Mandarin (character)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Mandarin, the greatest enemy Marvel Comics ever gave to Iron Man, began as a request made across a drawing board. Artist Don Heck later recalled that writer Stan Lee wanted a villain modeled on the old Fu Manchu stories. According to Heck, Lee told him, "I want a character like Fu Manchu." Heck was modest about his own part. He said the character was really Stan Lee's. The villain made his debut in Tales of Suspense #50 in 1964, and he has been rebuilt, killed and revived many times since.

  A few questions run through his long career. Where does a man find ten rings that obey his thoughts? Why does a conqueror obsessed with ruling the world keep his word to the hero he hates most? How does a character survive so many deaths, memory wipes and new origin stories? And how did a movie take his name and turn it into a joke played on the audience? The answers start in a village that the comics never bother to name.

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• 2. The Dragon's Starship

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  A village in mainland China, before the Communist revolution, is where the Mandarin was born. His father was among the richest men in the country and a descendant of Genghis Khan. His mother was an English noblewoman. Both died soon after the boy arrived, and he was raised by his paternal aunt, a woman embittered against the world.

  She passed that bitterness on. Every last bit of the family fortune went into drilling the boy in science and combat. By the time he was an adult he was penniless. He could not pay the taxes on his estate, so the Chinese government seized it and everything in it.

  Revenge needed power, and he went looking for it in the Valley of Spirits, a place no one had dared to enter for centuries. Inside lay a starship, and beside it the skeleton of Axonn-Karr, an intelligent, dragon-like alien from the planet Maklu IV. Axonn-Karr had landed on Earth centuries earlier and died there. For years the young man studied Makluan science until he mastered it.

  Aboard the ship he found ten rings, which seemed to be part of its propulsion. He learned to use them. Then he turned conqueror, subduing the villages around the valley, and his advanced science soon made him a force the Chinese army could not beat. The government feared him and asked for his help. He refused to serve anyone.

  Those ten rings, as later stories would reveal, had owners who wanted them back.

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• 3. Ten Rings, Ten Powers

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  Ten rings crowd the Mandarin's hands, one on each finger and thumb. The ice blast ring sends out waves of cold that can push an object's temperature to nearly absolute zero. The black light ring swallows illumination and leaves a patch of total darkness. The mento-intensifier ring magnifies his own psionic energy, letting him bend minds and conjure illusions that fool all five senses.

  The disintegration beam ring breaks the bonds between atoms, though it needs twenty minutes to recharge after each use. The electro-blast ring throws lightning at whatever strength he chooses. The vortex ring whips air into a spinning column. He can use it as a weapon, to lift objects, or to carry himself through the sky.

  The flame blast ring throws heat at an intensity he sets with his mind. The impact beam ring can fire fast neutrons with great concussive force, and it can also project sound and magnetic waves. The white light ring blinds enemies, floats objects with magnetic fields, makes holograms and intensifies gravity. The matter rearranger ring cannot change one element into another. It has still condensed water vapor, made poison gas, turned men to stone and changed a man into a beetle.

  No one else can command the rings without his permission. Years of meditation gave him a strong psionic link with them, and the link grew far stronger while his mind lived inside them. He can order them from vast distances and sense what happens near a ring that has left his hand. He can also lend one to a servant. If the servant dies or falls unconscious, the ring teleports back to him. If the Mandarin himself is knocked out, all ten return at once. Long exposure to the alien metal turned his hands green and scaly.

  He is dangerous without them. Constant practice has covered his hands in thick calluses, and he can split Iron Man's alloy armor with repeated blows. Marvel treats him as one of the greatest scientific minds on its Earth. He has also used a force-field generator, a hidden teleporter and a headband that can move his mind into his rings or into another person's body.

  In the 2010s, writer Kieron Gillen gave the rings names for one another, such as Zero for the ice blast ring, The Liar for the mento-intensifier and Remaker for the matter rearranger. His Iron Man run also let them think. The rings escaped S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Weapon Vault Omega, and the mento-intensifier stayed behind to fake the others' presence. Each ring then found a host, codenamed from Mandarin-One to Mandarin-Ten, with the goal of saving Earth from Tony Stark.

  The hosts were a strange crowd. Lord Remaker, a Chinese gang warlord, became Mandarin-One. Colin Sixty, a clone made by A.I.M., became Mandarin-Two after Stark ruined his life. Malekith the Accursed, the Dark Elf, became Mandarin-Four and bent his ring to his own will. Abigail Burns, an English activist who called herself Red Peril, became Mandarin-Seven. Marc Kumar, a freelance marketing expert who had grown to resent Stark because of his fiancee Pepper Potts, became Mandarin-Eight. Mole Man took the white light ring as Mandarin-Six.

  Malekith wanted the full set. He beheaded Mandarin-One and Mandarin-Nine and cut off the hands of Mandarin-Six. The six remaining hosts united against him. Afterward, Tony Stark and Arno Stark used four recovered rings to forge a Master Ring that could control the others, and most of the remaining hosts fell. Only Mole Man escaped, deciding the rings were more trouble than they were worth. With all ten in custody, Iron Man worked out the cause of their thinking. The corpse of Recorder 451 had been broadcasting an alien frequency, and the sentience was only a temporary power-up.

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• 4. Schemes and Satellites

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  Missiles and spy planes built by Tony Stark began to be sabotaged and stolen, and the Mandarin was behind it. To restore faith in his company's work, Stark put on his Iron Man armor and flew to China to investigate. From that day the armored hero stood between the Mandarin and his plans. The Mandarin liked to turn Iron Man against the Chinese government so both would be destroyed.

  In three early clashes the Mandarin took Iron Man, or Stark himself, prisoner. He never managed to kill him. He launched a small satellite and aimed its so-called death-ray at Stark Industries. He also built Ultimo, a 30 foot android with vast destructive power. He used Ultimo four times, and Iron Man beat it every time.

  Makluan teleportation technology let him snatch people at will or vanish from danger. He used it to pull the Swordsman to his castle just before the Avengers could arrest him, then installed the technology in the man's sword. In his fifth encounter with Iron Man, the Mandarin reached for his enemy and got Happy Hogan, Stark's friend. Hogan was wearing the armor to protect Stark's secret identity. Rescuing him, Iron Man beat the Mandarin in hand-to-hand combat for the first time and turned the Mandarin's own missiles on his castle.

  The Mandarin escaped to his satellite and built a gem-like device that beamed hate-rays at Earth. Each Avenger they struck attacked whoever stood nearest. He also gathered old enemies of the team. The Living Laser attacked Asia with Ultimo and lost to Thor and Hawkeye. Power Man and the Swordsman led mercenaries into a South American country and lost to Goliath, the Wasp and Iron Man. The Enchantress Amora and Skurge the Executioner led trolls in Africa and lost to Hercules and the Scarlet Witch. On the satellite, the Wasp happened to stand nearest to the Mandarin, and her attack switched the rays off. He was sucked into space and the Avengers wrecked the satellite.

  He moved to a base in the Gobi Desert and tried to recruit the Hulk. A device on the Hulk's neck was meant to start a war, but Nick Fury stopped it. Next he teamed up with the Sandman, whom the Hulk had just beaten. The Hulk wrecked the desert base, and the Mandarin dropped the Sandman into a hot vat that turned him to glass. The glass shattered, and the Sandman needed a long recovery in the satellite den.

  Later the Mandarin captured Iron Man a fourth time and tried to learn whether he was Stark. Stark fooled him by wearing a rubber mask over his own face. Frustrated, the Mandarin went after Stark's girlfriend, Janice Cord. His betrothed, Mei Ling, saved her and lost her own life. His next quest was for the Eye of Yin.

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• 5. Lost Bodies

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  Made by an ancient group of Chinese sorcerers, the Eye of Yin was a talisman of power that the Mandarin hoped would strengthen his rings. He manipulated the Royal Family of the Inhumans, then living in the Himalayas of Tibet, into finding it. Black Bolt, the Inhuman ruler, overpowered him before he could merge the Eye's power with the rings. Black Bolt stripped them from him and hid them.

  The Mandarin went back to the Valley of Spirits and the ruins of the starship. There he found a headband that helped him recover the rings, and he used his new power to restore his castle. Then the Unicorn, another frequent Iron Man enemy, asked him for a cure for a progressive disease. During their joint attack on Iron Man in the United States, the headband swapped the Mandarin's consciousness with the Unicorn's. He fled, desperate to leave the Unicorn's dying body.

  Home was no refuge. The Yellow Claw, another Chinese warlord and master criminal, had taken the castle. With the unwilling help of the Japanese mutant Sunfire, the Mandarin got his mind back into his own body. Iron Man later destroyed his temporary headquarters. When the Mandarin attacked the Yellow Claw to win the castle back, an exploding Yellow Claw robot injured him fatally. In the next clash between Iron Man and the Yellow Claw, the castle was destroyed for a second time.

  Dying, the Mandarin used the headband to move his consciousness into his ten rings. Loc Do, the Yellow Claw's power-hungry servant, seized the rings and activated them. The Mandarin's mind poured into Loc Do's body and drove Loc Do's mind out for good. With the matter rearranger ring he then reshaped the body into a younger copy of his original one.

  He rebuilt the castle and tried to capture Iron Man again, but caught the wrong person in the armor once more. This time it was Michael O'Brien, who later became a friend of Stark's and the second man to wear the Guardsman's armor. Iron Man flew in wearing an older suit, saved O'Brien and stopped an attempt to bomb the United States. He beat the Mandarin in combat for a second time and wrecked the castle again. The Mandarin's mental domination ring may have affected him, because Iron Man let his enemy go free.

  The Mandarin's next plots targeted the Vibranium Mound of Wakanda, which he hoped to convert into Type II Vibranium, and China's entire rice crop.

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• 6. Honor and Dragons

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  In Hong Kong the Mandarin went by the name Zhang Tong and had become a financial leader. When Tony Stark tried to open a branch of Stark Enterprises there, Tong's grip on officials and industry leaders blocked every attempt, even if it took murder. His dirty work went to the Hand. A member sent on a mission could borrow one of his rings. If caught, he would fanatically try to kill himself, and if he fell, the ring teleported back to its master.

  His agents then kidnapped James Rhodes and several of Stark's employees and forced Iron Man into single combat. The duel came with terms. If the Mandarin won, he would take over Stark's Hong Kong operations. If he lost, he would stop interfering. Iron Man won. The knocked-out Mandarin's rings flew back to him and left the Hand unarmed, so the hostages escaped. He kept his side of the bargain.

  That code of honor appears elsewhere. He once killed a minion who tried to drug him during a practice session, furious that a student would use such a dishonorable trick.

  Strange work also passed through his hands. The mutant Psylocke stepped through the Siege Perilous, which left her an amnesiac on an Asian shore. Matsu'o Tsurayaba found her and wanted to save his brain-dead lover, Kwannon, by swapping their minds. The Mandarin's rings could help, and the sorceress Spiral assisted. Psylocke ended up in Kwannon's body, and the Mandarin conditioned her to believe she was Lady Mandarin, his assassin. Wolverine and Jubilee rescued her and defeated him, and the fight ended his relationship with the Hand.

  Later he found that one of his rings was a counterfeit. Chen Hsu, an ancient wizard who lived in San Francisco, returned the genuine ring, and the Mandarin collapsed when he put it on. His memories had been fragmented because the rings were still tied to his mind. Hsu then led him to the Valley of the Dragons, where a magic herb woke the dragon Fin Fang Foom. Hsu controlled the beast, and it destroyed an army the Chinese government sent. Soon the Mandarin held a third of China.

  When Iron Man arrived, eight more dragons appeared. Thousands of years earlier, aliens from Kakaranathara, the fourth planet of the star Maklu, had come to Earth in search of conflict, a thing unknown in their culture that they craved. Their ship crashed and stranded them. They now demanded their rings back, and he refused. Iron Man forced his own power together with the rings and destroyed the Makluan dragons. The blast vaporized the Mandarin's hands and left him comatose.

  For months he lay between life and death, tended by a peasant woman who did not know him. His hands grew back as reptilian claws, and the rings called to him. Then he found the Heart of Darkness, an orb of apparently mystic energy. The alien Century believed it was an ancient artifact that works like a lens for dark power. With it the Mandarin turned back time in China and made it a feudal nation where electronics would not work. Iron Man defeated him with his team Force Works and with War Machine, but the Mandarin learned Stark's secret. Iron Man infected him with a techno-organic virus. The Heart rejected a man full of technology and imploded, and its last flare turned him into a janitor in the Hong Kong branch of Stark Enterprises.

  His memories came back. He decided that yesterday's feudalism had simply become today's capitalism, and he planned a giant flying fortress called the Dragon of Heaven. With it he meant to conquer Russia and then the world. Iron Man, back from a battle with the psychic menace Onslaught, found himself under attack. The real aim was not Russia at all. The Mandarin wanted to test Iron Man, prove him a worthy foe and justify his own view of capitalism as a feudal system. He seemed to die when the fortress exploded, but Iron Man was not convinced.

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• 7. Sons and Retellings

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  A package arrived for Temugin, and inside it were a pair of severed hands wearing all ten rings. Temugin was the Mandarin's son. He had precious few memories of his father, most of them of being taken to the monastery where monks raised and trained him. He was sensitive, spiritual and extremely powerful through his control of chi. Honor-bound to fulfill his father's wishes, he challenged Iron Man to avenge the death. Even without the rings, he proved a deadly adversary.

  He took his name from the claimed ancestor of both father and son, Genghis Khan, whose birth name was Temujin. He later turned up in other stories, once fighting the Spot and the Puma, and finally as a member of the Atlas Foundation. There he wore a cybernetic arm and became a constant irritant to its head, Jimmy Woo.

  The Mandarin himself returned after nearly 10 years away from the pages of Iron Man. He had been held in a prison in central China, apparently without hands, which suggests the severed ones were really his. He had lived for years without food or water, probably thanks to his mastery of chi. He killed several armed men despite having no hands. His rings were brought back to him and burned into his spine by heat. After striking at Iron Man through extremist splinter groups armed with advanced biological weapons, he resurfaced as Tem Borjigin, another name of Genghis Khan, with artificial hands.

  He next appeared as chief executive of Prometheus, a company that made bio-engineered weapons. Maya Hansen, a former love interest of Tony Stark, was making an army of soldiers with Extremis, a biotech virus she had created. Only 2.5 percent of people have the gene that lets it work. For everyone else, the virus is fatal. The Mandarin planned to release it on the public and expected a 97.5 percent fatality rate. He admitted he would die too. In the Silver Centurion armor, Iron Man tore five rings out of the Mandarin's spine, blasted him with them, and froze him inside a cloud of Extremis. An autopsy found only a blackened husk.

  In 2007, writer Joe Casey and artist Eric Canete retold his earliest appearances in Iron Man: Enter the Mandarin. Writer Matt Fraction went further in The Invincible Iron Man volume 4 Annual #1. A film director is kidnapped and forced to tell the Mandarin's life story. The Mandarin repeats the tale of an English noblewoman for a mother and the finest boarding schools. The director discovers that much of it is false and contradictory, and that one of the rings may have been used to make the Mandarin believe it.

  The truth, in this version, was bleaker. The Mandarin was the son of a prostitute in an opium den. He rose in the underworld and found the rings in an alien craft, brutally killing its pilot to take them. He paid for his operations through drug and gun smuggling, helped by the mercenary Raza. When the director shot the film his own way, the Mandarin called it lies, destroyed the theater and had the director killed. He later regretted it because he truly loved the man's films.

  The Mandarin is also the father of Sasha Hammer, revealed after the "Stark Resilient" storyline when she introduced her boyfriend, Zeke Stane, to her parents. With Stane's help, he recruited a crowd of Iron Man's foes, among them Blizzard, Whirlwind and Titanium Man, and built new Dreadnought robots. In "The Long Way Down," in 2012, he turns out to have been inside Tony Stark's head for years, planting designs for squid-like war machines called Titanomechs. In "The Future," he takes Stark to Mandarin City to build ten of them, as host bodies for his rings. The rings, he says, hold the souls of 10 alien beings, and he serves them. Stark joins the Mandarin's other prisoners, including Ezekiel Stane, Whirlwind, Blizzard and the Living Laser, and destroys the machines. Stane apparently kills the Mandarin.

  He did not stay dead. Under the alias Tem Borjigen, he becomes the public face of Hydra-occupied Bagalia, in Baron Zemo's plan to win recognition at the United Nations. The Punisher, taking revenge on Hydra, finds him giving a speech there. He shoots the Mandarin with a special bullet that slips past the force-field formed by his rings. The most famous change to the Mandarin would come not from a comic page but from a film.

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• 8. Screen Mandarins

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  In Iron Man 3 in 2013, two men claim the title of the Mandarin. One is Trevor Slattery, a hired actor played by Ben Kingsley. The other is Aldrich Killian, played by Guy Pearce, who used the actor's menacing image to hide his illegal activities involving the Extremis virus and Advanced Idea Mechanics. Killian also claims the name for himself. Earlier Marvel Cinematic Universe films only hinted at the character through a terrorist group called the Ten Rings, in Iron Man in 2008, Iron Man 2 in 2010 and Ant-Man in 2015.

  In 2021, Tony Leung played the "real" figure behind the legend in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. His character, Xu Wenwu, is the leader of the Ten Rings and father of Shang-Chi and Xialing. He found a set of powerful iron rings and became an immortal warlord. He named his organization the Ten Rings after acquiring them, but he never used the Mandarin name himself. Variants of Wenwu also appear in the animated series What If...? in 2023 and Marvel Zombies in 2025, both voiced by Feodor Chin. IGN had already ranked the comic character 81st among comic book villains of all time in 2009.

  Television gave him many other faces. Henry Ramer voiced him in The Marvel Super Heroes. In the 1994 Iron Man series he was Arnold "Arno" Brock, an archaeologist who forged gems from a buried alien ship into rings. Ed Gilbert voiced him in the first season and Robert Ito in the second. After battling Iron Man he lost the rings, won them back, and was rendered amnesiac and killed by mountain bandits.

  Iron Man: Armored Adventures, with Vincent Tong as a voice, used several Mandarin-based characters. In that series the original Mandarin, Genghis Khan, had scattered the Makluan Rings around the world and left Makluan Guardians to test possible successors. The main wearer is Gene Khan, a descendant who is partly Makluan. Xin "Shin" Zhang, his stepfather and head of the Tong crime organization, claims to be the true Mandarin until Gene imprisons him.

  In the animated film The Invincible Iron Man, Fred Tatasciore voices an ancient ruler served by the dragons Fin Fang Foom and Zhen Ji Xang. His descendant Li-Mei gathers the scattered rings and lets him project his spirit through her. Other voices include Barry Dennen in Lego Marvel Super Heroes: Maximum Overload. Taiten Kusunoki and Jamieson Price play him in Japanese and English in Marvel Disk Wars: The Avengers.

  Video games gave him boss fights and playable roles. James Sie voiced him in Marvel Ultimate Alliance, where Loki poses as the Mandarin to steal the Tome of Asarius from Atlantis. John DiMaggio voiced him in Lego Marvel Super Heroes, where he and Aldrich Killian lead Extremis soldiers in a takeover of Stark Tower. Wenwu is a playable character in Marvel Future Fight and Marvel Super War.

  His toy shelf is crowded too. Toy Biz put him in a Marvel Legends Face-Off two-pack with Iron Man, in red, and another with War Machine, in green. Hasbro made 3.75 inch figures, including one for the Iron Man 2 line. He has appeared in the HeroClix line, in Marvel Minimates, and in a Marvel Super Hero Squad four-pack as Zhang Tong. Lego built a mini-figure for him in the "Iron Man vs. the Mandarin: Ultimate Showdown" set, and Xu Wenwu later got Lego sets of his own, including "Escape from the Ten Rings."

  The actor from Iron Man 3 has not been written out. Trevor Slattery turns up in the series Wonder Man, which began in 2026.

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