Learn Chinese from All Wishes Come True (八仙！): 8 Words for Gods, Immortals, and Daoist Magic

All Wishes Come True! (八仙！) spends 144 minutes inside a very specific universe: Daoist immortals, celestial bureaucracy, and the vocabulary Chinese has built up over a thousand years to talk about the space between human and divine. You don't need to have seen the film — released in mainland China on 18 July 2026 and one of the year's biggest box-office hits — to use these words. They show up constantly in Chinese fantasy fiction, games, and folk religion.

The core vocabulary

仙 (xiān) — "immortal" or "transcendent being." This is the character in 八仙 (Bāxiān, "Eight Immortals") itself, and it's everywhere in Chinese fantasy media — 仙侠 (xiānxiá) is the entire genre of "immortal heroes" fiction that gives you shows like Guardians of Dafeng. Unlike a 神 (shén, "god," born divine), a 仙 got there through cultivation — which is the whole point of the Eight Immortals as folk heroes.

凡人 (fánrén) — "mortal, ordinary person." Literally "ordinary" (凡) + "person" (人). This is exactly what the film's eight leads are before the plot starts — the premise runs on the gap between 凡人 and 仙.

得道 (dé dào) — "to attain the Way," i.e., to achieve enlightenment or immortality through Daoist practice. 得 means "to obtain," 道 is the Dao — the underlying principle Daoism organizes itself around. When Chinese sources describe how the Eight Immortals became immortal, 得道 is the verb they reach for.

修炼 (xiūliàn) — "to cultivate, to train (spiritually)." The actual process of getting from 凡人 to 仙: meditation, alchemy, moral discipline, often over an implausibly long human lifetime. If you've encountered 修仙 (xiūxiān, "cultivating immortality") as a genre label for Chinese web novels, this is the same 修.

蓬莱 (Pénglái) — one of the mythical Isles of the Immortals, said to float somewhere in the Bohai Sea, unreachable by ordinary boats. All Wishes Come True!'s heist plot is set here — it's the film's version of the vault the mortals sneak into. Penglai shows up across Chinese literature going back over two thousand years, including in accounts of the First Emperor sending expeditions to find it.

天庭 (tiāntíng) — the "Celestial Court," heaven's bureaucratic government, complete with ranks, departments, and (per most retellings, including Journey to the West) an enormous amount of paperwork. Chinese folk religion tends to imagine the afterlife as an empire mirroring the earthly one, and 天庭 is its capital.

法宝 (fǎbǎo) — "magic treasure" or "divine weapon." Literally "Dharma" (法) + "treasure" (宝). Every immortal in Chinese myth carries one — Lü Dongbin's sword, Zhang Guolao's donkey, Lan Caihe's flower basket. It's also the word you'll hear used loosely today for "secret weapon" or "go-to trick" in completely non-magical contexts, the way English speakers might say someone's "signature move."

灵气 (língqì) — "spiritual energy" or "aura." Literally "spirit/soul" (灵) + "energy/qi" (气). It's the ambient magical resource that cultivation stories run on — a place, an object, or a person can have more or less 灵气, and running out of it is a common plot device.

One idiom for wielding immortal-tier influence

呼风唤雨 (hū fēng huàn yǔ) — "summon the wind, call the rain"

Meaning: To have extraordinary, almost magical influence or control over events.

Origin: The phrase comes from ancient shamanistic tradition, where controlling weather was the clearest proof of supernatural power — an ability more than one of the Eight Immortals is credited with in folklore. Tang-dynasty writers shifted it from literal weather control to a metaphor for sweeping influence over people and circumstances, and it's kept that double life ever since.

Connection: It's a natural label for exactly the kind of power All Wishes Come True!'s eight leads are faking at the start of the film — and, per the traditional legend, the kind their real counterparts actually have. Today it's just as often aimed at a market-moving investor or a rumor-starting influencer as at an actual deity: "这位有影响力的投资者可以用一个公开声明改变市场趋势" ("This influential investor could move the market with a single public statement") is the kind of sentence 呼风唤雨 shows up in now.

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Related reading:

• All Wishes Come True (八仙！): Who the Eight Immortals Really Are in Chinese Mythology
• 呼风唤雨 — full idiom page
• Wuxia Concepts Explained: Meridians, Qi, Neili