Born in the distant land of Tian Xia, Bao Xu travelled to Varisia when he was ten years old. His family had spoken with a travelling merchant from Korvosa who had talked them into paying him to take young Bao to a martial arts academy in the west where he would learn to be a master martial artist able to start an academy of his own back home. Unfortunatley, the merchant was an unscupulous man who had no intentions of carrying through with his word and upon arriving back in Korvosa, he sold Bao off as a slave to a local criminal named Gaedren Lamm. While in Lamm's employ, Bao was tortured and forced to work hard manual labor day and night. Though his back was strong, Bao was never the smartest of children and frequently made mistakes in his work, ultimately causing Lamm to beat the poor boy to the brink of death and dump his near-lifeless body in an alley.
Though severely injured, Bao survived the beating and lived for some time on the streets and back alleys of Korvosa, begging for coppers by day and rummaging for scraps of food by night. Eventually he was able to find work as a dockside laborer, but squandered most of his pay in the many bars dotting the Korvosan waterfront. Having lived with violence throughout his adolesence, Bao was quick to swing a fist and participated in many a barroom brawl, usually coming out on top during such encounters due to the half-remembered training he had received from his father as a young boy. In the darkest hours of the night when his workday was through and the bars were closed down, he often drunkenly trained in his flat, remembering the old forms and improvising new ones, honing his skills for the day when he would track down old Gaedran Lamm and seek his revenge.
