Examples:
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Comic Books
- The Ancient One is the previous Sorceror Supreme and trained Marvel's Doctor Strange in magic. The Ancient One's colleague Kaluu counts as well, Kaluu has taught Doctor Strange black magic and is currently the resident black magic expert for the Luke Cage's branch of Avengers.
- Yao Fei the Accomplished Perfect Physician from DC's Great Ten is a magical Chinese doctor. He gets transplanted on the Arrow tv show and becomes the archer mentor to Green Arrow, but still retains his healer roots by being the person who Oliver Queen learnt medicinal herbs from.
Film
- Chirrut from Rogue One is pretty much this exactly if you just substitute the Force for the source of 'wisdom'.
- Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid, though he's more well-developed than most other characters on this list.
- Mr. Han, played by Jackie Chan, in the 2010 remake.
- Jackie Chan and Jet Li's characters in The Forbidden Kingdom.
- Pai-Mei from Kill Bill. His treatment of students is less Wax On, Wax Off and more Training from Hell.
- Mr. Lee, played by Mako, in the Karate Kid ripoff Sidekicks. His own version of Wax On, Wax Off is throwing raw dumpling dough at his student and giving him a demeaning nickname. He is also somehow able to teleport a lit cigarette into the pocket of a racist who insulted him.
- The Indian characters in Eat, Pray, Love, who teach spiritual lessons to Julia Roberts' character.
- The nameless monk in Bullet Proof Monk.
- Pretty much every Chinese character in Big Trouble in Little China. For some reason, a restaurant owner, a maitre'd, and a Chinatown tour guide are all experts in Chinese martial arts and sorcery.
Live Action TV
- Master Po and Master Kan in Kung Fu. Their protege Caine is half Chinese and half White.
- Also from Kung Fu, Caine himself to the people he meets when he's Walking the Earth of The Wild West.
- In Kung Fu: The Legend Continues the Identical Grandson of Kwai Chang Caine, also called Kwai Chang Caine, took this role towards his long lost son Peter and others, and The Ancient One was this to Kwai Chang.
- Bruce Lee's character on Longstreet.
- An acupuncturists' teacher in The Invisible Man. He is able to intuit that the acupuncture needles he is using were stolen by his apprentice from a museum when they are ineffective.
- Lampshaded in an episode of Zeke and Luther, then played straight with the Asian mailman who appears in that episode and tries teaching one of the boys some sort of kung-fu technique.
- The Dragon, a Chinese magical healer from Once Upon a Time. Though he's implied to be an actual dragon, he mostly appears as an Asian human.
- Yao Fei on Arrow uses magical herbs capable of accelerating healing on several characters.
Literature
- The Destroyer series. Chiun is a Korean who is the Master of Sinanju, which is the sun source (original) martial art and the basis for all other martial arts. He teaches his knowledge to the protagonist, Remo Williams. The reason stated in the series for not simply employing Chiun to do the killing (instead of training Remo to do the killing) is to avoid invoking the related "Phantom Oriental" trope in passers-by.
- Parodied in the Discworld series by Lu-Tze, the sweeper at the Temple of Oi-Dong, who is also a master of the martial art Deja-Fu (in which the hands move through both time and space):
Rule One: "Do not act incautiously when confronting little bald wrinkly smiling men".
- Also played straight, in that as a result of the Narrative Causality of the Disc, Lu-Tze does have power over the course of history.
Video Games
- The Matrix: Path of Neo for a level has the old NPC Chinese herbalist who can sense auras/chi, who gives Neo a golden powder to make him permanently stronger.
Web Comics
- He doesn't appear in Paradigm Shift in person, but Mike has made occasional references to his sifu, and his background was quite typical of this trope; he was a bit of a delinquent as a teenager, but studying martial arts under an Old Master taught him self-discipline and got him interested in Zen Buddhism. As of the most recent story arc before the comic went on hiatus, he's started paying it forward to his partner and definitely-not-love-interest-she-swears Kate.
Web Original
Western Animation
- In Avatar: The Last Airbender, younger characters tend to have American accents while older, wiser mentor figures tend to have Asian accents regardless of what nation they are from. Iroh is the most prominent example. He was originally also played by Mako.
- Uncle from Jackie Chan Adventures, voiced by Sab Shimono. A highly-skilled practitioner of qi magic, he could send spells through the phone, but didn't know how a fax machine worked.
Other
- James Hydrick
claimed to have learned telekinesis from a Chinese master.
- Invoked by Ching Ling Foo, a Chinese magician popular in the USA during the late 1800s and early 1900s, as well as William Ellsworth Robinson, a Caucasian magician who pretended to be Asian.
