A 1D inorganic coordination polymer template route was firstly developed to synthesize metal sulfide aligned-nanowire bundles. Based on this strategy, CdS and HgS aligned-nanowire bundles with high yields were successfully prepared in a water system at room temperature using KCd(NCS)3 as a soft template. The results revealed that the morphologies of the MS (M=Cd, Hg) aligned-nanowire bundles were uniform with lengths of several microns and the diameters of each single wire were ca. 10–30 nm and 60–80 nm for CdS and HgS, respectively.