It is only fitting for me to point out that this study of the history of the wuxia film genre is inevitably incomplete, and that there are many spaces still left to fill. Some of the omissions are dictated by certain constraints. There are areas and periods I have omitted out of necessity because either the films are lost or that there is simply no critical impetus to study them due to long-held perceptions that they are too minor and that it is just too time-consuming to uncover extant film texts and other research materials. Much of the Cantonese cinema's wuxia films of the 1950s and 1960s belong in this category as do the Taiwanesedialect wuxia films produced in Taiwan in the 1960s.

I have also largely omitted the Taiwanese Mandarin cinema's wuxia films, essentially for lack of space in this monograph which demands a high degree of selectivity. Thus while I would have liked to write more on the films of Jimmy Wang Yu, Joseph Kuo (the ‘Bronzemen’ series), Wang Xinglei and Zhang Meijun (who made the first 3-D wuxia picture which I first saw when it was released in the late 1970s but which I have never had occasion to see again), it is impossible to cover them all in this volume. Similarly, much of the work in the Hong Kong Mandarin martial arts cinema (by such directors as Huang Feng, Luo Wei, Cheng Gang, Zhang Zengze) is left out simply because it is too voluminous to cover comprehensively.