Denis Gainty. 2013. Martial Arts and the Body Politic in Meiji Japan. London and New York: Routledge. 208 pages. $55 USD. Reviewed by Benjamin N. Judkins.

 

The passing of Denis Gainty in 2017 robbed the martial arts studies community of a promising voice. The earlier death of G. Cameron Hurst, Gainty’s dissertation advisor, in 2016 had already been a blow to students of Japanese martial arts history. Hurst’s seminal monograph, Armed Martial Arts of Japan: Swordsmanship and Archery [Hurst 1998], established a scholarly discussion of these subjects that transcended the early efforts of Donn Draeger and other, more popular, writers of the postwar era. Hurst helped to lay the foundations for the current flowering of martial arts studies. It is tragic that the field would lose both a critical pioneer and one of his most promising students in such a short period of time.

Gainty’s most enduring academic legacy will surely be his work Martial Arts and the Body Politic in Meiji Japan [Gainty 2013]. Whereas Hurst produced a broad study, examining the evolution of swordsmanship and archery throughout Japanese history, Gainty cogently argued for more tightly-focused studies. Rejecting standard historical approaches and the sociological variables that characterized much of the previous work in this area, Gainty instead sought to craft his own ‘historio-ethnographic’ method which, while accounting for the basic structure of a situation, privileged the auto-biographical writings of Japan’s martial artists [5]. In this way, individuals who cultivated these bodily disciplines were allowed to describe and interpret their own experiences.

From the start, Gainty lays out an ambitious project designed to complicate much of the ‘received wisdom’ shaping discussions of the modern Japanese martial arts. The Dai-Nippon Butokukai (Japan Martial Virtue Association) was a critical institution responsible for much of the popularization and standardization of the martial arts (particularly kendo) in the Meiji and Showa periods. Still, the English-language literature has largely neglected this critical institution. Hurst dedicated only a few pages to exploring its contributions, and most of that discussion revolved around elite government figures and their competing political agendas [Hurst 1998: 158-165].

In contrast, Gainty focused his entire volume on a finely-grained social and institutional history of the group. His carefully constructed case study results in two major findings. First, Gainty argues quite convincingly that the standard view of the Meiji period as an era in which the martial arts stagnated and nearly vanished is profoundly mistaken. This view is actually the product of romanticized notions equating the Japanese martial arts with the Samurai class. In reality, Japanese civilians had practiced (and taught) many of these systems for quite some time. Far from imperiling the martial arts, the disappearance of the Samurai as a visible social class actually opened a space where these arts could be appropriated by new cultural, economic, and governmental forces. When we set aside misty visions of the vanishing Samurai, what we actually find is a period of rapid growth and dynamic change within the Japanese martial arts….

 

Click here for the rest of my review, and links to the most recent issue of the Martial Arts Studies journal.

 

oOo

If you liked this review you might also enjoy: Who Benefits from the Traditional Martial Arts: Public Goods vs. Private Gains.

oOo

It goes by many names. Organization, bureaucracy…”hard work”… It’s the sort of social effort that defines modern industrialized life. Weber famously termed it the “iron cage” of rationality. We so frequently speak of, or imagine, the martial arts as an intrusion of pre-modern tradition onto the global stage that one might be forgiven for assuming that these institutions possess a logic and schema of their own.  This is exactly how they have been advertised for decades, as a critique of, or temporary escape from, the cold rationality of the mundane world.

And yet, as the following discussion reminds us, the Chinese martial arts have thrived precisely because they were a cultural revival movement that was both imbedded within, and dependent upon, China’s newly emerging modern institutions. Consider the following paradox.  How is it that a city like Guangdong might have vastly more martial artists in the years 1920 or 1930 than the same neighborhoods could have boasted in 1900 (right on the eve of the Boxer Rebellion)?

In the late 19^thcentury such practices were most popular in the countryside and they tended to be pursued by young men of marginal means looking for a way to make their way in the wider world. By the second decade of the 20^thcentury the sorts of institutions and industries that had supported these social pathways (the imperial military service examination system, the armed escort companies, salt smuggling/monopoly enforcement, etc…) had been obliterated by rapid social and economic change.  And yet the martial arts were still vastly more popular in Southern China during the second and third decades of the 20^thcentury than they had been during the first?

It was the adaptation of these systems to new purposes, and their adoption by modern social forces, that ultimately created the schools that we have today.  In the military archery examinations (used for selecting junior officers) were eventually replaced with dadao drill (for strengthening the infantry).  In the civilian realm, the upsurge of nationalism in the late 1910s led many members of China’s newly empowered middle class to search for acceptable ways to reconnect with their national local identities.  Ideally such an activity would both answer existential questions regarding what it meant to be Chinese while at the same time addressing the practical daily problem of life in a modern economy. Countless reformers within the martial arts community worked hard to create practices that could do both.

None of these groups were more successful than the Jingwu Association. Others (Morris, Kennedy and Gao) have noted that they combined a knack for franchising martial arts training with a keen appreciation of the latest advertising techniques.  The result was the creation of China’s first truly national martial arts brand, and the widespread acceptance (at least in urban areas) of their modernized understanding of the martial arts.

While a catchy advertising campaign might win you brand recogonition, by itself it is insufficient to create a truly national social movement. Individual consumption choices just cannot account for that, especially when we remember that Jingwu membership would been a luxury that was out of reach for many of China’s working class citizens. Reformers understood that they would need to find a mechanism to compel individuals (particularly in the quickly developing urban cores) to participate in these previously marginal activities if they were to have any hope of becoming a central aspect of China’s modern identity.

After all, one’s consumption decisions alone cannot make you a member of “the nation.”  If the martial arts were to remain a purely voluntary pastime they would never be more than one hobby among many.  That is not a strong basis for identity, or at least not the sort that the Chinese state was attempting to cultivate.  As Benedict Anderson so cogently observed, we find nobility in dying for one’s nation, rather than one’s employer, or an abstract political philosophy, precisely because the first is not a choice we have control over. Rather than a voluntary pastime, or means of making a living, a system was imagined where citizens would study the national fighting arts simply because they “were Chinese.” Through their shared practice they would come to understand what that phrase really meant. In some ways it is all too easy to get caught up in the details of Jingwu’s market innovations and lose track of their fundamentally nationalist political philosophy, or the radical scope of their vision.

Yet how does one transform the voluntary and the particular into the mandatory and the universal? China’s network of public and private schools was the only tool with the scope to accomplish this task.  Better yet, the national debates over curriculum reform that swept across the country in the late 1910s provided the ideal opening for reformers to argue that martial arts should become the basis of physical education in China, much as judo and kendo had come to be accepted in Japan.  Yet how was this agenda actually implemented? And what would this sort of instruction actually look like?

This is where our story returns to the question of bureaucracy.  Nothing gets done in a modern society without meetings, and they tend to generate a paper trail.  That is good news for historians. It seems odd, but if you want to know about the development of the traditional Chinese martial arts, discussions of the development of the modern educational system are actually a pretty good place to start digging.

I was reminded of all of this when I ran across the following article reporting on a series of organizational meetings which took place between the Guangdong Educational Association and local branch of the Jingwu Association. Formally inaugurated in April of 1919 (with a well-attended ceremony at the Haizu Theater in Guangzhou) the Guangdong branch of the Jingwu Association lost no time in enrolling local schools in its mission to save China by spreading the gospel of the (reformed and modernized) martial arts.  For their part, the schools seem to have been only to happy to receive physical education instructors who they did not have to recruit or train.

Local Students to Take Lessons in National Boxing from Members of the Ching Wu Association

The Educational Association helps a meeting of teachers and students on April 14. The meeting was purposely convened to introduce the teachers of the Ching Wu Athletic Association to the students who have joined in learning the national boxing exercises, and to work out a time table to suit the various schools.

It was decided to teach these exercises in the Educational Association’s building, in the Boys High Normal School, and in the Sacred Heart College on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays in the afternoon from 4 till 5:30 o’clock commencing this afternoon; in the No. 6 Government Public school and in Nam Hoi School on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, the time is the same as in the other schools beginning yesterday afternoon.  With regard to the Nam Wu Middle School and other schools in Honam they asked to arrange the days and time for themselves.  In Canton Christian College these exercises will be taught on Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays from 4 till 6 o’clock in the afternoon; and in the Government Trade School on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays in the Morning. The boxing exercises will also be taught to girls in Kwen Wai Normal School in Saikwan, and in the Girls Athletic School.

The Canton Times. Friday, April 16^th, 1920.  Page 1.

A few notes about this article stand out.  The first is that this instruction, while formally mediated and adopted by the provinces Educational Association, seems to have happened outside of normal class hours.  Thus, at least in 1920, martial arts education seems to have resembled a supplementary “club activity,” rather than something which could displace other subject from the school day.  Still, four and half to six hours of instruction a week was an ambitious schedule. This sort of “soft introduction” was also how the martial arts were first introduced to many Japanese schools in the late Meiji period.  It suggests a local demand for this sort of training even in the absence of more comprehensive curriculum reform.

Indeed, the following short notice, also from the pages of the Canton Times, suggests that this demand predated Jingwu’s move to the region.  It should also be noted that the editorial style of the Canton Times paper consistently used “national boxing” (rather than Jingwu’s “kung-fu” terminology) as its preferred English language name for the martial arts. That choice may be seen as potentially significant in light of the ongoing attempts to place these practices at the center of modern Chinese national identity.

The Seventh Canton Athletic Meet will begin February 27. The enrollment for the athletes concluding yesterday when more than one thousand from nearly 40 schools in Canton and other places reported to participate in this Meet. Among them, the Girls’ Normal School in Tai Shak Street will send a body of selected girl students to give a national boxing play while at the same time the Girls Physical Training School will also hold a military drill exhibition.  It will be most interesting for the guests to learn that Mrs. Fung Chaung-ching will also take part in the games on that occasion.

The Canton Times. Feb. 25^th, 1919. Page 7.

One wonders whether the Girls Normal School and Girls Physical Training School discussed here might have been the very same institutions that were referenced in the final sentences of the first article.  Still, the note on the Honam schools bowing out of the scheduling process is a valuable reminder that Jingwu was not the only player attempting to colonize this public space and there may have been some hesitance to adopt its program.  A short notice run in a wide number of newspapers in December of 1919 noted that a certain Mrs. Wu, the wife of a Colonel in the army, had successfully set up martial arts classes for female school students on Honam island in Guangzhou:

The new woman in Canton is not the tender and slim, timid and frail, pale faced and tiny footed Chinese woman of yesterday.  Mrs. Wu, wife of a Colonel of the Army, is organizing in Honam a club to teach the members of the gentle sex the national game of Chinese boxing.  In one of the government schools for women, Chinese boxing is taught to the girl students.

Straits Times, 17 December 1919, page 8.

I have yet to decipher the identity of “Colonel Wu,” but apparently he was an important enough figure in Guangdong in 1919 that the article’s author decided that he and his wife needed no further introduction.  Multiple figures were also promoting Ma Liang’s “New Wushu” at this point in time, and he was hardly the only military officer to have taken an interest in the martial arts and educational reform.

It is hard to know what exactly was being taught in the schools on Honam given the scanty information in this article.  Still, the Women’s chapter of the Guangdong Jingwu branch would not be inaugurated until Chen Shi Chao (the director of the Women’s Department, and Chen Gong Zhe’s brother) came to the region in the Spring of 1920.  So I would suspect that this program probably didn’t fall under the Pure Martial umbrella.

As John Nielson and I noted in our social history of the Southern Chinese martial arts, Jingwu’s proactive stance in the region payed off.  The schools noted in this article were just a fraction of the institutions that would adopt their system.  By 1925 no fewer than 45 of Guangzhou’s schools, companies and clans employed dozens of Jingwu instructors.  Together they educated at least 3,000 students in these various branch locations, in addition to the thousands more who took classes in the Association’s main schools.  Similar efforts were mounted in Foshan, Hong Kong, and other locations in urban Southern China.

It should be remembered that many of the individuals who would go on to promote the later Guoshu and Wushu movements were first introduced to the martial arts through the efforts of the Jingwu Association. Its success in the creation of a national martial arts cannot be understood merely in terms of business acumen or advertising strategies (those these things certainly helped).  Rather, their success in placing their unique vision of the martial arts in Chinese schools gave these systems the sort of coercive social influence that was necessary to turn a previously marginal (mostly rural) activity into a core aspect of the modern Chinese identity.

oOo

If you enjoyed this post you might also want to read: Ip Man, the Death of Language and the Roots of Communication

oOo

I should be packing for a weekend visiting family. But before leaving I wanted to share something from my recent reading.  Growing up in Western NY I had many opportunities to visit Toronto.  Its Chinatown was the first of North America’s historic Chinese communities that I was able to get a real sense of.  Unfortunately, I no longer get back there as often as I would like.  Nor have I really invested the time and effort to familiarize myself with the city’s substantial martial arts scene. Perhaps in our struggle to discover the treasures of far off times and places we always neglect those that are close at hand.

The following 1934 article published in the Globe hints at what I might be missing.  It profiles a Chinese lion dance and subsequent martial arts demonstration held during Toronto’s centennial celebrations. The Chinese dancers and musicians were far from the only performers at this event.  Each of the city’s many immigrant neighborhoods were represented through their own folk dances performed in “native” costumes.

This article is not long, but it is well worth reading as a reminder of the ways that Chinese communities were viewed in North America prior to WWII. It also brings up a few notes of special interest.  After corresponding with Arlene Chan, a local historian and expert on the development of the ethnic Chinese community in the region, I was delighted to learn that the Ship Toy Yen Society, referenced in this article, has survived more or less to the present day.  The group was best known in the 1930s and 1940s for its public theater at which Cantonese operas and other musical performances were staged. Apparently, it lived on as a benevolent society, dedicated to the performance of traditional “sword and spear dancing.”

According to Arlene Chan’s records the first dedicated Chinese martial arts school in Toronto was Sifu Jimmy Lore’s Jing Mo Kung Fu Club (1969-2003), which was located at 10 Hagerman Street in Old Chinatown.  It counted among its students the important figure skater, Elvis Stojko, who subsequently choreographed martial arts in his skating programs.  Chan noted that Lore is said to have taught martial arts at two clubs in the city during the 1930s, before opening his own establishment, but that part of the story requires further investigation.

Readers should note that after the performance of the Lion Dance this theatrical company also staged a public martial arts demonstration. Not knowing what to call the display the reporter referred to it simply as a “jiujitsu” exhibition.  The Western reading public was already familiar with that term by the 1930s, and it probably conveyed some idea of what was seen by spectators.  Still, its another reminder of the fact that there was no agreed upon terminology to refer to the Chinese martial arts until well into the post-WWII era.  I suspect that at least some of the invisibility of these practices is a result of our own linguistic shortcomings rather than the supposed “secrecy” of the Chinese community.

Clearly there is some interesting history waiting to be recorded in Toronto.  Perhaps this article is most valuable as a reminder not to ignore what lies on one’s own doorstep while staring off at treasures in the distance.  Special thanks go to Colin P. McGuire (an ethnomusicologist and fellow student of martial arts studies) who was kind enough to point me towards a couple of photographs from this event.  They compliment the article quite nicely.  Be sure to check out his blog.

Chinese Perform Weird Lion Dance

__________

Groups of Various Nationalities Celebrate Centennial in High Park

2,000-Year-Old Dance

__________

A strangely beautiful chapter was added to the story of Toronto’s centennial year when groups representing the nine nationalities gathered in High Park Saturday afternoon.  The flags of many nations waved in the light breeze besides the Union Jack and the Canadian Ensign. Picturesque folk costumes and the music of native instruments attracted crowds of Toronto citizens, who wandered about the park witnessing the dance and the games.

Many gathered to see the performance of the weird Mu Shu, or Lion Dance, which was executed by members of the Ship Toy Yen, local Chinese lodge.  This dance is more than 2,000 years old, and was performed in Toronto for the first time on Saturday.  The lion’s head was specially imported from Canton for the event.

To the throbbing of giant drums and the clashing of cymbals the Oriental dancers went through the motions of the ancient dance.  The men supporting the lion which was a brilliantly colored effigy with a large, ferocious-looking head whirled and spun, and as they dropped out exhausted their places were taken by others. Sputtering firecrackers added to the din of the Chinse musical instruments.  The dancers, whose duty it was to prevent the Lion from securing a bundle of money and vegetables tied to the upper branches of a tree, swung broad-bladed northern swords known as the Da Doi.  The Lion finally triumphed after reaching the money by climbing a human ladder formed by dancers, [and] went through the last victorious movement of the dance. This ceremonial was followed by an exhibition of jiujitsu….

oOo

If you enjoyed this research note you might also want to see: Research Notes: Visiting the National Martial Arts Examination in Nanking, 1933

oOo

We all love clickbait. Sure, we say we hate those gimmicky titles that populate our YouTube play lists.  And none of us would willfully admit to clicking on “108 Facts about Rick and Morty” or, “20 Things that You Didn’t Know About Wing Chun”, but advertising dollars don’t lie.  Just check out the viewership on these videos.  Yeah, we all clicked on them.

The human mind loves a list. These discrete, bite-sized, bits of predigested information slot seamlessly into our larger matrix of beliefs and world views, all while invisibly reinforcing our subconscious predispositions. Nor should we ignore the competitive appeal of a good list.  The mastery of ever more arcane facts is a great way to reinforce the credibility of one’s chosen Geekdom.  Indeed, if we take a step back and look at that YouTube feed again it quickly becomes apparent that information itself has become an easily consumable commodity; one capable of conferring a certain type of credibility or status.

Rather than challenging these popular conventions the current post intends to subvert them. What follows is the first half of a list of 16 facts that you may or may not know about the Chinese martial arts. In their own way each entry asks us to think a little more deeply about what we know about these practices.  And I am afraid that none of them are all that easily digestible.  But they do come with hints or links for further investigation.

It is the nature of any such list to flirt with chaos.  If the topic is drawn too narrowly there is not much of interest to say.  Drawn too widely and you quickly lose the threads that hold the various observations together.  To keep our list manageable each of our sixteen facts was drawn from one of four categories: places, personalities, “firsts” and concepts (hey, this is an academic blog, of course we were going to talk about ideas).  The first two of these topics, places and people, are tackled in today’s post. Enjoy!

Places

16. Shaolin Really Was a Martial Arts Powerhouse

While the title explicitly promised 16 things you didn’t know, the truth is that some of the biggest surprises come when we discover moments of continuity with popular legends. The Shaolin temple is a good example of something that both challenges and confirms the popular wisdom on the Chinese martial arts.  Maybe that’s why so many of us continue to be tantalized by its history?

The notion that Bodhidharma introduced the martial arts to the venerable institution is a complete myth. But it is absolutely true that the temple functioned as a martial arts training college during the second half of the Ming Dynasty.  And the monk’s favorite weapon really was the staff.  But their interest in pole fighting likely had little to do with the expected pacifism of Buddhist monks.  Indeed, they taught classes on the use of all of the major weapons at Shaolin, including swords, spears and archery.  Rather, the many lay students who traveled to train at Shaolin would often go on to become officers in the military or the creators of local militia forces.  Both of these groups needed to be well versed in the training of new troops.  During the 16^thcentury the staff was the favored implement of military basic training camps across China.  It was believed that once a soldier mastered the staff he had acquired the basic skills and discipline needed to take on any other weapon.

And Shaolin’s staff was deadly.  Period reports note that the temple’s warrior monks would go into battle against the Woku (Japanese pirates) armed with either long hardwood or pure iron staffs.  Do you want to know more about Shaolin’s impact of the development of the modern Chinese martial arts?  Check out The Shaolin Templeby Meir Shahar.

15. Shaolin is Still a Pioneer Today, in the Art of Tourism

The story of the Shaolin Temple is one of destruction and rebirth.  Indeed, the temple has been rebuilt many times in its history.  In its current incarnation it is one of the largest domestic and international tourist attractions in all of China.  The revenue that it generates has been vitally important to the region of Henan province characterized by slow economic development and a lack of good jobs.  The Shaolin Temple has been so successful that provincial and local governments across China have rushed to “rediscover” their own martial arts history in the hopes of attracting investment, tourists and students.  In some cases, this has been easy.  Chen Village (the historic home of Taijiquan) is not that far away from Shaolin and it also depends on visitors.  In other areas governments have rushed to excavate and rebuild forgotten temples as direct competitors to Shaolin.  For instance, there are multiple tourist sites in Fujian and Guangdong province (and probably other places as well) all vying to be acknowledged as the as home of the mythic “Southern Shaolin Temple.” When it comes to the booming martial arts tourism business, individuals are much more interested in consuming the notion of place rather than its actual history.

Not everyone is enthusiastic about Shaolin’s embrace of the tourist trade.  Many commentators have taken to criticizing the materialism of the temple’s monks and leaderships.  Indeed, the current abbot has been embroiled in a number of scandals over the years.  Yet Shahar points out that even this is not a new development. Students of Shaolin’s history have discovered even earlier accounts decrying the disorder and din caused by tourists at the temple, during the Ming dynasty!

14. Foshan Was a Martial Arts Mecca.

Foshan (a small city in the Pearl River Delta) is another location that has done quite well by the boom in martial arts tourism.  The city’s ancestral temple is home to small museums dedicated to both Wong Fei Hung (perhaps the best known Southern martial artist of all time) and Ip Man (Bruce Lee’s sifu and a Wing Chun master who rose to prominence much more recently). In recent Kung Fu films, the city is always shown as a hotbed of martial arts activity with a dozen schools competing with others in a tightly packed marketplace.

While almost everything else in these films is historical fiction, that basic image is remarkably accurate.  Due to a number of specific economic factors (reviewed by myself and Jon Nielson here) Foshan was a regional center for martial arts activity. In the case of Southern China it was a strong manufacturing economy that led to a demand for martial arts training.

How famous were Foshan’s schools?  Well, its love of martial arts training was so well known that short discussions of the situations even made it into China’s English language newspapers. That was a pretty remarkable feat for the time as these papers tended to focus on economic news and international events.

13. The Rooftop School is Dead, Long Live the Rooftop School!

Our last entry in this category is not so much a specific location, as a type of place.  During the post-war years millions of refugees streamed into Hong Kong.  Several important martial artists were among their numbers.  As the city became more crowded they tended to set up small schools that met in their own (usually tiny) apartments in Kowloon or the New Territories.  If a school was particularly successful and it needed more space it often found relief by retreating to the building’s roof top.  This was one of the few inexpensive open spaces that Hong Kong’s less affluent residents could rent.  Of course, they were cheap for a reason. They tended to be cramped and incredibly hot during the summers.  But marginal spaces such as rooftops, basements and empty warehouse spaces played a critical role in the development of the city’s martial arts scene.

All of this is now a thing of the past.  Skyrocketing rents have led to urban redevelopment and gentrification. Many neighborhood schools have lost their locations and everyone’s rents have increased.  A decline in demand for traditional martial arts instruction is not the only, or even the greatest, challenge that these systems face.  Nor is the problem confined to Hong Kong. The amazing rise in global real estate values during the last few decades has changed the face of cities from Guangzhou to London.  As economies are reconfigured the martial arts are forced to find new ways to propagate themselves and build their communities.

Personalities

12. Bruce Lee almost followed in the footsteps of Charlie Chan

The modern Chinese martial arts are more than simply urban geography.  They have also produced an incredible assortment of colorful personalities who have shaped the development of these systems. Indeed, popular martial arts history sometimes seems to reduce down to an endless stream of biography.

If there is any one lesson that we might take away from all of these biographies, it is the radically contingent nature of the Chinese martial arts.  Consider the following fact.  No individual had a greater role in popularizing the Chinese martial arts in the West than Bruce Lee.  He is also remembered as an individual who used his roles in both TV programs and films to shatter the stereotypes that had followed Chinese Americans for decades.

Yet as Matthew Polly points out in his recent biography, Bruce Lee didn’t come to Hollywood to play an action hero in the Green Hornet.  Instead he was initially recruited to play Charlie Chan’s son in a detective film. Obviously that gig fell through, and Lee was left to scramble. But if Lee had been cast he would not only have found himself playing a more cerebral detective, but he may well have ended up prolonging the life of a franchise that had promoted many harmful stereotypes in the past.  Still, you have got to wonder what sort of detective Bruce Lee would have been!

11. Ip Man Invented the Mobile Wooden Dummy.

The twists and turns of an individual career can reveal how fundamental social forces have forced the martial arts to adapt in a given time and place.  I have always found Ip Man to be helpful in this regard as his life was grounded in two very different times and places.  In the 1910s and 1920s the southern Chinese martial arts were closely tied to specific local and group identities.  The organizations that supported martial arts instructors, whether unions, corporations, clan associations or political parties tended to control local resources and as a result many (though not all) martial arts associations were closely tied to a specific place and social interests.

When Ip Man fled to Hong Kong he found himself in a very different, and much more fluid, urban landscape.  A review of his career shows that he moved apartments frequently (every couple of years in some cases) and taught his Wing Chun classes in literally dozens of ever shifting locations. Ip Man was constantly on the move.

The peripatetic nature of urban life required him to change the way that Wing Chun was taught in order to retain his equally mobile students.  But it also encouraged him to change the sorts of equipment that his schools used. Fixed wooden dummies, permanently buried in the ground, reflected the nature of life in generationally-stable Foshan.  Yet they were not well adapted to life in a Hong Kong apartment.

When discussing Ip Man’s dummy we tend to fixate on how his plan for hanging it changed its action and the quality of its play when struck.  What is often missed in these discussions is the much more basic fact that creation of a wall mounted dummy takes any Wing Chun school and makes it mobile. Such a dummy can be moved from one location to the next on a yearly basis.  In short, the types of dummies that we all use now (almost none of which are actually buried in the ground) are a powerful symbol of the increasingly mobile and fluid nature of Chinese martial arts, forever detached from their geographic point of origin.  All of this was set in motion by Ip Man who commissioned his own dummies as he struggled to find ways to make Wing Chun relevant in an ever-changing environment.

10. Wong Fei Hung put the Southern Chinese Martial Arts on the Map

Bruce Lee ignited a storm of interest in the Asian martial arts.  And more recent bio-pics have made his teacher, Ip Man, a widely recognized figure.  But it was Wong Fei Hung who created the modern world of Southern Chinese martial arts culture that would later immortalize these other men.  The historic Wong was a practitioner of Hung Gar and traditional Chinese medicine who lived and worked for much of his career in Foshan.  Following the death of this son the respected martial artist became a recluse, but that seems to have only contributed to the amazing outpouring of serialized newspaper articles, radio shows and eventually films that attempted to capitalize on his legend.  According to his Wikipedia filmography, at least 123 films starring Wong Fei Hung have been produced.  Nor does this number include his many TV appearances, or the various projects focusing on his famous disciples.

Yet Wong Fei Hung has always been more than an action hero.  He was also an important folk hero who represents changing notions of Cantonese identity. Many of his early films went out of their way to include ethnographic performances of authentic martial arts techniques and lion dances.  Even when this material disrupted the films narrative flow, audiences saw it as a way of preserving and editorializing on local culture and values. And these films were all the more potent given that Wong was a widely known historical figure.

All of this paved the way for the creation of later “real-life” folk heroes.  Indeed, it is interesting to speculate on how the current myths of Bruce Lee and Ip Man would be different if they were not following on the footsteps of Wong Fei Hung.

9.  Chu Minyi: “The Chinese martial arts (Guoshu) bring glad tidings to all of the world…”

If there is one spice that has flavored the popular discussion of the Chinese martial arts, it is the consistent belief that these systems conceal some great ancient secret. After all, secrecy is a powerful advertising strategy.  And there may even be some truth to it.  Many systems (though we should hasten to add, not all) reserve certain techniques and discussions for “indoor students.” And disseminating advanced material only to those students with the capability to deal with it might just be good pedagogy. But does all of this mean that the Chinese martial arts are truly “secretive”?

That question takes on a special urgency for students of martial arts studies who are interested in the global transmission of these systems starting in the middle years of the 20^thcentury.  We frequently hear the claim, sometimes coming from within the martial arts community, that kung fu was never taught to “outsiders” prior to the 1970s because of the extreme secrecy and ethnic chauvinism of the Chinese-American community.  As Paul Bowman has noted, this claim is problematic as it paints the Chinese-American community, which had been the victim of legislative and social campaigns of racism and persecution, as being responsible for its own fate.  A more balanced history of the martial arts in America might start with the post-WWII re-imagination of the Chinese as a “model minority,” as well as the rise of various counterculture movements, and ask how these changed the demand for traditional Chinese culture.

In any case, there is not much evidence that the Chinese tried to actively hide their traditional fighting system from the West.  To the contrary, during the 1930s the Chinese government went out of its way to promote the image of the Chinese martial arts abroad.  This was done through goodwill tours, newspaper articles and even the staging to a wushu demonstration at the 1936 Olympics.

The Western trained physician Chu Minyi was a driving force behind some of these efforts.  He demonstrated his Taiji Calisthenics at physical education conferences in Europe where he distributed instructional material that had been translated into English and French.  He commissioned a short German language documentary on the Chinese martial arts to be entered into the 1936 Berlin film festival (which accompanied the Olympics later that year).  He even helped to open a martial arts class for Western students at a theatrical club in Shanghai.  Chu and other reformers believed that the Chinese martial arts had universal benefits that should be shared with all of humanity.  His campaign was ultimately cut short by the Japanese invasion of China in 1937.  Yet when addressing his vision for the Chinese martial arts he noted:

  …Our goals in working to promote guoshu[national arts] are to gather together all those who excel in martial arts and all of the finest points of martial arts.  Then we can give this organized, systematized, scholarly, and methodological guoshu to all of the people of the world…Spreading Chinese guoshu to all of the people of the world will mean glad tidings for humanity.

Quoted in Andrew Morris, 220. Chu Minyi. 1928. “Zhongwei Chu Minyi shi zhi datan guoshu—feng wei renlei de fu-yin.” [Central Committee Member Chu Minyi’s Great Hopes for Guoshu: Presenting glad tidings to all humanity.] Jiaoyu Zazhi (Educational Review)20:12 (20 December 1928): 3-4.

Chu’s subsequent actions in the 1930s suggest that these were not empty platitudes.  The success of such efforts was certainly hampered by limited budgets and other more pressing problems.  Still, it is clear that the limiting factor in the early globalization of the Chinese martial arts was the lack of interest among Western populations rather than the impenetrable secrecy of the martial arts community.  Indeed, Chinese reformers and policy makers noted the West’s interest in Japanese judo and jiujitsu and were very interested in winning a similar level of legitimacy for their own arts.  Do you want to know more about these efforts?  Then be sure to watch out for my upcoming book on place of the martial arts in China’s public and cultural diplomacy efforts.

Watch for part two of this post soon!

oOo

If you enjoyed this list you might also want to see: Five Moments that Transformed Kung Fu

oOo

Welcome to the second half of our discussion of 16 facts about the Chinese martial arts that you probably don’t know.  If you are just joining us for the first time this list is a playful attempt to highlight some popular misconceptions about the Chinese martial arts while subverting a popular genre of (generally information free) internet click-bait.  In the top half of our list we covered a number of fascinating facts related to prominent places and personalities who helped to shape the Chinese martial arts.

In today’s post we move on to the top 8 remaining facts. These discussions will focus on the creation of popular concepts surrounding these fighting systems, as well as rethinking the ever popular discussion of “firsts.”  Indeed, so many of the historical discussions of the TCMA come down to attempts to determine when something first happened (or who first created it) that it seems only fitting that we should close out our list by challenging some of the conventionally accepted wisdom.

Key Concepts and Images

8. Chinese Boxers and their terrible “big swords”…

It is not uncommon for there to be something of a disconnect between the martial arts as they are actually practiced within a certain area, and the popular perception of these communities as transmitted by the international media.  For instance, Western discussions of the Japanese martial arts have tended to fixate on unarmed forms of fighting (first judo, and since the 1970s karate), while in actual fact kendo has always been the most popular budo practiced in Japan.  And it is not even close. The popularity of kendo just overwhelms everything else. Yet it never managed to capture imaginations in the West to the same degree as karate, judo or even aikido.  Hence we tend to have a slightly skewed viewed of what the Japanese martial arts community actually looks like.

Something similar happened in China, but ironically Western popular perceptions moved in the opposite direction.  From the final decades of the Qing dynasty onwards, a variety of unarmed combat practices became the most popular martial arts actually practiced by civilians around the country.  Of course this era corresponds nicely with the explosion of interest in the modernization of Chinese physical culture during the Republic, and the rise of Taijiquan as a critical marker of traditional Chinese culture.

Still, Western produced ephemera, newspaper articles, photographs and even early newsreels emphasized the appearance of alarmingly large swords within the Chinese martial arts.  By the 1920s civilian “Sword Dancers” and military “Dadao Troops” had come to dominate the popular Western image of these fighting systems.  I suspect that this reflects the lingering cultural impact of the “Boxer Uprising” (one of the largest media events of the early 20^thcentury) and the prominence of weapon displays in easily photographed marketplace kung fu exhibitions.

This isn’t to say that there were not a lot of traditional weapons within the Chinese martial arts. Yet just as the prominence of karate in the Western imagination tended to skew our understanding of the actual life experience of many Japanese martial artists, so too did the dadao become synonymous with Chinese martial arts during the pre-WWII period.  So, if you are looking for vintage images of Chinese martial artists and you keep coming up empty, try looking for “big swords,” “sword dancers” or “Chinese fencers” instead.  You might be surprised with what turns up.

7. Kung Fu is a misnomer…

If the dadao came to represent Chinese martial culture in the popular imagination prior to WWII, perhaps no concept became more closely linked with these practices than the name “kung fu” in the post-war era. Of course many are quick to point out that this term actually means “diligent effort” or “hard work”, and that we should really be calling these systems “wushu”.  But where did the term kung fu come from, and how did it enter popular usage in the West?

One popular school of thought is that kung fu appeared as a garbled translation or misunderstanding of terms in the 1970s following the popularization of Hong Kong action films.  While there is no doubt that it exploded in popularity during that era, its explicit usage as a name for the martial arts in English language publications is decades older than that.  “Kung fu” has been a popular shorthand for the martial arts in Cantonese for quite some time.  Given the importance of Southern Chinese immigrants in the introduction of these arts to the West, we should not be surprised that their preferred terminology, and other aspects of Southern martial culture, became well established early on.

What is generally not appreciated is that during the late 1910s and early 1920s the Jingwu (Pure Martial) Association began to publish material in English and work with English language newspapers in China to promote the recognition of the martial arts abroad.  They decided that if these fighting systems were to succeed they would need a catchy name that could compete with already successful marketplace “brands” like “Japanese judo.”  The Jingwu Association started to promote “kung fu” as the proper catch-all term for the Chinese martial arts in English language discussions, and by the early 1920s their efforts had gained some traction. In the modern era the question of how to refer to the Chinese fighting systems has always been somewhat political and fraught. It is a surprisingly complicated subject. But the next time someone tells you that “kung fu” is a misunderstanding that has nothing to do with the martial arts, tell them to take it up with the Jingwu Association.

6. “Wushu” has always been the proper name of the Chinese Martial Arts…

This bring us to the term “wushu,” probably the dominant term used to describe the Chinese martial arts today.  Typically, when someone objects to the use of the term “kung fu” it is because they advocate the use of wushu instead. [Granted, there are some folks working to bring back “Guoshu,” but that is a subject for another post]. Yet not everyone is comfortable using this term.  During the Cold War a number of Taiwanese and Southern Chinese martial artists in North America refused to use wushu simply because it was the preferred nomenclature of the Communist government.  Other martial artists (including some in mainland China) didn’t want their folk practices to be confused with the new combat sport (also termed Wushu) being promoted in government backed-schools. Still others disliked the modernist and modernizing “ring” of the term.

What is often not appreciated is that the Communist government, while it did much to promote this term after 1950, was not responsible for its creation or stabilization. Like many words this one has been around for a while, but that doesn’t mean that it was always used in the same way.  The Chinese martial arts historian Ma Lian-zhen argued in a 2012 article that this particular honor should go to the warlord, educational reformer and martial arts enthusiast Ma Liang (1875-1947) instead.

Specifically, Ma created a program of simplified martial arts instruction that he sought to make a mandatory part of the physical education curriculum in schools across China. His efforts were supported with the publication of four popular textbooks and a concerted lobbying campaign that generated much debate in the press.  And he even enjoyed some initial success promoting his “New Chinese Martial Arts” or “New Wushu.”

While Ma Liang’s political fortunes deteriorated over time, and his training program would eventually be eclipsed by the Jingwu and later Guoshu movements, Ma Lian-shen notes that his efforts were responsible for stabilizing and popularizing the term as an aspect of the modern Chinese language.   It even seems possible that one of the reasons why the Jingwu Association explicitly backed “kung fu” was that they were trying to distinguish their program from Ma’s “wushu.”  Likewise, the KMT advanced “guoshu” (national arts) as their own preferred term in an attempt to signal the new direction of their program.  When the Communist party came to power they wasted no time in dumping the term “guoshu” and turned back to Ma’s “wushu” in an attempt to signal yet another clean break with the athletic policies of the government that had come before.  Ma Lian-shen finds that while the current PRC promotes the term wushu, it was actually stabilized and reintroduced into modern usage by a Republic era warlord.

5. The western origin of those terrible “How To” books…

Perhaps no genre of publishing is more closely connected to the martial arts than the slim, highly illustrated (and sometimes quite fanciful) “how to book.” Like many kids who grew up during the 1980s, I remember visiting my local library to check out manuals on Tiger and Dragon Kung Fu.  That was before I graduated to tomes on Ninjutsu…good times.

It is interesting to note that this seemingly Western genre actually had its origins in early 20^thcentury efforts to reform, modernize and save the Chinese martial arts as part of further efforts to reform, modernize and save the Chinese nation. During the early Republic period various liberal intellectuals attacked efforts to rehabilitate the Chinese martial arts precisely because these practices had been associated with the failed Boxer uprising and the illiterate, superstitious, seemingly pre-modern peasants who supported its cause.  In an effort to show that the study of martial arts could have cultural value (and therefore a place in an increasingly literate and modern nation) all sorts of martial arts reformers rushed to publish manuals documenting, preserving and promoting their own styles.  The savvy marketers of the Jingwu Association were actually kind enough to editorialize on this process, but everyone seemed to feel the same impulse. Increased access to photography and the falling costs of publication and shipping ensured that the 1920s would enjoy a boom in martial arts publications the likes of which China had never before seen.

What were these books like? Well, they tended to be short on detail and the photography was hit and miss.  Sometimes they even attempted to teach a basic form, or they might give canned applications. Actually, they were not that different from what I found in my local library as a child in the 1980s.

It is easy to criticize these manuals while forgetting that they are critical primary documents telling us about the rise and global spread of the Chinese martial arts.  We tend to forget that the rush towards documentation and publication which created them was once seen as part of a modernizing agenda that aimed for nothing less than national salvation.  So whenever you come across a “how to” book of any age be sure to read the front matter and think about how this material spoke to the ideological debates of the day.

The “Firsts”

4. The first well known Chinese martial arts master in America was…

As we count down our top 4 facts we also embark on everyone’s favorite subject, the historic “firsts.”  Still, as students of martial arts studies it is not enough to simply come up with new and surprising answers when asked these questions at a cocktail party.  We also need to think about what each of these facts implies about how we think about the martial arts.

Nevertheless, the answer to our first question must be simple enough. It has become an article of faith that the Chinese martial arts were unknown in America prior to Bruce Lee.

And yet a moment’s thought suggests that this cannot be true.  How is it that Boxer Rebellion could be the most sensational media event of the early 20^thcentury and no one had heard of the Chinese martial arts until Bruce Lee?

Perhaps what we really mean is that Bruce Lee was the first Chinese martial artist to gain recognition (rather than notoriety) within his newly adopted homeland. Still, while that may be true on the mainland, this seems to ignore a lot of what was going on in Hawaii, one of America’s great cultural mixing pots.  But we always seem to ignore Hawaii.  For some reason that has become standard operating procedure in historical discussions that always seem to focus on events in New York or California. Certainly, Lee was the first Chinese martial artist to become a media superstar.  Yet that seems to set the bar for recognition unrealistically high. How many well-known martial artists can really be said to be “media super stars” today? Perhaps what we should be asking is who was the first Chinese martial arts master to be profiled in a major media source and to be celebrated as such?

If that is how we frame the question, then we need look no further than Wang Ziping. This Muslim martial artist had become a hero of the Guoshu movement during the 1920s and 1930s.  And interestingly enough he would go on to play a similar role as beloved “cultural treasure” for a new government after the Communist takeover in 1949. Wang was more than just a strongman and martial arts champion, he had some serious political staying power.

On this side of the pacific he was the first Chinese martial arts master to be profiled and discussed by name in the New York Times.  Unfortunately, the circumstances of his appearance were not auspicious.  In 1949 Zhang Zhijiang’s once vaunted Central Guoshu Institute was close to collapse.  His organization’s manpower and budget had been demolished by WWII, and the KMT, locked in a bloody civil war with Mao’s Communists, showed no interest in restoring his funding to pre-war levels. As part of his campaign to raise the global profile of the Chinese martial arts (and hopefully increase his budget) Zhang went to the NY Times to plead his case. He selected Wang as the figure who was to be held up to the American people as the ideal Chinese martial artist.

Not that it would matter. The last vestiges of the Guoshu program would collapse before the end of the year.  Still, Wang would survive. The Communist party would continue to call on Wang’s “star power” when undertaking their own efforts to promote Chinese physical culture as part of their public diplomacy effort.  All of this makes Wang the first Chinese martial arts master that a reasonably well read American would have encountered by name in a major media outlet.

3. The earliest public martial arts displays…

Prior to the post-WWII era, Western portrayals of Chinese martial artists tended to treat them as a generic class (“boxers” or “sword dancers”) rather than as accomplished individual athletes. And its important to remember that many Wester individuals living in major cities had been given the opportunity to see elements of martial arts performances in Cantonese operas and New Year celebrations (both of which were popular tourist attractions).  But when do we encounter the first organized martial arts demonstrations advertised to the Western public as such?

The earliest such displays that I have so far encountered were staged in London in 1851.  Billed as an “assault of arms” (again, the term “martial art” would not come into common usage until after WWII), highly elaborate martial arts displays were part of the nightly floorshow that was staged on the Chinese Junk Keying.  The first Chinese vessel to make the perilous journey to North America and then Europe, the Keying was a major tourist attraction which attracted the patronage of both royalty and celebrity guests.  It even made an appearance in the writings of Charles Dickens. And given the rough and tumble nature of life as a Chinese sailor, it is not surprising that the ship’s crew might have been able to stage a decent martial arts demonstration.

At least that is what I assumed when I first read about the Keying.  However, subsequent research suggests that these martial artists were not part of the ships original crew (all of whom had been selected for their ability to serve as part time entertainers).  Due to a contract dispute and lawsuit with the ship’s English captain, most of the original Chinese crew of the vessel had returned to their homes in Southern China while the ship was docked in America. As a result, a skeleton crew of British sailors were forced to take the vessel on the last leg of its journey across the Atlantic. That also suggests that the martial artists featured in the 1851 newspaper accounts were hired out of the small Chinese community that already existed in London at the time. The fact that the Keying was able to find the performers necessary to stage their frequent demonstrations offers an intriguing glimpse into the early globalization of kung fu.  Who would have guessed that mid-19^thcentury London had a Chinese martial arts “community?”

2. The first kung fu schools for Western students…

One of the favorite debate subjects that one runs across is which of the Chinese martial arts schools in the US was the first to accept non-Asian students. These discussions are often framed in terms of the courage to overcome secrecy or racial animus. They also have a strange tendency to leave out the fact that it was the Chinese themselves who had been the victims, rather than the perpetrators, of these behaviors.  Regardless of which Sifu is said to have opened his doors first, all of these discussions tend to focus on the post-WWII period.

Yet things in mainland China seem to have been a bit different. I suspect that the surprisingly early integrations of Chinese martial arts training into Western run missionary schools and the YMCA/YWCA probably led to all sorts of early cross training that we will never find out about.  But we do know from newspaper accounts that in the year 1936 Chu Minyi, who we previously met in the first half of this list, began to sponsor a series of demonstrations for the benefit of foreign citizens who were members of the International Actors Theatre in Shanghai.  The response to these initial demonstrations was so positive that a May 31 article in the China Press notes that one Chi Tung Chang had been hired to give regular lessons (presumably on Taijiquan) to interested members. Classes were to be held every Tuesday at 5:00 and members could either receive instruction or watch at no cost as the fee was covered by their club membership.

So much for the “impenetrable secrecy” of the Chinese martial arts. Once again, it seems that the limiting factor in the global spread of these practices was always Western interest rather than Chinese racial animus.

1. The first English language book on the Chinese martial arts…

Who wrote the first English language manual of Chinese martial arts? Discussions have tended to focus on figures in the post-WWII era.  As such, historical researchers are often surprised when they first encounter numerous translations and discussions of related practices including the “Eight Sections of Brocade” in American magazines and journals dating all the way back to the 1920s.  What was the origin of this material and what clues might it provide to the first English language Chinese martial arts manuals?

Western missionary schools in China during the late Qing worked hard to introduce the latest educational methods, and this included an emphasis on athletics and physical development as a means of character development that grew out of the turn of the century theory of “muscular Christianity.” Chinese students who graduated from these schools occasionally worked to promote the spread of athletics within Chinese society, and some even went on to become athletic directors at Chinese college and universities.  These individuals would often travel to America or Europe to pursue the graduate training necessary to further their career.

This then led to a ready avenue for informational exchange. Western physical education professors were curious about popular Chinese practices (indeed, the martial arts were frequently discussed in English language papers published in China), where as Chinese students were eager to learn about the latest innovations in coaching and physical training. The end result was the creation of a small but interesting body of dissertations and thesis that showed how these various interests fused in American Universities during the 1920s.

As I discussed in this paper, presented at a 2017 conference in Korea, the most interesting of these works that I have yet encountered was a thesis written by Ma Yuehan. It commented on the growing enthusiasm for martial arts training within university based Chinese physical culture circles. More importantly for our purposes, it also provided English language readers with an introduction to Xingyiquan which covered both the arts history (as it was understood at the time) as well as its practice and application.  All of this was augmented with a number of very clear photographs and suggestions for how the exercises in the book could be employed in a Western educational setting.

Unfortunately, like most academic monographs, Ma Yuehan’s 1923 thesis was never published.  Instead it sat relatively undisturbed in the archives of the YMCA training college in Springfield MA.  Nor is Ma even remembered as martial arts pioneer.  In truth he came to Xingyi rather late in life and is better known as a track and field coach and physical educational pioneer in the Western model. Still, his 1923 thesis is a remarkable achievement. If nothing else it reminds us that the fundamental impulses behind the current iteration of martial arts studies are not new.  In fact, the very earliest English language martial arts manual that I have located was written by a Chinese scholar seeking to place this knowledge within a comparative and cross-cultural context.  That effort dates all the way back to the early Republic period.

Each of these point on our list suggest that history is a funny thing.  It is true that Chinese martial arts are not as ancient or timeless as many of their students assume.  These practices (as we know them now) arose in the modern era and reflect the concerns of a world that is very similar to our own.  Yet much of what we assume first arose in the West during the 1970s or 1980s actually had its roots in China during the 1920s-1930s. This era tends to be neglected in popular discussions of the TCMA as we seek for ever more ancient origins.  Still, one cannot understand appreciate the dynamism and resilience of these practices without more closely examining this turbulent and creative period in Chinese history.

oOo

If you enjoyed this list you might also want to see: Two Encounters with Bruce Lee: Finding Reality in the Life of the Little Dragon

oOo

Introduction

You may not know her name, but if you have any interest in modern Chinese history, it is almost certain that you have seen her photographs. Hedda Morrison (1908-1991), while not acknowledged as a leading artistic photographer during the prime of her career, had almost unprecedent opportunities to explore and photograph what she considered to be vanishing aspects of Chinese culture during the 1930s and 1940s.  Images of traditional handicraft workers, and portraits of women and mothers, have proved to be among her most popular subjects. Since the 1980s (when many of her most iconic images were finally published in two important collections) they have increasingly come to define “traditional” Chinese life in the popular imagination.

Best of all, the occasional martial artist, street performer and weapon smith all make appearances in her photographs.  Morrison did not actively seek out these more sensational themes.  In fact, soldiers and other “martial” subjects make relatively few appearances in her catalog.  Still, she did photograph these subjects when she encountered them leaving us with not just an invaluable collection of images, but also important clues as to the social context of these practices.  Yet who was Hedda Morrison?

Life and Career

Hedda Hammer was born in Stuttgart in 1908 and it was her German heritage that first inspired me to take another look at her catalog of images. While researching the global understanding of Chinese martial arts during the Republic period, I became interested in the work of both private citizens and agents of the German government in shaping the image of China on the world stage. While few of Hedda’s photographs tackled explicitly political subjects, the turbulent politics of the period certainly shaped her career.

At the age of three Hedda was struck with Polio, then a common childhood disease.  Despite an operation as a teen she would walk with a limp throughout the rest of her life. This is an important piece of background information as it illustrates something about the texture of a life spent in exploration. After completing high school her parents sent her to the University of Innsbruck with the hopes that she would take up the study of medicine.  The subject proved to be uninteresting to her and, being an avid amateur photographer, she eventually transferred to the Bavarian State Institute for Photography in Munich.

Following her graduation in 1931, Hedda took jobs as photographic assistants in studios in Stuttgart and Hamburg.  However, she felt hemmed in by a lack of economic opportunity and was alarmed by the rise of the Nazi regime.  Looking to make a personal change she accepted an offer to direct the German run Hartung Studio in Beijing.  She explored and photographed the city until the Japanese invasion in 1938. Her German passport proved valuable during the early years of the occupation, but due to the deterioration of the situation in the capital she decided to leave and take up work as a freelance photographer.  This choice initiated a seven-year period (1938-1946) of almost constant travel which must be considered among the most fruitful phases of her career.  Most of the photographs discussed in this post were actually produced between 1935 and 1945.

Rather than attempting to capture the rapid social and economic transformation that was already underway in cities like Beijing, Hedda trained her lens on “vanishing” aspects of traditional Chinese life. Many of her photographs have a strong ethnographic flavor, and they often treat their subject with a degree of sympathy or respect.  At times this seems to border on romanticism. Indeed, Hedda’s empathy as a social observer grounds her approach to photography. Perhaps that is why her portraits are always more powerful than her numerous landscapes or architectural collections.

In 1940 Hedda met the British ornithologist Alastair Robin Gwyn Morrison and the couple were eventually married in 1946. They initially planned to live in Hong Kong, and some of Hedda’s best images of market and street culture were taken during this short interval.  However, Alastair accepted an appointment in the British Colonial Service and the two were transferred to Sarawak where they would spend the next 20 years.

Hedda continued to work and go on personal expeditions throughout this period producing thousands of photographs, but those are more likely to be of interest to students of the South East Asian Martial Arts. Eventually she retired to Australia where she remained active in the photographic community until her death in 1991. Many of her most important Chinese images where not published in collections until the 1980s.

Hedda Morrison’s long career produced a veritable mountain of important historical, artistic and ethnographic material.  Her final catalog of tens of thousands of photographs and over 60,000 undeveloped negatives (most of which were medium format) were donated to Harvard and Cornell.  The Harvard library has digitized much of this material and made it freely available online.  They seem to have gotten the bulk of the material produced in China during the 1930s and 1940s.  Cornell’s collections have not been as extensively cataloged or digitized. The library catalog suggests that most of her work in Special Collections pertains to her period in Sarawak and other travels in South East Asian (Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines). Sadly, I have yet to find the time to pull this collection and go through the various albums, but I am sure that the exercise would be fascinating.

Images

Given the vast size of her catalog, this post will introduce only a small selection of Hedda Morrison’s work. In 1935 she traveled to Hua Shan, an important mountain in Daoist tradition, yet one that was remote enough that it was (until recently) relatively free of tourists.  However, it did possess multiple Daoist sanctuaries complete with priests and students. Hedda recorded two of these individuals carrying out a “traditional dance” in which one participant armed with a jian attacked another with a fly whisk.  Hua Shan has been associated with a number of martial traditions since at least the Ming dynasty.  Unfortunately, the catalog contains no additional information about these individual’s affiliation or practices.  Perhaps a deep dive into her papers and notebooks might reveal more information about this incident.  But in any case, visitors to the Harvard digital collections can see the complete photo album of the expedition which includes some stunning landscape photography.

Hadda also took some significant images while in Beijing, including a few that we have previously seen on this blog.  Readers might recall the shop signs of the city’s swordsmiths, designed to function as a catalog of the arms that they carried. On the internet photos of these signs have sometimes been erroneously attributed to Sidney Gamble, an important sociologist and amateur photographer of the period.  I mistakenly accepted that attribution in this post.  Further exploration has shown that they are definitely the work of Hadda Morrison.

Hadda also photographed marketplace performers and martial artists, as well as traditional craftsmen who were involved with the martial arts.  One individual can be seen with hooked swords, while another demonstrated his ability to pull heavily weighted bows in one of the era’s many marketplace performances. This was a standard feat for Chinese strongmen which seems to have had its roots in the imperial military examination. This last photograph is particularly interesting as it also includes a glimpse of the table of patent medicines that the performer is selling.

Also important is an extensive series of photographs showing the construction of traditional bows and the fletching of arrows by Beijing’s Republic era craftsmen.  Again, I have selected only a few of the best images from this series, but all of them will certainly be of interest to archery students.  Other images show blacksmiths and knife makers hard at work, including one great photograph of a rack of finished cleavers. Finally, the last image in this set suggests that anyone with the patience to go through boxes of notebooks, photos and negatives in the Cornell achieves may also turn up interesting material related to the South East Asian martial arts.  I have not yet attempted this feat, but the one image included here is a reminder of the rich resources that Hadda’s keen powers of empathetic observation bequeathed to future generations.

oOo

If you enjoyed this post you might also want to read: Doing Research (8): Taking Seriously the Mundane, or How I Learned that a Choke is Never Just a Choke

oOo

A Different Take on an Old Debate

If you study the traditional Chinese martial arts and have spent any time on the internet, you will have heard some variant of these debates before. Do I need to study Buddhism or Daoism to really understand Wing Chun? Are the foundational principals of Taijiquan found in ancient Daoist philosophy, or would one be better served by taking a close look at late imperial Confucian writings? Of course, the current Abbot of the Shaolin temple has been busy promoting the idea that the wushu demonstrations staged by his warrior monks are an ancient type of “moving Chan.”

Anyone interested in the actual relationship between Chan practice and the Shaolin martial arts can probably find all of the answers they are looking for in Meir Shahar’s excellent work on the famous temple. Indeed, the field of Chinese martial studies emerged at least partially out of a desire to debunk many of the historic myths and misunderstandings surrounding Chinese religion and the martial arts. Yet there are aspects of these questions that remain tantalizing unexplored. For instance, does anyone wonder whether Christianity might really be the spiritual or ethical system that sits at the heart of the Chinese martial arts?

The notion that a Western religion might have anything to do with these hand combat practices seems far-fetched.  But that was not always the case. During the 1930s such linkages gained a sort of quasi-official legitimacy due to both the political efforts that the martial arts were caught up in and the personal ambitions of the leadership of the Central Guoshu Institute. General Zhang Zhijiang (1882-1966) went to great lengths to promote both boxing and Christianity with equal missionary zeal, often in the same breath.

Given his many efforts, all of which received glowing coverage in the Chinese (and to a lesser extent global) press, it may be worth wondering why they are not better remembered.  I suspect that this is because Zhang chose to stay in the PRC following the 1949 victory of the Communist Party.  He even continued to promote the TCMA during this extended “retirement.” Those efforts received a certain amount of social recognition.  However, his prior efforts to evangelize the Chinese masses were quickly forgotten.

None of that is really a surprise. We have seen variants of this story many times before. And if one’s interests lay only in the reconstruction of the old Guoshu training regime, it is probably not all that significant.  Yet for students of Chinese martial studies, Zhang’s linkage of the Chinese martial arts and Christianity is actually quite interesting. It signals the ways in which Central Guoshu Institute was attempting to situate these practices within ongoing debates over the nature of society, and how Chinese culture should be leveraged on the global stage as part of the state’s public diplomacy efforts. So why did Zhang attempt to link such seemingly different social movements? And how was all of this received by audiences in China and abroad?

Action Through Faith

Before delving into period media discussions of these topics, some words of background may be in order. As we discussed in a previous post, General Zhang Zhijiang was one of multiple leading martial arts reformers to emerge out of the period of warlordism which consumed the early years of the Republic. Zhang had a well-deserved reputation for personal rectitude that famously complicated his appointment as head of the opium suppression efforts for a government that had no intention of actually suppressing opium.  Before that Zhang had risen to fame as one of the most reliable lieutenants of Feng Yuxiang, China’s “Christian Warlord.”

While Feng was known to baptize his troops, it seems that Zhang discovered Christainity on his own.  While serving under Feng in Sichuan, he encountered communities of Christian converts and was impressed by their revolutionary zeal and what he termed “faith in action.” Like other elites in the period he took up the study of Christianity and saw it as both a progressive and modernizing force. That doesn’t mean that Zhang lacked a spiritual testimony.  Indeed, he would become just as famous as a Christian preacher and speaker in some circles as he is for the promotion of martial arts in others. Yet it appears that Zhang was attracted to both practices at least in part as each promised to transform China’s population from a disorganized mass, victims of both fate and global aggression, into a motivated and revolutionary body capable of making their way in the world.

Zhang would probably not understand our hesitation upon reading about the intertwining of kung fu and Christianity. Our current cultural vision of religion in the West tends to view it as a conservative force oriented exclusively towards the past. Yet that doesn’t really do justice to the progressive Christianity, often dedicated to radical social reform, that Zhang encountered earlier in the 20^thcentury.  Likewise, we tend to view the Chinese martial arts through allochronistic and ethno-linguistically essentialist lenses.  Again, it is unlikely that Zhang (hip-deep in a massive modernization effort) would have been sympathetic to such a view.  Like other reformers of the Republic period, he saw the Chinese martial arts (once properly purified and rectified) as a powerful force for the modernization of Chinese society. While his combination of Christianity and Chinese martial arts training may be jarring to modern sensibilities, during the 1920s and 1930s many individuals seem to conclude that the two were headed along the same path.

For instance, we have already seen reports on this blog of western missionary schools adding Chinese martial arts training to their curriculum in the early 20^thcentury.  While traditional athletics and ball games were certainly more popular in American and British schools, a certain number of missionaries who were exposed to both the Chinese martial arts and the Western notion of “muscular Christianity” seem to have decided that such instruction was just what their young charges needed. Indeed, the YMCA would become an important force for the promotion of both Western and indigenous boxing traditions in China. It is now also clear that the famous Jingwu Association was built largely in its image.

Jared Miracle has documented much of the ideological interplay between China, the West and Japan on this issue, and his work is well worth reviewing.  Likewise, Scott Phillips has recently coined the term “YMCA Consensus” to encapsulate all of this.  He notes that reformers both in the Chinese martial arts community and in other areas largely agreed on the steps which were necessary to modernize Chinese society. These included a turn away from superstitious practices and beliefs (folk religion and the opera), and often dovetailed quite nicely with the spread of progressive Christianity and other revolutionary philosophies in China.

This is a very useful concept, though one that might be better termed the “YMCA debate.” My 2015 volume on the history of the Southern Chinese martial arts (co-authored with Jon Nielson) looked at how these debates unfolded in some detail in a single location (the Pearl River Delta) where the forces of reform and modernization were soundly trounced by a reactionary local society.  Hence any “consensus” that existed tended to manifest itself at the elite national level.  Of course, this is exactly where most of our written historical sources come from (including the journal and newspaper articles discussed below).

It goes without saying that Zhang was the literal vanguard of such a movement.  When viewed in this context his dual promotion of Christianity and the Chinese martial arts makes perfect sense. We should also remember that many other individuals were coming to very similar conclusions during the Republic period.

A similar logic applies when we think about the KMT’s international public diplomacy strategy. Given the West’s well-established interest in judo and jiujitsu, it did not take a marketing genius to conclude that China’s martial arts heritage could be a great asset.  Still, one would need to show that these were not the same backwards superstitions that had led to the Boxer Rebellion a generation earlier. Rather, the “modern” martial arts were a rectified and scientific practice that could be shared with the world.

In short, individuals like Zhang hoped to demonstrate China’s modernization by sharing elements of a carefully curated “traditional” culture, much as every other major power was also doing during this period of nationalist revival. And what better way to contextualize such discussions than by linking them to the global currents of progressive Christianity, especially in its more “muscular” or sporting forms? The Chinese were not the only ones who appreciated the notion of “action through faith.”

The promotion of this message would monopolize much of Zhang’s career during the 1930s.  While his contributions to the development of the Central Guoshu Institute have been explored by Andrew Morris and others, one of the important aspects of Zhang’s career was his frequent extended good-will tours accompanied both by teams of martial artists and other officials, all designed to promote these messages. These tours were both domestic and international in scope.

In 1933 Zhang and a team of athletes, martial artists and diplomats undertook a long tour of South East Asia. This was a sensitive time as it followed Japanese aggression in Manchuria and Shanghai, and the Japanese were then sending their own teams of diplomats through the region and the West to explain their view of the Chinese situation. In 1935 another year-long expedition was mounted.  This one would cover both the United States and Western Europe before once again returning by way of South East Asia.  Again, Zhang would be accompanied by officials from the Foreign Ministry and martial artists.  In 1936 Zhang undertook a domestic tour across Southern China, a region that the Guoshu movement had trouble penetrating.  This was the same year that Chu Minyi would lead his better known Olympic expedition to Berlin and the subsequent international demonstration tour across Europe.

True to form, Zhang mixed his unique brand of Christian and martial evangelism in many of these stops.  That seems to have been particularly true of this 1935 expedition to the West.  How successful any of this was is another matter.  The Chinese press followed his progress, and the English language papers of Shanghai and Beijing reported that foreigners showed interest in the Chinese martial arts at all of his stops.  Unfortunately, few mentions of Zhang’s tour appear in the major Western papers that I have been able to review. Granted, this sort of search is more difficult to conduct as most local papers that might carry accounts of a multiple-city event aren’t located in a single database.  Still, it is not a good sign that his efforts made so little impact on the major national papers (at least in the US).  For instance, the Washington Post carried only a single notice of his visit to the US.  On page 4 of the October 9^th issue there is a short notice identifying Zhang and noting that he would be delivering a talk entitled “Christianity and Peace” at a joint meeting of protestant denominations at the Church of the Pilgrim at 8 p.m.

Chu Minyi’s Olympic expedition seems to have suffered a similar fate the following year.  Both Zhang’s 1935 and Chu’s 1936 tours must have been vastly expensive undertakings. And while both were politely received (note for instance we don’t find any newspaper articles mocking them) they clearly did not generate the same sort of enthusiasm in the Western press that they inspired back home. The question comes down to demand.

It was precisely Japan’s military success in Asia (a “hard power” resource) that made its culture attractive to Western consumers.  So while the “soft power” of cultural attraction may be independently deployed in the pursuit of certain policy goals, it rarely arises in isolation from developments in the realm of “hard power.”  More often than not, the two are linked. Zhang and Chu worked diligently to craft a strategy that would effectively communicate with Western audiences. Yet given China’s weakened military position, selling the desirability of its martial arts was always going be an uphill fight. While various reformers could argue that China was the true of home jiujitsu, Western audiences showed little interest in taking up the argument.

Still, the efforts that Zhang put forward help to remind us that reforms within the Republic era Chinese martial arts did not happen in a vacuum. Chinese officials were very much aware of the notion (championed first by the Italians, then the Germans) that a nation’s athletes should be thought of as “diplomats in track suits.” Further, the 1930s was a decade in which all of the Western powers were showcasing their national physical cultural heritage as well as the latest trends in physical training.  Rather than seeing the development of the Chinese martial arts during this period as something isolated or culturally pristine, it is important to consider the ways that Zhang and others sought to situate them within broader global trends.

Leading the Nation in Physical Culture

All of that should be taken into consideration when reviewing sources such as this. On September 15, 1936 the pro-KMT, English language newspaper The China Press, published a long article profiling Zhang.  It reviewed his recent tour of North America and Europe, and promoted his upcoming expeditions through the major cities of Southern China. The article provides us with a nice summary of Zhang’s career, which was no doubt its purpose.  More importantly, it suggests how Zhang and the rest of the Nanking establishment wanted his efforts to be seen and understood by readers in the West.  Interestingly, this piece repeatedly emphasizes the connections between Zhang’s attempts to proselytize the Christian message and his efforts to save the nation through teaching the martial arts.  Both were seen as an aspect of the same basic mission.

Nanking General Will Lead Nation in Physical Culture

_______

Chang Chi-chiang, foremost exponent of Ancient Physical Arts, to Take to Road with Staff of 20 Instructors

________

The day of inter-provincial wars in China is no more, and those warlords who rose to power, ruling a particular slice of conquered territory for various periods have either retired been pushed out of the picture or passed on to another world.

One of the few emailing military leaders, however, is General Chang Chi-chiang, a man of no mean ability, and who in his time had under his command no less than 300,00 men and fought in some 10 wars.

He has since written “finis” to a career of war, and is now engaged in a battle of quite a different sort. He is, in other words, seeking to win the hearts of China’s millions through serving his country in an entirely peaceful endeavor.

Airplanes, field guns and other military equipment have their place in the upbuilding of the country, the general concedes, but his task lies in building up the morale and physique of the people.

Today General Chang is Director of the Central Institute for National Culture [Guoshu] and concurrently Commander-in-Chief of the Leauge of Ten for [the] National Salvation of China through the faith and works of Chinese Christians.

To Lead Lectures

In the name and interest of both organizations, General Chang will soon lead in the future an expedition of more than 20 men in a round-the-country lecture and demonstration tour, urging every one of the four hundred millions of this country to prepare body and hearts against the eventuality of a great national crisis.

General Chang speaks forcefully when he talks of the thing which he thoroughly understands and in which he has put the deepest of faith and enthusiasm. Let each of our fellow-countrymen be thoroughly trained and drilled in the national physical art that our forefathers have left to use so that our body will be like iron and steel in times of great trials that may come, then no aggressive foreign power will be able to conquer China.”

General Chang mentioned with great pride what he considers to be the historic battle of Hsifengkuo in Northern China. He cited reports that the other country involved in those battles [Japan] has been busily searching for Chinese in Northern China versed in the use of the Big Swords. These Chinese, ignorant of what it means to their own country, have been bought to become instructors for the army of the nation concerned, General Chang said.

“If a foreign country has seen the need of training her citizens in a physical art that belongs to China, how much more should China be aware of the need herself?” General Chang asked.

Urges Physical Development

“So, ye four hundred millions, rise up like one man in intensified physical training.  Take lessons in boxing, in the use of swords, spears, arrows, each according to personal tastes.” That will be the clarion call which General Chang is going to make to the nation on his future round-the-country lecture and demonstration tour.

At the same time, General Chang, in his capacity as the Commander-in-Chief of the League of Ten for National Salvation of China, will urge all people, especially the Christians, to join that organization so that the entire force of 500,000—odd Christians will form a formidable strength in the campaign of saving China by purging the hearts of the four hundred millions of their sins.

This will not be the first time that General Chang has traveled extensively in the interest of the promotion of the ancient physical art and the heart-purging cause. He made a similar trip covering more than 14 countries in America and Europe last year.  “The people of all these countries showed considerable enthusiasm in the Chinese arts.” He said.

With General Chang, it is a case in which a real and worthy career began at the age of fifty.  For he was at that age when he was first made Director of the Central Institute for National Physical Arts in 1928. This organization had as its founders all the government executives including Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, Mr. Tai Chi-tao, Marshal Feng Yu-xiang, General [illegible] Lieh-chun, etc., who are still serving on the Board of Directors.

One-Man Job

But these founders have left the huge task of pushing the campaign entirely in the hands of General Chang so that it has been a one-man game for him for six years. Within this period. Branch institutes have been established in [illegible] and municipal centers as well as provincial capitals throughout the whole country, excepting Tiber and Mongolia.

The Central Institute at Tou Piao Hsiang has more than 20 instructors, each a specialist in one of the multiple sorts of Chinese boxing and swordsmanship. They have under their tutorship 120 students including 30 girls.

This organization with its auxiliaries throughout the country, according to General Chang, has had a hard time financially. A monthly subsidy of only $5,00 can hardly be enough to finance such a great undertaking. But General Chang has a spirit of determination that cannot be swerved by financial difficulties. He has incurred debt totaling $100,000 on account of the institute, he said.  General Chang is also president of the Central School of Physical Culture at Hsiaolingwei with a total of 300 students.

It is a marvel to see how the General has given himself up to the cause.  He rises at 5 o’clock and does a physical drill until 10o’clock every morning.  Even while talking with friends he moves his arms and hands every now and then as does a boxer.

The League of Ten for National Salvation of China was organized in 1933 mainly due to the inspiration which General Chang gave to a group of his Christian friends including Mr. David Young, pastor of the Advent Christian Church, Dr. Handel Lee, President of the Nanking Theological Seminary and Dr. Li Tien-lu, professor of the same institution.

General Chang was one time Chairman of the Opium Suppression Commission and later Pacification Commissioner for Kiangsu Province.

“Nanking General Will Lead Nation in Physical Culture.” The China Press. September 18, 1936, 4.

oOo

If you enjoyed this post you might also want to read: “The Professor in the Cage”: Can Gottschall Bring Science to the Study of Violence?

oOo

A Sense of Purpose

I was taking notes when I heard one of the most interesting comments to come up in the session. “I am not just another person, I have a purpose.” I wasn’t part of this particular conversation, and in truth the women weren’t speaking about the martial arts (at least not directly). Still, her comment triggered a momentary flash of recognition. No one else had articulated this sentiment quite so succinctly, but it was something I had been hearing in all sorts of conversations all week.  I immediately stopped what I was doing and made a mental note to log the statement in my daily notes.

As a social scientist I am struck by the notion that having a purpose makes somebody singular or unique. Humans are inherently social animals and modern capitalism ensures that we will all spend our days producing goods, information or services that are useful to several other people. Within a modern economy we all have many purposes, most of which we are only vaguely aware of. Of course, no one derives much psychological comfort from the fact that they are doing their bit to grow the quarterly GDP numbers.  Simply being socially useful does not appear to be the same thing as having “a purpose.” The achievement of the later stabilizes one’s identity, providing both a foundation of self-esteem and a set of guiding norms when making decisions. The former does not.

This is precisely what so many martial arts instructors have promised their students. In exchange for time, resources and the pain of inevitable injury and sacrifice, they promise a purposeful life, one that rises above the mundane. Even if we never fully escape our daily toil, we are promised that we will see it from a higher vista. We will have an opportunity to be an agent, rather than simply an object, of change. It is not enough to have an “identity.” It must enable something.

The construction of identity is much discussed in the martial arts studies literature. Yet in truth everyone has many (sometimes competing) identities thrust upon them. That is not enough to ensure any degree of life satisfaction. People are searching for an empowered identity, or, to put it slightly differently, a sense of purpose.

It is easy to observe the ways in which all of this manifests within the texture of daily martial arts practice.  Hours spent in training, or even the foregone pleasures of desert, are no longer pointless deprivation.  They are a sacrifice made tolerable by the acceptance of our larger purpose. It may take many forms.  We may be training for a fight, carrying forth the charge to open a branch-school in a new city, or simply showcasing the benefits that our style could bring into the lives of other potential students. We derive a degree of satisfaction from taking on these responsibilities. When we become martial artists, we don’t just add another layer of identity over an already cluttered public image, we experience a new sense of “purpose.”

Not all individuals will respond to the promise of social reasonability in the same ways. Some of us already have all of the “purpose” that we can bear. There is probably a good reason why many individuals go to the gym simply looking for a competent personal trainer, while a much smaller group are searching for their own personal Yoda. There are all sorts of selection effects that must be considered as we theorize about why only some individuals seem to love kung fu.  Still, it is my observation that a new (or renewed) sense of purpose that comes with martial arts training is highly valued by those who remain.

Individuals enjoy this feeling so much that they may even look for ways to protect or insulate their newfound sense of purpose. That suggests a need to think a little more deeply about the purpose of our chosen (and constructed) communities.  Indeed, as I listened to the ongoing conversation about “self-worth” and “purpose” that introduced this essay, my thoughts turned to Ip Man and all of the places that now seemed to be haunted by his memory.

A Sense of Place

How might the construction of a sense of place reinforce and insulate the comforting experience of purpose within in a martial arts community? Or to rephrase this question on a much more basic level, why do martial arts communities go to such great lengths to associate themselves with geographic places to begin with?

At first this might seem like a common-sense proposition. Everyone is, after all, from somewhere.

Yet fighting styles are not individuals. Wing Chun itself is more of conversation, or even a debate, about how a violent encounter is likely to unfold and (given a set of core concepts) how one might respond. Such debates are, by their very nature, universal. While Leung Jan may have first articulated his version of the debate in Foshan, I would be willing to bet that at least some of his teachers, training partners or opponents came from much farther afield.  Indeed, the militarization of Southern Chinese society that accompanied the Opium Wars of the 1840s suggests that at least some of the social currents that the region’s martial arts were responding to were not even Chinese in origin. It was the sudden appearance of European militaries that helped to destabilize the region and inspired the explosion of gentry led militia units. Many of the best and most dynamic conversations about hand combat take place at the margins of social, cultural and even civilizational conflict. What emerges is always hybrid and rhizomic.

Nevertheless, the need to tame, define and localize these conversations is also deeply rooted in both psychological and social needs. Perhaps nowhere is this more clear than in recent treatments of Wing Chun.  Three examples come to mind which I would like to explore in no particular order.

The first of these is also the most recent.  Wing Chun students who read this blog will already be familiar with Ho Kam Ming.  One of Ip Man’s long-term students, Ho states that he learned the entire system from Ip Man in roughly three and half years, and then worked as an assistant instructor, helping out with classes, for another three and half years. Still, Ho Kam Ming is most often remembered for the vibrant Wing Chun school that he opened in Macau immediately after leaving Ip Man’s tutelage. His school had a reputation for producing students who could fight.  It also produced a famous series of photographs showing Ip Man visiting Ho’s roof top school. In fact, these are the only photos that I am aware of showing Ip Man in an “class-room” setting. That makes them important historical documents.

Recently the Macau Wing Chun Chinese Martial Arts Federation has been working on an independent documentary film to preserve and commemorate the importance of “Macau Wing Chun.” The trailer for their film looks fantastic and if you haven’t seen it I highly recommend dropping what you are doing and checking it out. It is one of the more inspirational bits of non-fiction film making that I have seen in some time. I cannot wait to see the final product and suddenly feel inspired to ask all sorts of questions about Ho Kam Ming’s career.

Still, after re-watching the clip a number of times what stands out the most is the degree to which this project places Macau itself, and not just Ho Kam Ming, at the center of the Wing Chun story.  One gets a sense that the city itself might be an important character in this documentary. That is a fascinating, and not necessarily an obvious, editorial choice. After all, Ho Kam Ming actually learned his Wing Chun in Hong Kong, a city that he called home for much of his life. Nor is Macau his only adopted home. Like so many other Chinese martial artists he immigrated to Canada in the 1990s and set up a school in Toronto. Yet the branding of this documentary really emphasizes that this will be the story of “Macau Wing Chun.”

That doesn’t mean that Hong Kong or Toronto are ignored. It appears that each of these other cities receives some treatment.  They all get own airial “establishing shot” in the trailer (suggesting yet again that the cinematography in this documentary will be beautiful). Nevertheless, it appears that each of these places will be shown as spokes on a wheel. Present certainly, but emphasizing Macau’s place as the indispensable hub.

Given Hong Kong’s decades long project to brand itself as the home of Wing Chun, that emphasis may not be intuitively obvious.  Indeed, Hong Kong’s residents seem to have taken to the fighting system precisely because it makes a unique contribution to the city’s sense of place, rootedness and authenticity. In purely numeric terms one suspects that vastly more of the city’s children study Taekwondo or Karate than any type of traditional Kung Fu. And among the older set, one is more likely to encounter Taijiquan practitioners in the park than anyone doing serious chi sau. Still, Wing Chun has become the subject of many movies, TV programs and advertising campaigns precisely because it provides Hong Kong with a sense of authenticity and “purpose” as the leading city of the Southern Chinese cultural sphere.

This is where Herman Yau reenters our story. Of the many Ip Man bio-pics to be made since Wilson Ip opened the floodgates in 2008, Yau’s 2013 Ip Man: The Final Fight has got to be my personal favorite. While global audience may have found his older and more studious Ip Man’s less compelling than the younger and more kinetic version played by Donnie Yen, Yau understood what his domestic audience really wanted.  He made the streets of Hong Kong a major character in Ip Man’s personal story. He beautifully captured the feeling of sundrenched cafes, slums crowded with refugees, the violence of the era’s labor unrest and even the destructive power of the seasonal monsoons. If one leaves out the final spectacular showdown, his film has an almost ethnographic feel to it. True, its opening scene establishes that Ip Man (and Wing Chun) were displaced exiles. And yet by the end of the film they have become not just part of the city, but guarantors of its moral order.

In this vision Wing Chun is the quintessential Hong Kong art because it has the quintessential Hong Kong story. Yau’s film is my favorite of the bunch because it so beautifully illustrates how geography becomes community, and how community is experienced as a sense of purpose at the individual level. In his vision Hong Kong itself is the hub that holds the spokes of Wing Chun together.

Foshan might also make a similar argument. As one bit of martial mythology after another is debunked, it is actually somewhat comforting to learn that this small city really was a hotbed of martial arts innovation in the late 19^thand early 20^th centuries. Wing Chun was only one of many martial arts practiced there, and as Jon Nielson and I have demonstrated elsewhere, the art’s public profile was limited prior to the 1920s-1930s. The city’s main claim to fame prior to 1928 was its vibrant Choy Li Fut community, which dwarfed pretty much everything else in terms of sheer size.

Still, it is no surprise that from the 1980s onward the city would emphasize its connections with first Wong Fei Hung, and later Ip Man, the teacher of Bruce Lee. The city’s connections with these media legends would be immortalized through the construction of “sacred spaces,” set aside for the ever-growing flow of martial pilgrims, within the walls of the Ancestral Temple, a structure that already symbolized Foshan’s corporate identity.  And given the increased importance of the martial arts as an element of Southern China’s “intangible cultural heritage” it was probably inevitable that the martial arts would become a featured presence in the city’s newly reconstructed “old town” district.

All of this was commemorated with the release of a 2012 documentary, explicitly examining the question of identity and social meaning in Wing Chun.  Once again, the piece is beautifully produced and is well worth watching if you have not already seen it. I appreciate the fact that it goes to lengths to place Wing Chun within the flow of contemporary Chinese life, rather than dwelling only on the past. Again, the message is clear.  Foshan is not simply the place that launched Wing Chun into the global arena.  It remains at the heart of the art’s modern practice, and a fount of wisdom for those looking for guiding principles.  Again, other places are mentioned. Hong Kong makes a number of appearances, and Ho Kam Ming’s lineage is prominently featured. But now the hub of the wheel is located in Foshan, with Wing Chun’s brilliance radiating outwards from it.

Conclusion: The Purpose of Place

I think that each of these cities can make a claim to residing at the center of the Wing Chun story. Yet the way in which they are discussed is far from unique.  I have recently been involved in some conversations about the nature of “German” Wing Chun, and given the huge numbers of practitioners in that country compared to almost anywhere else in the world, such a label has its uses. Likewise, when I was studying with my Sifu (Jon Nielson) while at the University of Utah, we occasionally talked about “Salt Lake Wing Chun” in comparison to the branch of our shared lineage which was practiced in St. George, located in the far south of the state.

All of these labels are socially constructed. It is the universal and rhizomic nature of these arts which allows one group of students to identify their practice as “Macau Wing Chun,” whereas William Cheung students in Australia might casually refer to the same forms and footwork as typical examples of “Hong Kong Wing Chun.” This fungibility raises an obvious question, and one that has so far been overlooked in our discussion of how the martial arts are constructed as a marker of place. Why is this done? What social or personal work is accomplished by emphasizing geographic space while deemphasizing the many other possible markers of identity?

I suspect that the experience of purpose, and the need to defend or insulate that aspect of one’s identity, is critical to all of this. Any sense of identity that rests solely on our personal performance or attributes is inherently unstable. We all have good training days and bad. Fights are either won or lost. Our relationships with our Kung Fu brothers and sisters may be sustaining at some times, and fraught at others. In short, any number of changes in our personal circumstances could threaten the identity and sense of purpose that we have come to rely upon. And at some point, we all know that this must end.  The martial arts are primarily embodied skills. Age, sickness and death will eventually strip all of us of any sense of purpose that is rooted solely in the personal mastery or performance of these arts.

Yet, as we saw above, geography has a funny way of becoming community. It fills this role so effectively because it becomes both a symbol for those who share our practice (the “Salt Lake Wing Chun community”) and the field in which we express our sense of purpose.  Geographic place thus represents those forces that empower our identity, as well as the demands of social responsibility that we all feel. By allowing us to depersonalize these emotions, transferring them to a constructed social realm, we buffer our sense of purpose against both temporary and existential setbacks.

Like most things in life, there is a dark side to this mental machinery. The very fact that we can escape (if only for a moment) our personal characteristics by invoking a larger social identity suggests that someone else might call upon or reframe that same identity in an attempt to make unwarranted generalization about our personal practice. YouTube is full of videos designed to generate clicks through eliciting a sense of insecurity about one’s chosen style or lineage. Ironically, our projection of personal experience onto a socially constructed identity might end up threatening the security of our sense of self as easily as it insulates it.

These are precisely the sorts of discourses that marketing campaigns are made of. Hong Kong, Macau or even Salt Lake Wing Chun can all too easily become brands that are used to bat down or preemptively define others.  We all seem to experience the urge to arrange these labels vertically. Such an exercise is inherently harmful as it makes the world a smaller and less interesting place without really explaining the variety and richness that we see.

I don’t think that means that all such labels are bad, or that geographical place should be struck from our lexicon.  If we remember the rhizomic and universal nature of these practices, local identity (and localization) can illustrate the breadth and ever-changing nature of the Chinese martial arts. They can help us to acknowledge that our peak may not be as high as we once thought.  That we all see only a single slice of this landscape. This is fundamentally a good thing. An appreciation for wonder and mystery has always been the necessary counterbalance to any sense of purpose.

oOo

If you enjoyed this essay you might also want to read: Spreading the Gospel of Kung Fu: Print Media and the Popularization of Wing Chun (Part III).

oOo

“Echoes of Memories”

It is the elusiveness of memory that captivates us. People tend to think of their memories as a personal hard drive, always running in the background, silently backing up the minutia of our daily lives. As with any massive archive, indexing can be a problem.  We may temporarily forget where we have placed something. But once we pull the right file an accurate record of a day’s events unfolds before the mind’s eye. Our personal history is always there, within our grasp.

This is a comforting image.  It suggests that nothing and no one is really gone as long as something remains to invoke their memory. It is also profoundly mistaken.

As scientists have learned more about the brain we have discovered that, far from simply “reading” a record, the act of remembering is an inherently creative process. It is our imagination that reconstructs both the sequence and meaning of critical events. Memory is inherently plastic.  It evolves and changes over time.  And the memories that we invoke the most, often those that are the most important to us, are also where we tend to exercise the greatest creativity.

This understanding of how memory functions is challenging. It does not seem to conform to our daily experiences. On a more fundamental level, it also suggests that we may not know ourselves nearly as well as we think. As a historian I know that all personal narratives not tied to contemporaneous documentation are at least somewhat suspect.

However, this “weakness” is also the beauty of memory. Even as we lose the illusion of a perfectly knowable past, we gain ever more insight into how prior events live on and continue to impact individuals in the present. Which set of insights would we as students of Martial Arts Studies choose? Perfect records of what occurred at a single moment in time, or a better understanding of how those events echo through our lives, leaving meaning and possibility in their wake?

This is not a unique dilemma, and it is a question that my dual interests in history and anthropology force me to confront with some regularity. I was inspired to meditate on these issues again as I watched a recently released documentary titled “The Origins of Macau Wing Chun.” Directed by Daniel Mak and co-directed by Alex Jung, this hour and half long production is very impressive. Anyone who is interested in the history of Wing Chun will want to set aside time to watch and digest this piece.  The cinematography and visual construction of the documentary are excellent, and the music is worthy of special notice. There are all of the interviews with respected masters, visits to historically important locations and discussions of various aspects of the Wing Chun system that one would expect. Any student of the Southern Chinese Martial Arts will find something to enjoy in this story. Best of all, this documentary is generously being made available to the traditional Chinese martial arts community through various social media channels, including YouTube and Facebook.

It is clear that students of Wing Chun (particularly those from Ho Kam Ming’s lineage) will find a lot to like in this documentary. Still, as a student of Martial Arts Studies, what else does this substantial undertaking teach us about the Chinese martial arts in general, and their place in Southern Chinese life today?

When asking such questions, anthropologists often invoke the notion of “emic” versus “etic” viewpoints.  Simply put, an emic perspective reflects views, beliefs or norms that are communally held within the community in question.  This is the perspective that members of a group might have on their own situation, based in large part on their shared values. In contrast, the etic represents the perspective of an outsider, one who might claim to view things “objectively” (though it goes without saying that the notion of “objectivity” is fraught with problems in the modern social sciences.) To really understand the contributions of this film it is necessary to think about what it reveals when examined from both of these perspectives.

As such, my short review of “The Origins of Macau Wing Chun” proceeds in two parts. We first consider how this film might be read by its target audience of fellow Ho Kam Ming descendants.  After that we will shift our perspective and ask what it suggests to those with who do not share an “insiders” perspective on these questions.

“We are all old men now.”

The creative nature of memory indicates that it is not an entirely individual phenomenon. Memories are cemented in our identities largely through the act of sharing them.  This suggests the existence of a communal or social quality to certain types of memory. I might, for instance, have clear memories of some childhood incident precisely because my parents frequently repeated that story but not some other one. The construction of shared memories is a critical means by which we create and shape our communities.

It is thus no surprise that from an emic perspective this documentary is largely an exercise in the recollection and sharing of memory. The stage must be set before such a project has meaning.  Like many Wing Chun documentaries, this one begins with a retelling of the basic Wing Chun creation myth. Interestingly, in this version of the story Leung Lan Kwai is the biological son of Yim Wing Chun, effectively rooting Wing Chun within the “family style” tradition. From there the memory of Ip Man (who serves as the modern grand master of the art) is invoked by his students (Duncan Leung and others) and family (Ip Chun).

Ip Man’s 1966 journey to visit Ho Kam Ming’s rooftop school in Macau abruptly redirects the structure of what had been a broadly shared narrative. This single memory (reinforced with some now iconic photography) moves us from preamble to the meat of the story. Mixing footage from a series of one-on-one interviews, recently filmed training sessions, historical images and dramatic recreations, the directors weave together a narrative of Ho Kam Ming’s Macau clan.  Various parts of this story are correlated with basic discussions of the practice of Wing Chun.  The film draws on labels such as “Siu Lim Tao,” the “Wooden Dummy Man,” and the “Six-and-a-Half Point Pole” to denote the sub-sections that structure its narrative progression.  These are intertwined with a number of other, more abstract, headings including “Echoes of Memories” and “Training and Nostalgia.”

The overall effect of this structure is to argue that the texture of a life spent in Wing Chun (or, on a larger scale, the development of the community) is most legible when understood through the lens of embodied practice.  It also allows the documentary’s directors to cover a lot of ground in a way that is both accessible and intuitively appealing to Wing Chun practitioners. Basic explanations are given at times, but this project is in no way an introduction to the art. Wing Chun practitioners (especially those from the Ip Man and Ho Kam Ming lineages) will immediately recognize that this discussion is both for and about them.

Yet all of this structure really just acts as the jewelry box to frame the sharing of poignant personal memories. While beautifully produced, many of this film’s most moving moments emerge out of simple interviews in which a single individual reminisces on the community’s past.  The return of a group of (now much older) student to the previous location of Ho Kam Ming’s rooftop school at the Li Yuan Building (starting at minute 41) proved to be one of the most powerful sequences of the entire film. The shared narratives of community and personal history invoked in these scenes draws viewers into a powerful vision of what “Macau Wing Chun” is.

This vision was in turn dependent on a shared narrative of social unity in the past and continuing solidarity in the face of age and change. Such memories can unite and construct a community. Yet memory can also be invoked to separate and redefine. It is instructive to compare these scenes with Duncan Leung’s reminisces about Ip Man’s economic struggles in Hong Kong.  He places the blame for Ip Man’s suffering squarely at the feet of his other, supposedly less loyal, disciples including Chu Shong Tin and Wong Shun Leung. In Duncan Leung’s memory they were guilty of betraying their master by poaching his younger students for their own fledgling schools. As Jon Nielson and I explored in our book, there are a number of reasons why many of Ip Man’s students left him in the middle years of the 1950s, and neither Chu or Wong were entirely responsible for them. Much of it seemed to be the result of the social fallout of Ip Man’s relationship with the “Shanghai Woman.”

The nuances of actual institutional history are bound to transcend pretty much any project like this.  But it is fascinating to note the ways in which the unity of Macau Wing Chun is tacitly juxtaposed with the well-known rifts that seem to define the Hong Kong community. Conflict shapes memory, and memory shapes the experience of community.  From an emic perspective this documentary is essentially a discussion of the ties that bind Ho Kam Ming’s disciples together.  In a moment of remarkable self-awareness it is even acknowledged as such by one of his disciples during the final group interview.

The Etic Turn

Outside viewers would likely approach this documentary with a different set of questions. Rather than asking what is remembered, they may be more likely to ask who is doing the remembering in the first place? Such viewers are unlikely to be intimately familiar with the faces and life stories that flash across the screen. Second, they would probably have some questions about the genre and purpose of this film, particularly if they are not martial artists. And if they came from another part of the hand combat community, they might find themselves asking about the nature of Wing Chun itself.

The easiest way to think about these questions would be to consider how we are meant to understand the documentary’s title, “Origins of Macau Wing Chun.” Given both the size of this city, and the growing popularity of Wing Chun throughout the region, we can be certain that more than one lineage of the art is currently being taught in Macau.  But the documentary doesn’t really concern itself with the origins or composition of this more cosmopolitan vision of the city’s “Wing Chun community.” Rather, it focuses almost exclusively on the results of Ho Kam Ming’s efforts to bring Ip Man’s teaching to the area in the 1960s.

So perhaps what we are really watching is “The Story of Ho Kam Ming’s Wing Chun”? Yet a quick examination of his biography, or list of students, suggests that this is not necessarily the case.  For instance, Ho Kam Ming’s immigration to Canada is treated very quickly, and unless I am mistaken (which is a possibility as my own background is not within this lineage), I didn’t see any of his Canadian students or disciples being interviewed. That fact stood out to me as the documentary team traveled to Toronto and interviewed Ho Kam Ming, who is now living in a nursing home. And North American students of his lineage would probably have noted other absences (such as Augustine Fong) as well.

Perhaps the real emphasis in the title was meant to be placed on “Macau”? Again, this doesn’t quite fit.  Far from the parochial perspective that such an idea might suggest, this documentary actually spent a lot of screen time discussing events (and cementing relationships) in other places. Meetings and interviews were staged with important members of the VTAA in Hong Kong, and Ho Kam Ming’s roots in that city were certainly not forgotten.  Likewise, the growing links between the Macau and Foshan Wing Chun families were emphasized in a lengthy interview with a city official which, at times, began to feel a bit like a kung fu-themed infomercial. [Spoiler alert: Foshan is planning on building a Wing Chun theme park….You honestly can’t make this stuff up].

In reality it is the Macau Wing Chun Chinese Martial Arts Federation which is immortalized in this documentary, and the shared history that created it.  Yet the project is not strictly historical in nature.  It also seeks to advertise the group’s recent and ongoing efforts to contribute to the larger Wing Chun community. When seen from this perspective its less surprising that a documentary that frequently ruminates on the global nature of the Wing Chun community would neglect to explore Ho Kam Ming’s own international contributions.

All of this brings us to the question of genre. While I really enjoyed this project, in some ways it differs from the typical documentary. While basic technical explanations are provided in all the right places, this is clearly the sort of project that will be of the most interest to individuals who already have years of Wing Chun experience and enough investment in the community to already be familiar with the individuals being interviewed.  In short, this was a project tailor made for an “insider” audience.

With a run time of an hour and half, one suspects that only Wing Chun students (or those from Ho Kam Ming’s lineage) are likely to make it all the way to the end.  While the cinematography and editing are excellent, at times this project drags and feels self-indulgent. Some sections were worse offenders than others.  As regular readers of this blog will already know, I love the six-and-a-half-point pole. And yet I remain unsure what historical or theoretical purpose was served by the weapon’s inclusion in this film. Nor did it illustrate anything about the development of the city’s unique Wing Chun tradition.

The best explanation for the documentary’s length and pacing issues can probably be found in one of its more intriguing cameo appearances. In multiple shots one can spot individuals reading a large, softbound, book with a red cover.  During the concluding moments of the documentary it is revealed that this is a 50-year commemorative publication for the Macau organization.  Such commemorative volumes are pretty common in the world of the Chinese martial arts.  And it seems clear that in many ways the documentary itself is meant to be a visual compliment to that publication. Indeed, many of the project’s quirks (including its penchant for a certain type of nostalgic self-indulgence) vanish when we view it as a commemorative record rather than a typical documentary.

Such commemorative works are of interest to me as any effort to propagate social memories of the past are also an ideal opportunity to reshape how practices are understood in the present. And one can spot several instances where this documentary may do just that.  Many historical discussions of the Chinese martial arts obsess on a mythological (or at least solidly late-imperial) past. This project, on the other hand, repeatedly framed Wing Chun as a modern and dynamic fighting system with a bright future. This could be seen in all sorts of places, from the sorts of personal stories that were told to the interior design sensibilities of the schools that were visited. In an era when Wing Chun students are regularly bombarded with images of their fellow stylists getting trounced by MMA practitioners on social media, members of the Ho Kam Ming lineage repeatedly pointed out that they were gearing up for full contact, mixed style, tournaments a decade or more before it was cool. Other instructors in Macau noted that they continue to do so today.

“Past and Future”

Wing Chun, we are finally told, is a set of principles.  It is not a single training methodology or even a coherent set of goals. Change is inevitable as the art grows in popularity. A certain adaptability and congruence with the demands of the modern world my even help to explain Wing Chun’s success. In the documentary’s closing moments viewers are assured by the elders of Macao’s community that as long as the system’s core principles are studied and passed on, Wing Chun survives.

What I personally enjoyed most about this documentary was it’s quiet, confident optimism. This should be a great time to study kung fu. Students of the Chinese martial arts have never had more resources and good information at their finger-tips.  We have never had such easy access to so many really good teachers. And yet we are literally inundated with articles (many coming out of Chinese tabloids) loudly proclaiming the death and imminent disappearance of the traditional Chinese martial arts.

This documentary seems to have a different message for its viewers. The continual visual juxtaposition of the growth and modernization of Macau with the expansion of Wing Chun provides audiences with a powerful counter-argument to these gloomy meta-narratives. It is certainly true that the nature of the Chinese martial arts community is changing. The boom years of the 1970s and 1980s are behind us and unlikely to return.

Yet by focusing on the steady development of community schools and local institutions, this documentary illustrates why it is that martial arts students are living in a golden age.  And it further underlines a point that I have made in many places. National level narratives, while providing a valuable framework, can obscure as much as they reveal about the actual practice of the martial arts. Instead, these fighting systems are best understood as a local or regional phenomenon, reflecting the social forces that gave rise to, and supported, them. Students of Chinese martial studies need more local histories and ethnographies. “The Origins of Macau Wing Chun” offers something to both practitioners and scholars as it underlines the immense value of these projects.

oOo

If you enjoyed this review you might also want to read: The Story of Ip Man’s Wooden Dummy

oOo

Introduction

Welcome to “Chinese Martial Arts in the News.”  The nights are getting chilly and the new semester is just getting under way.  That means it is time for our “Back to School” news update.  While we have been vacationing the world of the Chinese martial arts has been busy, so lets catch up.

For new readers, this is a semi-regular feature here at Kung Fu Tea in which we review media stories that mention or affect the traditional fighting arts.  In addition to discussing important events, this column also considers how the Asian hand combat systems are portrayed in the mainstream media.

While we try to summarize the major stories over the last month, there is always a chance that we may have missed something.  If you are aware of an important news event relating to the TCMA, drop a link in the comments section below.  If you know of a developing story that should be covered in the future feel free to send me an email.

Its been way too long since our last update so let’s get to the news!

Wing Chun

There have been a couple of exciting developments in the Wing Chun world.  Readers may recall that I recently shared the trailer for an upcoming documentary on the Ho Kam Ming Wing Chun community in Macau (which you can see here).  That was excellent and I had high hopes for the project.  I am happy to say that the finished documentary did not disappoint.  Luckily the film’s creators decided to make it freely addible online, so you can watch all one and half hours at your leisure.

I have already written an extensive review of the documentary, but I would recommend this to any reader who practices Wing Chun or is interested in the Southern Chinese martial arts. Its beautifully produced and has some interesting historical discussions.  And its always great to get a detailed look at the relationship between a martial arts community and its urban environment.

Wing Chun also popped up in the headlines a couple of times.  This story struck me as particularly interesting.  A restaurant chain in the UK named “Leon” is coming to the United States, and part of their publicity focuses on the fact that they offer free Wing Chun training to their employees.

You may have heard that popular UK resultant chain Leon is coming to the United States soon. Known as “The Future of Fast Food,” the restaurant follows a unique model where they offer cuisines from around the world at a more affordable price point, but manages to maintain quality ingredients.

Even though Leon is taking strides to cement themselves in the future, we discovered that the restaurant chain draws tutelage from the past as well: Baristas at Leon are schooled in the ancient martial art of Wing Tsun, also referred to as Wing Chun, as a free elective during off hours.

This is not the first time we have seen this sort of story.  Facing a rise in air rage incidents a number of airlines operating in Southern China started to do something similar a few years ago.  But as the article makes clear, in this case Wing Chun is being taught to the employees as a life style benefit meant to encourage fitness and healthy stress management.

Also, while not directly about the martial arts, this article in the SCMP is well worth reading, especially if you plan on visiting China.  Best of all, they profile a boutique hotel in Foshan that sounds like the perfect place to stay for anyone planning a Kung Fu pilgrimage!

Next we move to the modern descendants of the Republic era Jingwu (Chin woo) Association.  Still very popular in South East Asia and Oceana, a major “Chin woo Championship” was recently held, hosting instructors from around the world.  This sounds like it would have been a great event.

Attracting more than 600 martial arts lovers from over 30 countries and regions, Tuesday’s event included martial arts competitions, divine liturgy and stage plays.

George Guo, chief Wushu instructor from New Zealand’s Chin Woo athletic association, led five of his students to take part in the event. “I hope they can truly understand the ‘Chin Woo spirit’ in China,” said Guo, who has been practicing martial arts since childhood. Over a period of two decades, he has taught over 1,000 martial arts students in Malaysia, Australia and New Zealand.

Our next article comes from the digital pages of the English language version of a Chinese tabloid.  Its headline proclaims “Kung fu turns Japanese-American into Chinese culture envoy.” Of course in the US it is not at all unusual to encounter Chinese-Americans in a Karate class, or Japanese-Americans taking Wing Chun.  But all of that seems to have been a bit of a surprise to authors of this piece who used it as a jumping off point for an extended biographical discussion.  The instructor’s story is worth reading, and the Chinese martial arts are socially positioned in an interesting way.

Another Chinese tabloid picked up the “Kung Fu Diplomacy” baton in an article aptly titled “Romanians love, practice, Chinese Martial Arts.” Yes…yes they do.

Petru Grindeanu, secretary-general of the Romanian Martial Arts Federation, told Xinhua that the Chinese martial arts are becoming increasingly popular in Romania. People have a new understanding of Kungfu and more and more Romanians practice Chinese martial arts, especially after the sport was included in the Olympic Games.

Today is the first World Wushu-Kungfu Day and the purpose of the event in Bucharest is to let more people know about the profound Chinese martial arts, he added.

If you are in Seattle and looking for something to do, the Seattle Times has a suggestion.  Take “Bruce Lee’s Chinatown” tour, organized by the Wing Lake Museum.  Not only do you get to see some really interesting artifacts in the museum, but it sounds like a great way to get to know the history of the area’s Chinese-American community.  And apparently their tour guides are top notch…

Don Wong knew Bruce Lee. As young men, they worked at Ruby Chow’s restaurant together. When Wong, leading the Wing Luke Museum’s “Bruce Lee’s Chinatown Tour” describes his connection with the martial-arts star,  it’s not the brag you might expect. He speaks with a touch of sadness as he reminisces about attending the judo classes Lee held at the restaurant after hours.

Wing Luke, where the tour starts, is bustling with 140 students on a field trip. But there are just three of us here for the Wednesday tour — Diana and Judd, a couple visiting from Arizona, and me.

Matthew Polly’s recent biography of Bruce Lee also continues to make waves.  For instance, the Times of Israel ran a lengthy story examining the evidence and issues surrounding his possible Jewish heritage.  I guess we might think of this as yet one more aspect of the “localization” of Bruce Lee as a pop culture figure.

Our next article comes from the pages of the South China Morning Post.  Its a great profile of an important kick boxer, as well as a discussion of the sorts of challenges that the city’s martial artist face….prime among them, coming up with a good cover story for your parents when training accidents land you in the hospital.  Fun stuff!

“I remember when I was 18, my sparring partner [accidentally] broke my nose. He had already caught me but thought I was ducking so went for the uppercut while I was falling – when I stood up my nose was completely disfigured, it was quite scary,” Ng said.

I just told my family I was staying over at a friend’s house for a few days but in reality, I was lying in hospital. Injuries in Muay Thai are not uncommon but luckily I haven’t had too many nasty ones.”

China is a tale of two sides, book survey reveals

The Telegraph ran an important article which, while not directly about the Chinese martial arts, should be read by students of Martial Arts Studies. While one part of the Chinese government has been busy promoting the TCMA as a source of Chinese “soft-power” in the global marketplace, other officials are increasingly worried that Westerners are only interested in China’s ancient past and thus are failing to understand that China is now a modern, high-tech power.  This was confirmed with a recent quantitative survey of the most popular book about China.

A recent survey found that the subject matter of books about Chinese culture in the overseas market falls largely within the realm of the traditional rather than the contemporary – a trend that may not be presenting an accurate reflection of modern-day China…

Yet that is the way that “soft power” works.  We don’t get to choose which of our cultural traits and media products citizens in other countries find the most attractive.  And that means that the public image of pretty much every country is warped.  Heaven only knows that the US government would like to downplay some of Hollywood’s excesses in the Middle East, but we just have to accept that this is not the way that cultural markets work.

Or do we? The individuals behind this study have put together a proposal to resolve the issue by having Chinese editors select the authors and subject that American publishing companies would be able to  promote:

As foreign publishers become more familiar with the interests of local readers, and Chinese editors can oversee the selection of Chinese cultural content, their collaboration may be better placed to tell an authentic Chinese story while taking market forces into consideration, the report concludes.

Obviously this is a nightmare scenario from a Western cultural perspective, and the fact that it was even proposed out loud betrays a profound lack of understanding of how American society works. Though it should be noted that these sorts of exercises are common in China’s media markets.  But I think that this is also a great example of how government intervention can kill a soft power success story by steering individuals away from traits and products that they genuinely like towards images that they “should” like (but actually don’t find all that interesting).  This sort of interventionist logic is something to watch as the government decides how (and whether) to promote the martial arts abroad in the coming years.

Last but not least, August is shaping up to be a very memorable month in the world of Lightsaber Combat.  The Saber Legion got lots of publicity by staging a national tournament at CombatCon in Las Vegas that received some coverage on ESPN2.  That led to a number of profiles of the group, which promotes itself as a competitive league rather than a specific style or school of saber combat.

“”We’re basically the (mixed martial arts) of custom LED sabers,” Birnbaum said. “We’re a fighting league.”….

“Basically, any martial discipline or sport that either has a stick or a blade, all you have to do is substitute that with an expensive flashlight and you’ve got what we do,” Cummings said.

Such disciplines include Japanese kendo, Filipino eskrima and European Renaissance practices.

And be sure to check out the ESPN profile on the tournament’s winner.

But its not just the Saber Legion who is having a good month.  Ludosport, one of the largest international lightsaber combat organizations, has recently made the jump from Europe to the United States, where they now have seven schools.  They will be hosting their first US National Tournament over Labor Day weekend in Elmira NY.  I will be at that event for a little “participant observation.”

And yet another group (the Sport Saber League out of France) has just concluded their first American-based international tournament in Indianapolis.  All in all, there seems to have been a very notable uptick in the organizational scale and sophistication of the lightsaber combat community in the last year.

Martial Arts Studies

While most of the students and professors who make up the Martial Arts Studies community have been on vacation, the academic publishers have remained hard at work.  As such I have a couple of exiting books to share with you:

Raul Sanchez Garcia. 2018. The Historical Sociology of Japanese Martial Arts. Routledge. Out Now. $54 for Kindle!

This is the first long-term analysis of the development of Japanese martial arts, connecting ancient martial traditions with the martial arts practised today. The Historical Sociology of Japanese Martial Arts captures the complexity of the emergence and development of martial traditions within the broader Japanese Civilising Process.

The book traces the structured process in which warriors’ practices became systematised and expanded to the Japanese population and the world. Using the theoretical framework of Norbert Elias’s process-sociology and drawing on rich empirical data, the book also compares the development of combat practices in Japan, England, France and Germany, making a new contribution to our understanding of the socio-cultural dynamics of state formation. Throughout this analysis light is shed onto a gender blind spot, taking into account the neglected role of women in martial arts.

The Historical Sociology of Japanese Martial Arts is important reading for students of Socio-Cultural Perspectives in Sport, Sociology of Physical Activity, Historical Development of Sport in Society, Asian Studies, Sociology and Philosophy of Sport, and Sports History and Culture. It is also a fascinating resource for scholars, researchers and practitioners interested in the historical and socio-cultural aspects of combat sport and martial arts.

Raúl Sánchez García is Lecturer in sociology of sport at the School of Sports Science, Universidad Europea Madrid, Spain and President of the Sociology of Sport working group within the Spanish Federation of Sociology (FES). He has practiced diverse combat sports and martial arts and holds a shōdan in Aikikai aikidō.

I should note that Professor Garcia published the first chapter his book as an article in the latest issue of the journal.  Read it here for free.

Lu Zhouxiang. 2018. Politics and Identity in Chinese Martial Arts. Routledge. $45 kindle. Out now!

Chinese martial arts is considered by many to symbolise the strength of the Chinese and their pride in their history, and has long been regarded as an important element of Chinese culture and national identity. Politics and Identity in Chinese Martial Arts comprehensively examines the development of Chinese martial arts in the context of history and politics, and highlights its role in nation building and identity construction over the past two centuries.

This book explores how the development of Chinese martial arts was influenced by the ruling regimes’ political and military policies, as well as the social and economic environment. It also discusses the transformation of Chinese martial arts into its modern form as a competitive sport, a sport for all and a performing art, considering the effect of the rapid transformation of Chinese society in the 20^th century and the influence of Western sports. The text concludes by examining the current prominence of Chinese martial arts on a global scale and the bright future of the sport as a unique cultural icon and national symbol of China in an era of globalisation.

Politics and Identity in Chinese Martial Arts is important reading for researchers, students and scholars working in the areas of Chinese studies, Chinese history, political science and sports studies. It is also a valuable read for anyone with a special interest in Chinese martial arts.

Lu Zhouxiang is Lecturer in Chinese Studies within the School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the National University of Ireland Maynooth, Ireland.

Tim Trausch (Editor). 2018. Chinese Martial Arts and Media Culture: Global Perspectives. Rowman and Littlefield. $128  USD (Hardcover pre-order). Due out in August.

Signs and images of Chinese martial arts increasingly circulate through global media cultures. As tropes of martial arts are not restricted to what is considered one medium, one region, or one (sub)genre, the essays in this collection are looking across and beyond these alleged borders. From 1920s wuxia cinema to the computer game cultures of the information age, they trace the continuities and transformations of martial arts and media culture across time, space, and multiple media platforms.

Tim Trausch is a research associate in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Cologne. His research focuses on Chinese media culture and aesthetics. He has published essays on Chinese-language film and television, and a book on the aesthetics of martial arts cinema. His current work focuses on photography and modernity in late imperial and Republican-era China.

Kung Fu Tea on Facebook

A lot has happened on the Kung Fu Tea Facebook group over the last month.  We watched a hypnotics film of butterfly knives be made, read some manuals of Chinese fencing, and looked for Wing Chun’s true origins! Joining the Facebook group is also a great way of keeping up with everything that is happening here at Kung Fu Tea.

If its been a while since your last visit, head on over and see what you have been missing!

Lu Zhouxiang. 2018. Politics and Identity in Chinese Martial Arts. New York and London: Routledge. 232 pages. $140/$45 USD (Hardcover/Digital).

Perhaps the clearest testament to the growing enthusiasm for Martial Arts Studies is the number of books and edited volumes released by scholarly presses in the last few years.  In addition to those published by traditional university presses, or as part of dedicated MAS series, a variety of commercial publishers have also entered this field. As in any research area, the quality of these works has varied. Routledge is one publishing house that has shown a notable enthusiasm for Martial Arts Studies, and its latest monograph, Politics and Identity in Chinese Martial Arts (2018) by Lu Zhouxiang, is sure to find an enthusiastic readership. Comprehensive without being verbose, this brief history of the Chinese martial arts (from the bronze age to the current decade) is likely to end up on a variety of course reading lists and bibliographies.

Lu is an author who knows, and demonstrates an enthusiasm for, this material.  All of that comes across in a book which introduces a substantial amount of information while still being an easy read. In fact, I managed to work my way through the entire volume (about 180 pages of substantive text) in only two sittings. That may be as much a testimony to the passion that the author brings to his material as the intrinsic clarity of his writing.

The volume itself is well constructed and includes many illustrations and facsimiles of objects or practices referenced in the text.  These add context without being distracting. While the hardbound volume is expensive, it should stand up to frequent use. The book’s index, however, could be more detailed.  Readers will also note that the endnotes and lists of works cited are placed at the conclusion of each chapter, rather than at the close of the volume.  I found that this made cross referencing the author’s notes quite easy.  But I did miss having a single comprehensive bibliography at the end of the volume. It was also a somewhat strange omission that the volume’s index did not include the names of most of the major authors who were referenced in the text.  Given the importance of the growing dialogue between various historical theories within the Chinese martial arts, that struck me as an unfortunate oversight.

Lu’s substantive discussion was divided into five short chapters bookended with both an introduction and conclusion.  These were arranged historically.  Indeed, the historical approach continues to be the most common lens through which the Chinese martial arts are viewed.  While Lu titles his book as an exploration of “politics and identity,” it is actually arranged as a brief historical overview of the totality of the Chinese martial arts.

This structure tends to emphasize the author’s contention that in every era the Chinese martial arts have been shaped by the policies and political aspirations of the Chinese state. The view of politics explored throughout this book is the traditional one of historians and political scientists, and not the more personal sort favored by students of cultural or critical studies. Given this statist orientation, it is not surprising that nationalism dominates the discussion of identity.  Other identities which are frequently implicated in discussions of the martial arts (e.g., gender, regional/national, urban/rural, sexual, generational, socio-economic class) are never explored. Lu’s methodological approach to uncovering the relationship between martial arts and the state is textually and empirically driven. Practices and their relationship are outlined for a given era, but they tend not to be critically assessed.  Instead the author is forced to quickly move on to the next period or major incident.

This general pattern of exploration is established in Chapter 2. This section provides an overview of the most ancient discernable era of Chinese military history.  Lu begins by reviewing the archeological and textual evidence on the Shang and Zhou dynasties. After a brief overview of this period he then proceeds to the Qin and Han, the Jin and Northern and Southern Dynasties, the Sui and Tang, and finally the Song and Yuan periods.

Given the vast amount of history covered most of this discussion was very brief, and students of Chinese martial studies (or military history) will already be familiar with most of the sources that Lu cites. However, his detailed treatment of the Song dynasty stands out as a highlight of the first half of the book.  The increased urbanization of this period allowed for the development of social practices (later expanded during the Ming) that begin to resemble modern Chinese martial arts.  While individuals certainly fought with swords, or pursued health-based practices, in ancient China, very little of this material seems to have much bearing on the modern practices that we refer to as “martial arts” (other than being the fodder for the serial construction of “invented traditions” by various cultural and political entrepreneurs).  This changed in the Song.  Given how quickly that era tends to get reviewed in other sources, I enjoyed the fuller treatment that Lu provided.

Chapter 3 introduces readers to the late imperial period, or the Ming and Qing dynasties. This is an immensely important era in both the technical and cultural construction of the martial arts.  It also provided Lu with an opportunity to examine some of the major schools (Shaolin, Wudang/Taijiquan) as well as formative events (the Taiping Rebellion, rise of secret societies, Boxer Uprising). Once again, Lu moves through a massive amount of historical material quickly and transparently, pointing out the major trends or advances in each era.

Given the relative scarcity of historical sources most of this material has already been introduced (and often discussed in much greater detail) in a variety of other sources. Lu’s discussion will clearly be a handy overview of the period for those entering the field of Chinese martial studies for the first time.  Still, it is disappointing that he did not take the opportunity to substantively engage with the arguments and observations made by Western scholars including Stanley Henning, Meir Shahar or Peter Lorge.  It would have been interesting to see what Lu made of Shahar and Lorge’s disagreements over the substantive meaning of the Shaolin tradition, or Henning’s analysis on the earliest appearances of the “internal” and “external” terminology in the opening years of the Qing dynasty.

Unfortunately, none of these authors are referenced in the chapter. In one sense that is not a huge loss as Lu’s seems intent on providing a simple historical overview, and he can certainly rely on prior Chinese scholarship to do that.  Yet this strikes me a missed opportunity to open a deeper dialogue between the Western and Chinese literatures. Still, the events at the end of Chapter 3 (most notably those surrounding the Boxer and 1911 uprisings) provide Lu with an opportunity to introduce more substantive discussions of the relationship between politics, nationalism and the martial arts.

I suspect that most readers will agree that Lu’s real contributions to the literature can be found in the second half of his volume.  When discussing martial practices in the ancient past we have relatively few sources and they are already well understood.  As we approach the current era the richness and complexity of the documentary record increases, as does the substantive similarity of martial arts practice.

Lu’s treatment of the Republic period (Chapter 4) begins with an examination of the rising tides of militarism within the Chinese martial arts and their association with nationalism.  These connections are then developed in his examination of Ma Liang (an individual whose legacy I have reviewed here and here). This section is particularly refreshing as Ma is something of a neglected figure in the Western literature. Stanley Henning has examined his (somewhat mixed) legacy.  Yet Ma does not really appear in the works of Andrew Morris, which have had a shaping impact on current discussions of Republican martial arts.  As such Ma’s contributions tend to get lost in our more detailed debates about the Jingu and Guoshu movements.  The prominent treatment that Ma receives in Lu’s volume may help to correct that tendency.

This chapter is also interesting as Lu begins to introduce asides on cultural history.  Some of this was evident in his prior discussions of Ming era wuxia novels. Yet his discussions of later periods are more systematic, focusing on the development of both swordsmen novels and martial arts films.

Still, it is hard to fully address so much material in such a short space. While Lu introduces readers to the innovations of Ma Liang and the Jingwu movement, he never has an opportunity to explore the political and financial setbacks that crippled both movements. Likewise, Guoshu’s contributions are duly cataloged, but not its various failings to effectively implement its own goals.  Students who are unfamiliar with this period may review this material and see only a smooth developmental trend when in reality the progression of the martial arts was stochastic at best.  Periods of growth were punctuated with reversal and notable losses throughout the Republic era. That criticism, grounded in the structure of Lu’s project, holds somewhat true for the entire volume. When we examine the past from our current position it is all too easy to reconstruct a smooth path leading inexorably to the present. Yet this sort of view is always a retrospective creation that tends to gloss over the many reversals and failures that foreclosed the paths not taken. We create a vision of an inevitable, rather than a highly contingent, present.

The strengths of Lu’s texts are magnified in the final two sections. Chapter 5 covers the Maoist era, providing western readers with a much-needed overview of the development of Wushu in the PRC after 1950, and its survival during the dark years of the Anti-Rightist campaigns and the Cultural Revolution.  Events in Hong Kong and the Chinese diaspora are touched upon in the discussion of wuxia novels and film, but for the most part Lu’s focus remains on the development of Wushu in the mainland.

Much the same can be said of Chapter 6.  Focused on the current era, this discussion provides an overview of the creation of modern governmental policy towards Wushu, its transformation into a competitive sport and its involvement with various domestic and international campaigns, including the Olympic movement.  This chapter again emphasizes the relationship between nationalism (understood now as the quest for “Chineseness”) and the martial arts.  Yet by the end of the volume China’s rich folk-martial arts tradition seem to have fallen by the wayside.  Instead Lu provides a highly institutional view of Wushu focusing almost exclusively on its official and para-official manifestations, both at home and abroad.

This choice is somewhat paradoxical.  On the one hand it allows for a detailed exploration of competitive and elite Wushu which is much needed in the Western literature.  Yet it also leads Lu to describe the global transmission and flow of the Chinese martial arts in ways that would seem one-sided or unrecognizable to most Western students of the TCMA. Even his discussion of media and movies becomes somewhat strained as we see Lu describing why the Ip Man film franchise “failed” in the West, when in fact it has proved to be quite popular in certain market segments and boosted the fortunes of the Wing Chun community. This was another section of the manuscript where Lu could have benefited from a substantive engagement with the various film and cultural studies scholars who have already explored the successes and cultural impact of the various martial arts film genres in great detail.

Finally, readers are treated to a short concluding discussion.  After reviewing the basic historical outline of the Chinese martial arts (always framed through their collective relationship with the state), Lu turns his attention to their future.  He begins by reviewing the positions of a number of noted Chinese scholars who argue that the advent of state-sponsored sports Wushu has been a dead end.  They note that China has not been successful in securing a place at the Olympic table (though the sport of Wushu has become quite popular in places like South East Asia). Some even argue that the economic and cultural subsidization of competitive Wushu has weakened the older and more culturally authentic lineages of “traditional” martial arts.

Lu’s own position in this debate is a full-throated defense of both the necessity and inevitability of modern Wushu, with everything that this entails in terms of simplification, standardization, state leadership and an emphasis on competition.  He begins, quite correctly, by problematizing the distinction between any “modern” and “traditional” practice.  Lu argues that all of these things are quintessentially modern practices which have reformed themselves in various ways as they have traveled to the current moment.  Indeed, Lu openly embraces an argument that I share. The martial arts have survived only by changing in every era.  It seems counterintuitive to expect that we would be the only generation exempt from that task.

And this is where his argument ends.  As he has already implicitly illustrated throughout the previous chapter, Lu believes that it was the state directed simplification and modernization of Wushu (as well as its subsequent promotion through various cultural diplomacy programs) which is responsible for the widespread popularity of the Chinese martial arts throughout the global system. Calls to rethink the system are misguided as, fundamentally, it has worked.

I suspect that many Western readers (especially those personally involved in the Chinese martial arts) would disagree with this assessment.  They would probably think back to the immense importance of Bruce Lee’s films, and the waves of Chinese immigrants in the 1960s and 1970s, who were responsible for planting the seeds of Chinese martial culture in an entire generation of Western students well before the era of “opening” explored by Lu.  Still, we must also be careful about dismissing his argument too easily.  Sport Wushu is growing very quickly in some areas of the world including Africa, South East Asia and Eastern Europe.  It seems that we might even be witnessing a second global transmission of Chinese martial culture, one that might play out very differently than “Kung Fu Fever” of the 1970s.  If this turns out to be the case, readers might look back and see Lu’s final arguments as being prophetic rather than purely descriptive.

While I might disagree with aspects of his conclusions, in some ways this was my favorite section of the book. It was the only time that Lu fully exposed and explored a major debate within the Chinese language literature on the martial arts.  I would have gladly traded the first two chapters of historical review for a more detailed exploration of exactly how this and other debates developed during the Maoist and current era.  So much of the material from the Ming and Qing dynasties has been reviewed elsewhere, and as Lu himself so clearly illustrates, the practices that we call “Chinese martial arts” today are really a product of a period of rapid modernization and nation building that didn’t start until the late 19^thcentury. It was in the discussions of these more recent periods that we see Lu’s own voice begin to emerge from the confines of “historical consensus.”

I doubt that all readers will appreciate Lu’s emphasis on modern competitive Wushu. Yet this is one aspect of the Chinese martial arts that is often lost in the waves of historically focused studies of events in the post-1949 diaspora.  That is why I subtitled this review an “essential overview” of the Chinese martial arts. Theoretically informed readers will immediately realize that every “view” comes from a certain perspective. Ultimately, we will need multiple perspectives when attempting to grapple with a phenomenon as complex as the modern Chinese martial arts. The clarity of Lu’s work, as well as the tight focus of his individual chapters, suggests that this is a work that could be easily integrated into a variety of undergraduate curriculums.  What makes it essential is his framing of this discussion from a perspective that is often missing on those same reading lists.

About the Author: Lu Zhouxiang is Lecturer in Chinese Studies within the School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the National University of Ireland Maynooth, Ireland.

oOo

If you enjoyed this review you might also want to read: Reality Fighting and the End of Civilization

oOo

***Its Labor Day in the United States and I am currently off on a fieldwork trip.  As such this seems like a great time to revisit a post from earlier this year on the importance of guilds and labor unions in the Chinese martial arts, a critical and too often overlooked subject.  Enjoy!***

National boxing is very popular in Fatshan city.  It is reported that there are some eight national boxing schools which are directed by well-known national boxers.  School fees are only from two to three dollars a month.

“General News,” Canton Times, September 9^th, 1919 (page 7)

Foshan would have been a fascinating place in the late 1910s.  The Hung Sing Association’s brand of Choy Li Fut dominated much of Guangdong’s martial arts scene.  Interesting and innovative things were happening in the Hung Gar community.  And of course Ng Chung So was cultivating a small but dedicated community of Wing Chun students on the eve of a period of rapid growth that would unfold in the 1920s and 1930s. This brief notice informed English language readers in Hong Kong and Guangzhou of something that we already know.  The Southern Chinese martial arts were about to enter a brief, but brilliant, golden age.

What was the social position of these practices, and how can we best explain their flowering?  Popular theories on both questions abound.  We hear tales of a Southern Shaolin Temple, wandering revolutionaries and secret societies galore.  In more academic works we encounter the Jingwu Association’s sophisticated, nation wide, advertising campaigns, or the attempts of government officers and educational reformers to create a new martial art for the new Chinese nation. 

It is easy to pit these two schools against each other and assume that this is the totality of the debate.  If the mythological explanations are wrong than the elite driven national narratives must be correct. What is more confusing is that there are elements of truth on both sides.  

While it is clear that the Qing never inspired southern kung fu by burning an actual temple full of real Shaolin monks, that image gripped the public imagination and allowed countless local styles to wrap themselves in the banner of Republic era nationalism and revolution.  This facilitated the localization of abstract notions like “the nation,” and provided a pathway for individuals to enact and experience a new imagined community on an embodied level.  Likewise, the Jingwu Association advertised a middle class art that was both socially progressive and compatible with the demands of modernity.  They provided a ready made pathway for those who wished to argue that the Chinese martial arts should serve as the foundation for modern Chinese society.  Indeed, we are still feeling the effects of their reforms.

Yet both of these explanations tend to neglect the actual experience of most of Southern China’s martial artists.  Wuxia novels were written in a high literary style and tended to be more of an elite past time. Likewise, while the urban middle class that Jingwu appealed to was growing in relative terms, it was still a very small proportion of Southern China’s total population.  Most urban citizens were common laborers or domestic help.  They couldn’t afford Jingwu’s dues and likely had little interest in the global, cosmopolitan, vision that it promoted.

To understand the rapid growth of the martial arts in Southern China, one should start by investigating local labor markets.  More specifically, we need to focus our attention on the relationship between the region’s many small labor unions and the massive proliferation of urban martial arts schools in the Republican period.  These are issues that Jon Nielson and I already examined in our book, The Creation of Wing Chun: A Social History of the Southern Chinese Martial Arts, but perhaps a more focused discussion is in order.

Consider again the news clipping at the top of this essay. It actually makes a great deal of sense that Foshan would have led the way towards the professionalization of the martial arts marketplace in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Its position in the regional trade system made it a unique manufacturing powerhouse.  The city was famous for its commercial porcelain exports and it enjoyed a monopoly on the regional production of iron goods.  Silk and sugar were also regionally important trade goods.  And its streets were filled with workshops making the household goods that supported Guangzhou to the East.  Indeed, much of what was sold in Guangzhou was first manufactured in the workshops of Foshan.  The “industrial revolution” (and I am using that term very loosely here as most of this production actually happened in small shops), came early to Foshan.

All of this had a critical impact on the development of local labor markets.  In an era when most peasants in the countryside rarely had much cash on hand (inhibiting their ability to buy luxury items), workers in Foshan were paid a steady wage.  They worked predictable hours.  More importantly, they were organized into collective trade guilds.  In addition to negotiating working conditions, these groups were responsible for providing certain goods to their members, such as housing, shared worship spaces (sometimes a cemetery) and even entertainment.   During the final decades of the Qing dynasty it became increasingly popular for guilds to use their pooled economic resources to hire martial arts instructors.  And given the region’s occasional bouts with labor unrest, it is hard not to see that as a recreational choice with social implications.

This process continued and accelerated as later industrialization swelled cities like Guangzhou, Shanghai and Hong Kong with peasants leaving the countryside looking for (relatively) well-paid work.  While patterns of guild organization gave way to small labor unions, these still functioned as something of a social safety net, providing housing assistance, entertainment and networking opportunities.  Lin Boyan (1996) has described how displaced workers from the countryside would pool their resources to hire a local martial arts teacher, bringing them to the big city.   This was a world that was at once familiar, but still quite different from, the era of small town militias and public boxing grounds that had come before.  Note the following observations on the Guangzhou’s changing cityscape as reported in the North China Herald.

CANTON’S AMUSEMENTS

_________

More Time Now for Play

_________

From Our Own Correspondent.

Canton, Sept. 5.

The Cantonese are giving more time to amusement, or as a matter of fact they have more time to play.  The civil servants and railroad employees in the city, who have regular office hours, have adopted tennis as their popular form of recreation.  The Sun Ting Club, an organization of returned students and younger officials and leading merchants of the city, has a baseball team of more than 20 regular members.  The Y.M.C.A. gymnasium and swimming pool are attracting a large number of business and professional men daily, and the law court and department store clerks enjoy their games alike in these places.

The laboring class now has more time for amusement and play since the success of its demands for shorter hours and higher wages through a series of strikes. Its members usually organize themselves into clubs for physical training, usually boxing,—now under the title of “national art of self-defense.”  These clubs also teach the Cantonese popular amusement of lion dance, displaying their skill at parades or other public appearances.

The moving picture shows are now an institution in Canton, and there are half a dozen theatrical [opera] companies here wholly composed of young women and girls.  Nowadays the country towns and villages have no difficulty in getting support for a show to come to their towns for a season from two to four days at a time with four or five shows in a couple of months.  In Canton the show places have to close at midnight, while in the country districts one may last from eight o’clock in the evening to five in the morning.  In addition to the regular theaters, the large department stores and amusement parks provide a variety of shows for which a general admission fee is charged, and many spend their leisure hours there.

“Canton’s Amusements: More Time Now For Play,” The North China Herald. September 17, 1921.

Once again, the advent of limited work hours and greater pay (the fruits of hard fought battles with business owners), opened the doors for an explosion of kung fu schools.  Again, all of this happening in the middle of the Jingwu era, but that organization’s progressive reforms and nationalist agenda do not seem to have much to do with the trends reported in these articles.  And while Jingwu would vanish (except in South East Asia) between the 1920s and the 1950s, the sorts of folk kung fu styles favored by these labor unions (Hung Gar, Southern Mantis, Choy Li Fut, Wing Chun) are still very much the backbone on the modern kung fu community.

Still, as this newspaper account makes clear, the popularity of these styles did not emerge in a cultural vacuum.  These practices were consumed by the same workers who enjoyed the growth of opera (indeed, the “Red Boats” were still a common sight in the 1920s) and cinema.  The social meaning and identity of these practices sat in juxtaposition to pursuits like tennis or swimming, activities that were far more popular among China’s upper middle class mangers.  Still, both kung fu and western athletics benefited from the same expansion of the region’s leisure economy.

This is not to say that the social implications of joining a kung fu school were identical to signing up for a baseball team.  There was often an undercurrent of social power (perhaps even coercion) in the former that was not evident in the latter.  Workers certainly enjoyed martial arts practice, yet many of these schools were sponsored by “Yellow Unions” which included the company’s officers within their membership.  In that case one’s employer might gain additional social leverage over workers by also having a leadership role within the martial arts community.  And martial arts teachers were even hired to help firms “deal with” labor issues.

Boxing was also seen as an important mechanism for militarizing the labor movement by members of the KMT and other social reformers.  Promoting this sort of martial arts training seems to have been regarded as a extension of party’s more revolutionary and anti-imperialist goals.  (One could discuss the clear thematic connections to the newly resurgent mythos of the burning of the Shaolin Temple here, but that will need to wait for some future post).

Nor was this militarization of the labor force merely theoretical.  Jon Nielson and I discussed the impact of the 1925 boycott of British goods (and trade with Hong Kong) in our previous volume. Multiple martial arts instructors and organizations were involved in that effort.  Yet the following report from the China Press notes that by the second year of the strike such training had become mandatory for the workers on the picket-line and in Guangzhou. 

By suggestion of the Kuomintang Workers Delegate Conference, comprising more than 170 labor unions in Canton City alone, for members not joining the picket regiment which will be trained under military system, all labor unions quartered in Canton will conduct classes of boxing.  It may be recalled that this conference has decided to organize a picket group of 1,700 to 2,000 strong.

“All Foreigners At Canton Under Police Surveillance.”  The China Press. September 23, 1926. P. 7.

Still, it was not all revolution and “charging the barricades.”  The promotion of martial arts within labor unions also seems to have been part of the government’s larger efforts to promote physical culture.  We already discussed Chu Minyi’s efforts to create upscale martial arts clubs for public sector employees. Those efforts did not occur in isolation.  Rather they were an extension of trends that had been going on for some time. Once again, we can turn to the China Press for another news clipping that nicely fuses labor relations, martial arts instruction, and the promotion of a national physical culture movement, this time from 1933 (the height of the Guoshu era). Again, these are the stories that we ignore when we focus exclusively on a handful of elite social movements.

Labor Unions Due to Battle in Athletic Contest Next Spring

For the first Time in local Chinese athletic history, an All-Shanghai Labor Track and Field Meet will be held at the Public Recreation Ground, Nantao, next spring.  Four open Championships will be staged.  They include track, field, all games and Chinese boxing.  Each labor union is required to participate in at least one of the four championships games.

The China Press. December 16, 1933 page 6.

Conclusion

All of this would be stripped away by the victory of the Communist Party in 1949.  Its important to note that they never explicitly banned martial arts practice.  Indeed, the newly reconstituted wushu sector was promoted and cultivated within the sports and educational realms.  Many of China’s most famous remaining martial artists found new homes as coaches at universities or teaching Qigong and Taijiquan classes in hospitals.

But that sort of elite practice excluded most of the nation’s population.  As the Party transformed the economy, nationalized markets and banned labor unions, more plebeian martial artists no longer had the incentive or opportunity to continue to practice.  By the end of the 1950s much of the martial arts culture that had dominated the Republic era simply vanished on its own.  

Things were different outside of China.  Small labor unions continued to sponsor martial arts classes in South East Asia and Hong Kong. Wing Chun students can all recite by heart how Ip Man began his teaching career at the Restaurant Worker’s Union headquarters in Hong Kong. Nor was this the last labor group he would teach during the course of his Hong Kong career.  In light of the foregoing discussion it should be clear that this is not an incidental element of the story, or a bit of local color.  It reminds us of the historic importance of Southern China’s guilds and labor unions as engines of working class martial arts practice.  During the Republic period they promoted and shaped popular kung fu traditions.  In the early 1950s one union in Hong Kong gave Ip Man a leg up, ensuring Wing Chun’s survival and eventual spread throughout the global system.

oOo

If you enjoyed this you might also want to read: Lives of Chinese Martial Artists (3): Chan Wah Shun and the Creation of Wing Chun.

oOo

***I need to set aside some time to work on another writing project over the next few weeks.  As such we will be dipping into Kung Fu Tea’s extensive archives, and revisiting one of my favorite series of posts (originally published in 2013) over the next week or two.  If you discovered the blog in the last few years I think you will really enjoy this three part series!***

Introduction

It is frequently and loudly asserted that one cannot learn Kung Fu from a book.  We are often told that the Chinese martial arts exist primarily as an oral tradition.  Little of value was written down, and the essence of an art can only be conveyed through direct contact between the teacher and a students.  All of this is true enough.  A dedicated and talented teacher is a virtual prerequisite for achieving any degree of mastery in the Chinese martial arts, at least for us mere mortals.  Yet if everyone knows that books are dispensable, why do we have so many of them?

Any examination of the subject will quickly show that for a supposedly oral culture, the Chinese martial arts have had quite a fixation with writing things downs.  Detailed manuals, historical legends, medical texts and even philosophical pondering have been published in great numbers by martial artists since at least the 1910s.  Some of my own research indicates that in Southern China the market for printed boxing material may be even older.

In truth the printed word has been critical to the spread of the martial arts in the modern era.  New styles of swordsmen novels (both in the 1920 and later in the 1950) helped to spread and romanticize martial culture.  Practical manuals allowed ideas and techniques to be dispersed across an expanding market.  Further the potential for advertising allowed for the emergence of truly national “martial arts brands.”  Various Jingwu and Guoshu groups even ended up publishing their own newsletters and weekly newspapers in the 1920s and 1930s.

While there is an undeniable element of oral and physical culture within the Chinese martial arts, the often overlooked truth is that it was the printed word that allowed them to become a mass phenomenon.  Print seems to have enabled the commodification and distribution of the martial arts in ways that we are only beginning to fully appreciate.  Without printed manuals, magazines and newspaper stories the 20^th century development of the Chinese martial arts would have looked very different.

Nor was this a phenomenon that was confined to China proper.  Print was a critical vehicle that carried the traditional Chinese arts along the currents of a rapidly expanding global marketplace.  A limited number of western individuals had been lucky enough to come into contact with the Japanese and Chinese martial arts early in the 20^th century, and a handful even made some attempts at bringing this knowledge back to their home country.

After WWII the number of servicemen and government employees who encountered the martial arts while stationed in Asia (and Taiwan in particular) began to grow.  Yet the Chinese martial arts could not become a widespread phenomenon in the west if there was no general knowledge of their existence and little demand for their instruction.  When thinking about the “Kung Fu Craze” of the 1970 we tend to concentrate on the contributions of cinema (Bruce Lee) and television (“Kung Fu” the TV series).  What is often forgotten is that there was a substantial period just prior to that when the Chinese fighting styles were built up and promoted to a growing body of martial arts aficionados through print.  Even after “Enter the Dragon” burst onto the international stage individuals still turned to books and magazine articles for basic discussions of what the Chinese martial arts were, practical advice on selecting a style and more in-depth discussions of the history and philosophy behind their newly discovered passions.  Martial arts publications did not cause the Bruce Lee phenomenon, but they certainly played a role in enabling it.

In no way do I wish to diminish the value of visual media in the post-Vietnam Kung Fu explosion.  Still, it is important to remember that there is another media market that also deserves careful consideration.  In this post I would like to quickly review and discuss two works (a book and a magazine article) that helped to introduce Wing Chun to the western, English speaking, world.  Both of these works predate the 1973 explosion of interest in Bruce Lee and the Chinese martial arts.  In part II of this post I will discuss two additional publications (both books) which emerged in the wake of the Kung Fu craze.

I hope to accomplish three things with this review.  The first, and most obvious goal, is to learn a little bit more about the spread and early history of Wing Chun in the western world.  Secondly, by looking at these works (and others like them) we may begin to gain a better understanding of the global expansion of the Chinese martial arts more generally. 

Lastly, we do not actually have a full record of all of the various pamphlets, books and articles published on the martial arts in late Qing and early Republic era China.  Authors like Kennedy and Guo have done an excellent job of discussing the later parts of this period, but the era from the 1870s-1911 is still not well understood.  Perhaps by looking at the relationship between print media and the martial arts in the modern era we will discover puzzles and research questions that might help guide our exploration of the past.

The Earliest Western Works on the Traditional Chinese Martial Arts

The Chinese martial arts seem to have been subjected to uneven media coverage and discussion in the western world.  For a few years after the Boxer Uprising (ca. 1900) nefarious martial artists and fanatical anti-western cultists seemed to dominate popular discussions of China.  While those stereotypes never fully died away (indeed, they actually proceeded the rebellion by at least 50 years) certain things did seem to fade from the public consciousness.  Popular publications from the 1940s and 1950s are full of references to Japanese Judo, yet there seems to be little remaining cultural memory in the west that there were ever martial artists in China at all.

Japanese Judo was widely recognized as a combat sport par excellence from WWII onward.  It became increasingly popular with returning GIs and young people after 1945 both in North America and in Europe.  In fact, if one reviews the magazine articles and ephemera on the martial arts that was available to the general public from the middle of the 1950s to the middle of the 1960s it is clear that Judo absolutely dominated the public consciousness of what the martial arts were and should be.  It is little wonder that this was the first Asian sport to be adopted by the Olympic Games.

This position of dominance was not to last.  I have always suspected that Judo may have been a victim of its own success.  It generated so much enthusiasm and popularized the martial arts so effectively within certain circles that it left individuals asking very understandable questions.  Is this all there is to the martial arts?  What about other forms of Jujitus?  How about serious sword training?  What about Karate?  And if so many of these arts publicly trace their roots back to China (something American martial artists in the 1960s were well aware of), why are there no Chinese martial arts teachers?

It is important to note that all of this is happening a decade or more prior to the explosion of interest in the Chinese martial arts that would be unleashed in 1973.  Yet contemporary publications (particularly Black Belt Magazine in America) make it clear that by the 1960s there was a general enthusiasm for new and exotic martial arts.  The growth of Karate and later Tae Kwon Do (often referred to as “Korean Karate” in the early publications) led this new movement.  But the Chinese styles also became a fashionable subject, particularly when they could be tied to the various “striking arts” that seemed to represent a viable stylistic alternative to Judo.

Sophia Delza was one of the first early pioneers of the Chinese martial arts in the USA.  A dance professor and Wu style Taiji Quan student who had studied in Communist occupied Shanghai, she actively attempted to popularize these methods of physical training through her ground breaking public demonstrations in the middle of the 1950s and with her 1961 book T’ai Chi Ch’uan: Mind and Body in Harmony, an ancient Chinese way of exercise to achieve health and tranquility. This volume was definitely the first English language publication on Taijiquan and it was probably the first book ever published on the Chinese martial arts in America.

Delza proved to be slightly ahead of her time.  General interest in the TCMA among judo and karate practitioners began to noticeably increase in the middle of the 1960s.  Initially this wave of interest was fed with magazine articles, and then Bruce Lee’s groundbreaking appearances in the “Green Hornet” and “Longstreet.”  After that more specialized publications on the Chinese martial arts started to come out.  Following the release of “Enter the Dragon” in 1973 the entire popular culture landscape changed for martial artists.  Finding publishers willing to take on these exotic projects became much less of an issue.  

So what does the early publication record for Wing Chun look like?  When might an informed or curious martial arts student have first encountered this style?

Chances are good that such an individual (if living in North America) would have first seen Wing Chun mentioned in the pages of Black Belt Magazine during the late 1960s.  It wasn’t until March of 1965 that a Chinese martial artist was first featured on the cover of this important magazine (Wong Ark Yuey).  Shortly thereafter Dr. William C. C. Hu was tapped to start a regular column dealing with Chinese martial arts and culture.  Obviously much of this material focused on Taiji and more general history.

Bruce Lee made his first appearance in Black Belt (as part of a “round-table discussion”) in June of 1967.  He appeared on the cover of the magazine for the first time in November of that same year dressed as Kato from the “Green Hornet.”  While he mentioned his teacher Ip Man, he never specifically spoke about Wing Chun in that issue. 

Fans would not have to wait long to learn more about his style.  Black Belt  ran a follow up piece the next month.  This article featured more positive references to Ip Man, and the first discussions of both Wing Chun and Jeet Kune Do to appear in a nationally distributed format.

On February of 1968 the Chinese martial arts were once again on the cover of Black Belt.  This time the discussion of Wing Chun would be much more substantive and explicit.  In fact, it is the earliest account of Wing Chun that we have in a major publication.

Discussion of the Chinese fighting styles pervades this entire issue of the magazine.  If you are interested in the social history of the TCMA in the west this is one source that is well worth looking at.  Be sure to start with the opening editorial.

Following along with the general history above, the author begins by noting the strong tide of emerging interest in the Chinese martial arts.  Yet his entire discussion of this phenomenon remains situated in the larger struggle between Karate and Judo.  In fact, one suspects that by the late 1960s the term “karate” had simply come to mean “the striking arts,” while Judo had come to dominate the popular imagination of what a grappling could be.  The entire discussion is actually somewhat interesting to consider from the vantage point of our current debates about MMA.

In this editorial Kung Fu is clearly seen as being part of the “striking camp.”  It is explicitly acknowledged as the forerunner of modern Karate and readers are informed that the issue’s main feature will examine the fate of these arts in “Red China today.”  We are also told that a number of tournament karate fighters, including Chuck Norris and Mike Stone, have been training with Bruce Lee.  As such we should expect to see some new strategies and techniques from Kung Fu emerging in the contact karate arena.  But never fear, even if you don’t have access to a personal Kung Fu coach, Ohara Books will soon be releasing a full line of new publications on the Chinese martial arts (including Wing Chun, Taijiquan and Bagua).

At its most basic level this “special issue” of Black Belt is really an infomercial designed to promote a new line of books published by the same individuals who owned the magazine.  Still, it is fascinating to note that by 1967 (when this issue would have gone into planning) there was enough interest in the Chinese martial arts to justify this sort of advertising push.

The “Green Hornet” ran on television from roughly September of 1966 to March of 1967.  It is likely that Lee’s role in the production helped to promote awareness of the Chinese martial arts among a more general audience.  Still, interest in these styles had been rising among established martial artists for some time.  I suspect that this may have been precisely why they latched on to the series (which did not turn out to be a hit with a broader audience and was canceled after a single season) in the first place.

The main article is just as revealing as the opening editorial.  It features a lengthy introduction that attempts to situate the Chinese fighting systems within the larger world of the martial arts and mainland China’s Communist ideology.  Neither efforts show a huge amount of familiarity with the underlying subject matter, thought the author (Anthony DeLeonardis) makes a game attempt. 

Perhaps the most interesting part of this initial discussion is the author’s analysis of the Communist Party’s new found enthusiasm for Wushu and Qigong in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  Oddly the article indicates little awareness of the Cultural Revolution, which had been in full swing for two years by the time of publication.  Ironically things went very badly for the Chinese traditional medicine and martial arts “sectors” during this period.  By 1968 both were being decimated.

The author also attempted to argue that criticism of the TCMA as flowery or ineffective are misplaced.  He notes that martial artists from a variety of styles focus on forms training, and in the case of the Chinese martial arts true sparing might be “too dangerous” to allow.  Still, he points to the long history of “challenge fighting” within the Chinese hand combat community as proof of their seriousness.

The article then proceeds to present nine one page illustrated discussions of various Chinese fighting styles.  The second of these is dedicated to Wing Chun.

The description of the Wing Chun system starts off by mentioning Yim Wing Chun and the female origins of the style.  It then introduces chi-sao (sticky hands) which is described through contrasts with Taiji’s push hands.  While brief the discussion employs a number of concepts that are representative of Wing Chun’s training philosophy.  Lastly it ends with a photograph and nod to Ip Man.  In fact, he gets the only photo in this section of the article.

The actual text bears a striking resemblance to James Yim Lee’s book on Wing Chun that would be published by Ohara press in 1972.  One wonders if either he or (more likely) Bruce Lee had a hand in filling out this discussion.

As one might expect the brief discussion leaves one wanting more, but that was the point of the exercise.  Each of these snippets was just as much about building demand for the new line of soon to be released publications as it was about informing readers of what was happening in “Red China.”  In fact, no Wing Chun (or very little), was happening in mainland China at this point in time.  The Communist party had not been in favor of the art to begin with.  And after the start of the Cultural Revolution openly practicing any traditional fighting system in an urban area was extremely ill advised.

Still, we have gone some way towards addressing the first question outlined in the introduction to this post.  Any practicing martial artist with a subscription to Black Belt (which was the publication of record for the American martial arts community in the 1960s) would have heard about Wing Chun by the fall of 1967 or the spring of 1968.  Bruce Lee, who had been cultivating his contacts with the editors and staff of Black Belt, was probably key to the early exposure that the art enjoyed in this magazine.  But at the same time he appears to have been riding a larger wave of growing popular interest in the Chinese martial arts going back to at least the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Of course his own fame would massively accelerate and reshape these trends.  But that had not happened yet.  The years of 1967-1968 are interesting as Lee had managed to achieve a certain amount of celebrity status among individual who were already interested in the martial arts.  And many of these same practitioners were already looking for something exotic and new.  Yet Lee was not yet a household name in North America or Europe.

Early Wing Chun Books

Magazines tended to be at the leading edge of the publishing industry.  It is easier to get short articles placed in monthly publications than to create an entire book from the ground up.  That is the reason why these sorts of resources are so important when researching social histories.  They tend to be leading indicators.

Nevertheless, once the magazine industry hit on a successful topic, the book publishers were never far behind.  In 1969 Rolf Clausnitzer and Greco Wong published the first book on Wing Chun Kung Fu to appear outside of China.  This book is very interesting because of its early date.  Again, at the time of its publication Bruce Lee was a known quantity to many martial artists, but the Kung Fu Craze of the 1970s was still three years off.  Ip Man was still alive (though he had recently slowed down his teaching schedule) and his most important students were all still relatively young and active.

Wing-Chun Kung-Fu: Chinese self-defence methods (London: Paul H. Crompton, 1969) can be a challenging book to find.  It was published in the UK and that’s where I ended up finding my copy.  While a number of examples of this little volume did end up making it to North America, they tend to be relatively rare and to command a high price.  Still, if you are interested in the early social history of the art, it is worth the time and the effort to locate a copy.

Wing-Chun Kung-Fu contrasts nicely with the foregoing Black Belt articles.  It was widely distributed in a popular periodical and aimed at individuals who probably had never heard of the art before.  Clausnitzer and Wong’s project, coming just one year later, was a vastly more detailed and substantive work.  However, it was only aimed at a small audience, those individuals who were already looking for a source on Kung Fu and who may have even been familiar with Wing Chun.  There were fewer copies of this book in circulation, but they were also targeting a more specific audience.

If the ultimate purpose of the Black Belt issue was to promote a new line of instructional books, Clausnitzer and Wong seem to be promoting the art of Wing Chun itself.  I like this book for a number of reasons.  Many of the discussions are good, the photography is clear and the authors went to some lengths to describe Wing Chun as a social system as well as a technical one.  In addition to the normal discussions of the forms and “defensive applications” that you might expect to find in a book like this, they also recorded the earliest contemporaneous discussions of what a typical Wing Chun class in Hong Kong was like, Ip Man’s unique personality and why he believed that it was imperative that Wing Chun be taught as a “modern” art.

Clearly the authors were aware that change was in the air, and they wanted Wing Chun to be part of this new movement within the martial arts community.  Further, they seem to have come to the conclusion that the best way to promote the art was to outline it in simple terms and let other people discover its effectiveness for themselves.  This actually makes the book easy to read and less jarring than much of the highly self-promotional literature that would be produced in the coming decades.

Both of the books co-authors have had interesting martial arts careers in their own right.  Rolf Clausnitzer appears to be the primary author of the volume.  I have never been able to find a complete biography for him but apparently he was familiar with Hong Kong.  At various points in the volume he mentions meeting Ip Man in person in 1960 and he studied intensively with Wong Shun Leung in 1964.  In fact, he was Wong’s first foreign student.  Clausnitzer also mentions that his brother Frank was a classmate of Bruce Lee’s at St. Francis Xavier College.  He also seems to be aware of a number of stories and accounts of William Cheung’s early days in Australia.

After returning to the UK he continued his studies with Wong Wai Cheung (Greco Wong).  Wong in turn was the first student and training partner of Moy Yat, an important early missionary of the Wing Chun gospel who we will be hearing more about in the second part of this post.  Wong can be seen throughout the extensive photography that illustrates this book.

The outline of the volume proceeds as follows.  After a brief introduction to Chinese Kung Fu the authors discuss the basic nature of Wing Chun training and the outline of a typical class (circa 1969).  It would begin with forms practice, move on to applications and punching drills, and then finally sparring or “chi-sao.”  They note that warm-up exercises or formal calisthenics were rarely part of Kung Fu training and don’t seem to have played much of a role in contemporary Wing Chun schools.

After that they move on to a historical outline of the art.  They repeat the story of Yim Wing Chun with some historical reservations given the lack of evidence for the account and wide variability in how it is told.  The authors do not dwell on the history but rather move on to a discussion of “Wing Chun Today.”  This begins with a brief account of meeting Ip Man (whom Clausnitzer found to be calm and cheerful) in 1960 and his attitudes towards Kung Fu and Wing Chun training.

“Originally from Kwangtung province he migrated to Hong Kong where he still resides.  An outspoken man, Yip Man regards Wing Chun as a modern form of Kung Fu, i.e. as a style of boxing highly relevant to modern fighting conditions.  Although not decrying the undoubted abilities of gifted individuals in other systems he nevertheless feels that many of their techniques are beyond the capabilities of ordinary students.  Their very complexity requires years if not decades to master and hence greatly reduced their practical value in the context of our fast-moving society where time is such a vital factor.   Wing Chun on the other hand is an art of which an effective working knowledge can be picked up in a much shorter time than is possible in other systems.  It is highly realistic, highly logical and economical, and able to hold its own against any other style or system of unarmed combat.” P. 10.

I quoted this section of the original text as I think it bears repeating.  The memory of Ip Man has been appropriated by so many individuals seeking to promote so many visions of the art that I think his original thoughts (to the extent that we know them) are in danger of being lost.  This is about the best short discussion of Ip Man and his approach to Wing Chun that I have seen.  It is all the more remarkable for being made contemporaneously, when Ip Man himself was still alive and active in the leadership of his Kung Fu clan.

The book next turns to a discussion of the “Main Theories and Principals Behind Wing Chun.”  I find the use of the word “principals” interesting.  Over the years it has become somewhat axiomatic that Wing Chun is a “principal based art,” rather than one founded on techniques.  Of course substantial differences remain as to what these principal are. 

So far as I am aware this is the first extended print discussion of the “Principals of Wing Chun.”  Briefly these are; straight line punches, simultaneous attack and defense, attack rather than defend wherever possible and always move forward rather than retreat (forward pressure as a strategic concept).  I have seen other concepts added to this list over the years, but these basic ideas always seem to be present.

Next the authors review stances and shifting, Siu Lim Tao (with photographs included in an appendix at the end of the book), single sticking hand, double sticking hand and the lap sau (warding off hand) drill.  The explanations are brief and only cover the basic exercise.  The rest of the volume is dedicated to two man defensive drills, including some kicking.

Overall this book provided the reader with a surprisingly good introduction to Wing Chun.  It is challenging to be the first example of anything in your field.  When you consider the overall quality of information on the Chinese martial arts that was available to the public in the 1960s, it is hard to see this book as anything other than a gem.

Not only did they clearly illustrate many of the basics, this book managed to convey something of the “feel” or essence of Wing Chun.  It captured the idea that this was a modern adaptation of an ancient art.  I suspect that this dynamic tension between the ancient and modern really appealed to a lot of potential students in the global market place.  As I have argued elsewhere, Wing Chun was well positioned to take advantage of both Bruce Lee fame and Ip Man’s modernist leanings.

In that light the following reflection on the social attitudes within the Hong Kong Wing Chun clan, made in 1969, seem almost prophetic.

“An interesting characteristic common to most practitioners of Wing Chun lies in their relatively liberal attitude to the question of teaching the art to foreigners.  They are still very selective when it comes to accepting individuals students, but compared with the traditional Kung Fu men they are remarkably open and frank about the art.  If any one Chinese style of boxing is destined to become the first to gain popularity among foreigners, more likely than not it will be Wing Chun.” p. 12.

Conclusion

This concludes the first part of our discussion on early Wing Chun publications.  We have seen that Wing Chun was starting to make regular appearances in the specialty press by the late 1960s.  Bruce Lee’s fame among practicing martial artists helped to promote the style within the traditional combat market. 

Still, all of this was happening within the larger context of a community in flux.  As Judo lost ground to Karate in the 1960s a critical space was opened for experimentation and exploration within the western martial arts community.  It seems that both Bruce Lee in America and Clausnitzer and Wong in the UK sensed this opening and moved to take advantage of it.  Lee helped to increase recognition of the style within the broader martial arts community, while Clausnitzer and Wong argued that Wing Chun was the Chinese martial art best adapted to the modern western world.

It is impossible to really understand either of these publications (or their authors) in isolation.  Both are the product of a global community in which certain types of cultural trade are accelerating.  Clausnitzer and Wong focus on the transnational spread of a very specific form of physical culture to enlarge their personal community.  Black Belt seems to be more interested in promoting a diffuse identification with Chinese martial culture to increase demand for a new line of instructional publications.  The commercialization of Wing Chun through print media in the late 1960s is critical to its subsequent spread throughout the martial arts community.

In a sense this is no different than what was happening to the other Chinese styles (such as Taiji Quan) at the same point in time.  A market demand must be cultivated among potential students (i.e., consumers) before any sort of real cultural engagement can happen.  That necessitates the building of a “martial brand.”  The expansion of print publications were critical to this process prior to the 1973 explosion of interest in the Chinese martial arts.  Nor did all of these publications target the same audience or have the same goals.

In part II of this post we will explore how this process changes (and what remains the same) as we enter the Kung Fu craze of the 1970s.

Click here for Part II of this series.

Introduction

In the first part of this series (which you can read here) we discussed the earliest works on the Chinese martial arts to appear in English, and looked at two sources on Wing Chun.  The first was an article in a 1968 edition of Black Belt Magazine (the publication of record for the American martial arts community at the time) and the second was Wing-Chun Kung-Fu: Chinese Self-Defence Methods by R. Clausnitzer and Greco Wong (1969).  These works are the two oldest treatments of Wing Chun in the English, and they are some of the earliest published sources on the art that we have in any language.

They are interesting to review precisely because of their early date.  Bruce Lee, while known to many martial artists and through his role as Kato, had not yet broken out and become a house hold name.  Likewise, while there was a decided uptick of interest in the Chinese martial arts from the early 1960s onward, we were still three to four years away from the explosion of the “Kung Fu Craze” of the 1970s.

Both of these works were aimed primarily at individuals who were already martial artists and may have been curious about the Chinese styles.  In essence they were an invitation to a group of specialists to branch out from Judo and Karate, and investigate something new.  Clausnitzer and Wong in particular offer some insightful observations of life within the Wing Chun clan (both in Hong Kong and England) just before the onslaught of interest that followed the release of “Enter the Dragon.”

In Parts II and III of this series we will examine the next generation of early publications on Wing Chun.  At least a few of these works may have been in planning prior to Bruce Lee’s eruption into the general popular consciousness.  Nevertheless, in their final incarnation each of them shows an awareness of the changed nature of the popular culture landscape.

Some of these authors seek to provide guidance to the inexperienced in an effort to help them avoid the many poor instructors who appeared almost overnight in the early 1970s.  In other cases these authors sought to put themselves at the forefront of a rising tide of interest in the Chinese martial arts.  Lastly, a few individuals used both books and magazine articles to attempt to claim the leadership of the Wing Chun movement (at least in the English speaking world) following Ip Man’s death from throat cancer in 1972.

In this post we will focus on Wing Chun Kung-Fu by James Yimm Lee (Ohara Publishers, 1972).  In Part III of the series we will go on to cover Kung Fu for Young People: the Ving Tsun System by Russell Kozuki and Douglas Lee (1975) and Secret Techniques of Wing Chun Kung Fu by K. T. Chao and J. E. Weakland (1976).

Note that Parts II-III will cover only the first few years of the “Kung Fu Craze.”  Many more articles and books on Wing Chun were published in the later 1970s and early 1980s.  Nevertheless, these three works really set the terms (and in some cases even the technical vocabulary) for many of the debates that would follow.  For that reason alone they deserve careful consideration by anyone interested in the development of Wing Chun (and the Chinese martial arts) in the west.

I should note two additional points before going on.  This series will basically provide a chronological overview of the five earliest Wing Chun publications with one exception.  In 1974 Moy Yat (an Ip Man student then living in New York City) published a very brief work titled 108 Muk Yan Jong.  The work contained only 79 pages, most of which featured images of the wooden dummy form being performed by Lee Sai Jow.  The book was published in Hong Kong by the Tak Shing printing company and was accompanied with minimal text.  Its most valuable lasting contribution was probably the set of detailed plans for the construction of a wooden dummy that it featured in the back.

I am not including this book in the current series of reviews for two reasons.  To begin with it was aimed at individuals who were already a part of the Wing Chun system.  Secondly, I am not sure how much of a substantive impact it actually had.  After years of looking I have never located a copy of the original edition.

Kung Fu for Young People was written by a Moy Yat student (Douglas Lee) and that work seems to have reached a much larger audience.  Greco Wong, who we discussed in Part I, was also one of Moy Yat’s most senior students from his period of teaching in Hong Kong (roughly 1962-1973).  As such I have decided to focus on these two works which enjoyed a somewhat wider distribution.

Lastly, it should be remembered that most of the readers that we will be discussing in Parts II and III of this series were pure beginners.  Their first exposure to the martial arts was usually through either film or television.  That was not necessarily the case in Part I.  In that post we saw two printed works that were promoting the Chinese martial arts on a much smaller scale and somewhat independently of major media trends.

Yet in the years between 1972 and 1976 things started to change very rapidly.  The printed works on Wing Chun produced during this period were now just one part of a much larger social movement.  They did not really drive the mania around Bruce Lee or Kung Fu, but they helped to fill out the initial vision and provide basic resources to the legions of newly minted martial artists that arose in this era.

James Yimm Lee, An American Kung Fu Pioneer.

Wing Chun Kung-Fu by James Yimm Lee (Ohara Publications, 1972) may not actually be the first book on Wing Chun, but it is the one that everyone remembers.  Its stark green cover provided the first glimpse that many seekers ever encountered of this new and mysterious art.  The dramatic, over-acted, expressions of the two figures on the cover seemed calculated to tap into the image of machismo unleashed by Bruce Lee.  While “Enter the Dragon” had not yet been completed, his other films were setting box office records across Asia.  They were even getting some coverage in American publications.  This was an image of Kung Fu that matched the spirit of the time.

Still, it would be a mistake to judge this book solely by its cover or to assume that James Lee himself was in away selling hype.  His name and “hype” just do not fit together in the same sentence.  Lee was truly a pioneer of the Chinese martial arts in America.  He was an extremely hardworking, dedicated and loyal individual who expected to see those same traits in those around him.  He was also one of the most experienced and well-connected martial artists that one was likely to run into in the 1960s.

Lee had been interested in the martial arts since he was a child.  During WWII he, like so many other military men, was exposed to Judo and boxing.  Lee eventually ended up earning a brown belt in the Japanese art before moving on to other studies.

His interests in physical fitness were wide-ranging and very modern.  He was an advocate of both scientific nutrition and weight lifting.  He actually ran a gym at one point.  Lee was also among the first wave of American students to study the traditional Chinese martial arts in the US.

By the late 1950s Lee was already something of an expert in martial arts circles.  Earlier in the decade he had begun to write and self-publish a number of short, no-nonsense manuals on different aspects of the martial arts.  These were sold through advertisements placed in publications like Popular Mechanics.  This hard won writing and publishing experience served him well, and it enabled him to help other martial artists, like Bruce Lee (no relation), get their own ideas out into the market.

In 1957 James Lee turned his attention squarely to the Chinese martial arts.  He began to study a compound Shaolin system (possibly a combination of Hung Gar and Choy Gar) with T. Y. Wong in San Francisco’s Chinatown.  He even helped his teacher to publish one of the first books on the Southern Chinese martial arts in English (Chinese Karate Kung-Fu: Original “Sil Lum” System, For Health and Self Defense, 1961).  Lee (using his Chinese name) is listed as a co-author on the cover.

Nevertheless, his association with the more elaborate Shaolin arts did not survive his first meeting with the young Bruce Lee.  He was impressed with not just Bruce’s physical grace, but also the pure practicality of his approach to the martial arts.  James Lee himself was nothing if not practical.  He was immediately attracted to the simplicity of Wing Chun, its raw aggression (at least in Bruce’s treatment of the system) and its unrelenting emphasis on actual violence and self-defense.

James and Bruce’s relationship went well beyond “teacher and student” or even “colleague.”  James’ wife lent her wedding ring to Bruce and Linda for their marriage shortly before she died of cancer at a tragically young age.  After leaving Seattle for Oakland Bruce and Linda moved in with the recently widowed James.  They worked, taught and lived together for a number of years.

It was during this time that Jeet Kune Do really began to evolve.  But at the same time James Lee was also taking extensive notes on Bruce’s original Wing Chun style.  He states in the introduction of his book that he had hoped to teach the original art to son.  But the notes ended up becoming the core of a work that would reach a much broader audience.

Wing Chun Kung-Fu was perfectly positioned to ride the wave of “Bruce Lee mania” that started in 1973.  It was already published and one the shelves by the time that fans started to ask serious questions about Bruce’s background and training.

Unfortunately neither man would live to see the success of this small volume.  The circumstances of Bruce Lee’s death are well known.  James died of lung cancer, evidently a victim of the industrial chemicals he encountered in his career as a welder, a year earlier in 1972.  He was only 52 at the time.

Of course the success of his small volume did not come about by magic.  Ohara Publications used its relationship with “Black Belt Magazine” (both had the same owners) to heavily advertise the book.  The cover of the September 1972 issue was basically a page long full color advertisement for the new publication mailed to every newsstand, drugstore, martial arts school and library in the country.  While Ohara promoted a number of their own books in the magazine, few enjoyed quite the publicity that James Lee’s volume received.

Given how important this issue of “Black Belt” was to the ultimate success of the book, I would like to take a moment to examine it in a little more detail.  This is a valuable exercise for a number of reasons.  Doing so reveals not only the advertising that helped to launch Wing Chun, but also the growing interest in the Chinese martial arts more generally.

As I mentioned in the previous post, this trend probably dates back to the 1950s and it was noticeable in the period’s literature and ephemera by the middle of the 1960s.  However, by the early 1970s (still prior to “Enter the Dragon”) the Chinese arts had achieved a noticeable level of recognition among practicing martial artists.  For instance, the September 1972 issue of “Black Belt” offered readers six full length articles.  Two of these focused on Judo, one on a “Korean Karate” (Tae Kwon Do) system, a review of the samurai/cowboy film “Red Sun” and two articles on the traditional Chinese martial arts.

One was the second part of a short series on the self-defense applications of Taiji Quan.   The other promised an in-depth treatment of Wing Chun.  Its tagline reads as follows:

“WING CHUN KUNG-FU, an ancient system of Chinese boxing founded by a woman. Creates balance between attack and defense by the use of such devices as ‘sticky hands.’  In a prelude to his forthcoming book on the subject, exponent Jimmy Lee demonstrates wing chun’s principal of the ‘four corners.’”

The cover of the magazine further promises readers the secrets of “The Sticky Hands of Wing Chun Kung Fu: the most intriguing techniques in developing the sensitivity of your hands.”

The entire layout of this magazine is remarkable not just for what it says about the state of Wing Chun in 1972, but the Chinese martial arts as a whole.  About one third of the total column inches of space in the articles were dedicated to the Chinese martial arts.  Half of the magazine focused on subjects that fell outside of the traditional sphere of the Japanese martial arts.  This balance is pretty typical of the period, but it was a sharp departure from the magazine’s early days in the 1960s when readers could reasonably expect that every article in a given issue would focus on a Japanese art (usually Judo, then Karate, Aikido and Kendo).

Even before the explosion of the “Kung Fu craze,” the interests of western martial artists were becoming more global.  For example, one of the Judo articles in the September 1972 issue, while still about a Japanese art, focused exclusively on the experiences of a European instructor in France.

The actual copy of the Wing Chun story was written by Peter Bennet.  At the time James Lee was very ill.  He would ultimately die within a few months of the release of this issue.  It began with a brief recap of the Yim Wing Chun legend, and then moved on to a quick introduction to Ip Man and the role of Chi Sao in training.  The discussion was illustrated with a series of photos (labeled in Chinese) showing Ip Man and Bruce Lee demonstrating dan chi sao (single armed sticking hands).

After the first two pages the article shifts gears, and presents an excerpt from the book in which James Lee demonstrates some simple techniques for simultaneous attack and defense in each of the “four corners.”  The photography is clear and self-explanatory.  The text is minimal but it does introduce a conceptual discussion of the four gates and some of the technical vocabulary associated with different hand techniques of the southern Chinese martial arts.

The final page of the article is shared with the column “Budo Breeze” by Mitch Stom.  This feature was basically a news blotter with some editorial commentary.  Again, it is interesting to look at this to help to situate the preceding discussion of Wing Chun.  Most of the items on the list are actually about controversies and happenings in the world of karate which by 1972 had clearly surpassed Judo in terms of popularity and general “hipness.”  It is what the cool kids were doing.

However the second item on the list was a note about James Lee’s illness and his relationship with both Bruce and Jeet Kune Do.  Once again readers are reminded that a new book in Wing Chun is about to be released.

Yet this entire conversation is nestled within a larger discussion of the world of Karate.  It is book-ended by a note about Chuck Norris (who ironically had just landed a role in one of Bruce Lee’s films) and complaints about the latest World Karate Championships in Paris that had resulted in multiple teams (including the Japanese) simply walking out.

Wing Chun benefited from the more general growth of interest in the Chinese martial arts in this period.  But that growth was still attached to, and in some senses subordinated to, the large movement of martial artists away from Judo (a grappling art) towards karate (a striking art).  Systems like Wing Chun fit into this narrative precisely because they offered excellence in striking.  Note that the “Black Belt” articles of the era almost never mention grappling, locks or throws in Wing Chun.  They are certainly present in the system, but it was not what audiences were interested in.  Conceptually speaking it does not appear that the Chinese arts had yet become their own “thing” in the mind of readers.  While valued for their exotic nature and origins, for most individuals the investigation and practice of these fighting systems was still subordinated to other trends within the martial arts world.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this article comes in the final lines of Peter Bennet’s introduction.  After noting that Ip Man has retired from active teaching (indeed he would die in December of 1972, within weeks of James Lee) the author informed the readers that Leung Ting was his “successor” and was continuing to teach in Kowloon.  We are then told that Wing Chun is taught in America by Tso Yue Kuen, a Chinese herbalist and student of Ip Man in San Francisco.

This assessment of the state of Wing Chun in 1972 seems calculated to confuse rather than enlighten.  Indeed it strikes me more as disinformation than anything else.  While Leung Ting was actively teaching in Kowloon, he was certainly not Ip Man’s successor.

Indeed many people more senior than Leung Ting, perhaps dozens of them, were also teaching Wing Chun in Kowloon at exactly the same time.  Either James Lee or Bruce could have clarified this point in a few seconds, so one strongly suspects that they were not consulted before the article went to print.  One can only imagine Bruce’s reaction upon reading that Leung Ting had assumed the leadership of the Wing Chun clan while Ip Man was still alive.

The question of who was teaching Wing Chun in America is also equally interesting.  I have never been able to find any specific details on Tso Yue Kuen.  Yet there were clearly other Wing Chun practitioners in the US by 1972/1973 and some of them were actively teaching.  Bruce Lee taught Wing Chun to a number of individuals, including James Lee.  In San Francisco Kenneth Chung (a Leung Shung student) and Ben Der were both active in this period.  In fact Kenneth Chung had probably been teaching since the end of 1968.  Within a few months of the publication of this issue Augustine Fong would open his school in Tucson Arizona, and both Moy Yat and Duncan Leung would open schools in New York City in 1973.

In the late 1960 the few publications on Wing Chun that existed seemed content to simply promote the existence of the art, which was basically unknown.  By the end of 1972 there appears to have been enough of a groundswell of interest in the art that competitive claims about succession and leadership could arise.  Of course the art was still most popular in Hong Kong, but it seems that a number of students from this period could see that it was positioned for impressive success in the coming decades.  Again, all of this is happening just prior to the explosion of the “Kung Fu mania.”

Wing Chun Kung-Fu: Defining the Debate      

I would now like to turn to Jame’s actual book.  The text of this work had been in preparation for a number of years.  Recall that the discussion of Wing Chun in the 1968 Black Belt special issue on the Chinese martial arts was pretty reminiscent of this later work.  Still, few individuals actually saw a copy of the finished work before the death of its author.  While it bears a 1972 copyright date, the book was not released to the public until very late in the year (probably December).  Most readers encountered the text in 1973 or later.

This is important as the world of the Chinese martial arts was different before and after this year.  Bruce Lee’s 1973 film “Enter the Dragon” brought the Chinese martial arts to the attention of vast new audiences.  While his personal practice was highly pragmatic, the on-screen image of the martial arts that Lee projected was romantic in the extreme.  His character in “Enter the Dragon” managed to be both some type of Shaolin disciple and a British secret agent.  Indeed it is hard to imagine that anyone other than Bruce Lee could have juggled such conflicting career trajectories.  Other themes in the movie included enigmatic villains and tournament death matches all interspersed with deep philosophical meditations on the nature of the martial arts and violence.

It seems likely that these were the sorts of expectations that new readers would have brought to the text.  This was, as they were constantly reminded, the only style that Bruce Lee formally studied.  And the cover of the book at least hints of the same theatricality.

For that reason Wing Chun Kung-Fu is really most remarkable for what is not there.  The text is direct and simple.  Nothing unnecessary has been included.  In fact, if readers were to walk away from the prose with any impression at all it would probably be one of ascetic discipline.  This would come as no surprise to those who knew James Lee or were familiar with his earlier works, such as his Iron Palm training manuals.  For him the martial arts were a purely practical, almost technical, exercise.  Perhaps this is why he felt such a strong attraction to the highly utilitarian Wing Chun system in the first place.

The book starts off with a discussion of the Yin-Yang symbol (often employed by Bruce Lee).  The discussion is direct and seeks to ground the symbol in concrete physical experiences that anyone is familiar with.  It is clearly written with the intent to clarify rather than to mystify.

Likewise the following section is titled “A Brief History of Wing Chun.”  The author was not exaggerating.  The entire discussion of the art’s history (both ancient and modern), and fundamental nature runs less than 300 words.  Immediately readers are moved into clear visual demonstrations of the basic stances, the concept of the “center line,” the idea of the “immovable elbow,” facing an opponent, footwork and the introductory form, “Siu Lim Tao.”  I believe that the extensive photography of the form offered in this book remains some of the clearest and most easily understood ever published.

Following this preliminary material a number of different self-defense applications are introduced.  This is followed by a concise introduction to Chin Sao and other training methods.  The volume concludes with a glossary of Chinese terms.

The entire work runs a little over 200 pages in length.  However most of this is photography and directions.  There is actually very little discussion in the book.

It is clear that this was an intentional choice on the part of the author.  Other authors, such as Clausnitzer and Wong, managed to work quite a bit of discussion (some of which was very interesting) into their equally technical treatments of Wing Chun.  But Lee seems to have felt that discussions which were not directly relevant to the topic at hand simply distracted from what was vital.

He states in his introduction that he is aware that the media is generating interest in the Chinese martial arts, and that this will lead to a new wave of students seeking instruction.  Lee believes that many of the people who are currently opening martial arts schools are not adequately trained themselves.  Further, Lee carries an unusual degree of bitterness towards the time that he spent in the Southern Shaolin system and claims that he wants to help new students avoid the same pitfalls.  As such he is going to show them the sorts of things that a teacher should address and do, rather than just discussing them in the abstract.

Lee’s book has a timeless quality to it.  Perhaps its very parsimony is what keeps it from feeling old or outdated.  It is a great reference work for new Wing Chun students who are just starting to be introduced to a wide range of material.  It breaks things down in clear and simple ways and shows what is essential to remember and focus on.

This work continues to be widely read and used today.  In fact, it’s the only book that I will be reviewing in this series that is still widely available and referenced.   Today there are a sizable number of books on Wing Chun.  Many of them are explicitly aimed at new students just learning “Siu Lim Tao.”  Yet this volume remains the only one that my Sifu (and I suspect many others) is willing to recommend to his students.  Due to its taciturn style it says nothing problematic, but it includes great illustrations of essential concepts and movements.

Wing Chun Kung-Fu has gone through many printings.  It has sold over 150,000 copies and has been translated into a number of different languages.  There are very few technical books on the martial arts that can say the same thing.  This single source has introduced more people to the actual practice of Wing Chun than any other printed work ever produced.  It is absolutely ubiquitous, and it deserves to be so.

Conclusion

Authors have complex motivations for writing.  Some seek wealth, others fame.  Some have a burning need to communicate an essential idea or insight.  Many of the best authors write seemingly because they cannot help it.

James Lee wrote because he wanted to be respected.  He did not want to be famous.  He wanted to be a successful author so that his beloved wife (who also died of cancer) and young child could respect him and see the things that he had accomplished.  And I think that he also wanted the respect of his many friends and acquaintances in the martial arts community.  He wanted to be remembered for being something other than a welder.

Within the martial arts community he found a type of respect and social status that was not granted to him by society as a whole.  The admiration of his peers was freely given and very much deserved.  In the early 1960s James Lee was one of the most experiences and well-rounded martial artists in California.  He had connections in many important places and many individuals came to him for advice.

It goes without saying that Bruce Lee would not have become quite the same icon that he did without the friendship and support of James.  He introduced him to weight lifting, the serious study of western boxing and Ed Parker (who subsequently helped to launch his career both in the world of martial arts and television).  But James Lee, 20 years older than Bruce, was also a teacher and martial artists in his own right.

This review of Wing Chun Kung-Fu only scratches the surface of a very interesting and instructive life.  I hope to be able to consider him in greater detail at some point in my “Lives of Chinese Martial Artists” series.  It is clear that Lee is not going to be forgotten in Wing Chun circles any time soon.  His incredibly successful book on Wing Chun became a guiding light for those seeking a simple and direct introduction to the Chinese martial arts in the midst off the “Kung Fu Craze.”  It continues to play the same role for countless readers today.

Click here for Part III of our series on Print Media and Popularization of Wing Chun.

Introduction: Wing Chun Enters its Esoteric Phase

This is the third and final installment of our short series on the earliest printed publications to discuss Wing Chun in English.  These books and articles range in date from 1968 to 1976 and are actually some of the oldest published material on the art in any language.  Part I of this series, which examines the earliest Black Belt article to discuss Wing Chun (1968), as well as Clausnitzer and Wong’s pioneering volume (Wing-Chun Kung-Fu: Chinese Self-Defense Methods, 1969) can be seen here.  The sources discussed in that post are an interesting window onto the nature of the early Wing Chun community before the advent of the “Kung Fu Craze” in the 1970s.

Part II of this series focuses on the contributions of James Yimm Lee.  His slim green volume Wing Chun Kung-Fu was heavily promoted by Ohara publications and Black Belt Magazine.  It even graced the magazine’s cover in late 1972, as Lee himself lay dying of lung cancer.  This work took the simplicity and parsimony that had always been part of the Wing Chun system to the next level.  Lee’s treatment of the art sought to demystify the subject matter with clear photography and discussions based on training methods rather than history or philosophy. 

The end result was one of the best-selling works ever published on the Chinese martial arts.  While the project had actually been started many years earlier, the release of the book was perfectly timed to exploit the eruption of the Bruce Lee Phenomenon following the release of “Enter the Dragon” in 1973.  It was a tragedy that neither James nor Bruce lived to see its ultimate success.

In today’s post we will examine the next two introductory works to be published on Wing Chun.  The first of these, released in 1975, was Kung Fu for Young People: the Ving Tsun System.   This volume, co-authored by karate expert Russell Kozuki and Moy Yat disciple Douglas Lee (Lee Moy Shan), was published and distributed by the Sterling Publishing Company in New York City.  The second work that we will review is titled Secret Techniques of Wing Chun Kung Fu by K. T. Chao and J. E. Weakland.  It was published by Paul H. Crompton Ltd of London.

Each of these works is clearly a product of the Kung Fu Craze.  Both of them make reference to Bruce Lee and martial arts themed television shows and movies in their text.  The authors have no doubt as to where their readers are coming from and what their level of experience probably is.  Kozuki and Lee even play off of the superficiality of their readers experience.  The advertising blurb on the back of their book attempts to create a sense of shame and insecurity in the readers, promising to teach them the real truth behind the myth of the Chinese martial arts.

Nor is this promise unique.  The works of this last period are characterized by a concerted effort to recast Wing Chun as an esoteric, rather than a rational and modern, practice.  In many respects the two books that we will be looking at below are very different.  Each has its own goals and quirks.  Yet both of them seem to be engaged in a process of myth-building and mystification.  Nor are they alone in this.  We do not have time to review all of the magazine articles that started to appear after 1973, but this same esoteric turn, with its increased emphasis on ancient philosophy, secret master-disciple relationships and “living the martial way,” is clearly evident in that literature as well.

From one perspective this is an unexpected development.  The pre-1972 discussions of Wing Chun never mentioned ancient philosophy.  Nor was there much discussion of the art as a “way of life,” as opposed to a more efficient method of boxing. 

In 1968 Clausnitzer and Wong correctly predicted that Wing Chun was well positioned to explode in popularity for a number of reasons.  In their discussion they specifically pointed to Ip Man’s attempts to simplify and rationalize the teaching method as key to making the style compatible with modern life.  They also noticed that a large number of Wing Chun students attended English language schools, giving them a chance to travel and live abroad.  Lastly they noted that unlike the other traditional martial arts clans in Hong Kong, Wing Chun did not cloak itself in secrecy and shun western students.  It was precisely these modern innovations that positioned Wing Chun to enjoy substantial success in the wake of the “Bruce Lee Phenomenon.”

Yet after 1973 Bruce Lee becomes the crux of the issue.  As we have seen in previous posts, there was a serious disconnect the between Lee’s approach to the martial arts in real life (which was reflected in the spartan utilitarianism of James Yimm Lee’s book) and the image that he projected on the silver screen.  That vision of the Chinese martial arts focused on mysterious Shaolin schools, esoteric eastern philosophy and becoming a human weapon capable of fight against oppression with one’s bare hands.  This was the aesthetic vision that transfixed audiences, and it followed them into the Karate and Kung Fu schools, which they joined in droves.

The strongly entrenched utilitarian ethic in Wing Chun probably insulated the art from at least some of this increasingly romanticized vision of the martial arts.  But it is clear that things did change after 1973.  Frequent protests to the contrary notwithstanding, martial arts instruction is, and always has been, a buisness.  Like any industry the “good” that is produced is informed by the forces of both “supply” and “demand.”  And when a giant new customer base shows up demanding esoteric oriental values and practices, at least some supplier will discover that they are willing to produce them.

By the 1980s it was clear that Clausnitzer and Wong’s predictions had been vindicated.  The simplicity of the Wing Chun system, along with its relative openness, probably did help it to succeed while other Kung Fu systems failed to thrive.  Yet the public image of the art, which was increasingly being consumed by competing claims of authenticity based on esoteric or even secret teachings, probably would have surprised the authors.

Ultimately this move towards a greater emphasis on lineage and claims of priority spread and succeeded because it filled a need on the part of consumers.  What Wing Chun as a fighting system offers is very simple, but what consumers demanded in the wake of the Kung Fu Craze had more to do with complex questions of identity and personal transformation.  While this pattern would crystallize and become clearly recognizable in the 1980s, it is interesting to note that the same trends can be seen taking root in 1975 and 1976.

Making Kung Fu Suitable For Young People: The Ving Tsun System

Following the death of Ip Man, Moy Yat immigrated to New York City and began teaching Wing Chun.  In fact, he had been teaching Wing Chun in Hong Kong since the early 1960s and had trained Greco Wong.  Another of his students, Lee Moy San (Douglas Lee), had actually moved to New York shortly before his teacher arrived.  Lee continued to teach in the area and promote Moy Yat’s Wing Chun organization until he returned to China in 1986.

Lee Moy Shan is a fairly widely recognized figure in the Wing Chun community.  He taught Darrell Jordan (among others) and has also given a number of interviews over the years outlining his approach to Wing Chun.  He was also the coauthor of one of earliest books on Wing Chun written in the English language.

Still, Kung Fu for Young People was not a solo effort.  It was co-authored by Russell Kozuki (1914-2004), a martial arts writer, teacher and founder of the Nippon Goshindo Kempo System.  In addition to Kempo, Kozuki also studied Kodokan Judo and Hakko Ryu Ju-Jutsu.  In 1969 he published The Karate Road to Power with the Sterling Publishing Company in New York.  This was the same firm that would carry the later work on Wing Chun.

Kozuki’s relationship with Sterling appears to have been long and exceptionally fruitful.  In 1975 they released Karate Power: The Basic Katas.  Later in 1981 Sterling would debut his volume Karate for Young People.  In 1983 they published Power Karate.  Sterling then published Winning Karate in 1984.

I do not know the nature of the preexisting relationship between Lee and Kozuki, but it makes sense that the publisher might want to insure the success of a project like this by relying on a proven source.  The 1975 volume on Wing Chun actually lists Kozuki as the primary author.

When reading this little book I often find myself wondering whose voice I am really hearing.  For instance, the work starts off with a discussion of the “Center Line theory” (a term that appears to have first been used by James Yimm Lee a few years earlier.)  This is good solid Wing Chun stuff, as is the discussion of stances that follows.  Then, after a brief discussion of Kung Fu concepts, the book turns to a chapter-long discussion of “blocking hands.”

This is really odd.  While one sees “blocks” in karate, there are no “blocks” in Wing Chun.  Movements like the Tan Sau or Bong Sau (which are discussed at length in this chapter) start off as potential punches that are somehow bridged or redirected.  In fact, it is impossible to do a Bong Sau correctly if it does not start out as a punch.  The entire discussion is actually a little misleading.  I don’t think that anyone who actually teaches Wing Chun would ever introduce the Bong Sau, Pak Sau and Tan Sau before they introduced the basic punch, yet that is exactly what this volume does.

I can only think of two possible explanations of this.  It is possible that they authors intentionally decided to introduce the “defensive” material first in an attempt to “correct the misconception” that Kung Fu was a dangerous and violent pursuit that might not be well suited to young people.  After all, a lot of the media being produced in the middle of the 1970s was popular precisely because of its graphic portrayals of violence.  Yet there was also a perception by practitioners that this could limit the growth of the art.  As a result attempts to restore a sense of “balance” to the discussion of the martial arts were common in this period.

On that note it is interesting to look at how the Sterling Publishing Company advertised this volume to resellers and book stores:

KUNG FU FOR YOUNG PEOPLE: The Ving Tsun System by Russell Kozuki and Douglas Lee ($4.95) is intended to correct the misconception that Kung Fu is a deadly sport. The authors explain that the system is safe and exciting; it stresses speed, inner strength, a healthy mind and body. ( 10-up).

Publishers Weekly. Vol. 208 Part 1. 1975.  pp. 103.

Clearly the enthusiasm of the Kung Fu Craze was double edged sword for those who sought to promote the martial arts.  They wished to commodify these fighting systems.  Yet at the same time it was necessary to make them safe and appealing to a consumer audience.  This was especially important when dealing with readers “Age 10 and up.”  The emphasis on “defensive movements” (which is not really a category that exists in Wing Chun) might make sense in that context.

Of course the other possibility that is that Kozuki may have been crafting the discussion that emerged based on his prior experience writing on Karate.  Kung Fu became popular in martial arts circles among the same group of people who were interested in Karate.  Both of these striking systems were perceived as a more vigorous alternative to judo and other grappling systems.  In various Karate and Tae Kwon Do systems blocks are purposive actions.  An extensive background in those systems might color how one perceives and discusses Wing Chun as well.

The volume then proceeds with a discussion of punching, kicking and the history of Kung Fu.  One of the most remarkable things about this book is the photography.  While not particularly clear most of the photos feature female Wing Chun students.  Even the cover of the book shows a woman in bell bottoms using her Kung Fu against a male opponent in a self-defense situation.

All of the works that we have previously discussed related the story of Yim Wing Chun and noted that her system was thought to be good for female practitioners.  Yet after that they simply retreated into the world of the male dominated studio and showed only men demonstrating Wing Chun’s essential techniques.  So far as I am aware, this is the very first major publication from the era to forcefully make the argument that women both could and did study Wing Chun, and then to back that up with their photography.

Still, for the most part this brief work (127 pages) is most remarkable for what is not there.  I found it fascinating that while the authors treated the topic of Wing Chun’s history twice, and even claimed that monks and nuns were central to the development of Kung Fu, they never once mentioned the art’s association with the Shaolin Temple.  Even Ng Moy’s Shaolin roots went unmentioned.

Secondly, this work features a number of somewhat random self-defense techniques drawing from all three unarmed forms (and possibly some dummy material) but there is nothing really useful to a beginning student in here.  For instance, there is no discussion of Siu Lim Tao or a list of the basic movements that students will encounter therein.  While countless new Wing Chun students have been able to buy James Yimm Lee’s book and use it as a primer or prompter when learning their basic material, it would be impossible to use this book in the same way.

Wing Chun is a concept based art.  Yet besides a few basic drills (pauk punch ect.), what this book offers are examples of set piece defenses.  Again, this is hard to understand as Wing Chun explicitly eschews this approach to the combat.

So if it does not seek to systematically introduce basic skills or fundamental concepts (other than those already published by James Yimm Lee) what is the real purpose of this work?  The answer seems to be advertising. 

When looking over the basic structure of this work it might seem strange to readers that the authors would save the discussion of Wing Chun’s history for the final two pages of the book.  In most treatments history is placed right at the beginning.  However its position at the end of the volume allows the author to seamlessly transition into his sales pitch.

After seeing the fierce firepower of the Wing Chun (but no systematic information that would give anything away) readers are informed:

“At present, the New York City area is blessed with the presence of Master Moy Yat, a prominent instructor in the Ving Tsun Kung Fu “family” and a close disciple of the late Grand Master Ip Man.  The responsibility of bringing Ving Tsun to the rest of the United States and consequently to the rest of the western world depends on Master Moy Yet.” pp. 126.

It goes without saying that this view of the Wing Chun community is not entirely correct.  There were actually a number of other Wing Chun instructors (all Ip Man students) who were active in the US by 1975.  I believe that Duncan Leung was even teaching in New York City as these words were penned.  And of course there were also a number of other instructors in places like the UK and Australia.

In short the authors and publishers have just successfully cooperated in convincing readers to spend $4.95 on what was essentially an elaborate advertisement.  It allowed the Sterling Publishing Company to benefit from the growing enthusiasm around Kung Fu at little expense, while the Moy Yat clan was able to use the book in an attempt to get out in front of the “Bruce Lee phenomenon” and claim the growing market for Wing Chun as their own.

It is hard to imagine that a book like this could have been published prior to 1973.  Western martial artists with an extensive background in Judo or Karate would have very quickly noticed what was missing from such a work.  Further, Wing Chun was an obscure enough topic that it wasn’t really worth anyone’s time and effort to try and set themselves up as the “grand master” of the system. 

After 1973 that all changes.  We have already seen Leung Ting claim to be Ip Man’s successor in the pages of Black Belt.  Now we have Moy Yat attempting to monopolize instruction in North America and Europe. 

Revealing the Secret Techniques of Wing Chun Kung Fu

It is interesting to contrast Lee Moy Shan’s work with that by James Yimm Lee.  Where Lee studiously avoided any discussion that might distract from the technical execution of the art, Lee seems to have embraced the notion that Kung Fu was as much a way of life as anything else.  Moy Yat himself was a proponent of similar ideas. 

Still, in order to use Wing Chun as a metaphor it must be generalized to fit a variety of unrelated situations.  That is simply the nature of the exercise, and it always comes at the expense of a certain “conceptual fuzziness.”  Still, I suspect that this is an accurate reflection of what many martial arts students were demanding in the middle of the 1970s.

A similar trend can be seen in what is otherwise a very different book.  In 1976 K. T. Chao and J. E. Weakland released Secret Techniques of Wing Chun Kung Fu, Volume 1. (Paul H. Crompton LTD, London).  The preface of this book begins by decrying the rapid rise of popular interest in Wing Chun.  In the opinion of the authors this has led to a number of recent books and articles that neglect the principals and concepts of Ip Man.  They seek to remedy the situation by revealing the “secret techniques” that lay behind Wing Chun through both conceptual analysis and a series of two man drills and exercises.

While brief the preface of this book raises a number of important questions.  To begin with, Ip Man loudly and repeatedly claimed that he had no “secret techniques.”  That was the entire point of his reformed teaching system in the Hong Kong period.  Thus it is sort of ironic to hear one of Ip Man’s direct private students offering to reveal the very secrets that his teacher claimed did not exist. 

In point of fact there is actually nothing in the book the vast majority of experienced Wing Chun practitioners will have not seen before.  The material that the authors offered in this volume is good solid stuff, but it is also pretty widespread throughout the Ip Man clan.  Of course this will not be the last time that a Wing Chun student will seek to advance a project through the claim of secret esoteric knowledge.

Secondly, one wonders exactly which books the authors are condemning.  It is certainly true that many of the magazine articles that were published in the 1970s were of uneven quality.  But only a hand full of books on Wing Chun had ever been released.  In fact only three works (excluding Moy Yat’s specialized monograph on the dummy) had been released to that point.  The first of these by Clausnitzer and Wong (1969) was of surprisingly good quality (especially given its early date).  The second by James Yimm Lee (1972) has proved to have real staying power in the market.  And it seems unlikely that Chao and Weakland would have been aware of Kozuki and Lee’s 1975 volume when they were preparing their own manuscript for publication.  No other books on Wing Chun had yet been published in the English language.

One suspects that these lines could have been a rhetorical flourish rather than a serious critique of the existing literature.  It may simply have been another way to add value to the more systematic vision of the art and Chao and Weakland were about to reveal.  Still, there is a real possibility that Chao objected to the stripped down version of Wing Chun, devoid of most its Chinese cultural reference points, which had been promoted by Bruce Lee prior to the creation of Jeet Kune Do and James Yimm Lee in his 1972 volume. 

Whatever their differences, there does seem to be one topic that the present authors and James Yimm Lee agreed upon.  The point of a book on Kung Fu is to teach the style, or at least assist in that process.  Neither author saw their book primarily as an advertisement for the art or an attempt to promote a specific school or lineage. 

Weakland and Chao never seem to have been active public martial arts instructors.  As such they didn’t really need “advertising” in the same way that Moy Yat did. 

Chao studied Wing Chun from childhood and then went on to receive law degrees from Universities in both Taiwan and the UK.  Weakland spent most of his career as a historian at Ball State University in Indiana.  Many of his publications deal with medieval and renaissance Europe, with an emphasis on Catholic history.  Both of these individuals had successful careers outside of the martial arts.

In the “About the Book” section the authors note that the scope of the demand for instruction in Wing Chun is quickly outstripping the number of qualified instructors trained by Ip Man who are currently in the west.  While they pay lip service to the idea that it is impossible to learn the martial arts without a skilled teacher, it quickly becomes evident that this is exactly what their book is meant to do. 

The entire text is structured around the Siu Lim Tao form.  It breaks the form down into its component movements and structures an entire teaching curriculum around these pieces.  In each case an individual movement is introduced, a series of two man drills are provided and these self-defense applications are introduced.  At the end of the work the complete form is introduced, which students can now practice with a fair degree of understanding.

It is very difficult for most people to learn anything without a teacher.  Still, if I was forced to outline a program for self-instruction it would be something very similar to what Chao and Weakland provided in this book.  If one had a group of friends with which to study this material, and you actually went through the outlined drills and exercises regularly, it would be possible to grasp some of the basic ideas behind the Wing Chun system.

Of course the real problem facing potential students in the late 1970s and early 1980s was not the complete absence of experts, but rather the challenge was finding regular instruction.  Many people who did not have a local instructor could still make it to the city for occasional training or a two day seminar a few times a year.  Even this would be a real advantage as it would allow students to feel the different energies for themselves.  They could then return to their small study groups with their notes, Chao and Weakland’s book and the hopes of actually making some progress.

I suspect that this is exactly how Wing Chun managed to spread itself so quickly in North America during the early 1980s.  While regular instruction was still somewhat hard to find there were enough materials on the market that at least some individuals were able to engage in a successful campaign of self-instruction.

Chao and Weakland would have been an exceptional resource in another sense.  By providing a ready-made curriculum for drilling basic skills, teaching Siu Lim Tao and introducing its self-defense application, they probably helped a lot of “less experienced” instructors set up shop.  Given that their book starts off with a warning of the dangers of the insufficiently trained teachers I am not sure what the authors would think about that.  Still, I suspect that this book was actually a critical resource for many new Wing Chun students and Kung Fu teachers alike in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

While the authors offer the most detailed of our early works on Wing Chun, it is not without its problems.  These start in the section titled “History.”  Given that Weakland was a professional historian (indeed he was the first professional academic of any type to write on Wing Chun) one would have expected something really special.  He should have known all about the importance of reliable sources or, baring that, simply getting decent translations of some of Tang Hao’s books on the history of Shaolin Kung Fu from the library in Taiwan where his co-author got his law degree.

Instead Weakland appears to have relied on the oral folklore of both martial artists and gangsters to investigate the origins of Wing Chun.  Of course he was not unique in this.  The redoubtable R. W. Smith basically did the same thing with his short volume on Shaolin Kung Fu.  Both men (otherwise fine scholars) seem to have accepted without question that the Chinese martial arts were passed on only through oral culture.  As such those legends had to be given primacy. 

In reality this is not at all the case.  The martial arts did leave behind a written record and historians can look into these questions. Still, this is an important reminder of how pervasive the theory of their exclusively “oral nature” was, and the progress that has subsequently been made in the area of Chinese martial studies.

For me the most interesting material in the book is found on pages 2-5.  Here the authors recount their own version of the Wing Chun maxims.  These are statements that convey some essential concept of the art.  Traditionally they were used as aids to memory and teaching.  For instance “the Wing Hand (Bong Sao) is either the best or worst of movements” is a commonly known axiom still heard in schools today.  This is the earliest publication of these maxims that I have been able to locate.

Chao and Weakland also published the earliest English language translation of the Wing Chun Jo Fen (rules of conduct). This was a list of precepts that Ip Man posted at his school.  It should be noted however that the authors (probably Chao) felt free to take some liberties with this material.  Ip Man’s original list had nine rules.  They shortened this to eight by omitting his seventh precept (“Participate in society – be conservative, cultured and gentle in your manners”) and adding two of their own.  The first of these was a quote from the Dao De Jing stating that “A good fighter is never angry.”  The second was drawn from the Zhuangzi, “Great courage is not aggressive.”

While undoubtedly good advice, neither of these additional rules really reflect the original themes of the Jo Fen.  It has more to do more with social relationships than personal psychology.  They also show that the authors are not providing a straight translation of their prior Wing Chun experience; rather they are interpreting and editorializing on the system.

It is important to note that there is no evidence of Wing Chun having any sort of connection to Daoism in Foshan or Hong Kong, but you would not get that impression through reading this book.  The mythology of the system explicitly links it to Buddhism, but that influence is pretty much absent from most lineages of the system as well.  If Ip Man himself was influenced by any traditional philosophy it was probably Confucianism.

Yet the authors of this book seem to be more interested in Daoism, and finding applications for Daoist theory, than one might expect.  The Zhuangzhi is quoted in a number of places in an attempt to situate core Wing Chun concepts.  The introduction also features a lengthy discussion of the Ying Yang symbol that contrasts nicely with the one offered by James Yimm Lee.  While Lee attempts to understand Wing Chun in the abstract, standing apart from any particular system of meaning, Chao and Weakland seem to argue that it can only be understood within the context of traditional Chinese culture.  If their book has any “secret” to offer its probably this.

Overall this is a very useful book.  The photography is a little overexposed, making some of the illustrations less clear than they could be.  The authors also attempted to introduce their own English language terminology for the movements, much of which failed to catch on.  Still, the technical discussions in this book (and the two other volumes that followed it) are excellent.  While less well known than Lee, these are still valuable reference works as well as important historical sources.

Conclusion

Our survey of the early English language publications on Wing Chun has made it clear the art experienced rapid growth between the middle of the 1960s and the mid 1970s.  Not only did the number of students increase, but their goals and background changed dramatically. 

Early works such as those by Clausnitzer and Wong were aimed at a relatively small audience of experienced martial artists.  These individuals were motivated by the trends within the martial arts community.  For instance, they were often investigating Kung Fu because it had been advertised as a “striking arts” and as a possible alternative to Judo.  While we usually date the start of the “Kung Fu Craze” to 1973, a careful survey of these works shows that the Chinese martial arts had been steadily gaining popularity within martial arts circles since at least the middle of the 1960s.

Latter works, such as that by Kozuki and Lee sought to capture a much larger audience whose only exposure to the martial arts was through the media.  These consumers and potential students appear to have placed more weight on issues of culture, identity and personal transformation than the striking vs. grappling debate.  Of course this is also exactly what the martial arts of the small and large screen promised them.  While Bruce Lee opened the doorway for a vast number of new martial arts students, he was also responsible for altering the way in which many of these styles, including Wing Chun, were discussed and viewed by the public.

This focused examination of the major Wing Chun publication from 1968-1976 has revealed some critical themes in the history and the spread of this art in the West.  More importantly, it has also suggested some important themes to consider when discussing the emergence of Kung Fu and the continued popularity of the Chinese martial arts.  Lastly we have seen that even in a era dominated by visual media, print sources continue to offer a valuable and nuanced window onto popular culture trends.

As previously noted, I have been taking a couple weeks off from the blog to focus on another writing project that needs my attention. Nevertheless, I ran across an image that I wanted to share. As I did a bit of research it occurred to me that this photo suggests a theoretical dilemma that may be relevant to that project as well. It seems that I just cannot stay away from Kung Fu Tea. But in this case that might actually be for the best.

Let us begin with the photograph that tempted me out of my blogging vacation.  It is an eight by eleven-inch glossy print showing three Chinese martial artists with swords (jian) in a Beijing park.  This particular photo was previously part of the Houston Chronicle’s photo archive before I purchased it at auction.  The stamps on the back indicate that it was published on December 26^th1984, and that it was provided by the Financial Times’ newswire service. Unfortunately, the digital archives for the Houston Chronical begin in January of 1985, so I am not sure what article this ran with.

The image itself speaks volumes.  In my opinion it is one of the best photographs of the folk martial arts in China that I have seen from this period.  Taken on “Jade Flower Island” in Beihai Park, the image features both architectural and martial points of interest.  The composition of the picture mirrors the conventions of traditional Chinese painting where we see human figures in the foreground dwarfed by the enormity of their environment.  The eye is naturally drawn upward from our elderly martial artists towards a tiled roof, and then to the distinctive outlines of the White Pagoda.  That seems to blend into the surrounding sky.  Our swordsmen wield wooden blades and move in slow circles that balance the vertical sweep of the image. It goes without saying that the entire scene projects a carefully calculated image of timelessness.

This allochonistic element is probably the key to understanding the photograph’s appeal.  The more western cut of the trousers and shirts worn by the men strongly suggest that this image post-dates the Mao era, but I have a feeling that the average Western viewer would have a difficult time estimating the age of this image. It exudes the same timeless aesthetic that seems to draw so many to the Chinese martial arts.

Still, 1984 is hardly the distant past and Beihai park remains full of retired Taijiquan practitioners. Knowing this I set out to do what any self-respecting martial arts blogger would do. I began to search the internet for recent pictures of more contemporary martial arts students practicing in this same spot. The juxtaposition would have been lovely, but unfortunately my search turned up nothing.

What I did manage to locate, however, were dozens of mentions of Taijiquan in major American newspapers during the year 1984. Specifically, Proquest Historical Newspapers came up with 35 mentions of “Tai Chi” for that year in its sampling of national and local newspapers. If one were to rerun that same search for a more recent year you would simply be inundated with references. But given that fewer stories about China and the Chinese martial arts were produced in the mid 1980s, it was possible to examine every reference to “Tai Chi” that showed up in the search.

This exercise (while not entirely scientific) proved to be heuristically useful. The first thing that became apparent was that by 1984 it was not at all difficult to find a decent beginner’s class if one lived in any good-sized city in America. The vast majority (70%) of the references were advertisements for instruction.  The local advertisements in one Boston newspaper were really quite interesting.  While there was a single advertisement for a “Wushu” school, and another for a “Ving Tsun” studio, at least eight other teachers and schools listed “Tai Chi” instruction, making it the most commonly available Chinese martial art at the time. While the activity in the Houston Chronicle photograph may have struck the average American as “exotic” or “mysterious,” it seems that many readers would have known exactly what they were doing.

Indeed, by 1984 so many Americans were familiar with “tai chi” that it could simply be mentioned in passing without any additional explanation being necessary.  A number of articles in the Proquest sample did just that.  One Chinese-American dancer noted with ambivalence that people simply assumed that she must have studied taijiquan simply because she was of Chinese decent (she did not). Ronald Reagan’s trip to Beijing in in 1984 also provided an opening for a number of reflections on Chinese culture or society which contained passing references to Taiji. In one such essay the noted humor columnist Andy Rooney reminisced about visiting China while in the Army and advised President Reagan to “skip the Tai Chi” as “the television cameramen are bound to get shots of you doing it and you could look pretty silly.” Indeed, the underlying premise that ran throughout Rooney’s essay was that somehow China hadn’t really changed that much from the 1940s and that much of life in “the real China” (something that Nancy Reagan had noted that she wanted to see) was bound to make an American president appear either uncomfortable or foolish.

Only a handful of articles took “Tai Chi” as their central object of inquiry. These were inevitably profiling new martial arts classes or Chinese teachers. Their descriptions of the art emphasized that it was best understood as a type of “moving meditation” that was beneficial to one’s health. Indeed, moderate exercise and stress relief were the main draw.  One woman who had recently started a career as a computer programmer decided that “Tai Chi classes” were just the thing to help her destress after a long day of writing code. Gone were the modernist and scientific explanations of taijiquan that Chinese reformers had promoted in the 1920s and 1930s. In their place readers found references to profound philosophical ideas and mysticism. A few intrepid reporters even tried to figure out how all of this related to “Tai Chi’s” ability to convey actual self-defense skills with little success.

Just as interesting were the elements absent from these discussions. In the entire sample of articles, I did not come across a single refence to Chinese action films, Bruce Lee or even other Chinese martial arts. Indeed, there didn’t seem to be any sort of reference to modern visual media at all. Likewise, the pre- and post-war experience of China’s many martial artists was entirely absent.  “Tai Chi” was portrayed as an entirely timeless art that was known only through embodied practice. It didn’t seem to exist in relation to any outside reference points at all.

Whether any of that is true is highly doubtful. It is likely that the people signing up for all of those beginners’ classes had some sort of expectation as to what they would be getting.  And it is very likely that those expectations were shaped by films, television and popular publications in some way.

Perhaps the strangest omission of all was the wall of silence separating the discussion of taijiquan as a cultural practice from the realities of life in China in 1985. President Regan’s upcoming trip ensured that there were many profiles of the state of both Chinese politics and society.  Yet these tended to carry a notably different tone than the largely positive (if unabashedly orientalist) discussions of “Tai Chi.”  American readers were informed that China remained a largely impoverished country. Few individuals could afford cars and even a black and white TV set was a luxury beyond the means of most families. In 1985 bicycles remained the nation’s dominate mode of urban transport and hand-drawn wagons could be seen transporting bulk goods on practically any street.  As the title of an April 26^tharticle in the Hartford Courantput it, “Poverty Ridden China Struggles to Catch Up With the World.”

By 1984 taijiquan had come to be seen as a positive and desirable past-time, enthusiastically embraced by middle class students across the West. Yet few other elements of Chinese society shared that honor. What a close reading of this year’s newspapers suggests is that while Americans were increasingly willing to embrace Taijiquan, by in large their attitudes toward China remained ambivalent.  Indeed, it is useful to look back at the press coverage of the mid 1980s to remind us of not just how rapid China’s economic growth has been, but also the degree of cultural respect that it now commands. The rise of China’s social standing within the global community has been every bit as rapid as its economic ascent.

Political scientists developed the concept of “soft power” as a way of theorizing these moments of transformation.  Joseph Nye coined the phrase in an attempt to capture the force of cultural attraction that some leading states (though not all) are able to exert in international politics.  It refers to the degree to which citizens of other countries come to regard another state’s cultural products, norms, political institutions or modes of social organization as desirable and worthy of emulation.  We might think of soft power as a nation’s charisma.

Both large and small states can cultivate soft power resources and employ them as part of a public diplomacy strategy.  Yet Nye theorized that its especially important for the leading, or hegemonic, states of the global system to command this sort of cultural respect.  Simply put, even the most powerful states (say, the USA at the end of WWII) have finite resources. Yet the actual costs associated with maintaining a peaceful and cooperative international order are almost limitless.

If every diplomatic action, or the establishment of every international organization, were to require costly negotiation no state could afford to play a leadership role in global politics.  Yet through the spread of soft power citizens in other countries might decide to accept certain shared norms, cultural standards or expectations that naturally advantage the hegemonic state. This outward flow of domestic cultural acceptance lowers the cost of global leadership and actually helps to stabilize the creation of a cooperative and peaceful international order.  It goes without saying that in the current era China’s leadership has become obsessed with cultivating its soft power within the global system.  Its current support of the traditional martial arts through various cultural diplomacy programs is just one aspect of a much larger effort.

In some ways the concept of soft power seems to explain a lot about the global spread of the Asian martial arts. Why were Westerners so interested in Judo during the 1910s and 1920s, while a concerted public relations campaign by the KMT to promote Chinese boxing in the 1930s was largely ignored? Simply put, Japanese culture captivated the West in ways that Chinese culture never did in the pre-war period. Japan’s rapid modernization and victory over Russia in 1905 convinced many individuals that it possessed some sort of cultural secret that led to this victory, and Japanese martial artists loudly advertised that this secret could be found in judo, kendo and jujutsu. In contrast, China suffered a string of military defeats and seemed to fall ever further behind Japan’s benchmarks for economic modernization.

Americans were not, for the most part, hostile towards the Chinese state during the 1920s or 1930s.  But they saw little that was worth emulating.  This would seem to explain why the efforts of Chu Minyi or Zhang Zhijiang were bound to fail when it came to popularizing the Chinese martial art.  China lacked soft power during the era’s critical public diplomacy battles.

This is an attractive narrative, and it has the virtue of being relatively parsimonious.  Unfortunately, our discussion of the state of taijiquan in mid 1980s complicates things. In the 1970s-1980s we see the popularity of this martial art skyrocket prior to the improvement of China’s image on the global stage.  Kung fu and taijiquan both began their ascent into popular consciousness at a time when China was largely viewed as an impoverished state and a negative example.

Clearly Bruce Lee and the popularization of Southern Chinese action films have something to do with this.  Though it is interesting that neither of those factors were ever discussed in any of the “Tai Chi” articles that found their way into my sample set. It has been widely theorized that America’s disastrous loss in the Vietnam War may also be linked to the growing popularity of the Chinese martial arts in this period as a wounded American popular culture struggled to appropriate the forces that had caused it so much pain. That certainly seems plausible. But then again, there is very little discussion of any sort of foreign policy (let alone the Vietnam War) in the era’s taijiquan literature.

What is striking is that most of the discussions that did occur focused on the personal needs and growing discontents of the American students who were taking up these practices.  They felt unhealthy and stressed about work. They were aware they were out of shape. It seems to have been a personally driven search for wellness in face of growing levels of social stress (and a perceived need to resist or subvert these trends through individual action) that drove individuals towards the practice of taijiquan.

On the surface this might seem like a facile finding.  Yet its important as it reminds us that no single model can account for the global spread of the Asian martial arts.  The factors that seem to explain Western interest in Judo in the 1900s-1910s (growing admiration for, and fear of, Japanese society) were quite different from individually experienced anxieties that attracted middle class Americans to taijiquan in 1984.

The growth of a nation’s soft power can clearly aid in the popularization of its martial arts or combat sports.  Yet the case of Taijiquan reminds us that it is not a necessary condition.  Put simply, not all practices in all times and places are easily interchangeable. The fact that various arts might perform a variety of social functions suggests that we should not expect so see all styles following the same linear pathway towards social acceptance and respectability.  Indeed, it was entirely possible for Americans to discover much to admire in taijiquan at a time when they could find very little else that attracted them in Chinese society as a whole.

oOo

If you enjoyed this discussion you might also want to read: What is a lineage? Rethinking our (Dangerous) Relationship with History

oOo

***After a quick return to the blog earlier this week, I have directed my attention back to my other ongoing project.  The good news is that this manuscript chapter just a couple of days from completion. There is a definite light at the end of the tunnel! The other good news is that we will be revisiting a fun essay I wrote back in 2013 in the mean time.  I should be resuming my normal posting schedule very soon.  And that is a good thing because essay ideas are starting to literally pile up on my desk.  In the mean time, please enjoy this meditation on the Wing Chun/opera connection.***

Introduction

In September of 1850 a Major in the Imperial Army stationed in Guangdong took his own life.  Records indicate that he was older and struggling with a chronic illness.  Given the state of medicine in the middle of the 19^th century one can only guess that he was probably in substantial pain when he died.

In the grand scheme of things this individual tragedy was of no historical consequence.  Yet when I first ran across records of it in the index to the old Guangdong Provencal Archives (seized by the British Navy during the Opium Wars and taken back to London) it had a profound impact on how I thought about the origins of Wing Chun.

A Major is an important figure in the provincial military, but they are far from irreplaceable.  The archives are full of notices regarding the promotions, retirements, punishments and training of various military officers.  Clearly these people came and went, and the replacement of a single Major was basically routine.  As such, it was fascinating to read how much attention this unfortunate event generated.

On September 24^th there was a flurry of activity at the Yamen.  The first item of business was a report filed by Hsu Kuang-chin (the archive index still uses the Wade-Giles Romanization system so I have kept it here) of the Major’s death.  Next a number of other recommendations for promotion were filled to fill the now vacant post.

The only thing outwardly odd about these reports was the identity of their author.  Hsu Kuang-chin was the Imperial Commissioner of Southern China.  One would not normally expect such an important civil official to be taking on questions of human resource management.  The reason for such high level involvement would become clear three months later.

On December 19^th of 1850 Hsu Kung-chin and Yeh Ming-chen (the Provencal Governor, and one of the most important individuals anywhere in the Chinese civil service) filed a joint report to the imperial household following up on the Major’s death.  It would seem that in the intervening months they (or their staffs) had been conducting a more detailed investigation into events surrounding the suicide.

This was a tense time in southern China.  Civil and international battles had already been fought, and more (including the Red Turban Revolt) were expected in the future.  The influence of rebel factions and organized crime were growing.  Apparently there had been some fear that the Major’s suicide had not been what it seemed.  What if he had been compromised?  What if he took his own life to prevent himself from being blackmailed or used against his will?

With notable relief the report concluded that no outside factors were implicated in these tragic events.  The suicide was what it had initially appeared to have been, the death of an old sick man.  One can almost imagine the relief in the final report.

Yet what do these events tell us about the state of governance in southern China?  There was certainly tension, and a number of imminent security threats.  Large scale international and civil war were on the horizon and both the Governor and the Imperial Commissioner knew this.

Yet this was not an uncontrolled frontier.  When you skim over the notes in the archive, it becomes clear that the government and its security apparatus was immensely watchful.  Any major crime committed in an urban area was investigated immediately, and even seemingly mundane events, such as the death of an old sick man, could trigger a long and detailed investigation.

I find it useful to keep events such as this in mind when thinking about the folklore of the southern Chinese martial arts.  Many of these systems tell stories that describe an almost “wild west” situation.  We are told of mysterious masters who killed multiple opponents in market-place challenge matches, or wandering Shaolin rebels bent on the assassination of local officials.  But how plausible are any of these stories?  Not very.

Killing someone in a challenge fight was very explicitly against the law.  There were no exceptions to this, and no contract could be signed that would actually relieved the other party of responsibility.  Such actions would lead almost inevitably to one’s own arrest and execution for murder.  In a few extraordinary cases the sentence might be commuted to years of imprisonment.  Kung Fu legends notwithstanding, this was behavior that the state did not tolerate.

Likewise, if the suicide of a single military officer who suffered from a known chronic illness could touch off a three month counter-intelligence investigation led by the two highest ranking Imperial figures in the province, is it really realistic to assume that there were packs of Shaolin trained revolutionaries prowling around the capital, carrying out assassinations, and no one noticed?

Wing Chun and the Red Boat Opera Rebels

If one is to believe the folklore that is popular in many Wing Chun schools the answer is a resounding yes.  Wing Chun (like all other Cantonese arts) claims to originate at the Southern Shaolin Temple.  The monks of the Temple were opposed to the Qing, especially after they burnt their sanctuary to the ground and scattered the few survivors.  Some of these individuals (in the case of Wing Chun the Abbot Jee Shim and the nun Ng Moy) are said to have passed on their fighting arts along with a solemn charge to “oppose the Qing and restore the Ming.”

The standard Foshan/Hong Kong Wing Chun lineage states that the teachings of both Ng Moy (via Yim Wing Chun) and Jee Shim ended up being transferred to (and united by) members of the “Red Boat Opera Companies” in Foshan.  These individual made a living by traveling from temple to temple, performing Cantonese language operas during village holidays.  These performances often required great martial skill.  Then as now Kung Fu stories were popular with audiences.  Nevertheless, the opera singers themselves were members of a low status caste and were often marginalized and ignored by the more powerful members of society (at least when they were not on stage).

According to Rene Ritchie (1998) their highly transient lifestyle, combined with extensive training in costuming and disguise, made the Red Boat Opera singers the perfect revolutionaries.  Robert Chu, Rene Ritche and Y. Wu (1998, here after Chu et al.) also noted that the compact boxing style of Wing Chun could well have evolved in the cramped quarters of a ship.  These nautical origins notwithstanding, it would have been the ideal system to carry out revolutionary activities in the only slightly more spacious alleys of Foshan and Guangzhou. (For a summary of much of this literature see Scott Buckler “The Origins of Wing Chun – An Alternative Perspective.” Journal of Chinese Martial Studies.  Winter 2012 Issue 6.  pp. 6-29)

Of course there is one big problem with all of this.  There is a total lack of evidence to support any of it.  There is no concrete evidence that anyone did Wing Chun prior to Leung Jan, and while second hand accounts state that he studied with a couple of retired opera performer (probably during the ban following the Red Turban Revolt) he did not give us a detailed accounting of their prior activities or political involvements.  In fact, all of the more detailed accounts of the lives of the opera singers that we now have come from individuals who were active during the Republic era (1920s-1940s), at the earliest.  Other accounts date from the 1950s or even the 1990s.

This actually makes a lot of sense.  Other important elements of the Wing Chun mythos (such as the character Ng Moy) either emerged or underwent significant transformation in the Republic period.  The chaotic word of political intrigue and street assassinations which the opera rebels are said to have participated in actually sounds much more like the 1930s than it does the relatively stable  late 19^th century (say 1870-1890).

Of course, Wing Chun was never actually taught as a public art until the Republic era.  Almost by definition this is when most of the discussions of its origins and history would have been produced and packaged for public consumption.

Nor would this be the first time that we have discovered that some landmark of southern China’s martial arts culture may be more of a product of literary innovation than history.  There is a growing consensus among scholars that the Southern Shaolin Temple itself never existed, at least in the form that most Kung Fu legends claim.  The entire theme of the Red Boat Rebels is actually something of an appendix to the larger Shaolin myth complex.

If there really had been packs of killer theatrical agents plying the waters of southern China, fomenting local revolts and assassinating Imperial officials, the government would have taken notice.  The proper reports would have been filed followed by extensive investigations and more reports.  That is simply the reality of how the Imperial government worked.  The fact that there is no mention of a campaign to foment revolution or conduct political killings in southern China during the relevant decades is pretty strong evidence that 1) such a thing never happened or 2) the Opera Rebels were stunningly ineffective.  While silence in the historical record can never really rule out any hypothesis, the first alternative seems to be the much more likely scenario.

I do not mean to imply that martial artists were never involved with political violence.  They certainly were. That is one of the reasons why I find their history to be so interesting.  And there were rebellions and targeted political killings throughout the 19^th century.  But historians have a pretty good grasp on the forces behind most of these (the Taiping Rebellion, the Eight Trigram Rebellion, the Boxer Uprising) and their narratives have little in common with the myth of the Red Boat Rebels.

Violence and Radical Politics in the Cantonese Opera Community, 1850-1911.

In most cases I would be content to treat such accounts as examples of “local folklore” and move on.  Yet in this instance some caution is in required.  To begin with, the plays staged by various Cantonese Opera troops often focused on heroic feats that required their actors to be highly skilled martial artists.  Opera troops actually competed with one another to be the first to demonstrate a new style, or to stage the most spectacular battles.  As such, they really were an important source of innovation in the southern Chinese martial arts.

While the mythology of Red Boat Rebels may be highly historically implausible, the earlier (and less embroidered) account of Leung Jan studying Wing Chun with two retired performers in the wake of the Red Turban Revolt is actually somewhat plausible.  We may not be able to confirm the existence or life histories of Leung Yee Tai or Wong Wah Bo to the same degree as Leung Jan, but there is nothing about their involvement with the martial arts that challenges credulity.  While a little shadowy, it is entirely possible that such individuals did have something to do with the development of Wing Chun and, truth be told, quite a few other southern martial arts.

It is also hard to simply dismiss the tradition of the Red Boat Rebels out of hand.  Opera companies in the Pearl River Delta did occasionally involve themselves in local political controversies.  Some of these events even assumed a stridently anti-government and violent character.  While these actions never actually took the form of anything described in the Wing Chun legends, it is pretty clear that later story tellers and “historians” had a lot of good material to work with.

I propose that our current tradition linking Cantonese Opera singers to both the creation of Wing Chun and to the prosecution of a violent anti-Qing revolutionary campaign came about through the fusion of two separate half-remembered historical episodes.  These were brought together by later storytellers during the middle of the 20^th century.  The older of these two traditions focused on the role of the Cantonese Opera companies in the siege of Guangzhou and conquest of Foshan during the Red Turban Revolt in 1854-1855.  I suspect that many of my readers will be at least somewhat familiar with these events.  They have been mentioned in the Wing Chun literature for years, though they are rarely treated in the depth that they deserve.

The best historical discussion of the Red Turban Revolt available can still be found in Frederic Wakeman’s classic text, Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839-1861 (California University Press, 1966).  It would not be hard to write a book on these events, but they are usually overshadowed by the larger, more destructive, Taiping Rebellion which was happening further to the north at the same time.  At some point I hope to do a series of posts focusing on the Red Turban Revolt, but I have yet to find the time get started on that project.

It is often assumed that the uprising in Guangdong was simply the local expression of the larger Taiping Rebellion which was gripping much of central China.  That is certainly what local officials in Guangzhou argued as they sent reports back to the throne.  But as Wakeman and others have demonstrated, this was not the case.  The Red Turban Revolt was for the most part an independent uprising that resulted from local mismanagement.  It actually started as a simple tax revolt which spiraled badly out of control.

One of the dozen or so main leaders of this group was an opera performer named Li Wenmao.  He managed to put together a large fighting force that had at its core a number of the region’s many traveling opera societies.  Li is remembered for entering the fight in full costume, something that B. J. ter Harr reports in a number of other uprisings in the middle of the 19^th century.  As Holcombe has already pointed out, the moral and political rhetoric of the theater proved to be an effective means of rallying the masses in more than one late Qing uprising.

The image of costumed opera singers fighting the government evidently left a great impression on the local countryside.  It also made a real impression on the Governor who promptly banned the performance of public vernacular opera and ordered the rebel opera singers to be arrested and executed.  The survival of the local government seemed in doubt in 1854.  Yet following their eventual victory the political and economic elite of the province unleashed a white terror that saw the execution of nearly one million rebels, secret society members, bandits and opera singers.

It took decades for the Cantonese Opera community to recover from Li Wenmao’s disastrous and ill planned revolt.  Still, these events help to frame some of the facts that we do know.  Leung Yee Tai and Wong Wah Bo may have been living with Leung Jan and teaching him martial arts precisely because Cantonese Opera performances were illegal and it was dangerous for former performers to be out and about.  The very fact that they survived the revolt (and did not follow the retreating opera army to their new “Taiping kingdom” in the north) would also seem to be pretty strong circumstantial evidence that they had never really been swept up in the violence (the repeated assertions of modern folklore not withstanding).

Still, the Cantonese Opera community demonstrated that they were quite dangerous as a group and capable of impressive levels of violence.  In retrospect these individuals have been remembered with something like awe.  Yet at the time they were probably best remembered for the immense destruction and loss of life that they helped to foment.

One of the most important things about the Red Turban Revolt that modern Wing Chun students usually overlook is its spontaneous and almost apolitical nature.  In retrospect it is easy to see this event on the horizon.  The government’s revenue collection tactics (Guangdong’s taxes were the only funds available to finance the Qing’s war with the Taipings) along with other sociological forces had turned southern China into a veritable powder keg.  Still, it was impossible to know when the explosion would occur or the form that it would take.

Unsurprisingly mounting taxes turned out to be the spark that ignited the bomb.  The violence started by pitting secret society members involved in the gambling trade against the government.  It quickly spread through a series of bloody reprisals and counter-strikes to include more or less every secret society chapter and bandit group in the country.  These groups coalesced into loose armies intent of sacking various towns and cities, and in the process they recruited tens of thousands of desperate peasant “soldiers” who were looking for economic relief and a change in management.

Kim (“The Heaven and Earth Society and the Red Turban Rebellion in Late Qing China.” Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences.  Vol. 3, Issue 1.  2009) provides a good overview of the various major “chiefs” of the movement.  However the one thing that really stands out about the revolt is their relative lack of coordination, or even a common purpose.  Some elements of the rebellion were driven by a familiar brand of peasant utopianism, while others seem to have been in it mainly for the money.  While the secret society chant “Oppose the Qing, Restore the Ming” was heard throughout the uprising, no one appears to have had any plan for actually fulfilling the second half of the couplet.

While we see Cantonese Opera performers resorting to violence and lashing out against the government in the Red Turban Revolt, they are not the politically motivated, highly dedicated, undercover organization described in the Wing Chun creation story.  This was an outbreak of community violence more in the mold of Robin Hood than James Bond.

This would not be the last time that the Pearl River Delta would see opera performers taking an interest in radical politics and the promotion of revolution.  Opera companies were commercial undertakings and they succeeded by telling the sorts of stories that people were willing to pay to hear.  Most of these scripts focused either on martial heroics or love stories with happy endings.  For reasons that I cannot fathom popular sentiment seems to have demanded that love stories in novels end in tragedy but those on the stage must resolve into a haze of bliss.

Nevertheless, opera companies would occasionally find some success by running a politically motivated play that tapped into an important public conversation.  The anti-opium and anti-gambling crusades of the late 19^th and early 20^th century found expression in new Cantonese plays that went on to enjoy some popularity.

In the last decade of the Qing dynasty a group of young revolutionaries and students took note of this phenomenon and decided to use it to their advantage.  With the backing of the Tongmenhui, Sun Yat Sen’s revolutionary group, about two dozen new “political” opera companies were formed to spread the gospel of nationalism and revolution throughout southern China.

Historians from both the nationalist and communist parties have tended to valorize the efforts and success of these groups.  They certainly did help to raise the consciousness of the masses in southern China.  While very few of their techniques were totally unique they did help to popularize certain innovations, such as singing librettos in modern vernacular Cantonese and they experimented with the staging of western style spoken plays.  The best short discussion of this movement can be found in Virgil K. Y. Ho’s volume Understanding Canton: Rethinking Popular Culture in the Republican Period(Oxford University Press, 2006).

Like other sorts of opera companies these “revolutionary troops” traveled from place to place.  Often this happened in Red Boats.  While traditionally associated with Cantonese Opera in the popular imagination, the iconic Red Boats were actually something of a late innovation. B. E. Ward (“Red Boats of the Canton Delta: A Chapter in the Historical Sociology of the Chinese Opera.” Proceedings of the International Conference on Sinology.  Academia Sinica: Taipei, 1981.) notes that the first reports of specially constructed Red Boats do not occur until the 1850s.

Given the decades long prohibition of Cantonese Opera in the middle of the 1850s, they cannot have become common until the more peaceful late 19^thcentury.  Ho indicates that the boats actually reached the peak of their popularity in the 1920s, and then rapidly declined in the middle of the 20^thcentury.  On those grounds alone it is clear that the strong association between Wing Chun and the Red Boat Opera singers is more likely a product of the 1920s-1930s than the 1820s-1830s as it does not appear that this symbolic complex would have meant as much to individuals from the earlier period.

The revolutionary opera companies of the early 20^th century were a very short lived, if memorable, phenomenon.  Most of these companies seem to have appeared around 1905, and few survived much past the actual 1911 revolution.  Going to the opera was a popular form of diversion, and audiences (quite reasonably) expected to be entertained in the fashion to which they were accustomed.  This meant loud music, vulgar lyrics, predictable plots and impressive costumes.  What they did not want was to pay good money to listen a political lecture.

The revolutionary troupes had another problem.  The Cantonese Opera Guild in Guangzhou refused to accept them as members.  This appears to have mostly been a reflection of their chronic inability to attract large audiences or sell tickets.  As a result they were actually prohibited from playing on any stage associated with the Opera guild.  Of course this included most of the venues that could raise a decent crowd.

Lastly, while these individuals were “revolutionary” in their politics and ideological orientation (many of the companies explicitly backed Sun Yat Sen) they were much more conservative in their methods.  These troops were dedicated to the pen rather than the sword.  They sought to spread the revolution by educating peasants, not by assassinating local officials.  They were drawn to the stage because of its propaganda value, not its association with costumes, disguises, gangsters or ducking out of town under the cover of darkness.

Again, this is not to say that secret societies were never involved in the revolutionary project.  After all, Sun Yat Sen’s Tongmenghui itself was a secret society.  Nor do I want to imply that political killings never happened.  The late Qing and early Republic eras saw an uptick in assassinations and political murders.  But once again, these attacks were carried out by terrorist, mercenaries and government agents using very modern guns and bombs.  Revolutionary opera companies were not either side’s weapon of choice.

The Red Boat Revolutionaries: Creating a Legend

A very interesting picture has emerged from the preceding conversation.  There are at least two periods in the late Qing and early Republic era when factions within the Cantonese Opera community became very visibly involved in radical politics.  Both of these eras were short, but highly visible.  In fact, they were exactly the sort of thing that was likely to imprint itself on the popular imagination.

The first of these occurred in 1854-1855 when Li Wenman led a large number of companies into an open uprising against the government (and helping to lay siege to Guangzhou) in the midst of the Red Turban Revolt.  Far from being covert, most of this violence occurred on the battlefield.  The political motivations of the major leaders of the uprising were far from unified.  One group escaped the government’s victory in Guangdong to establish their own Taiping Kingdom in the north.  Other factions, including many of the bandit and secret society chiefs, appear to have been motivated mostly by the promise of spoils.  The tens of thousands of peasant recruits who filled out the various armies were motivated mostly by physical hunger and economic desperation.  While highly destructive and dedicated to the overthrow of the local government, the Red Turban Revolt was in some respects surprisingly apolitical, especially in comparison to the ongoing Taiping Rebellion in central and northern China.

If you skip forward 50 years another group of radical opera singers appears.  These individuals are dedicated political revolutionaries.  They are ideologically and politically sophisticated, and they seek to spread their radical agenda through the many small theaters and stages that they visited.  Like everyone one else along the Pearl River Delta they journeyed by boat, often in the Red Boats that signaled the arrival of a traveling opera companies.  While never very commercially successful, they made their presence known throughout southern China and then they disappeared, almost as rapidly as they had emerged.

We now have all of the pieces to begin to build a new theory of origins of Red Boats Revolutionaries in the Wing Chun creation myth.  I should point out that this is just a theory and one that probably needs additional refinement and revision.  Given the nature of the discussion I can only marshal circumstantial evidence in its favor, but it may be an idea worth considering.

As Wing Chun started to gain popularity in the late 1920s and 1930s it became necessary to repackage discussions of the art’s history and origins in ways that were compatible with the basic pattern of the Hung Mun schools (all of which claimed an origin from Shaolin) and the expectations of potential students (who wanted a story to tell them what this new art was all about).  Story tellers in the 1930s and 1940s (individuals like Ng Chung So) would have been alive during the final years of the Qing dynasty and may have remembered the revolutionary opera companies on their Red Boats, spreading radical ideology in their wake.  Most of their students, however, would have been too young to have any firsthand knowledge of these events.

In an attempt to bring the story of Leung Yee Tai and Wong Wah Bo into conformation with the highly popular Shaolin ethos, the distant memory of the violent 1854 uprising may have been conflated with the more recent revolutionary opera companies to create the vision of a group that sought to use violent means to overthrow the government while “staying undercover” in their daily lives.  Stories of such groups, often with reference to various secret societies, were rife in southern Chinese folklore and were particularly common in the martial arts tales of the “rivers and lakes.”  In fact, given the fading memories of these two sets of radical opera performers, it seems rather natural that they would fall into this commonly available archetypal pattern.

Adopting this new synthesis would also have the added benefit of giving both Wong Wah Bo and Leung Yee Tai (and hence modern Wing Chun) some real revolutionary credibility.  This could only be helpful given how popular “revolutionary” rhetoric was in the 1930s.  It might also have helped to provide Wing Chun with some rhetorical cover since anyone who examined the art would immediately discover that it was dominated not by the working class (like the more popular Choy Li Fut) but by wealthy property owners and conservative right-wing political factions.

Conclusion

The provincial archives of southern China contain no evidence that would point to a campaign of targeted political killings and other subversive activities by revolutionary Cantonese opera companies because such groups did not exist.  Most opera companies were more concerned with eeking out a living, and those that may have been associated with secret societies appear to have been smarter than to go around murdering local leaders.

This does not mean that these groups ignored politics.  In fact, there were two very notable periods when they became involved in the political process.  The current myth of the Red Boat Rebels may be a mid 20^th century conflation of these two memories into a single event.  This new construction allowed Wing Chun to connect itself more fully to the revolutionary rhetoric of the southern Chinese martial arts even though the system has a history of reactionary associations and behaviors.  It also provides additional evidence that the Republic era (from the 1920s-1940s) was a critically formative period in the creation of the modern Wing Chun identity and mythos.

oOo

If you enjoyed this post you might also want to see: The Red Spear Society: Origins of a Northern Chinese Martial Arts Uprising

oOo

Introduction

Welcome to “Chinese Martial Arts in the News.”  I recently finished the heavy lifting on my draft chapter, so I am now returning to a normal posting schedule. Thanks for your collective patience! A (long overdue) news update seems like the perfect way to ease back into things.

For new readers, this is a semi-regular feature here at Kung Fu Tea in which we review media stories that mention or affect the traditional fighting arts.  In addition to discussing important events, this column also considers how the Asian hand combat systems are portrayed in the mainstream media.

While we try to summarize the major stories over the last month, there is always a chance that we may have missed something.  If you are aware of an important news event relating to the TCMA, drop a link in the comments section below.  If you know of a developing story that should be covered in the future feel free to send me an email.

Its been way too long since our last update so let’s get to the news!

News from all Over

A number of this month’s news items highlight the varied intersections between the martial arts and politics.  As such, it seems appropriate to lead off with recent developments at the Shaolin temple.  The venerable Buddhist monastery (and spiritual home of the Chinese martial arts) has once again found itself at the center of controversy. Seeking to get ahead of new government policy directives designed to limit the independence of Chinese religious movements from the state and Communist Party, the temple’s leadership have decided to take a much more visible and proactive role in promoting “patriotism” (rather than simply Buddhism) in the monks’ public performance.  This is actually a somewhat nuanced topic as Chinese Buddhist monasteries have never been truly independent of the state and Shaolin, in particular, already carries a patriotic reputation.  Still, the move has inspired some controversy and much discussion.  A good overview of all this can be found in the South China Morning Post article titled: “Red flag for Buddhists? Shaolin Temple ‘takes the lead’ in Chinese patriotism push.”

Here is a sample of the sort of pushback that has been encountered:

Tsui Chung-hui, of the University of Hong Kong’s Centre of Buddhist Studies, said Buddhist scripture already required its followers to respect the state.

“The government does not need to take pains to promote [this] and monasteries also do not need to pander to politics,” Tsui said on Tuesday. “They should let monks dedicate themselves to Buddhism and not waste their time performing various political propaganda activities.”

China has recently come under the spotlight for its efforts to clamp down on minority religions including Islam and Christianity, which it associates with foreign influence or ethnic separatism. Mosques and churches flying the national flag have become an increasingly common sight in China amid the crackdown.

Interested readers may also want to check out this follow-up article critically examining the state of Buddhism in China, including multiple discussions of the compromised situation of the Shaolin Temple.

From questions of patriotism and political interference, we now turn to controversies over animal welfare.  Certain martial artists in Jiaxing, in the eastern province of Zhejiang, have recently been making waves with their own brand of “bull fighting.” While various types of bull sacrifices and worship can be found across the ancient world, this particular practice seems to be a mix of the old and new.  Discursively attributed to the Hui Muslim minority, the practice (which actually resembles steer wrestling minus the horses) was first demonstrated nationally in the 1984 Ethnic Minority Games, and was recognized as a martial art only in 2008. As with so many other “rediscovered” martial arts, the hope seems to be that the practice will increase tourism in the region.

While a seemingly odd story, the more I think about this one the more important it becomes. On a purely theoretical level, it raises questions about the boundaries of what we might consider the “martial arts,” and how they are constructed and negotiated. I suspect that in the West common sense would dictate that the martial arts are a social activity between humans, rather than humans and animals.  And yet this story also reminds me that countless Chinese language books and articles on the martial arts (even scholarly one’s) start off with a straight faced assertion that the Chinese martial arts were created in the distant past so that people could defend themselves from wild animals. I always dismissed these lines as boilerplate, but now I am starting to wonder what their relationship to the Chinese cultural vision of the martial arts actually is.

Of course, no one is actually being called upon to defend themselves from these bulls.  The animals seem to be very tame and have been trained to tolerate humans throwing them to the ground without putting up much of a fight.  While no bulls are killed in the practice of this “martial art,” it would seem to be open to all of the same ethical questions as North American rodeos.  And yet Western readers are assured that any appearance of cruelty is simply a result of their inability to grasp the “deep cultural significance” of the activity.

If you are wondering what all of this looks like in practice, check out this video.

Our next article, from the English language version of a Chinese tabloid, is more mainstream.  It provides an account of all the ways that a Wushu performance has managed to “Wow US Audiences.” Being a press release by a provincial government’s information office, the most interesting aspect of this article is its total transparency about the organization and purpose of shows like this.

“We hope that our show will serve as a bridge for martial arts lovers overseas to learn more about Chinese culture and appreciate the beauty of China,” said Huang Jing, director of the international communication department of China Intercontinental Communication Center.

The center presented the event, together with the Chinese Wushu Association and the Information Office of Henan Provincial People’s Government.

From Virginia we jump back across the Pacific to Tianjin.  While Huo Yuanjia (the titular founder of the Jingwu Association) is often remembered for the phase of his career that occurred in Shanghai, his hometown roots have also made him a popular figure in Tianjin.  The city just marked his 150th birthday with a major event.

Established on June 30, 1990, the Tianjin Chin Woo Athletic Federation has over 70 branches worldwide. The event aims to leverage the global influence of Huo Yuanjia and the club to strengthen local town’s leading role as the birthplace of the Chin Woo culture. It will help display the city’s profound history and culture as well as carrying forward the Chin Woo spirit to promote solidarity.

“Kung fu helps build road to success, strength.” So claims an article in the English language edition of the China Daily. The story provides an overview of a network of Shaolin associated schools in the United States.  It tends to focus on adolescent students and the benefits that they derive from dedicated martial arts training. As always, its all about the discipline.

What happens when Brazilian capoeira meets Chinese Kung Fu? This is the fascinating premise behind a new documentary which I need to locate a copy of.

What would happen when Chinese kung fu meets Brazilian martial art capoeira?

As a part of the Open Digital Library on Traditional Games, the documentary Capoeira meets Chinese Martial Arts was screened on Monday in Beijing and showed the sparks between the two traditional cultures.

The 10-minute film, co-produced by the embassy of Brazil and Flow Creative Content, in partnership with UNESCO and Tencent, presents the meeting of Brazilian capoeira masters with Chinese martial arts masters in Beijing and Hangzhou.

One part “interesting,” one part “cringeworthy,” all heuristically useful. Vice magazine decided to let its readers ask a Kung Fu master ten questions. Find out what they came up with here.

Are you looking for your next Bruce Lee fix?  If so, check out this interview with on Radio West.

Through his legendary films, Bruce Lee bridged cultural barriers, upended stereotypes and made martial arts a global phenomenon. Biographer Matthew Polly joins us to explore the life of this ambitious actor who grew obsessed with martial arts.

Its been a while since we discussed a martial arts film, but there is a new project on the horizon that looks interesting.  I like Ip Man films, and I like Michelle Yeah, so its good to hear that she is going to star in an Ip Man spinoff.  In addition to the typical movie Wing Chun, this also looks like its going to be a sword/gun-fu movie.  I don’t see any butterfly swords in the trailer, but I think I spotted a couple of kukri.  I have no idea how those knives show up in the storyline, but as a long time kukri collector, I approve.

Finally, an update from the lightsaber combat community.  Ludosport (originally an Italian group which has since expanded globally) recently held their first US National Championship in Elmira NY, not far from Cornell. They were kind enough to let me hang out and do some fieldwork with them for couple days.  And there was even some nice press coverage of the event by the local news.  Check it out. Hopefully I will be blogging about this event in the near future.

Martial Arts Studies

Summer is typically a slow time for academic news, but a lot has been happening in the Martial Arts Studies community.  We have conferences, journals and even facebook discussions to talk about.  But I am afraid that we aren’t going to get to any of that in this update as we have to deal with a deluge of new books.

The first item of business is Prof. Janet O’Shea’s new publication Risk, Failure, Play: What Dance Reveals about Martial Arts Training (Oxford UP, 2018).  Wondering what it is all about?  Check out this interview in which she discusses her latest project.

Or, if you have decided to order a copy, you can do so here.

Janet O’Shea. 2018. Risk, Failure, Play: What Dance Reveals about Martial Arts Training. Oxford UP. 284 pages. $35 USD. Release Date: Nov. 1

Risk, Failure, Play illuminates the many ways in which competitive martial arts differentiate themselves from violence. Presented from the perspective of a dancer and writer, this book takes readers through the politics of everyday life as experienced through training in a range of martial arts practices such as jeet kune do, Brazilian jiu jitsu, kickboxing, Filipino martial arts, and empowerment self-defense. Author Janet OâShea shows how play gives us the ability to manage difficult realities with intelligence and demonstrates that physical play, with its immediacy and heightened risk, is particularly effective at accomplishing this task. Risk, Failure, Play also demonstrates the many ways in which physical recreation allows us to manage the complexities of our current social reality. Risk, Failure, Playintertwines personal experience with phenomenology, social psychology, dance studies, performance studies, as well as theories of play and competition in order to produce insights on pleasure, mastery, vulnerability, pain, agency, individual identity, and society. Ultimately, this book suggests that play allows us to rehearse other ways to live than the ones we see before us and challenges us to reimagine our social reality.

Fuhua Huang and Fan Hong (Eds). 2018. A History of Chinese Martial Arts. Routledge. 256 pages. $133 HC. Release Date: October 3.

Chinese martial arts have a long, meaningful history and deep cultural roots. They blend the physical components of combat with strategy, philosophy and tradition, distinguishing them from Western sports.

A History of Chinese Martial Arts is the most authoritative study ever written on this topic, featuring contributions from leading Chinese scholars and practitioners. The book provides a comprehensive overview of all types of Chinese martial arts, from the Pre-Qin Period (before 222 BC) right up to the present day in the People’s Republic of China, with each chapter covering a different period in Chinese history. Including numerous illustrations of artefacts, weaponry and historical drawings and documents, this book offers unparalleled insight into the origins, development and contemporary significance of martial arts in China.

Tim Trash. 2018. Chinese Martial Arts and Media Culture: Global Perspectives (Martial Arts Studies). Rowman & Littlefield. 306 pages. $128 Hard Cover. Release Date: October 16

Signs and images of Chinese martial arts increasingly circulate through global media cultures. As tropes of martial arts are not restricted to what is considered one medium, one region, or one (sub)genre, the essays in this collection are looking across and beyond these alleged borders. From 1920s wuxia cinema to the computer game cultures of the information age, they trace the continuities and transformations of martial arts and media culture across time, space, and multiple media platforms.

Paul Bowman (ed). 2018. The Martial Arts Studies Reader. Rowman & Littlefield. 244 Pages. $44 Paper Back. Release Date: Nov. 15

Today we are witnessing the global emergence and rapid proliferation of Martial Arts Studies – an exciting and dynamic new field that studies all aspects of martial arts in culture, history, and society. In recent years there have been a proliferation of studies of martial arts and race, gender, class, nation, ethnicity, identity, culture, politics, history, economics, film, media, art, philosophy, gaming, education, embodiment, performance, technology and many other matters. Given the diversity of topics and approaches, the question for new students and researchers is one of how to orientate oneself and gain awareness of the richness and diversity of the field, make sense of different styles of academic approach, and organise one’s own study, research and writing.

The Martial Arts Studies Reader answers this need, by bringing together pioneers of the field and scholars at its cutting edges to offer authoritative and accessible insights into its key concerns and areas. Each chapter introduces and sets out an approach to and a route through a key issue in a specific area of martial arts studies. Taken together or in isolation, the chapters offer stimulating and exciting insights into this fascinating research area. In this way, The Martial Arts Studies Reader offers the first authoritative field-defining overview of the global and multidisciplinary phenomena of martial arts and martial arts studies.

Raul Sanchez Garcia. 2018. The Historical Sociology of Japanese Martial Arts. Routledge. Out Now. $54 for Kindle.

This is the first long-term analysis of the development of Japanese martial arts, connecting ancient martial traditions with the martial arts practised today. The Historical Sociology of Japanese Martial Arts captures the complexity of the emergence and development of martial traditions within the broader Japanese Civilising Process.

The book traces the structured process in which warriors’ practices became systematised and expanded to the Japanese population and the world. Using the theoretical framework of Norbert Elias’s process-sociology and drawing on rich empirical data, the book also compares the development of combat practices in Japan, England, France and Germany, making a new contribution to our understanding of the socio-cultural dynamics of state formation. Throughout this analysis light is shed onto a gender blind spot, taking into account the neglected role of women in martial arts.

The Historical Sociology of Japanese Martial Arts is important reading for students of Socio-Cultural Perspectives in Sport, Sociology of Physical Activity, Historical Development of Sport in Society, Asian Studies, Sociology and Philosophy of Sport, and Sports History and Culture. It is also a fascinating resource for scholars, researchers and practitioners interested in the historical and socio-cultural aspects of combat sport and martial arts.

Raúl Sánchez García is Lecturer in sociology of sport at the School of Sports Science, Universidad Europea Madrid, Spain and President of the Sociology of Sport working group within the Spanish Federation of Sociology (FES). He has practiced diverse combat sports and martial arts and holds a shōdan in Aikikai aikidō.

I should note that Professor Garcia published the first chapter his book as an article in the latest issue of the journal.  Read it here for free.

Lu Zhouxiang. 2018. Politics and Identity in Chinese Martial Arts. Routledge. $45 kindle. Out now!

Chinese martial arts is considered by many to symbolise the strength of the Chinese and their pride in their history, and has long been regarded as an important element of Chinese culture and national identity. Politics and Identity in Chinese Martial Arts comprehensively examines the development of Chinese martial arts in the context of history and politics, and highlights its role in nation building and identity construction over the past two centuries.

This book explores how the development of Chinese martial arts was influenced by the ruling regimes’ political and military policies, as well as the social and economic environment. It also discusses the transformation of Chinese martial arts into its modern form as a competitive sport, a sport for all and a performing art, considering the effect of the rapid transformation of Chinese society in the 20^th century and the influence of Western sports. The text concludes by examining the current prominence of Chinese martial arts on a global scale and the bright future of the sport as a unique cultural icon and national symbol of China in an era of globalisation.

Politics and Identity in Chinese Martial Arts is important reading for researchers, students and scholars working in the areas of Chinese studies, Chinese history, political science and sports studies. It is also a valuable read for anyone with a special interest in Chinese martial arts.

You can read my review of Politics and Identity in Chinese Martial Arts here.

Kung Fu Tea on Facebook

A lot has happened on the Kung Fu Tea Facebook group over the last month.  We watched vintage guoshu performances from the 1930s, read about new exhibits in Hong Kong, and discussed the problem of extremist political groups in the martial arts! Joining the Facebook group is also a great way of keeping up with everything that is happening here at Kung Fu Tea.

If its been a while since your last visit, head on over and see what you have been missing!

A Preamble

Everyone knew that the situation was deteriorating, and recent events had sensitized government officials to the growing threat of extremist groups within the area’s largest martial arts networks. Local immigration and a shift in the neighborhood’s religious complexion had brought tensions in one community to a boiling point.  Groups of previously reliable citizens were protesting outside of a newly constructed place of worship shouting both racial and religious epitaphs.

Law enforcement wasn’t sure whether to move against the protesters or to just try and keep the groups separated until their anger burnt itself out. From their perspective it was difficult to know if either side actually deserved any sympathy at all.  The supposed “victims” of these violent abuses had been filling the local courts with petty crimes and nuisance lawsuits for years.

Still, the public safety officials all agreed that it was a bad sign when a group of aggressive martial artists appeared right at epicenter of trouble just to conduct some “public workouts.” The group had recruited a new leader, a regionally famous fighter with a reputation for protecting “the people.” They claimed it was all necessary. Someone had to protect the community from these “outsiders.”  That is when the torches were lit.

The Problem of Violence

The still fledgling field of martial arts studies has recently turned its attention to the problem of extremist political violence and its potential connections to the martial arts. Given that so many groups train explicitly to deal with the reality of violence (either to prevent it, or to enact it more efficiently), its odd that this topic is only now gaining visibility.  In the 2017 Martial Arts Studies meetings in Cardiff my good friend Sixt Wetzler delivered a paper laying out a carefully constructed framework for considering the intersection of these issues.  And pointing to the rising prominence of public groups training for violent street battles within the West’s increasingly polarized political atmosphere, I ended my own keynote with a plea for more scholars to take up these issues.

That is not to say that this is easy subject matter. In many cases our research reflects our personal interests and backgrounds. People write papers about embodied training in their favored styles, or address discursive issues in popular films or TV programs. And it is generally good advice to “write what you know.” Yet in moments of social upheaval that advice can lead to a strange myopia.  Few of us are members of extremist organizations, on either the right or the left. And only a handful of martial arts studies scholars have any direct experience in law enforcement or intelligence work. I suspect that (with a few notable exceptions) studies of the intersection of martial arts training and social violence in the modern world lagged behind as it was a research topic without a sizable audience within the field.

It was the appearance of multiple news stories linking the spread of white nationalist hate groups and certain MMA training facilities, fashion labels and fight promotion companies which finally broke this stalemate. Little of what these outlets printed was actually “breaking news.” In February of 2018 Mother Jones published an article titled “The Terrifying Rise of Alt-Right Fight Clubs.” So as to not undersell the story the editor helpfully subtitled the piece (authored by Bryan Schatz) “White nationalists are learning martial arts to prepare for race war.” Much of the same material would later appear in an extended piece in The Guardian titled “Fascist Fight Clubs: How white nationalists use MMA as a recruiting tool.”

The implication of elements of the ever growing MMA community in these recruitment efforts inspired some sustained engagement. This unfolded on Facebook groups and blogs, and Paul Bowman has provided a nice summary of these debates here and here. Following the lead of the reporters in these pieces, much of the discussion has so far focused on how we should conceptualize the mixed martial arts and their connection to these efforts.  Are they truly violent sports?  Is there something about them that makes them particularly useful to extremist groups at this moment in history? And perhaps most intriguingly, is there an inherent conceptual connection between the sorts of “violence” that one sees in the octagon, and that which has appeared on the streets.

These are all interesting questions.  Yet in this essay I would like to outline another set of concerns that is likely to take this discussion in several different directions.  And that leads us back to the account of a single violent encounter in the preamble to this essay.  When and where did this happen?  And in what respects is knowing the answer to that question important? What aspects of community violence are historically and culturally bounded, and when do we cross over into the realm of institutionally or structurally determined behaviors?

It would not be hard to come up with several historical incidents that fit the events I outlined above. Some could be as old as the classical world, while others might appear in the headlines of a contemporary European paper. In point of fact, the “regionally famous martial arts teacher” in my account is none other than Zhao San-duo, a late 19^thcentury Plum Blossom master who, while not directly involved in the Boxer Uprising, helped to light the fuse of anti-foreign and anti-Christian violence that would bring Imperial China to its knees.

This is not to say that the sort of xenophobia that was seen in late 19^th century China, and the Western ideology of racial supremacy seen within groups like the California based Rise Above Movement (RAM, a violent extremist group profiled in both of the previously cited newspaper articles) are in any way identical. While both sets of ideas focused on the need to “protect” a community from perceived racial or religious threats, the historical, cultural and social framing of these ideologies are quite distinct. That is critical to remember, especially as government or local communities seek to address the spread of violent ideologies.

Yet the ease with which one might fit this outline to several cases suggests that there may also be structural and institutional issues that need to be taken into account. The association of martial art training with political or social extremism is not a new phenomenon.  Nor is it restricted to only one side of the political spectrum. For every alt-right MMA club that one finds in California, I suspect that one will be able to locate a Marxist boxing gym in France or Italy.

Nor, when examined in historical terms, does there seem to be a very strong correlation between the sort of martial art being practiced and the probability that it will be radicalized by an anti-systemic group. In Japan it has always been the traditional Budos, with their strong associations with a (mostly imagined) Samurai past, that are the most likely to appeal to both violent ultra-nationalist groups and organized crime syndicates. Yet I doubt that many American MMA practitioners would look at these judo, kendo or aikido schools and find their practices to be notably “violent” by the standards of televised UFC bouts.

One challenge that we face is that since many of us are directly involved in the practice of the martial arts, it can be difficult to see beyond the boundaries of our own experiences and communities. In effect, we have a difficult time perceiving our communities as an outsider with different goals might. This is a distinct disadvantage when it comes to understanding why a particular extremist group might be interested in infiltrating a practice or what their goals might actually be.

To gain some clarity on these issues we might begin by taking a step back from the martial arts themselves and considering what we know about the ways that violent extremist groups typically operate. This is a subject that has been studied extensively by both social scientists and law enforcement personal. While students of martial arts studies have a unique perspective to bring to the table, we should note that there is already a well developed body of empirical observation and theoretical literature that we can draw from.

One of the first things that a student of terrorism might point out, for instance, is that we should carefully consider both halves of the phrase “extremist organization.” While we tend to put a lot of mental emphasis on a group’s views or ideology (often because they are horrifying), if we wish to understand what they actually do on a day to day basis we must remember that they are basically a voluntary social organization.  To survive in the short run they must solve immediate problems like generating a funding stream, recruiting personal, managing their public image and coordinating with other actors. Any extremist organization that fails at these tasks will not be a problem for every long.

To better accomplish these basic goals radical organizations occasionally insert themselves into a wide range of social movements, many of which do not appear to have anything to do with violence.  Sports organizations, on-line communities, new religious movements, musical sub-cultures and international charity organizations have all proved to popular targets for ideologically motivated violent groups. Each of these provides opportunities for extremist organizations to craft communities in which they can radicalize members.  In some cases these cover organizations also help to raise money, operate across international borders or improve the group’s “brand.”

When seen in this light it is not at all surprising that violent organizations, either in the current era or in 19^thcentury China, would be interested in hand combat schools. Yet I suspect that the actual martial arts skills gained are not the most critical aspect of their organizational calculus. In modern society martial arts clubs are ubiquitous to the point of being almost invisible. Whether an ultranationalist judo club in Japan, or an MMA school in the United States, both organizations provide groups with a chance to cultivate marginal and dissatisfied individuals in an environment that is likely to generate little suspicion.

From a social scientific perspective these recruitment drives are actually quite enlightening. As martial artists we tend to mentally divide our actives into the serious business of physical training and “everything else” that goes along with being a member of an organization. This second category might include such banal interactions as chatting in the locker room, carpooling to a local tournament or meeting up at the gym for strength training.  The friendships we create, the on-line media we consume, the social community that we build, all of these things are typically seen as “secondary” to the serious business of physical training.

Yet when trying to understand the function and social value of a martial arts school, we need to be willing to reverse this way of thinking.  In actual fact, it is within the realm of the secondary where we find these practices’ greatest value. As any martial arts teacher can attest, it is the friendships that are made in a training hall that keep many students coming back week after week. It is there that they are exposed to the media that their fellow classmates consume. And it is largely through these “secondary” social channels that martial arts communities articulate what their practices mean, and hence what their identity actually is.  Embodied experience is never self-interpreting, which is precisely why so many political, national and social groups have found the martial arts to be useful over the last hundred years or so.

Again, trends within the Boxer Rebellion help to illustrate this basic relationship between a group’s seeming primary purpose (to impart individual skills) and its actual social utility (to reinforce group bonding). Historical and eyewitness accounts suggest that relatively few Chinese Christian were killed with the sorts of hand to hand combat techniques that were taught by the local martial arts communities that the Yihi Boxers drew from. Instead we find accounts of execution squads rounding up local Christians, locking them in their own churches, setting the building on fire and shooting anyone who tried to leap out. Paul Cohen noted that fire, rather than Kung Fu, was the Boxer’s weapon of mass destruction. While we tend to fixate on their claims to magical invulnerability in hand to hand combat, it is often forgotten that much of their magic dealt with the control of fire as they sought to burn entire neighborhoods to the ground.

Does this then indicate that their martial arts training was useless on the battlefield?  Not at all. It was on the boxing grounds of Shandong that the Boxers who would terrorize Beijing were welded together into a somewhat cohesive, radicalized, social unit. It was these “secondary” aspects their martial arts training that laid the necessary social foundation for the tragedy of 1900.

Likewise, when reviewing the footage of recent riots that can be found online, it seems unlikely that a few months of BJJ or MMA (or HEMA) training is going to make the average skinhead that much more effective in a messy brawl with Antifa or law enforcement.  I am as much an advocate of martial arts training as anyone, but the most important function that these clubs serve is likely to organize their members into a somewhat disciplined unit, to coordinate with other likeminded cells, and then to get their guys onto the streets. Certainly strength training and a basic familiarity with fighting might help.  But at the end of the day individuals are motived to fight for communities, not training styles.

Implications

All of this may seem obvious.  I hope that it does. Yet approaching extremist groups from an institutional perspective reveals important strategies for understanding and deterring their spread. Perhaps the first of these is that there need not be any direct ideological correlation between the types of venues that groups use for recruitment and their ultimate political or social goals.  For instance, modern MMA, 19^thcentury Plum Blossom and traditional European Longsword are three very different martial arts both in terms of cultural background, social structure and patterns of imagined violence. Yet each has proved to be an attractive target for radical groups looking to recruit members and coordinate their agendas.

We commit a grave error by treating MMA as some sort of “gateway” to the world of social extremism due to its inherently “violent” or competitive nature. While conceptually interesting, debates as to whether we might legitimately call what happens in the octagon “violence” in the same ways as a deadly political street fight misses a critical point.  There is little violence in Scandinavian new religious movements, yet they too have become, at times, a site of extremist recruitment.  There are good reasons why groups might want to recruit members from charities or other organizations that have no visible connection to violence at all. I am sure that if we looked closely enough we would also find some level recruitment happening at Wing Chun training halls, karate dojos and Kali schools. What is critical is the way these activities can be discursively framed and deployed, and not necessarily anything inherent in their embodied practice.

At the current moment MMA is probably attractive to extremist groups simply because it is so popular with young males generally and is aligned with several trends in popular culture. Its most important assets may not be the brutality of its practice, but the fact that it has crafted a fashionable pop culture aesthetic. Indeed, it may simply be the practice’s “soft power” that make it an attractive target for subversion.  Its highly networked structure also make it both commercially flexible and a decent platform for the sorts of networking that extremist groups may seek to engage in.

If these social characteristics make martial arts organizations attractive to extremist groups (on both the left and right), they also suggest some options for deterring their spread. Consider, for instance, the role of social capital in this type of institutional framework.  “Social capital” refers to the decentralized bonds of trust and reciprocity that are created within small communities that can then be applied to larger networks.

All group interactions create social capital to one degree or another.  Yet they do not always create equal amounts of trust, (bonding capital) nor are they equally good at extending this radius of community (bridging capital). When we look at the specific MMA schools and fight promotions implicated in the news articles cited earlier, it becomes apparent that they are in many ways pretty marginal cases.  This makes sense as, once created, communities rich in social capital tend to be somewhat conservative in character (even if very supportive of their members). My prior research looking at religion and terrorism suggested that communities which were rich in social capital were more resistant to radicalization attempts. Relatively disconnected and marginal groups tended to be low hanging fruit for extremist organizations both because they had less to lose, and less ability to resist corrosive social discourses.

This suggests that one important strategy for containing the spread of extremist ideologies in the martial arts is to focus more attention of building healthy communities with many points of intersection, both with other hand combat groups and the community at large.  Such organizations are much harder targets for radicalization. However, containment strategies that focus on state surveillance, or anything else that corrodes trust (and therefore social capital) within the community, might backfire in unexpected ways.  If we weaken the bonds of reciprocity either within martial arts groups or between them, social capital theory suggest that we might actually increase the probability that these movements are captured by anti-systemic actors. [Incidentally, efforts by the late Qing dynasty to monitor and suppress its own hand combat schools seems to support this hypothesis, but that is an argument for a different post.]

The modern martial arts function as a type of social machinery. Like any machine they perform work, the normative implications of which have more to do with the hand at the controls than any inherent property of the practice itself. It is the fundamental amorality of the martial arts that allows them to be co-opted by both nationalist forces and advocates of regional identity, often at the same time.  Likewise, the same embodied experience of kickboxing or rolling might be used to support discursive structures that emphasize a sense of the profound human equality in some circles, or radical hierarchies of difference in others.  What really matters is the supplementary forces that construct and give meaning to these experiences.

An institutional approach to the problem of extremism not only suggests viable strategies for containing these movements (a topic that I hope to return to in a future essay), but it also reveals something critical about modern hand combat groups. It is often the secondary and seemingly supplementary aspects of our practice that have the most profound impact on the community around us.  We neglect them at our peril, both as scholars and concerned martial artists.

oOo

If you enjoyed this essay you might also want to see: Government Subsidization of the Martial Arts and the Question of “Established Churches”

oOo

***I hope that the following guest post will be the first entry in a new occasional series here at Kung Fu Tea. While I am neither a linguist or historian of ancient China, I have found myself regularly attending the Cornell Chinese Classics Colloquium (CCCC) over the last couple of years. This fascinating series of workshops typically invites a visiting graduate student or junior professor to present a reading and translation of an ancient Chinese text of their choosing.  The presenter highlights some puzzles that arise out of their text, either linguistic or historical in nature. This sets the stage for what is often a lively, and always enlightening, discussion.

The only drawback of the CCCC series is that none of the various scholars have yet presented a reading of a martial or military text. This group typically looks at political, literary, religious or even medical documents.  Still, the growing interest in the reconstruction of various Chinese martial arts classics suggests that perhaps we could benefit from a similar effort. Students who are working on their own translation or reconstruction projects should feel free to submit a guest post.  Ideally their essay will introduce both a translation of a specific section of text, and discuss either the linguistic, historical or technical issues that it presents.  Hopefully this will inspire some good discussion. Given that there are very few academics who have translated these sorts of texts professionally, I would suspect that most contributions will come from amateur scholars, graduate students and individuals working on side projects.  As with the CCCC, everyone is coming here to learn, and (charitable) feedback is always welcome.  Enjoy!***

The poetry of motion: Qi Jiguang in verse

By Chad Eisner

When discussing Chinese martial arts classics it is often observed that, for a considerable period, the norm was to render technical information in verse form. Sometimes these verses are even called “songs” by modern martial artists. While this tradition has been kept by some, others have explicitly shunned the practice in favor of more straight forward instructions. Still, the fact remains that a sizable number of martial arts texts from the historical record are written in verse. 

Proponents of the verse method of recording martial arts knowledge cite their ability to communicate more than just sequences of movement, or a specific response to an action.  Properly understood they may also provide a framework for interpreting the technique in different contexts. Of course, verse also serve as a very convenient mnemonic for the memorization of traditions that may have been passed down orally. The issue with that method is that by keeping the language vague and open to interpretation, you make the act of understanding the technical information more difficult. When attempting to translate these poems to another language scholars face a large number of possible readings and reaching a consensus may be difficult.

Translation versus Interpretation

My background is as a (former) professional interpreter. Therefore I am coming at the act of translation from a specific place. Most people do not know the difference between interpretation and translation or that there is a difference between them at all. In the general sense, translation is the art of finding the equivalent words or phrases and interpretation is the act of discerning their meaning within their context. Professionally, “interpretation” happens live with little to no preparation or foreknowledge of what is being said. Translation is the act of transmitting information about things that are unchanging, as in being written down or recorded. 

These two process are related, of course. Translation is a part of interpretation but because interpretation happens live, there are certain methods one must follow in order to ensure that the information and intent of the speaker are being communicated. In translation, since the text exists in a static form, the translator has access to all of the linguistic information during the entire process. This allows a translator to formulate solutions to problems more carefully and thoughtfully. 

The result is that each profession approaches the translation of any text in a slightly different way. The translator looks for (in general) the most accurate and similar translation of each concept, including structure and word choice. The interpreter is more concerned with “equivalency” within the target language rather than a “word for word” approach. This may take the form of restructuring sentences, using different words, or finding completely unique idioms in the target language that serve the same function as the ones being used in the source language. A simple example of this is the greeting in Chinese “Nihao ma?” (你好嗎). Literally, this phrase means “Are you well?” But it is used much more frequently and in a wider context than the English phrase. It is therefore most often translated (or interpreted)  as “hello” as it is used as a generalized greeting in Mandarin the same as the word “hello” functions in English. These are generalizations and there are several schools of thought for both translating and interpreting that take harder or softer stances on these issues. 

Expansion and Contraction

When attempting to translate anything, there are certain issues which must be considered as many languages have different solutions to the same problems. One of these is the issue of linguistic expansion and contraction. This is when a single word in the source language cannot be expressed with a single word or “gloss” in the target language. It is necessary then to explain the concept in as concise language as possible to communicate the meaning and intent of the original text. This is a common occurrence in any language, but in written Chinese it happens with considerable frequency and can have lasting effects on the understanding of terms and concepts. 

When translating and interpreting poetry and verse, the job becomes that much harder. Not only does one have to contend with almost intentionally obscure literary allusions and aesthetic styles, but one must now also render it in a similar fashion for the target language. This makes it necessary to approach the task with more of an interpreter’s mind set, being willing to alter things to make them adhere to the same type of experience for the reader, in which ever language there are experiencing it. There are concerns regarding meter, rhyme, structure, devices used and many many more things that are indicative of poetry and verse beyond what is found in prose. 

These factors come together with the nature of poetry and verse to create a very difficult scenario for the translator. There will be numerous ways to translate the same text and none of them will really be more correct than some of the others. In “19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei”, Eliot Weinberger looks at 19 different translations of a four line Chinese poem. Just among the English translations one can find distinct and unique takes on the simple verse. This underscores the fact that there are many ways to interpret what is being said and therefore, many correct translations of any text in verse. 

This is not to say the effort is wasted. It is absolutely possible to render excellent verse to verse translations of songs, poems, and other forms of expressive writing. A good example of this is the song “Les Tomber les Filles “ written by Serge Gainbourg and performed by Franz Gall and translated and performed by the musician April March in 1995. March’s translation of the ’60’s era French pop song displays many of the techniques needed for translation of these types of texts:

Original by Gainsbourg: 

Laisse tomber les filles, laisse tomber les filles

Un jour c’est toi qu’on laissera

Laisse tomber les filles, laisse tomber les filles

Un jour c’est toi qui pleureras

Oui j’ai pleuré mais ce jour-là, non je ne pleurerai pas

Non je ne pleurerai pas

Je dirai c’est bien fait pour toi, je dirai ça t’apprendra

Je dirai ça t’apprendra

Translation by March: 

Hang up the chick habit

Hang it up, daddy,

Or you’ll be alone in a quick

Hang up the chick habit

Hang it up, daddy,

Or you’ll never get another fix

I’m telling you it’s not a trick

Pay attention, don’t be thick

Or you’re liable to get licked

You’re gonna see the reason why

When they’re spitting in your eye

They’ll be spitting in your eye

The first thing one notices is the title of the song. “Les Tomber les Filles” literally means “let the girls fall” or “drop the girls”. March’s translation of “Hang up the Chick Habit” does some fairly impressive things. First, it takes account of time period and chooses a phrasing with ’60 era flavor in the slang term “chick” used as an adjective. This immediately places the language in time and gets the listener into the right mindset. The idiom used in the French is reversed, conceptually, in the English translation. Where in the French we are told to “drop” the girls, the same sentiment is expressed by “hanging up” the habit of womanizing. Because of the nature of idioms and of course musical styles and concerns, finding equivalent phrases based on what they mean rather than the words they use is essential. 

Without going into too much detail on each the lines and their translation, a quick glance at the selection above will reveal that there is a significant difference in the literal meaning of the French and the transition by March. Again, due to the confines of music, restructuring, rephrasing, and finding equivalent words and phrases, not directly translated ones, is necessary. It is the underlying meaning that needs to be addressed and since verse is often used as a tool for delivering information, it is this meaning that needs to be understood before a translation can be rendered.

The question is then brought up, what value is there in the effort to translate and render these verses into Western equivalents? Besides the scholarly and linguistic value that such an exercise provides, it may also be important to the modern practitioner who is purely interested in the content of these texts rather than their academic discussion. Martial artists often take inspiration from these works in their teaching and practice. Making them accessible to more people would seem to be a laudable goal. 

Verse emphasizes form over function, sacrificing clarity. Modern attempts to not only understand the original message but then render it in verse form in the target language is a laborious, but ultimately rewarding, process. I have tried to keep the changes in my own project to a minimum, or in service of the verse structure. I have used my prior experience in Chinese martial arts, specifically Taijiquan, as a base for my interpretation of the techniques. I offer them only as an example of a single interpretation and do not claim authority on the matter. 

In translating the verses of Qi Jiguang into English rhyme, some linguistic and interpretive liberties have been taken. A certain amount of linguistic expansion and contraction is necessary to achieve a proper meter and rhythm that remains internally consistent throughout the text. The form of the verses has also been changed to find an equivalent structure in English that can encompasses the several metrics in the original. 

Verse structure

The verse structure I have chosen for these translations is based on U.S. armed Forces “Cadences” or marching rhymes. I have chosen this form as it is related to the military context, of which the text is a part, and for it’s simplicity. I have imagined (or rendered) it as if these verses were used as a call and response drills for large groups of provincial soldiers. As such I have kept the language on the courser side, although still giving nods to Qi Jiguangs practice of poetry. Although I have little knowledge of classical Chinese Poetic forms, Qi and his fellow military people were often criticized on their writing as being overly simple and naive. Although some did find Qi’s poetry to be pleasing, writers like Shen Defu claimed their success was due to their uneducated audience and the low brow environment of the frontiers and borderlands . 

Settling on the military cadences, I used two forms; a quarter note version and an eighth note version. Most fit better into the eighth note form but there are several that are in the quarter note cadence. 

1. Quarter note: Ta Ta Ta Ta Ta Ta Taaa
2. Eighth note: Ti-Ti Ta Ti-Ti Ta Ti-Ti Ta Ta

Rhyme scheme

The Rhyme scheme I have chosen is a simple AA,BB structure to reflect the simplicity the succinct and brief nature of the originals. The simple rhyme scheme also is a feature of nemonic rhymes to facilitate their memorization. The simple paired scheme is a one that is intuitive to most languages and cultures. 

Voice

At times in the text, the first person is used. At other times the second person being given instructions is used. And at still other times it is unclear on whether the passive or active voice is being used. I have attempted to keep it as consistent as I can. The particulars of Literary Chinese grammar make it sometimes difficult to determine the subject and/or object in the sentence. Again, these factors are in addition to the already mounting factors when the target translation is to be in verse. 

Examples

What follows is a sampling of my attempt. I have chosen the first four entires as they relate to modern Taijiquan practice and are often seen as antecedents of present day techniques. I do not attempt to draw lines of origin or make authoritative statements into the connection between modern naming conventions and Ming Dynasty ones. While the names and many of the positions are similar, the nature of the drawings and the text make it difficult to discern the original intent. Still, these are iconic techniques and positions that form the foundation of many practices today. 

These four entries also provide a good sampling of the various types and flavors of techniques presented. Qi’s text has a few basic structures and approaches. Some are straight forward, step by step instructions. Others are explained in general terms as responses to situations and changing variables. Lastly, Qi ends each verse with a superlative, often making statements of prowess that seem right out of kung fu movies or modern professional wrestling. 

My first attempt tried to take all linguistic information contained in the lines. The resulting translations were in my opinion, too verbose stylistically and did not match the succinct and brief nature of the originals: 

Lazily Tie Your Coat and come to stand outside,

Sink into single whip, with single sudden stride

Without the courage to attack, when your enemy is caught,

The sharpest eyes and the fastest hands will both be all for naught.

While far more skilled and expert translators, like Douglas Wile, have produced excellent translations, I hope to add a small amount of depth by offering a glimpse into what these lines would sound like in verse form. I feel that having them rhyme in this way can give a little extra flavor, and maybe foster more thought about the content of the text. Either way, I accept any and all criticism and know that there will be many errors in my work. These errors are mine but I have tried to accommodate alternate perspectives when available. 

1.

Tie your coat and come outside,

Single Whip with sudden stride,

With out the courage to advance,

Sharp eyes fast hands will have no chance.

懶扎衣出門架子

變下勢霎步單鞭

對敵若無膽向先

空自眼明手便

“Lazily Tie the Coat” begins the set.

Lower your stance and lightly step into Single Whip.

If you lack the courage to attack when facing an enemy,

Your sharp eyes and fast hands will be for naught.

The first verse. The verse is about the technique called “Lazily Tie the Coat”. It states that this is an opening move to the “set” or form (架子 JiaZi). The poetic liberties taken should be obvious. Reframing the same information as a command brought about a more literal yet figurative relationship in the sentence. “Come and stand outside” is used to mean a beginning relating to 出門- literally “out the door”. While it probably means ‘to begin’, keeping the poetic nature of the phrase offers a good equivalent in English.

The interpretation of the passage seems to be more general in its scope. The first two line describe the technique “Lan Zha Yi”-Lazily Tie the Coat and the step into “Single Whip”. Any practitioner of Taijiquan, especially Chen Style, should be able to picture this move in a particular way. The grappling of Lan Zha Yi and the step into Dan Pian (single whip) are ubiquitous in the various styles. Although the illustration of Qi’s move shows a standing position with feet together, a difference from the current practices in Taijiquan, it is reasonable to assume that the name of this technique is focused mainly on the upper body. Very much like Single Whip, Lazy Tie the Coat is an image or mime of an action of tying a long belt around a coat as was done in old China.

The last two stanzas give general advice for fighting. Essentially, take the initiative in an encounter and do not let up. Violence tends to favor the aggressor and if you lack the courage or fortitude to press your attack, it will fail no matter how good your other attributes are. Qi has put an number of these general axioms for combat amongst the verses.

2.

Golden Rooster stands on top,

Present your leg then sideways chop,

Rush in low and trip the bull,

They cry to heaven loud and full.

金雞獨立顚(顛)起

裝腿橫拳相兼

槍背卧牛雙倒

遭着叫苦連天

Jīnjīdúlì diān (diān) qǐ

zhuāng tuǐ héng quán xiāng jiān

qiāng bèi wò niú shuāng dào

zāozhe jiàokǔliántiān

Golden Chicken Stands Alone rises up.

Brandish the leg and cross the fists together.

Thrust forward and turn the back in “Reclining Bull” to throw them.

Those that encounter this move will cry of their hardship to heaven.

This verse differs a bit from the first in that it is more akin to step by step instructions or “plays” denoting martial application. The instructions are for its application in fighting, one assumes in a one on one encounter. Modern practitioners may be more comfortable thinking of this technique as a solo exercise or mime of a combat technique.

However, the verse contains another named technique “卧牛” or “Reclining Bull”. Which seems to indicate a throw where the opponent’s legs are in the air. Essentially hitting the ground supine. One possible interpretation of this technique is a standard “fireman’s carry”. Coming in low and scooping the opponent up and throwing them over your shoulders. I have chosen to translate this technique as “trip the bull” to stay with in meter and rhyme.

3.

Testing Horse was Song Taizu’s,

Stances all can drop and move,

Advance attack, retreat to dodge,

Come in close with a fist barrage.

探馬傳自太祖

諸勢可降可變

進攻退閃蒻生強

接短拳之至善

Testing Horse was taught by Taizu.

Several stances can drop down and change.

Enter to attack and retreat to dodge with full vigor.

Come in close range where the fist’s reach is best.

This verse seems fairly straight forward as well. The first line is worth examination in a few aspects. First the name of this technique “Tan Ma” (探馬) is similar to the Taiji posture, “Gao Tan Ma” 高探馬 often translated as “High Pat on Horse”, it is more likely referring to testing a horse to see if it is able to be saddled. The high outstretched arm being the testing hand and the other arm folded but he side as if holding a saddle. Although like most of the illustrations, it is difficult to match them to real world actions.

The first line makes the claim that this technique was taught by “Taizu” the Emperor of the Song and a frequent figure in martial arts. The intent here seems to be to give the technique a sense of antiquity or lineage. This plays into the idea that traditional martial arts should have long histories. While that is a common idea in modern days, it held true in the Ming Dynasty as well. Several authors bemoan the loss of martial traditions, arts, and methods during their time. And while writers like Mao Yuanyi set out to preserve these traditions in works like the Wubei Zhi, the actual partitioners of the techniques, i.e. the military, were seeing firsthand the power of firearms and gunpowder based weapons. Qi, himself, wrote of the superiority of firearms and later built tactics almost solely around such weapons. Our present text is found in the Jixiaoxinshu, and was intended as a manual for the training of mercenary troops in provincial armies. Even in the introduction to this section, Qi states that “Barehanded fighting is all but useless on the battlefield”, and that he included the fist routines as a kind of exercise for troops. It may be that these troops responded to long histories and lineages more so than the upper classes and hereditary military families.

There is a liberal dose of restructuring in the first line. Trying to encapsulate the idea of antiquity and prestige I opted to go out on a limb. “Testing Horse was Song Taizu’s” seems to fulfill those requirements. This was done entirely for structural reasons and I was able to keep all information intact.

4.

Crossed Single Whip firmly pries it’s way in,

When finding it hard from their kick to defend,

Rush in with continuous, liftings and chops,

Knock down Tai mountain into low stances drop.

拗單鞭黃花緊進

披挑腿左右難防

槍步上拳連劈揭

沉香勢推倒太山

Crossed single whip advances with tight circles.

When you find it difficult to defend kicks from either side,

Rush in with continuous downward and upward chops.

Sink low into the posture, Pushing Mount Tai.

“Ao Dan Bian” or “crossed Single Whip” is a common name and familiar again to practitioners of Taijiquan. The illustration provided by Qi shows the familiar stance of one hand held up in front as if in a chop and the rear hand made into a fist or hooked shape with arms stretched out straight from each other. “Ao” or “crossed” refers to the position of the forward leg to the forward hand which are opposing each other. So, if the right hand is forward the left leg will be forward.

“Dan Bian” or “single whip” refers to the upper body position and the arms. The arms are stretched out from the body and turned so that one hand is behind (often held in a hook gesture) and the other in front. The image is most likely of a mounted rider, holding the reigns with the front hand and the riding crop (bian 鞭) behind. It is a familiar position in opera indicating when the characters are riding in the narrative. In opera too, a long stick called a “bian” is used. The whip in this instance being a riding crop or short stick.

The rest of the verse explains the basic use of the technique. While there are many ways in which to interpret the movements explained, the logic of them seems salient. Qi advocates that his readers be aggressive with their intent and rush in with downward and upward strikes with which to disrupt, or otherwise interfere with, the opponents kicks. Once done, the practitioner sinks low into the stance “pushing Mt. Tai”. Essentially, it appears as if the technique comes in aggressively and then drops low to attack the legs, presumably for a knock down.

oOo

About the Author: Chad Eisner is a martial arts practitioner and instructor in Ann Arbor Michigan, teaching Ma She Tongbei and Taiji Quan. His experience in Chinese martial arts  and as a professional interpreter have naturally lead to a fascination with the translation of Ming dynasty martial arts texts. He is also the co-founder of Terra Prime Light Armory which uses historical based weapon arts to create lightsaber and fantasy martial arts for use in competition, performance, and learning. 

oOo

References

Akmajian, Adrian. Linguistics: An Introduction to Language and Communication. 5th ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, ©2001

Barnes, Archie, Don Starr, and Graham Ormerod. Du’s handbook of classical Chinese grammar: an introduction to classical Chinese grammar. Great Britain: Alcuin Academics, 2009.

Biguenet, John, and Rainer Schulte, eds. The Craft of Translation. Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Chen, Jack Jaiyi editor and translator. Fist Classic.  Singapore: Historical Combat Association, ©2012.

Di Cosmo, Nicola, ed. Military Culture in Imperial China. (Ryor, Kathleen, Wu and Wen in Elite Cultural Practices During the Late Ming) Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011, ©2009.

Kang, GeWu. The Spring and Autum of Chinese Martial Arts: 5000 years, first ed. Plum Pub, 1995.

Kennedy, Brian, and Elizabeth Guo. Chinese Martial Arts Training Manuals: A Historical Survey. Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books :, ©2005.

Lorge, Peter Allan. Chinese Martial Arts: From Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

-War, Politics, and Society in Early Modern China, 900-1795. Warfare and History. London: Routledge, 2005.

Mao, Yuanyi茅元億. 武備志Wu Bei Zhi. [China: s.n. ; not before, 1644] Map. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2004633695/.

Mroz, Daniel. The Dancing Word: An Embodied Approach to the Preparation of Performers and the Composition of Performances. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Rodopi, 2011.

Nolan, James. Professional Interpreting in the Real World. second ed. Vol. 4, Interpretation: Techniques and Exercises. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2012.

Peers, Chris. Men-at-arms Series. Vol. 307, Late Imperial Chinese Armies 1520-1840. London: Osprey, 1997

Qi, Jiguang戚繼光. Wu Shu Xi Lie武術系列. chu ban. ed. Vol. 6, Ji Xiao Xin Shu.績效新書 Tai bei shi: Wu zhou, 2000min 89.

Schulte, Rainer, and John Biguenet, eds. Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Weinberger, Eliot, and Octavio Paz. 19 ways of looking at Wang Wei: (with more ways). New York, NY: New Directions Books, 2016.

Wile, Douglas. T’ai-Chi’s Ancestors: The Making of an Internal Martial Art. New York: Sweet Chi, 1999.

oOo

If you enjoyed this discussion you might also want to read: Tai Hsuan-chih Remembers “The Red Spears, 1916-1949”

oOo