Chapter 32. The Founder of National Geographic of Azeroth: Ediart, Tian Jian

A chapter from ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 三十二 艾泽拉斯国家地理创始人 Ediart

First published in the author's Zhihu column on July 15, 2014: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19798412

This translation was reviewed against the Chinese original on August 1, 2026. If you spot a mistranslation, a wrong name, or a factual error, please open an issue or send a pull request.

Plenty of people will read the title of this chapter and ask a question. Isn't National Geographic of Azeroth, NGA, a World of Warcraft site? What does the founder of an online games website have to do with esports?

He has a great deal to do with it, and the connection runs deep.

For example, the first edition of the official Chinese manual for Blizzard's Warcraft III in 2002, more than 70,000 characters of it, and the 140,000-character official strategy guide were both translated by Ediart, Tian Jian. He was also among the first columnists in China to write Warcraft III match reports for print outlets such as CBI Computer Business Information and Home Computers and Games, and one of the founding members of War3cn, the earliest Chinese-language Warcraft III news site.

What does that mean?

It means that many of the Chinese hero names and ability names that Warcraft III players take for granted today were settled by this one man, and that he was among the first to sow the seeds that turned Warcraft III into a mainstream Chinese esports title.

Two years later, in 2004, on the strength of his work localising Warcraft III and of having founded National Geographic of Azeroth, the largest Chinese-language World of Warcraft community in the world, Tian Jian was recruited at once by The9 in Shanghai as localisation manager for World of Warcraft. As WOW took off, another legend grew up around him. Players called him E-da, Big Brother E, as a mark of respect. His influence on Chinese games culture as a whole has been profound.

The other side of E-da is far less well known.

How was Tian Jian able, before he had even turned 19, to translate a dense and technical game manual on his own and to understand Western games culture so deeply, and yet fail his second year at university twice and drop out? His online name was Ediart, but he was also called Penguin and TBK. Where did those names come from? He is blunt, and inside the industry that bluntness has offended plenty of peers and colleagues. What lies behind his stubbornness? And why does he say that there will never be another site like NGA?

There is a great deal to tell, so let me start at the beginning.

Tian Jian was born in 1983 in Fuping County, Shaanxi. He says the place has been built up nicely since, but at the time it was a small, closed-off county town. His upbringing looked likely to close him off further. Before he was five, his family moved around Qinghai, and in his early teens he lived in Fufeng County, next to Famen Temple near Baoji. Perhaps it was that unsettled life that made his character independent and tough. Fortunately, he was an excellent student.

The family was not well off, but his mother was a teacher with a remarkably open mind, and she believed strongly in what new things could do for a child. So through every wave that swept the early 1990s, the learning machines for Wubi typing, the personal computer, the rush to learn English, she gritted her teeth and pushed Tian Jian into the first rank of each one.

Even today, when Tian Jian mentions the Lenovo computer his family bought in 1995 for more than ten thousand yuan, his eyes light up. That machine completely changed the way he saw the world, above all through the first English game he played, a small demo on a pirated disc that cost twenty yuan. It was called Command & Conquer. Tian Jian understood no English at all and had never played anything of the kind. All he could see were vehicles and infantry, so he clicked here and clicked there and tried to work it out, and whatever he did he could not beat the computer. It frustrated him badly. Then one day he moved the mouse over the construction vehicle and a deploy symbol appeared. He tried clicking it.

Tian Jian says that in that instant he felt his whole world open up.

After that there was no stopping him. From the games large and small on pirated compilation discs, to Red Alert on two CDs with its mass of film-like cutscenes, to the first legitimate copy he ever bought, the 3D FIFA, to his own favourites Age of Empires and StarCraft, his childhood passed happily inside the two hours of computer time he was allowed each week.

Western games shaped the direction of his life.

His marks always put him near the top of his year, but in his final year of secondary school outside pressure forced him to give up the humanities, which he loved, and switch abruptly to the sciences, which he was not good at. It left him deeply depressed.

In that low period he fell hard for two games with dark settings, Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven and Fallout 2. Those two, together with Baldur's Gate and the other Western games he became obsessed with once he reached university, affected him in two further significant ways. First, he discovered that compared with Chinese RPGs, video games could offer a far greater degree of freedom, which widened his view of the world again. Second, both games carried a great deal of English text steeped in Western games culture, and he had to digest and understand it to keep playing. That forced him to improve his English and also pushed him to look much more deeply into how Western games were designed.

His route into English deserves a mention of its own.

Around 1994, Tian Jian's mother bought him three volumes of the English-Chinese Word Ocean Dictionary. Note that this was not a small pocket dictionary. Each volume was as long as half an arm and as thick as a fist, and it used Webster's phonetic notation. To keep playing his games, 11-year-old Tian Jian gritted his teeth and read them anyway. The consequence was that for a long stretch after English classes began at secondary school, he was annotating words in two different phonetic systems.

Another unusual thing happened early on. Just as he was starting to learn English he came across a book about word roots. It showed him that English, like Chinese, extends meaning by combining and varying roots. Set against the vocabulary he had built up from the dictionary, that discovery gave him a technique. He could guess the meaning of an unfamiliar word from its roots, which is far more efficient than memorising word lists. With that technique, and with the English of the games he puzzled over all day, his English came on enormously. Tian Jian says it was especially useful for cloze tests, and he grins when he says it.

His mother's foresight, his own talent, and a dream that pulled him towards the world behind games rather than the playing of them meant that he was always going to take an unusual path through games.

So after winning a place in the mathematics department of Northwestern Polytechnical University, Tian Jian set out to explore the world of games. The rise of the internet gave him a way in, and websites became the first target of that exploration. To do a job well you must first sharpen your tools, so the first thing he worked through was the famous web design trio of the day, Dreamweaver, Flash and Fireworks. While he learned, he tried building a site for his own StarCraft team, CT.

That opened the door to another world.

In 2001 a new real-time strategy game caught his attention. It was Warcraft III, then still in testing. Competitive play and Western fantasy were exactly his kind of thing, and he was confident about the game's future, so he began collecting and organising foreign material and putting it on the CT team site. His match reports leaned towards teaching beginners, which made them popular with new players in China, and gradually he built up a small reputation.

One day KinK, the founder of War3cn and a man with a strong background in web engineering, found Tian Jian through the CT site and proposed that they build War3cn together, with KinK on the technical side and Tian Jian on content. That suited Tian Jian, who wanted to write, so he moved everything from CT across.

The world moves in currents. Once you are inside one, half the effort carries you twice as far, even if you got there by accident.

For nearly twenty years there has been one company in games that stands like a god, in reputation and in profitability alike, at once a mountain nobody can climb and a river in full flood. Half by design and half by chance, Tian Jian had thrown himself into its current. The company was Blizzard Entertainment.

Surviving in that current meant passing a brutal first test. He had to translate the official Chinese Warcraft III manual, more than 70,000 characters, and the 140,000-character official strategy guide, in a single month.

Warcraft III was distributed in China at the time by Wuhan Aomei Electronics, and War3cn's relationship with Aomei won the site the translation job. Tian Jian was in his second year at university. To save money he slept in his dormitory during the day and went to an internet café to translate through the night. He stopped attending classes altogether. Twenty-one consecutive all-nighters later, it was done. Everyone was a little crazy about games in those days, but the price of Tian Jian's craziness was failing every subject in his second year and having to repeat it.

People still joke about some of the mistranslations from that job. He does not mind. He named his company Youdian, a self-deprecating nod to his famous error Youdi'an. From the outside he looks entirely cheerful about it. As the comedian Guo Degang put it, the bitter memories of those years all sound like jokes when you tell them now.

In any industry, the people who set the rules and the standards enjoy a real first-mover advantage.

The combined work of Tian Jian and the others gave War3cn something close to a monopoly on games localisation at the time. Once the money started coming in, though, it only accelerated the site's split. Tian Jian says that of the three core members, Bloodsun and KinK fell out over money, while he took the view that the forum should be strictly moderated rather than left open to idle chatter. The cracks between them widened until he was squeezed out.

The episode marked him. From then on he held to two principles for running a site. Never take partners, and moderate the forum strictly.

The birth of National Geographic of Azeroth

At the European Computer Trade Show in 2001, Europe's equivalent of E3, Blizzard revealed the first details of World of Warcraft. The American magazine Gamespot followed with an 8,000-word preview. Tian Jian was stunned by it. He translated the article immediately and submitted it to the Chinese magazine Home Computers and Games. It was the first piece he ever sent to a print publication, and the first he ever had published.

That excited him, and the idea of running a website and working as a freelance writer took hold. Mathematics still did nothing for him, and even after repeating his second year he had no wish at all to carry on. He told his family he wanted to leave university, and inevitably the whole family was strongly against it, but he gave up his studies anyway and chose the path of games.

A note here, because Tian Jian's position was very unusual. He already had standing column commissions from all the major print outlets. The rate was only 80 yuan per thousand characters, but he often submitted tens of thousands of characters at a time, so he could earn thirty or forty thousand yuan in fees over a single term.

His range was wide too, from the latest foreign games news to match reports and reviews. He covered the lot, which often left editors in an awkward position. The material was good, but it was all by one person, and running all of it under one name did not look right. So they asked him to submit under a range of different names. That is where Penguin came from, after the hidden penguin king character in Warcraft III, along with CT_TBK, CT_LION, Ediart and others. Ediart in particular was made by fusing the English words edit and article, which tells you how hard he was writing at the time. So he had a skill to fall back on when he found the nerve to drop out in his second year. Please do not copy him.

After the news of World of Warcraft's internal testing broke in 2001, Tian Jian started building the National Geographic of Azeroth site at the end of that year. At first it was a single page holding some of his translations. By the end of 2002 the site had grown to a certain size, and the forum had four or five hundred people online.

To keep the content of the site to a high standard, he moderated the quality of forum posts strictly and at the same time invited a group of core members from NTRPG, a well-known Chinese RPG forum, to write for the site. Together they formed the Chosen Ones, the team at the heart of NGA's culture of quality. It was an organisation that could only shrink, never grow, and it was precisely those strict, even harsh rules that guaranteed NGA's standard. Later on, plenty of players regarded having an article published on NGA as an honour, which shows how well Tian Jian managed the brand.

Once he was inside the current, everything that followed came naturally. As interest in World of Warcraft grew at home and abroad, NGA's traffic grew with it and so did Tian Jian's name. In 2004, when The9 finally secured the Chinese licence for World of Warcraft, it went straight to Tian Jian, who was still in Xi'an keeping NGA going on his writing fees, and asked him to come to Shanghai as localisation manager. He agreed.

Contrary to the rumours that went around, Tian Jian did not sell NGA to The9, and he says The9 never intended to buy it from beginning to end. His sense is that The9 thought hiring him was enough, and that whether it owned the site did not matter.

And so Tian Jian, who calls himself a country boy, arrived in the great city of Shanghai. The first time he took a taxi, the driver asked as he got out whether he wanted to pay by card or in cash. He said card, and handed over his bank card.

That is the comic note on which the new legend began.

It began with a hard campaign. From his first day on April 23, 2004, to the end of March 2005, when the first version of World of Warcraft was ready, the localisation team he worked in must have translated close to seven million characters of game content. He started at nine in the morning and finished at two the next morning, and he slept on the office desks along with several colleagues. One of them snored so loudly that he was banished to the meeting room.

Tian Jian says that whenever he thinks back to that period he drifts off into it. The first version was only a little over four million characters of actual content, but it went through constant, large-scale revision, because the game itself was still being changed in the United States. To keep up with the game's versions they had to finish the old material and revise the new at the same time. They were still localising a new build on April 26, 2005, the day the closed beta began. It was a painful and joyful year.

The ocean of work was not really the problem. Tian Jian enjoyed that kind of pure work, and he let it blur into his life entirely. What gave him headaches was the friction with the QA department in the United States. QA was responsible for checking translation quality, and he often disagreed with them about how Chinese translation should work.

The American side, for instance, wanted every piece of English rendered into Chinese. But World of Warcraft contains an elven language which, although it is spelled out in the Latin alphabet, is not English in any strict sense. Tian Jian argued that the game had deliberately invented a language and displayed it in that non-English form precisely to convey a sense of a foreign civilisation. Rather than transliterating those lines into a string of baffling Chinese, it was better to leave them as they were, so that the intent inside the game came through. QA disagreed. He simply did not translate them.

Another example. Tian Jian gave one character a very Chinese name, Benborba, taken from Benborba and Baborben, the pair of fish spirits in Journey to the West. When the name appeared, countless players praised Blizzard for understanding Chinese culture so well. In fact the name almost caused a complete breakdown with the American QA team, who felt it should simply be transliterated as Moqi. Tian Jian flatly refused to change it, and Benborba stayed. That is the little murloc in Ironforge everybody came to know.

There were countless smaller points as well. He translated one name as The Supreme Delicacy, and the American side objected that the Chinese word for delicious was an adjective and the phrasing was therefore ungrammatical. And so on, and on.

In short, for Tian Jian those memories add up to a single line. Those were the years when we localised World of Warcraft together.

NGA, by comparison, was a far happier story.

Sharak, the founder of the well-known World of Warcraft tool BigFoot, was someone Tian Jian discovered on the forum, and he also backed the team behind the WMO raid statistics tool. NGA held on one side the World of Warcraft tools that users stuck to and on the other a steady stream of high-quality World of Warcraft content, so players could not do without it either inside the game or outside it. In the end BigFoot had five million daily active users, while NGA had 800,000 unique visitors a day and more than ten million page views, and it had begun to influence World of Warcraft players around the world.

Looking back, Tian Jian says NGA's success belonged to its moment and cannot be repeated now. The failures of EQ and Mojian in China had left many people doubtful about the newcomer World of Warcraft, which is what allowed a student in his second year to seize his chance and take a share of something far bigger players had written off. Today publishers and any number of professional media outlets rush to build dedicated sites, on the principle that it is better to overreach than to miss anything.

His own path was unusual as well. Improbably, he became the person who set the localisation standards and rules for Blizzard's Warcraft games in China, while his job at The9 let him see where the games were heading before anyone else did. All those coincidences made NGA what it was, and the environment today would not allow another NGA to appear. He believes the age of pioneering in PC games ended long ago.

In April 2011, exactly seven years after joining The9, Tian Jian resigned to start his own company, Shanghai Youdian Information Technology, working exclusively on mobile games. The titles it released afterwards, Wei Baoshi and Soushen Ji, drew wide attention in the industry. He says the well-known foreign mobile game Clash of Clans had an enormous effect on him. The first time he played it, the world opened up in front of him once again.

Perhaps a new frontier has opened once more.

Ediart, Tian Jian.