Character · Cardcaptor Sakura
Syaoran Li
He flies in from Hong Kong to collect the cards himself, finds a fourth-grader has beaten him to them, and takes it badly.
In Otakana the clue reads: Boy from Hong Kong hunting the same cards
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Cardcaptor Sakura
- Letters
- 7 · Normal
Syaoran Li is a descendant of Clow Reed, the sorcerer who made the cards in the first place, and his family sent him to Japan to bring them home. He expected to inherit the job. Instead he arrives to find Sakura Kinomoto already holding the sealing wand, having released the entire deck by accident, and his first move is to try to take it off her.
His methods are older than hers. He carries a straight Chinese sword, throws paper talismans charged with fire, lightning and water, and uses a divination board that swings a needle towards nearby magic. Where Sakura improvises and gets lucky, he plans and gets there second. The rivalry lasts about a season before it turns into something he is far too proud to name out loud.
CLAMP wrote him as a rival and then let the story slowly reverse him, which is one reason Cardcaptor Sakura reads better than its premise suggests. His stiff formality against Sakura's cheerfulness gives the series a comic engine, and his gradual reddening whenever she talks to him is played for laughs long before anyone acknowledges it.
Spelling SYAORAN
SYAORAN is the trap of this whole series. The Japanese is シャオラン, which standard Hepburn romanises as Shaoran, so your ear says SH and the tiles want SY. CLAMP chose that spelling to point at the Chinese original, 李小狼, little wolf, read Xiaolang in Mandarin. Seven letters, and the S-Y opening is unique enough that landing it usually finishes the row.