Shenhua

Name Shenhua

Information Gender Female Affiliates Leigharch Sawyer the Cleaner Lotton Mister Chang (boss) Affiliation Hong Kong Triad Weapon Dual corded kukris Race/Nationality Taiwanese Status Alive

Shenhua is a Taiwanese assassin who is employed under Mister Chang as an assassin for the Hong Kong Triad in Roanapur. She later formed an unorthodox three-person team with Sawyer the Cleaner and Lotton the Wizard.

Appearance Shenhua is a young woman with a skinny and tall build, pale skin, and dark cyan eyes. She has knee-length dark-blue hair with chest-length bangs covering the right side of her face, and she always wears red nail polish, lipstick and eyeliner.

Her hair is styled differently in the two anime series:

In the first two seasons of the Black Lagoon anime, she ties her hair in a low ponytail at the top. In the Roberta's Blood Trail OVAs, she ties her hair at the bottom. She has been seen wearing a Rose Chinese cheongsam that shows both of her legs, along with a white jacket. She has a strap holding throwing knives on both legs. On top of all of this, she also wears two long, red, tassel-like earrings on both ears.

Personality Shenhua is an assassin who takes good care of her personal appearance, and she is also very proud of her native Taiwanese heritage; specifically she is descended from benshengren people, who migrated from mainland China to settle in Taiwan long before other mainland Chinese people (waishengren) fled to Taiwan after 1945. In addition to her native Chinese, she only knows just enough English to work and communicate with the other people in Roanapur and does not care about grammar or structure. Her broken English earns her nicknames like "Yes-lady" ("Chinglish" in the English version) from Revy, but those who know her well are more concerned with her expertise with throwing knives and blades. In the main series, it is not specified which Sinitic language that Shenhua speaks, though Mandarin is used in the manga and anime by the editors and staff since it is the Sinitic language most commonly defaulted to when people think of the term "Chinese language." In the Black Lagoon light novel Shaitane Badi, Shenhua is shown to be able to speak Cantonese, and in the light novel Ballad of the Sinful Wizard, she is shown to also understand the Hokkien language. In contrast, in the spinoff manga Dismemberment Galore! The Gore Gore Girl, she has claimed that she cannot understand a word of Mandarin.

Her primary weapon involves two kukri blades tied together with a long rope, and she can swing them around, throw them, and quickly pull them back. Her personal philosophy in using such weapons is that guns run out of bullets, while blades and the human body will never fail. Despite her line of work and her attitude toward Revy, she is quite kind, as she recognizes Garcia Lovelace's chivalry and even offered him to stay at her place. Likewise, Black Lagoon creator Rei Hiroe said that Shenhua allowed Sawyer and Lotton to live with her because she is a caring person. A difference between the anime and manga versions of Shenhua involve her religion. In the manga, she mentions to Eda that she is Taoist and is not bothered with killing nuns. In the anime, she refers to herself as an atheist and is not bothered because morals never get in the way of her work.

Skills It is unknown if Shenhua has any unarmed hand-to-hand skills, although it is likely. In the anime, she fights only with blades, and never engages anyone in true hand-to-hand combat. The only other person who does this is Frederica Sawyer, who frequently works with her in "disposal" jobs.

Weapons Shenhua's weapon of choice is blades since, as she sees it, they never run out of bullets. Her primary weapon is a pair of kukri-style blades attached to a long cord. These two knives are sometimes referred to in the light novels as yanagiba or liuyedao. With these attached, her effective weapon's reach no longer becomes limited by her arms' reach. She can throw her knives and yank them right back into her hands. Additionally, another weapon Shenhua uses are several Feidao throwing knives that she keeps in straps around each leg. She has deadly accuracy, even when throwing several at once.