Shang-Chi defeated them. They took poison capsules rather than face Fu Manchu's wrath. The message on the knife was a birthday greeting from his father.

Ducharme announced the failure at Fu Manchu's New York headquarters. Five robed figures sat at a table of seven chairs. Fu Manchu seated two replacements and continued the hunt.

A third assassin dragged Shang-Chi down a manhole and fought him with a mace in the sewers. After a long and brutal battle, this man also took poison. His likeness later appeared as a pin-up in Deadly Hands of Kung Fu #4.

A woman whom Shang-Chi had earlier dismissed as a streetwalker helped him from the manhole. A fourth assassin, never seen without his robes, threw a shuriken which struck her in the leg, then took poison when Shang-Chi caught him. Shang-Chi carried the wounded woman to her apartment. She attempted to garrote him. He nearly strangled her with her own hair. When he released her, she leapt from the window to her death rather than face Fu Manchu. A second effigy dropped before the window, bearing a second message.

Shang-Chi entered Fu Manchu's headquarters. Fu Manchu, informed that yet another assassin had failed, reconvened the Seven. Five members filed in. A servant fetched the remaining two from the hall. Fu Manchu berated them for their failure. When he struck the table, one robed figure slumped forward. The hood was lifted. It was a third effigy of Shang-Chi.

Shang-Chi had ambushed two of the Seven in the corridor, clothed himself in one robe and the dummy in the other, and taken their seats. He threw off his disguise and attacked the remaining five.

He is the equal of any one of the Si-Fan's best assassins. That night he faced five of them at once. A long, grueling fight ended with the defeat of all five. It is not known whether those five took their lives as their predecessors had done. Fu Manchu departed by helicopter for "the heart of America." Each member of the Seven had failed at their task.

[ MOKF GS #1 ]

A new Seven sat with Fu Manchu in New York. Fah Lo Suee had found the ruby eyes of Seth-Amon. By their hypnotic power she had begun to peel Si-Fan assassins into her own service. The Si-Fan was fragmenting into rival factions. A civil war was coming.

That same night, a man in a robe offered Shang-Chi a religious tract in Times Square. A dragon dagger from an alley killed the man where he stood. Shang-Chi recognized the weapon as Si-Fan. He entered Fu Manchu's headquarters through the roof and the elevator shaft. He drove the same dragon dagger into the table of the Seven and held his father accountable for the death of an innocent man.

The Seven attacked with spears, maces, swords, shuriken, staffs, axes, and daggers. Shang-Chi levered the first into the second and third. He broke a beam, which struck the fourth and fifth, and landed upon the sixth. He flipped the seventh onto the table. All seven were bested. It is not known whether they took their lives for this failure.

Fu Manchu then offered Shang-Chi the chance to kill him, claiming that such an act would prevent the war Fah Lo Suee had set in motion. Shang-Chi declined. Fu Manchu said that nothing had changed between them. Shang-Chi walked into the night and decided, at last, that once again his father had lied to him.

[ MOKF #27 ]

Clarifications:

• The Seven Elite Assassins of the Si-Fan are not the Council of Seven. The Council of Seven are master planners. They serve as top-tier leadership for an international confederation of secret societies. The Seven Elite Assassins are martial artists. They kill. They do not govern.

• The group referred to as the Council of Seven in MOKF GS #1 and MOKF #27 is not the Council of Seven. That identification is an error. Moench, Gulacy, and Buscema borrowed Rohmer's name and recast the office as a cadre of the Si-Fan's seven greatest killers. The borrowing is understandable. It is still a misidentification. This group has been properly identified as the Seven Elite Assassins of the Si-Fan.

• The Seven Elite Assassins have no existence in the novels of Sax Rohmer. They are a creation of the Marvel comics. Their first appearance is Giant-Size Master of Kung Fu #1 (September 1974).

• The number seven is a number of chairs, not a brotherhood of seven immortal men. Fu Manchu filled empty seats as soon as they were emptied. The Seven who attacked Shang-Chi on his birthday and the Seven who attacked him in 1974 are not known to have been the same seven persons.

• Named Si-Fan assassins such as Jekin, Dahar, Chow Loo, Shadow-Stalker, Shadow-Hand, and Tiger-Claw are not, by that identification alone, members of the Seven. This entry restricts membership to those seated among the Seven in MOKF GS #1 and MOKF #27.

• Although it could be assumed that Fu Manchu's seven best killers would be drawn from the wider ranks of the Si-Fan, Dacoits, Phansigars, Hashishin, and Thuggee, the comics present them simply as Si-Fan. No individual among them has been named.