Introduction

For someone who doesn’t read classical Chinese, I spend a lot of time in seminars listening to presentations on ancient texts.  Cornell regularly invites visiting scholars to discuss their work.  While none of these individuals has ever given a talk on a martial arts related project, they almost always suggest points worth thinking about.

This last week Guolong Lai, a professor of archeology at the University of Florida, gave a fascinating talk on the translation of a Warring States era document.  Like many of the documents that survive from the period, these had been written on thin bamboo strips that were then buried in a tomb.  When the tomb flooded they were trapped in an oxygen starved environment.  After being stabilized each bamboo strip was surprisingly clean and easy to read.

Still, Professor Lai had a problem.  The various strips had been disassociated from each other and mixed with strips taken from other texts (possibly by the individuals who looted the tomb).  Previous scholars had attempted to do a basic reconstruction in which they sorted this mass of separate sentences back into piles representing a handful of documents.  Once you could be fairly certain which strips went together, one could start to reconstruct the narratives like a puzzle.  This part of the process is generally easier than you would think.

Indeed, Prof. Lai observed that it may be entirely too easy.  We should probably treat the speed with which entire texts are reconstructed with a certain degree of skepticism.  The problem is that the human brain is just too good at pattern recognition.  We naturally strive to find and reconstruct meaning.  And when its not there, sometimes we force things.  It turns out there are a number of ways to resurrect a physically deconstructed text, and many of them can be made to tell remarkably coherent stories.

Obviously this is a challenge for archaeologists and students of ancient Chinese literature.  How do you know that you put the sentences in the right order?  Or on a more basic level, how could you tell if an entire group of sentences was just missing?

Lai’s solution to the problem was to approach these texts not from the technical perspective of archaeology or linguistics, but rather through literary analysis.  To do so he turned to a group of (somewhat unfashionable) structuralist theories coming out of the field of narratology.  Looking at similar texts from the Warring States period its easy to find very popular, almost fixed, story telling structures shared across a wide range of texts.  Using these literary patterns as a map he could demonstrate with relative ease where the gaps (in the form of missing bamboo strips) were, and note where other scholars had forced readings and continuities on the text that may not have been there.  The anthropologists in the room were thrilled.  I am not sure everyone else was equally taken with this methodology.  I walked out of the room thinking “Score one for structuralism.”

Finding the Universal in the Particular

Finding universal patterns in texts is a tricky business.  When we are doing genre analysis on a small group of similar texts all found in the same place, and all produced by a single social class, the identification of repeated patterns may not be much of a stretch.  The problem, however, is that we (being obsessed with pattern recognition) will almost immediately start to find that same pattern in lots of other places as well.  We are then faced with a dilemma.  Do we really have a sound theoretical reason to expect to see this correlation, or are we simply allowing our imagination to get the best of us?

I was struck with these questions as I listened to Lai.  The burial text that he was reconstructing told the story of a religious debate in ancient bronze age China.  It related that after a battle had been fought in which territory was gained at the expense of lives, the natural order was upset.  The kingdom was gripped by a drought, and the King’s sages told him of a river god in the newly conquered territory that was no longer being honored.  The court then faced a dilemma.  Could the king go out and sacrifice to strange gods (separate from his own ancestral and territorial cults) in an attempt to appease them?  Or was this a situation that called for an exorcism of the vanquished gods and ghosts?

It should be remembered that this is a very early text, predating the establishment of the political and religious logic of Empire.  As such the King opted for spiritual warfare rather than appeasement and all was right with the world.  Yet I could not help but reflect on that fact that (while the final solution was different), this was a very familiar story.  It was a dilemma that I had heard many times before.  But I knew the story from Ming dynasty novels (such as the Canonization of the Gods and Water Margin) in which Chinese communities enacted rituals to transform the ghosts of vanquished soldiers and gods into local deities so that they could receive regular sacrifices without upsetting the social order.

On a theoretical level there is very little connection between popular religion and literature in the Ming dynasty and the coffin texts of the Warring States period.  I have no idea how to draw those dotted lines.  Do we postulate the existence of “universal symbols” within “Chinese” culture, or do we do our best to ignore the fact that very similar discussions keep popping up in very different times and places?

China is not the only region that presents such challenges.  Starting in the late 19^th century (the era that saw the high water mark of Western imperialism) several writers, including Edward Taylor and James Frazer, began to examine comparative collections of mythology and folklore.  They noted that certain patterns seemed to repeat themselves in stories that were generated by cultures who had no contact with one another, or who had even existed at different times.  Taylor stated that stories of wandering heroes often shared a remarkable number of elements.  The goal of this early research was varied, but some scholars wanted to be able to map the plot elements of story sequence with the same sort of precision that one might chart the elements of grammar in a sentence.  The hunt was on for seemingly universal aspects of the narrative process.

This basic insight found expression in a several theories.  Anthropologists and those interested in rituals identified universal structures, expressed in van Gennep’s tripartite pattern of separation, liminality or initiation, and return.  The nascent field of psychology also found inspiration in these shared narrative patterns. Yet rather than exploring the differences of human culture they tended to fixate on supposedly universal aspects of the human psyche, the problem of the subconscious, and the process by which children became mature individuals.  Being rooted in fundamental structures of biology, the stage was set to transition from a search for the universal rules to narrative construction, to the discovery of humanity’s universal narrative, or monomyth.

Writers such as Otto Rank (a follower of Freud) and Carl Jung, laid the intellectual foundations for such a move.  Yet it found its most popular and widespread expression in the writings of Joseph Campbell.  Campbell was deeply familiar with Jung’s body of work and was a student of world mythology.  Critics have accused him of being a “mere popularizer” of other’s work, and someone who failed to sufficiently research or cite the many story traditions that he drew on.  Certain elements of this critique have merit, but Campbell’s work cannot simply be reduced to Jungian insights and might be better understood as a creative extension and synthesis of intellectual currents that were then popular.

One of the most fruitful hypothesis to emerge from Campbell’s career is the notion that a universal story can be found in the “hero’s journey.” On a purely individual and psychological level, the hero’s journey can be thought of as a metaphor for a universal coming of age process that all human beings experience.   Yet, according to Campbell, the universality of the process has also found expression in a startling wide range of mythic stories.  The basic narrative structure of the hero’s journey can be found in seemingly different traditions such as the life of Christ, the Chinese tale of Mulan and the much more modern adventures of Luke Skywalker.

The universality of this structure notwithstanding, there is a good bit of confusion as to how to describe it.  Campbell has inspired an entire school of followers, each attempting to make minor improvements on his pattern.  As such, the hero’s journey might have 3, 4, 8, 12 or 17 stages depending who one asks (more on that later).  Further, not every narrative will necessarily include every stage.  This is especially true of the more detailed theories.  Sometimes a stage is omitted, or it may be doubled for increased narrative impact. Yet the various stages are almost always encountered in the same progressive order.

In the interests of time I will only review a very simple version of the hero’s journey, focusing on what might be thought of as five of Campbell’s main stages.  Those wanting to delve deeper into this subject are free to check out his book The Hero With a Thousand Faces, or watch any action/adventure movie made in Hollywood during the last two decades.

Campbell noted that the hero’s journey almost always starts with a “call to adventure.”  It might seem innocuous, such as Gandalf leaving a rune scratched into Bilbo Baggin’s door in the first scene of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Hobbit.  Or it may be more fully developed as a miniature narrative; think of Harry Potter’s battle with the Dursleys to receive his acceptance letter from Hogwarts.  In the case of Star Wars, Luke’s “call to adventure” came in the form of a literal call, pre-recorded by Princes Leia and loaded in R2D2’s memory banks.   The call may be eagerly accepted (Harry Potter) or initially rejected (as in the case of Bilbo.)  Yet psychological maturation, rituals of initiation and narrative structures will not be put off.  Eventually our heroes find themselves swept up into a larger world, far removed from the parochial realm of family and daily affairs where we first met them.

It is interesting to consider how these narrative structures might express themselves in the creation myths that surround the Chinese martial arts.  One suspects that these myths can entrap the imagination of Western students precisely because they contain, or can be read as building upon, similar structures.  The story of Yim Wing Chun as told in the post-Ip Man Wing Chun community would seem to be good candidate for analysis precisely because it self-consciously narrates a heroic journey to maturity through China’s hinterlands of “rivers and lakes.”

Still, in strictly cultural terms, this remains a Chinese story.  Its opening phase revolves not so much around the agency of Yim Wing Chun as her father, the head of the household.  The family’s collective call to adventure comes when he is falsely accused of a crime in Guangzhou sometime after the death of his wife.  Given the vagaries of Qing justice, he decided to flee the city (itself the capital of Guangdong) and to head for White Crane mountain on the far Western edge of the empire.  This flight would take the small family out of the mundane world of the well-ordered empire, and into the mythological realm of heroes, villains and wandering Kung Fu masters.  In this case Yim Wing Chun was either too young or too dutiful to resist the call to the fantasy-land of outlaws and warriors termed the “Rivers and Lakes” in Chinese popular literature.

Campbell noted that no apprentice hero would last long without aid (often divine) and a mentor who can either instruct, or ritually initiate, them.  The need for mentors is still felt quite strongly in modern societies.  I suspect that many individuals sign up for martial arts classes precisely because they are searching for their own personal Yoda or Obi-wan Kenobi.  Adam Franks’ ethnographic work on the Shanghai Wu Taijiquan community suggests that this desire is also experienced cross-culturally.  Even Christ receives his initiation into the realm of the spirit through the administration of John the Baptist.  Everyone, it seems, needs a mentor.

Like so many other young individuals in Kung Fu legends, Yim Wing Chun found assistance in the form of a wandering Shaolin monastic figure.  One suspects that Joseph Campbell would have had much to say on the narrative of the burning of the Shaolin temple, and its many global resonances.  Unfortunately, such a digression would take us beyond the confines of the current essay.  Its sufficient to say that the former Shaolin Abbess Ng Moy, herself in hiding from the Qing government’s watchful eyes, befriended the Yim family shortly after they moved to the region and set up a small tofu shop.

The true nature of the helper is not often revealed until a moment of crisis.  Given that we are discussing heroic narratives, such conflicts are not rare.  The major source of opposition comes in the form of what Campbell termed the “threshold guardian.”  The idea of threshold, or a liminal space, is a rich one, regardless of whether these narratives are approached from a ritual, cultural or psychological perspective.  The crossing of a threshold often symbolizes the process of death and a descent into hell where one must confront some repressed, dark, aspect of the self.  Perhaps there is no more potent threshold guardian in modern mythology than Darth Vader who combines in a single menacing package the promise of death and the rage of being abandoned or betrayed by one’s own parents.  It is clear that the version of Luke Skywalker that we have come to know lacks the mental strength and self-control to face such an opponent. That identity must pass away so that a better version of Skywalker, one that has confronted and mastered his hatred and the need for revenge, can move on.

Wing Chun’s threshold guardian is manifest when her latent sexuality begins to appear.  A marketplace bully, apparently the leader of some sort of local gang, takes an interest in the increasingly beautiful young girl and demands that she “marry” him.  The intrusion of this unwanted proposal sets the rest of the narrative in motion.

To a Western student a “marketplace bully” may not appear to be that important of a threat.  Chinese readers, on the other hand, have a rich library of prior legends and novels to draw on.  Having such a character demand a young woman’s hand in marriage is a common narrative trope. Yet Wing Chun was espoused to be married by her parents shortly after her birth.  Breaking off such an engagement was a serious violation of one’s social duty.  Further, abandoning her father without support in his old age would also be a violation of the Confucian norms of filial piety.

Readers might also recall that in an opening chapter of the Ming novel Water Margin (which basically functions as the Old Testament of the TCMA community) an analogous situation can be found.  Here the “Flowerly Monk” (a different type of escaped monastic) comes across a situation in which the bully’s “proposal” is a thinly disguised metaphor for abducting the girl from her father and using her as a prostitute.  His solution to the problem is characteristically direct, involving only a steel pole and a lot of beating.  In that case it is the monk who is the ostensible hero (or more properly, the antihero) of the narrative.

But this is not the way that the Abbess Ng Moy operates.  In Shaolin stories, she is often the tactician.  Beating one marketplace bully to death, while satisfying, would not really solve Yim Wing Chun’s underlying problem.  The River and Lakes are full of similar characters, and she would be no closer to fulfilling her social duties.

Ng Moy instructed the Yim family to accept the marriage proposal with the following amendment.  Mr. Yim was to apologetically note his daughter (who had never studied the martial arts) was fond of boxing, and would only marry an individual who could beat her in single combat.  The father suggested that the Bully come back in a year, and they could resolve the whole question on a raised platform in the marketplace.

With the trap properly baited, Ng Moy took the young girl to the mountains and instructed Wing Chun in her own variant of the Shaolin tradition.  As we all know, this combined the soft and hard, taking full advantage of the yin, or feminine, traits to overcome “hard,” purely masculine, strength.  The marketplace bully had no idea what he had agreed to, and a year latter he found himself on the wrong end of a public thrashing at the hands of a teenage girl.  One can only imagine that this might decrease his standing in the social register of the River and Lakes.  Wing Chun, on the other hand, had proved to be a master of this dangerous realm.

This is where we are often tempted to end our stories with a “happily ever after.”  Yet Joseph Campbell would remind us that the most important stage of the hero’s journey was still to come.  He noted that these were not simply linear stories, in which a traveler went from point A to B.  Rather, the critical journeys were psychological and social in nature.  We can see the same basic structure in rituals and rites of passage.  First the individual is separated from society, then they are initiated and their social status is changed.  Lastly, they must return to community so that they can fulfill their new role.  And in so doing society itself is also transformed.

Looking at these narratives through a psychological lens, Campbell believed that the individual faced a suppressed or dark aspect of the self in the confrontation with the threshold guardian.  By overcoming this challenge, the hero wins a “great boon” that they then have a responsibility to return to society.  In real life, this takes the form of greater joy, wisdom, service and community participation.

While we often move beyond the marketplace confrontation rather quickly, it is worth considering how these ideas play out in the Yim Wing Chun narrative.  The orthodox version of the story (as related in the Ip Man lineage) says little about the rest of her life.  But we do know two important pieces of information.  From a cultural and a structural standpoint, both of these facts are critical.

First, we know that Yim Wing Chun returns to the world of mundane life and marries her childhood fiancé, who is now some sort of salt merchant.  Put slightly differently, our hero leaves the enchanted world of Rivers and Lakes for a life that affirms conventional social values.  Yet her choice to return also has an impact on the world around her.  She retains her martial arts skills and passes them on to her husband.  From there they begin to make their way around the busy Pearl River Delta where they eventually come down to us, along with Ng Moy’s charge that we should “Oppose the Qing and Restore the Ming.”

At the first cut it might seem that the boon that Yim Wing Chun brings is the martial arts system that bears her name.  Still, the revolutionary charge at the end of her story suggests that something more is going on here.  After all, the Qing were not her threshold guardians.  She never confronted them.  Yet they play an outsized role in all of the early 20^th century creation narratives to emerge out of the region’s martial arts subculture.

It is no coincidence that this was also an era of increased imperialism and colonization.  Southern China’s involvement in the Opium Wars meant that they were well ahead of the curve on this issue.  But by the turn of the century the empire’s rapid defeats by the Russians, Japanese and the allied coalition (responding to the Boxer Uprising) left little doubt as to how dire the military situation really was.  In only a few hundred years the Chinese had gone from being one of the most militarily powerful empires the world had ever seen to a seemingly helpless victim of imperialism, unable to even secure the sovereignty of its own borders or economy.

Douglas Wile, in his pioneering work on the Taiji Classics (another collection of late 19^th century martial arts texts), notes that we should not underestimate the impact of all of this on the Chinese psyche. The nation had become so weak that one could not save it by directly opposing the foreign powers.  Rather a different sort of strategy was necessary, one in which the wisdom of China’s culture was preserved and called upon in such a way that the forces of misdirection, femininity and yin might overcome the western advantages of science, military might and masculinity.

It would be overstating things to assert that there were no female martial artists in Chinese history.  Still, prior to the 1920s-1930s, this was overwhelmingly a man’s world.  As such its very significant that during the final decades of the Qing Dynasty we see a sudden explosion of interest in stories about female heroes and the use of weakness to overcome strength.  Such narratives gained popularity not because they were a sign of emerging feminist values (though that is how they are often read by martial arts students in the West), but because many of these female heroes could be read as metaphors speaking to the national condition.

Wing Chun is one art among many in a region of China that was known to be an incubator for the creation of new styles.  Yet the narrative of Yim Wing Chun addresses questions that go well beyond the creation of a single martial art.  This is fundamentally a story about rebalancing the relationship between society and the nation.  It speaks to a collective desire to confront the feelings of fear, alienation and powerlessness that wracked society in the Late Qing and Early Republic period.  Wing Chun itself is merely the vessel. The great boon that was restored to the people was a reintegration of martial, or Wu, values into the national psyche.  It promised that China, though apparently weak, could once again harness the destructive power of violence and become the “master of two realms.”

Yet this was no call to perpetual revolution.  On a personal level Ip Man was a conservative Confucian who by all accounts was left embittered by the failed nationalist revolution and the successful Communist effort that followed.  The strength that his version of the Yim Wing Chun tale advocates is the kind that emerges from the rectification of the self and the fulfillment of family and social obligations.  It is the doubling down on those things, combined with the restoration of Wu values, which defines this vision of modern Chinese society.  This should not come as a surprise.  As various critics have noted, these sorts of myths are often the expression of a conservative bias.

Conclusion

The notion of the hero’s journey has become so widely dispersed that it is now a subconscious lens with which many of us try to make sense of our world.  Even if we have never read the work of Jung or Campbell, we have all seen countless movies and television shows created by writers who keep dogeared copies of their works close at hand.  It is a narrative structure that we have come to expect.  And because we expect it, we can see bits of it almost everywhere.

This bring us back to the problem of Warring States texts.  Whether approaching ancient literature or martial arts mythology, scholars are confronting fundamentally similar problems.  We just do not know how to read these texts because they were produced by cultures very different from our own.  In both cases we might turn to narratology for help.

Given the nature of the specific genre that he was working with, I think that Prof. Lai was on safe ground when he applied such a method.  I am not sure that the same can always be said for attempts to use structuralist theories to interpret martial creation myths.  The deeper one delves into these topics, the more one is forced to doubt the universality of the patterns that Campbell and others have claimed to find.

While the hero’s journey seems to fit the story of Yim Wing Chun, one can easily find stories within the annals of Chinese literature that would be a stumbling block.  For instance, we already drew an important contrast between the way that similar themes were dealt with in a turn of the century narrative and the much older Ming Novel Water Margin.  While western readers may find the narrative structure of Ip Man’s story intuitively appealing because of its seeming familiarity, much of what they will encounter in Water Margin is confusing, off-putting and even shocking.  These are heroes that do not conform to our Western expectations, embedded in story structures that seem chaotic.  Yet this is one of the most popular novels in Chinese history.

This realization should cause us to ask additional questions about our initial reading of the Wing Chun creation myth.  Did it really fit Campbell’s narrative structure, or are we simply making a few obvious aspects of the story conform by ignoring large swaths of subtext that escaped our notice as we are not early 20^th century Chinese martial artists grappling with the fear that our country might be partitioned and carved up by the Western powers in much same way that they had just dispatched Africa and the Middle East?

The lax nature of the narrative expectations laid out in Campbell’s work (where any specific hero’s journey might exhibit four of his points, or all 13) makes his approach maddeningly difficult to test or falsify.  All of this leads me to doubt the actual existence of a single universal narrative.

Yet hero’s journey may still survive as a strategy for reading certain types of texts.  Thinking carefully about narrative and ritual structure may reveal points about a text that we might otherwise miss.  Properly understood, it should highlight the importance of cultural differences and variant outcomes, rather than obscuring them under the tautological labels of “universal values” and “human psychology.”

Yet it is the very ubiquity of these narrative patterns in modern popular culture that can lead to self-delusion and capture when we attempt to apply them in areas where we have no theoretical reason to expect to see them.  Far from revealing the universal aspects of the human psyche, one suspects that what Campbell may have illustrated is the ease with which an ethnocentric approach to story-telling can obscure the reality of the cultural differences that surround us.

Of course, the term “mythology” has been used many ways, and Campbell’s school of thought is not the only one that might help us to make sense of the narratives that surround these practices.  Critical theorists have developed other approaches for understanding these discussions.  Those will be the subject of an upcoming essay.

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If you enjoyed this essay you might also want to read: Did Ip Man Invent the Story of Yim Wing Chun (a classic post from the early days of Kung Fu Tea).

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Looking over my posts from the last few months I realized that it has been too long since we discussed new (to us) images of the Chinese martial arts.  In this post our friend Sidney Gamble will help to rectify that oversight.  Regular readers may recall that Gamble was an American sociologist who documented daily life in Republican China’s major cities.  His observations were recorded in several academic books.  Yet Chinese martial artists are likely to be more familiar with his passion for photography and amateur film making.  Some of this material found its way into Gamble’s various publications.  But he left behind a much larger archive of images, most of which was only discovered after this death.  We have already discussed the importance of his recording of the “Five Tiger Stick Society” and the Miaofeng Shan pilgrimage.

While northern China’s martial artists were never a subject of sustained study, Gamble’s interests in urban sociology seems to have brought him into frequent contact with such individuals.  Both his professional and personal interests ensured that he would spend a great deal of time exploring, and photographing, China’s marketplaces and festivals.  These were also great places to find martial artists, opera performers, patent medicine salesman, soldiers and a wide variety of other colorful characters.  From time to time such figures would make it into his books.

The photographs discussed in this essay explore the nexus of his encounters with marketplaces and the martial arts.  As part of his effort to document China’s changing cityscapes, Gamble took many pictures of Beijing’s shops and storefronts.  Some of these buildings were quite humble.  Others featured elaborately carved wooden screens and bright tile work.  He was particularly taken by the almost universal habit of fashioning shop signs from the objects that one sold.

Its hard to think of a better way to advertise one’s wares, and such signs might appeal to customers with limited literacy.  Still, a number of these signs also featured written descriptions, and various trades seem to have had their own stylized approach to signage.  Nowhere was this more evident than in the shops selling swords and knives.

Gamble photographed at least three different sword shops during his survey of Beijing’s markets.  Each sign was constructed of seven to twelve wooden sword replicas suspended one above another.  Perhaps the shape of the sign was meant to remind patrons of blades of various sizes and shapes on a rack.  Most of these wooden replicas portrayed the single edge dao, but occasionally other weapons appeared including spears heads, daggers or short and sturdy dadao.

I was somewhat surprised when I first came across these images.  The commonly heard troupe is that the Qing dynasty outlawed the civilian ownership of weapons as well as the practice of the martial arts so such things could only be found in secret societies.  Still, period accounts of the final decades of the dynasty (when the countryside was littered with militias and awash in traditional arms) would strongly suggest that those regulations were often observed only in the breach.  While researching accounts of the Boxer Rebellion I ran across one ominous note recounting how all of the storefronts in Beijing put up signs advertising swords and knives as the displaced Yihi Boxers streamed into the city during the spring of 1900.

Period observes noted that the market for swords and other traditional weapons had been in serious decline from the final decade of the 1800s onward. I assumed that the industry would have basically collapsed by the 1930s.  Apparently that was not the case, and a variety of weapons continued to be created, collected and sold in the sorts of small shops that Gamble frequented.  Indeed, as the following quote indicates, they continued to be indicative of the types of handicraft manufacturing that dominated much of Beijing’s economy.

In the northeast corner of the district was a group of streets, Kung Chien Ta Yuan (Bow and Arrow Street, that was as interesting as any we found in the city.  There, away from the bustle and traffic of the highway, were grouped the shops of the bow and arrow makers, some making long bows and others feathered-tipped arrows, others making cross bows to shoot clay marbles.  And many a boy can be seen bringing home a string of small birds that he has shot with one of these cross bows.  Then there are gold and silver shops where men, sitting on benches like saw horses and working with simple tools, make dishes of elaborate pattern.  In one corner is a shop where the men are busy cutting out saddle trees and making material for boxes, while just next door they are making copper kettles, dishes and pans, starting with the sheet copper and gradually beating it out with hammer and anvil into the desired shape and thickness.  There are stores occupied by the curio dealers with their assortment of porcelain, bronze and other things, wonderfully interesting places to spend an hour and keen men with whom to make a bargain.  Besides these there are cloth and tea shops, pipe stores, shops where they make reed mats, another for paper clothes, silk thread stores, a sword shop and one that deals in pig bristles. (Sidney David Gamble, John Stewart Burgess. 1921. Peking: A Social Survey. New York: George H. Doran Co. P. 322)

After reading this excerpt from Gamble’s survey, the next question must be, who patronized these sorts of shops?  Unfortunately, his writing gives no indication of who was buying traditional recurved bows in the 1920s-1930s.  But the patrons of the various sword shops do make the occasional appearances in his work.  Most often they can be spotted on the more vibrant market streets closer to the highway or at local festivals.

Through his films we have already met the 13 martial arts societies that took part in the annual Miaofeng Shan pilgrimage, which was an important social event in the Beijing area during the 1920’s.   Clearly schools and temple societies such as these would have patronized the shops that Gamble recorded on Bow and Arrow street.  And we have already reviewed numerous accounts of the sorts of martial artists, strongmen and patent medicine sellers that one was likely to encounter in more ordinary marketplaces.  Luckily Gamble also recorded some important images of these individuals.

Yet ever the sociologist, he was more interested in the question of how martial arts groups related to society, rather than simply seeking out feats of arms.  That turns out to be an interesting question as a great many martial arts schools in the 1920s-1930s had committees to provide either basic services to their members, or to raise money for community causes.  When we look at the groups that these martial arts schools cooperated with in their charitable work, it’s a little easier to see where they fit in the broader social structure.

Some $300 is annually raised for the chou ch’ang by a three day benefit given on the grounds of the Peking Water Company, outside of the Tung Chih Men.  This consists of an entertainment of singing, acting and acrobatics given by some nine groups of men who not only come and give their services but often pay their own expenses as well.  These men usually belong to some club or secret society and come year after year to make their contributions to the poor of peking.  One of these clubs, the Cloud Wagon Society, sent 40 members for the three days and subscribed $35 for their expenses.  This group sang old Chinese folk songs.  The Old Large Drum Society, founded in 1747, sent a group of 60 dancers and musicians.  The Centipede Sacred Hell Society, with some thirty-five members, gave demonstrations in the use of the double-edged sword, chains, pikes and other implements of combat.  The Sacred Jug Society was a group of 15 men from the village of Tuen Van, who amused the crowd by juggling jugs.  A group of actors gave their plays walking and dancing on four-foot stilts.  The Old and Young Lions Sacred Society made sport for the people with five lions of the two man variety, and whenever the lions moved the drum and cymbal players were sure to call attention to the fact by beating on their instruments. (Sidney David Gamble, John Stewart Burgess. 1921. Peking: A Social Survey. New York: George H. Doran Co. P. 208).

For better or worse, Sidney Gamble never set out to document China’s Republic era martial artists.  Perhaps that is just as well.  It is all to easy to read only the discussions of a single topic that interests us and begin to assume that such practices were omnipresent.  The challenge facing students of Chinese martial studies is not only to reconstruct the history of these fighting systems, but to understand their place in a much broader society where most individuals had little interest in the subject.

Gamble’s work is interesting to me precisely because it never places the martial arts at the center of the discussion.  And yet, these topics and practices are never totally out of view.  Even Beijing’s foreign residents and newspapers followed (from a distance) the developments of the Jingwu or Guoshu associations, and everyone could relate stories of particularly impressive (or pathetic) marketplace performances.  Yet far from being the center of the social universe, these martial organizations and practices remained one social movement among many.  The key to winning influence was in the friends you made, and how the martial arts sought to rhetorically position themselves.

Historians are most familiar with the modernist (Jingwu) and statist (Guoshu) discourses seen in the major reform movements of the period.  Yet in Gamble’s various home movies, photos and written accounts we see smaller martial arts groups continuing to be involved in local events and making common cause with other guardians of China’s performance and folk cultures.  In recent years this pathway (mostly ignored by elites in the 1920s) has come to the fore as China’s “folk” martial artists have attempted to position themselves as the vanguard of attempts to promote the nation’s “intangible cultural heritage” both at home and abroad.  Gamble’s work suggests that perhaps we should also be looking to the fruitful 1920s to locate the origins of this movement as well.

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If you are interested this you might also want to read: Collecting Chinese Swords and other Weapons in late 19th Century Xiamen (Amoy)

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Introduction

Are the martial arts good?  I think that most people who spend a lot of time practicing any of these systems would reflexively answer “Yes.”  I know that I would.  Fewer of us would pause to ask about the scope and domain that such a question begs.  Good for who? ‘Good’ in what sense?  Are we imagining a ‘private good’ that accrues simply to an individual or a bounded organization?  Can there by something more?

None of these answers are obvious.  Despite the positive public image that these arts have won in recent decades, they have always had a troubling dark side.  Historically they have been associated with ethno-nationalism and were consciously used by multiple states to militarize their citizens during the wars of the 20^th century.  Even a quick survey of the history of community violence, local rebellions or organized crime in China’s tumultuous 19^th and 20^th centuries will quickly demonstrate that the martial artists were not always on the side of peace and social order.  And in the current era its all too easy to watch the coverage of modern combat sports and wonder about the spread of toxic visions of masculinity.  Indeed, the controversies that outrageous pre-fight statements generate only seem to sell more advertising.

As practitioners, we must maintain our faith that the martial arts can be a positive force in the world.  Yet as scholars and social scientists we must face the fact that this has not always been the case.  Understanding how, and under what circumstances, the martial arts might advance the common good is one of the key theoretical challenges that we face.  And given the amount of public and private support that various martial arts programs currently receive, these are policy questions with “real world implications.”

A previous post asking whether the martial arts might promote the creation of more just societies introduced the work of John Rawls and laid the foundation for a more systematic discussion of these subjects.  Most studies of the martial arts ask what impact they have on practitioners.  Are they beneficial, or might they promote anti-social behavior?  Do they deliver on their promises of increased physical health and psychological well-being, or are they ineffective?  Researchers have focused on assorted styles, different sorts of students, and even the impact of various motivations and philosophies (traditional practices vs. competitive sports) to ascertain their impact on individual outcomes.  We have learned much about these practices in the process.

Yet a Rawlsian approach suggests that such approaches tell only part of the story.  Martial arts practice always generated externalities (effects impacting third parties) that go well beyond the more common narratives of individual costs and benefits.  This is no secret.  Various governments, in both Asia and the West, have actually put in place policies promoting the martial arts (or even incorporated them directly into their educational systems) precisely because they were attempting to promote such externalities.

We cannot forget that martial arts are, in a number of ways, fundamentally social phenomenon. If we want to assess their impact, variables at the social level must be considered.  Further, the Rawlsian approach reminds us that most individuals will not have the right mix of attributes (income, age, health, access, interest) to take part in martial arts training, yet they will still be affected by the externalities that it generates.  Any discussion of the allotment of society’s resources must account for the majority of people who will not actively be engaged in these practices.  Again, most residents of Beijing in the summer of 1900 had no interest in the martial arts, yet they were all deeply impacted by the sudden eruption of the Yihi Boxers on the dusty plains of Shandong.

The Martial Arts as a Public Good

As conceptually useful as Rawls has been, once questions of public policy emerge, additional theoretical tools are necessary to sharpen our thinking.  Specifically, if martial arts might be shown to generate benefits for all of society, and not just the individuals who practice them, can they be thought of as a public good?  And might that lead to an argument for greater public support?

These questions arose near the conclusion of the previous essay on Rawls’ theories of justice.   Yet we cannot answer them without exploring what a “public good” actually is, and saying a few words about their typical relationship with society and the state.  The term itself is somewhat slippery in that it has been popularized in multiple contexts.  In political discussions, a public good might be anything that benefits society as a whole, or a specific service that the “public” (usually in the form of the government) provides.  An example might be the interstate highway system, or the construction of a new local high school.

This essay will instead employ the much more detailed version of this concept that was developed in the field of economics.  Specifically, economists claim that something is a public good only if it meets two standards; it must be “non-excludable” and “non-rival.”  Given that these are not terms that most of use in daily conversation, some unpacking may be in order.

First, a good is non-excludable if anyone is free to enjoy it.  If there is an apple tree in a public park, any visitor might take an apple.  In the absence of rules prohibiting this behavior (and probably a sturdy fence), we might call our imaginary apples a “non-excludable good.”  No one enjoys a property right to exclusively dispose of these goods.

An object is “non-rival” if your consumption of the good does not leave any less of it for me to consume.  Now our metaphorical apple tree runs into problems.  It may be heavy with fruit, but the number of apples must be finite.  At some point one more apple for you is one less for me.  As a result, apples are rival goods.  And as wonderful as our public apple tree might be, it is not a public good.

The park that the tree is located within may be a different matter.  Parks do not spontaneously appear in isolation.  They are the result of public policy initiatives that promote entire systems of parks throughout an urban landscape.  Beyond that there will likely be “green belts,” community campuses and waterfront recreation areas.  And while I may find that someone is already sitting under my favorite apple tree, there will be many other areas of the park system that are not being utilized to capacity.  Even in a city as busy as New York, it is not hard to find a quiet spot in Central Park, and something like Morningside Park, or The Bronx Park, will inevitably be mostly empty.  The creation of a parks system itself is much closer to being truly non-rival and thus approximates a public good.  As the old saying go, build a public park and the Taijiquan students will come.

This is where the distinction between a political “public good” and an economic one becomes especially relevant.  The creation of a new high school will certainly benefit some members of the public.  Yet these benefits are likely to be highly excludable.  Only the children of one neighborhood (which may contain a block of powerful voters) receive the benefits.  Further, other schools may lose funding as it is transferred to the new facility.  Yet economists would still argue that the creation of a public school educational system would be a public good.  Other public goods include things like clean air, national security and the creation of new academic fields, like martial arts studies!

Public goods are a critical component of our national wealth.  While its hard to put a monetary value on something like a solid public education system, or an interstate highway network that lets you travel quickly and easily anywhere you would like, these things contribute immensely to our day to day well-being.  Even if you are not attending school, you still derive benefits from living in a society that is widely literate.

Unfortunately, the unique characteristics of public goods also dictate that they will probably be underprovided.  Because no one must pay to take an apple from our tree, no one has an incentive to plant more trees (at least in our imaginary park).  The received wisdom is that this is one of the situations that justifies the state’s intervention in society and the market.  The state can tell us that we must educate our children, or impose taxes on our income to pay for public parks, precisely because the benefits that society receives from having a healthy and well-educated workforce vastly outweighs the cost.  Yet left to their own devices, markets have proved unable to provide these goods.  For this reason, many of the examples of “public goods” that you might find in a college textbook simply assume that they are the result of some public policy.  But can private groups, or society itself, also provide public goods?

This is where the martial arts become an object of interest as they often argue (at least in informal terms) that they can do just that.  On the surface this is something of a paradox as the process by which the martial arts are taught is clearly not a public good.  Most students must pay (sometimes quite hefty) tuition fees.  Indeed, martial arts instruction is usually encountered in the context of economic markets.  Like all for-profit enterprises, it is highly excludable.

It is not only the profit motive that is an issue.  The benefits of public goods must be available on a massive scale, yet martial arts instruction is typically a far more intimate affair. Even when Tai Chi instruction is offered in the park for free, there is a natural limit on the size of any class.

On the other hand, a given private activity might have unintended externalities, and sometimes their reach can be quite surprising.  Only a small number of individuals in the United States train in the mixed martial arts at an elite level.  Of them only a few dozen are actively involved in televised matches at any point in time.  And yet it is entirely possible that the immense media focus on their matches not only reflects social shifts, but is actually moving the needle on a number of issues from the importance that we put on “tradition” in the martial arts, to discussions of gender more generally.

Nor should this MMA example be taken as an indication that this phenomenon is in anyway new.  While the public often fixates on their “ancient” past, almost all of the traditional Asian fighting systems came into their own in the final years of the 19^th century, or the opening decades of the 20^th.  This was the great era of nationalism and state governments quickly seized upon the importance of physical culture and martial arts in the state building process.

We have already reviewed the ways in which both the Chinese and Japanese governments sought to introduce martial arts training into school curriculums.   There is no quicker way to create a unified national identity than by crafting a universal physical culture.  Yet these efforts never really were “universal.”  While Wushu may be China’s national sport, and its taught in many high schools, most people in China have never practiced it.  One could easily make a similar statement about Judo in Japan during the 1930s, or Boxing in America in the 1950s.

The key to understanding the actual social impact of such activities lay in the externalities that they generated.  Japanese parents, who by in large had never studied the martial arts, attended Kendo and Judo matches and festivals in the 1920s to support and cheer their children on.  They did so in the full knowledge that all over Japan countless other parents, who they would never meet, were also gathering in support of these practices and identities.  As Benedict Anderson has noted, this exercise in imagination and empathy is the process by which communities are formed and identities are stabilized.  One could tell an almost identical story about Jingwu demonstrations in Shanghai in the 1920s, Boxing events in New York in the 1930s and Taekwondo Tournaments in Seoul during the 1970s.

Across the globe the nationalization of the martial arts has been associated with both their homogenization (usually under the guise of modernization) and their sportification.  This last transformation, while often painful to traditionalists, is critical as it makes the martial arts an easy target for state control.  Competitive events (particularly those that are folded into educational structures) need to be regulated, promoted and properly supported.  At the same time, the introduction of competitive elements made what had once been small scale practices the subject of public empathy and identification on a vast scale.  One only has to consider the enthusiasm generated by the 1928 National Guoshu Examination, or the inclusion of Judo in the 1964 Olympic Games, to understand how combat sports and nationalism might interact.

Looking back over the conflict rich 20^th century, its easy to view all of this with a fair degree of suspicion.  Modern nation states do not have a great track record when it comes to promoting peaceful and just societies.  Yet civically minded governments have also attempted to use this process in a way that more closely approximates the provision of public goods.  Combat sports often require little in the way of expensive training equipment and can be a cost-effective way of providing interesting physical education to the largest number of children.  This probably accounts for wrestling immense global popularity.  And any improvement in adolescent health is good for society.

Knowing that individuals develop networks of trust and reciprocity with their training partners, some governments (in both Europe and Asia) have attempted to turn to kickboxing leagues and martial arts societies as a way to promote friendships and healthy interactions between community groups who have previously come into conflict.  All sorts of sports have proved useful in similar projects, and there is no reason to think that the martial arts should be an exception.  The greater degree of trust and empathy that is often developed between training partners in combative situations suggest that they might be uniquely effective.  Again, an atmosphere of reduced social tensions is something that all citizens can reap the benefits from, regardless of whether they are the ones who are engaged in the training.

Even the purely private provision of the martial arts might be particularly important in areas with a history of sustained community violence.  In a previous essay we discussed the ways in which violence acts as a contagion within social networks.  This process goes beyond the bounds of metaphor, and epidemiologists have noted that it is possible to use the sorts of public health protocols that were originally developed for dealing with contagious diseases to contain the further spread of violence.

To the extent that traditional martial arts training provides a point of social intervention, where individuals can be sheltered from the immediate impact of violence while learning how to process and cope with its aftermath, it may render a valuable service.  This is another good that may accrue to the community as a whole.  By inoculating a greater number of at-risk individuals against the urge to retaliate or spread violence, the entire atmosphere of a community might be changed.

There has been some research suggesting that traditional martial arts training (rather than competitive combat sports) might be necessary to accomplish such goals.  I am not sure that this is really the case.  It is hard to think of a less traditional, or more competitive, sport than amateur boxing.  Yet minority communities have long relied on the boxing gym to be just such a point of intervention in local communities, providing social alternatives, getting young people “off the streets” and carefully regulating the spread of violence.  Loic Wacquant’s ethnographic study Body & Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (Oxford UP, 2004) must be counted among the most important foundation texts of Martial Arts Studies.  In it Wacquant painstakingly unpacks the place of the predominantly African-American boxing gym in the Chicago ghetto.

By the end of the volume its clear that the establishment he studied had a stabilizing effect on not just the lives of individuals boxers (who benefited from the discipline and social connections that the gym offered), but the neighborhood as a whole.  All of this was done on a shoestring budget.

Its relatively easy to find additional studies of boxing (and other combat sports) that come to similar conclusions.  Several such papers have been presented conferences over the last few years.  Perhaps this should not be a surprise.  Philosophies and norms are taught to, and experienced by, individuals.  Yet when discussing “public goods” we are looking at the social level of analysis, and this means considering the externalities of martial practices that impact those people who do not study them.  In this case its structural variables, specifically, how the martial arts relate to society and the state, that are likely to be the most important.

Wacquant’s Chicago boxing gym also illustrates another aspect of the public goods concept quite nicely. While it was a force for stability in the neighborhood, the condition of the gym itself was pitiful.  As a public facility, few individuals had an incentive to contribute to the success of Dee Dee’s program.  The training equipment was described as being in a constant state of tatters, and the gym itself clearly needed basic upkeep and maintenance.  While it produced multiple professional fighters, their wealthy managers seemed to have felt no obligation to invest in the “farm team” or its facilities.  Nor did most of the individuals who trained at the gym, even though (as Wacquant repeatedly noted) many of them were comparatively stable and well off.  As any economist would remind us, such goods are subject to the “free rider” problem and tend to be underprovided, even when the value that they provide is clear to all.

Conclusion

The question of whether the martial arts, as they exist in the Western world today, can provide public goods is really an issue of scale.  The existing schools, gyms and after-school programs do provide positive externalities to local communities that can be thought of as public goods.  Yet these are underprovided.  Further, the decline in real wages and the shrinking of the American middle class has put further pressure on these commercial institutions.  Public policies supporting or subsidizing the martial arts (as is sometimes seen in Asia and Europe) would doubtless increase the provision of these public goods.

Yet this comes at the cost of making the martial arts responsive to the demands of the state rather than their students.  Numerous false starts notwithstanding, I suspect that at some point Wushu will be accepted as an Olympic sport.  If nothing else, the IOC must bow to the quickly changing realities of the global balance of power and the growing popularity of the event across South-East Asia and Africa.

When this happens, millions of Chinese citizens will enjoy a sense of pride, validation and nationalism (itself a public good?) that will follow the undoubted triumph of their athletes on the global stage.  The spread of competitive Wushu may even promote understanding and empathy on the global stage as more individuals are drawn into the process.  And the state-backed nature of this enterprise strongly suggests that it will not be underprovided.  Still, one wonders what impact this success will have on China’s more traditional folk arts.  Such policies always create winners and losers.

As social scientists, we might argue that many of the strategies that we currently see (lobbying for inclusion in school curriculums, campaigning for intangible cultural heritage status) are attempts to interest the state in the externalities that traditional fighting systems can offer, and thus win a more permanent type of support insulated from the vagaries of changing tastes and market forces.  Indeed, this strategy is very like that of Chinese and Japanese martial artists in the early 20^th century as they articulated their own vision of what the ideal modern society should be.  In the modern era it seems impossible to disentangle the fate of the traditional martial arts from the exploitation of the public goods that they are believed to produce.

oOo

If you enjoyed this post you might also want to read: Why is Ip Man a Role Model?

oOo

Introduction

Co-authorship of today’s post is shared with Joseph Svinth, the editor of the EJMAS and multiple other important works on martial arts studies.   He brought the following account and historic photographs to my attention, and we both agreed that they were worth sharing here.

It seemed as though the events of WWI had largely receded from the public consciousness over the last few decades.  Yet the Great War has been making a comeback in popular culture.  It served as the setting for the hit 2017 film “Wonder Woman,” as well as several other projects appearing on the small screen.  It is often forgotten that China was officially a combatant in WWI (having declared war on Germany and her allies in 1917).  While China never sent troops to fight on the Western front, it did provide the UK and France with a large labor corps to assist the war effort. The opening scenes of Donnie Yen’s 2010 film “Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen” helped to renew popular appreciation of that fact in China and the West.

Yet what was the Chinese Labor Corps? Following the horrific (and largely unexpected) losses of the first two years of the war, the allied governments found themselves facing an acute manpower crisis on the Western front.  To alleviate this pressure the French (and later British) governments began negotiations with China to provide a large body of non-combatant laborers.  These individuals were typically drawn from poor families in Shandong and other provinces of northern and central China.  The provision of about 140,000 workers freed up allied soldiers allowing them (for better or worse) to return to the trenches.

The members of the Chinese Labor Corps performed a wide variety of tasks.  The simplest included digging trenches, filling sandbags and setting up camps.  More specialized assignments included working in weapons factories, unloading ships at various ports, and cleaning and maintaining heavy weapons such as tanks.  Between ten and twenty thousand members of the Labor Corps died during WWI, and their graves can be found in war cemeteries across Western Europe.  Most returned home in 1919 or 1920, yet at least 5,000 individuals remained in France and helped to create that country’s Chinese community.

The experiences of members of the Labor Corp were highly variable.  Many individuals were forced to work for extremely poor wages, and some were even deprived of basic food and supplies.  Others seem to have weathered the conflict better and a few were trained as semi-skilled workers.  These units were led by British and French officers and were accompanied by Chinese students who acted as translators.

At least one of the officers who worked with the Chinese Labor Corps should be well known to students of martial arts history.  Ernest John Harrison made a name for himself as both an intrepid journalist and an early student of Judo.  While living in Japan Harrison became the first Westerner to receive a blackbelt from the Kodokan.  He went on to write many books and articles.  Early in his career he tended to tackle more political questions, but after WWII the public knew him best for his many volumes on various aspects of Judo.  Anyone interested in learning more about him should check out this “autobiography”, based on Harrison’s private correspondence with the American martial arts pioneer R. W. Smith.

Harrison was already an avid wrestler and judo practitioner by the time that he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in British military and assigned to the Chinese Labor Corp.  As such he was in a good position to observe the Lunar New Year celebrations that his troops staged in 1918. He noted with interest the performance of “katas” (his term) and weapons demonstrations.  At one point, Harrison even found himself facing off against a Chinese martial artist in both jacketed and stripped wrestling.  He also reported on a brick breaking demonstration.

Harrison’s account notes that his fellow officers and countrymen also observed and photographed these demonstrations.  Luckily for us, many of these historic photographs still survive, so we can visualize with ease the scenes that he describes.  The existence of these photos also raises two additional points that are worth considering.

Joseph Svinth notes that it is clear that these celebrations had been planned by the Chinese workers themselves and quite a bit of preparation went into them.  It is not really a surprise to see the martial arts being demonstrated in a setting like this.  Yet it is important to note that even in an explicitly militarized context, the Chinese martial arts never appeared in a “pure” form.  Practical wrestling was always juxtaposed with amateur opera, actors on stilts, iron palm demonstrations and sword dancing.  It is sometimes assumed that there was once a pure “military” art that was debased by the world of the seasonal festival or marketplace street fair.  Indeed, that was the operating theory of many early 20th century reform organizations, including the Jingwu Association (whose very name means something like “pure martial.”)  While not denying that the martial arts have had a “serious” and a “military” aspect, the experience of the Chinese Labor Corps seems to suggest that these things could never be fully extracted from the other cultural factors that traditionally surrounded these fighting systems, even in an environment as grim as the battlefields of WWI.

Second, these scenes of the Chinese martial arts were not enjoyed in isolation.  Soldiers from many nations saw these displays.  And on other holidays (Christmas and New Year) they tended to enjoy their own forms of boxing, wrestling, theater and pantomime.  The 1910s and 1920s were a period of intense globalization and cultural exchange.  While WWI demolished important aspects of the global trade system, the meeting of so many soldiers and cultures on the Western front encouraged other types of exchange and cultural learning.  If nothing else, the sad shared experiences of trench raids led all sorts of individuals to wonder about better and more appropriate forms of martial art and hand to hand combat training.

The presence of the Chinese Labor Corps in Europe ensured that they too would be part of this conversation. Chinese travelers brought their experience with Western boxing back to their homeland, while individuals like Harrison got to see iron palm demonstrations and try their hand against China’s martial artists.  During the 1920s and 1930s many individuals in China would begin to actively promote their martial arts on the global stage precisely because the martial arts had become the subject of a truly global conversation.  The Lunar New Year celebration of the Chinese Labor Corps was an important harbinger of things to come, and who better to announce its arrival than E. J. Harrison?

Description of Source Material

“Transcription of a thick notebook (some 132 pages and nearly 38,000 words) in which Ernest John Harrison records his life as an officer in the Chinese Labour Corps, starting on 14 December 1917 and ending on 25 July 1918, going from Japan to China to Canada to England to France.  The original is in the possession of his daughter, Mrs Aldona Collins…  The account is in his handwriting.  Where there is doubt about the spelling of a word, mainly names, this is signified with (?).  R.  Bowen. November MM.” [Note: I have added additional paragraph breaks to make the document easier to read in a digital format.]

11:          Probably the most enjoyable and satisfactory day yet spent in camp.  Companies were roll-called and then given the rest of the day to themselves.  When I arrive on parade company was drawn up with lance-corporals facing right flank, in which position the entire company solemnly saluted me.  NCOs and p’ai t’ous came up to the mess soon after nine am.  They made a gallant showing .  Lowder and all the rest admitted that they carried off the palm for smartness, as exemplified in marching, turning, etc.  My English-speaking corporal tendered me the NCO’s cards with names transliterated and also two crimson paper scrolls bearing names of members of company and also communicating some special New Year sentiment.  Burman, as at one time assistant officer, also received cards.

I acknowledged greetings to the best of my poor ability, the while my messmates on the verandah above made ribald remarks at my expense.  The men went off as smartly as they came.  Afterwards I visited bunk-house and told them how pleased I was with their performance.  It is undoubtedly gratifying to see that, after all, one’s efforts have borne fruit.  Hennigan, Thompson, Spence and I went for a walk before tiffin.  We did perhaps four miles across country to a Japanese settlement, where we drank some beer at a tea-house.  Rising Sun flags were displayed everywhere in honour of the Japanese New Year.  Here too we met one of Hennigar’s sergeants, a fine-looking fellow, who is a local resident. He took us to his home and introduced us to his brother and nieces.  For such a man the surroundings were really surprisingly decent; showing how good a type often enlists in the coolie corps.  Returned in good time for tea.

While enjoying my post-tiffin nap the head boy called me saying that Van Ess wanted me to come out to see some coolie stunts.  I went down and found two fellows stripped to the waist going through kata-like movements.  One man had a knife with which he made mimic attacks upon the other.  The display was quite good and thrilling in its way.  Then nothing would satisfy Van Ess but that I should try conclusions with the bigger man of the two.  He being stripped it was not easy to obtain a grip, and during the first encounter, as I twisted his arm, he caught my foot and managed to bring me on all-fours to the ground – of course no fall at all in wrestling, but none the less a source of great delight to the mess onlookers.  Then we repaired to softer soil on the East side of the mess.  The coolie donned his tunic and in quick succession I twice put him on his back without trouble.  He declined to have any further truck with me.

The two fellows then continued their stunts.  The culmination was one in which the smaller man lay with his head resting cheek downwards on a stool; the other placed seven bricks upon the other side of the head, and then seizing a single brick dealt the pile a violent blow which shattered them in fragments over the head of the recumbent coolie who at once sprang up none the worse for his experience.  The taller coolie also broke several bricks over his own head. Several snaps were taken by Van Ess, Lowder, Cormack, etc, of these interesting scenes.

Shortly before four pm a procession headed by the camp “band” paid us a state visit.  There were the mandarin and daughter (or wife), the mandarin astride a pole and the girl in a sedan chair carried on bearers’ shoulders, an escort comprised of several men on stilts, including our sergeant-major also made up as a mandarin who staggered perilously as though under the influence of liquor.  One of the stilt-walkers was made up as a girl carrying a fan, he was simply immense, his imitation of the mincing steps of the conventional belle, the craning forward of the neck, the handling of the fan and the simper being ludicrous beyond words.  A squad of “soldiers” clad in our jail-birds’ uniforms, armed with wooden guns marched behind the band, and deliberately marched out of step.  They were priceless.  Unfortunately, the sergeant-major became so intoxicated with his success that he outdid himself and fell rather heavily.  I then left the scene and returned to the mess for tea.  Sayer told me at tiffin time that he had had a yarn with my men during the forenoon.  He said they referred to me as the “No.1″ officer in camp!   They praised my good temper and declared I hardly ever struck them like other officers.  Sayer assured them I had a very bad temper of which they had better be beware.  One man said he knew coolies were not beaten in France.  Sayer told him he was wrong and that if he objected to corporal punishments for his misdeeds he had better not go to France.  The man, however, concluded he would go in any case and risk it.

My schedule over the next four to six weeks is going to be pretty crazy.  I have a couple of writing projects followed by some heavy duty transoceanic conference travel.  As such we will be dipping into our archives for some “deep cuts” and classic hits, with the occasional guest-post to keep things fresh.   I will also be sharing some of these papers on the blog once things settle back down.  I selected the following post (which originally aired back in 2014) as it touches on a topic that I am currently confronting in my own research.  How should we understand the linkage between traditional fighting systems and the nations that supposedly gave birth to them?  Given the “invented” (and relatively recent) nature of most nations and martial arts, this is a critical question for all martial arts historians.

The Martial Arts and National Identity in the Popular Imagination

While few people can really claim to be experts in either the history or practice of the martial arts, the last six decades of popular culture have given most individuals in the west a set of shared beliefs and impressions about these fighting systems.  For instance, they will immediately recognize the term “Black Belt” and apply it to all sorts of arts.  They will also associate certain styles with specific countries.  Karate and Judo are known to be Japanese.  Kung Fu and Taiji are both synonymous with China in the popular imagination.  And of course everyone “knows” that boxing is a western sport.

Except of course if you happen to be in the Philippines, where you can meet many fine professional and amateur boxers.  For that matter I suspect that there are vastly more practitioners of certain Southern Chinese martial arts in North America and Europe than there are in Hong Kong and Guangdong.

Nor is this “globalization” of the martial arts a new thing.  Apparently it has been going on for as long as individuals with an interest in fighting have had access to ships.  Without White Crane’s journey to Okinawa, would Karate exist?  Or lacking Japanese immigration to Brazil, would the UFC look the same?  In both cases the answer seems to be doubtful.

Yet the belief that somehow the “traditional” fighting systems reveal an essential element of “national character” is incredibly persistent and widely held.  This fact was driven home to me recently while watching cartoons with my nephew.  In the wake of the critical and commercial success of the “Avatar: the Last Airbender” a sequel (apparently in its second season) titled “The Legend of Korra” has also been commissioned.

This is not a series that I have followed regularly so I will not attempt an in-depth critique.  Still, I have always been fascinated by the fact that the various social groups which make up the world of the “Avatar” are identified quite distinctly as “nations” rather than states or empires.  This is all the more remarkable as most of the “nations” of the original series are clearly pre-modern societies.  Yet nationalism is a distinctly modern phenomenon.  The very idea of the common social identity that we now refer to as “the nation” is only a couple of hundred years old.

The “Legend of Korra” is set in a more industrialized future version of the same world.  Thus the claims to national consciousness in that series are less anachronistic.  Yet in the episode that I was watching (Season 2: Beginnings Part 1-2) the main character is forced to travel far back into the memories of the human race to a time when the spirit and mundane world were still intertwined.

This fictional journey was undertaken with the ostensible purpose of explaining what an “Avatar” was.  However, the exercise quickly expanded into a more general effort at mythic world-building.  Using striking and highly symbolic imagery the animators attempted to explain many facets of their fictional world.

Tellingly, one of the most important “facts” that they sought to introduce was the ancient and timeless origins of the various “nations” that would be seen later in the story.  Each of these ancient proto-nations was also shown to have its own distinctive martial art, almost from before the moment of its historical birth.

This idea that nations are eternal, that they somehow loom up out of the mists of history, is called “essentialism.”  It is based on the belief that there is some essential or immutable characteristic that gives a group its distinctive identity and makes the borders between nations hard and easily distinguishable.  Language, ethnicity and religion are probably the three most commonly cited seeds of proto-nationalism.  These supposedly immutable characteristics are then often pointed to as the explanations for modern conflicts between nations.  So rather than the civil or international wars being the results of a failed political process, they are reimagined and sold to the public as “ancient ethnic hatreds” or “eternal religious conflicts.”

In general this sort of essentialism is not a very productive way to think about the emergence of modern social and political communities.  Tying the martial arts to national ideologies based on racial purity (in the case of the Japanese during the 1930s) or Darwinian competition demanding rapid modernization (China at the same time) was not an altogether successful social experiment.

Still, the fact that our Saturday morning cartoons are discussing (in great detail) how the various martial arts are an expression of ancient and timeless natural attributes is a valuable reminder of just how widespread this idea is.  It has become one of those things that “everybody knows.”

Nor are these discussions limited to the realm of popular entertainment.  We should not be surprised that students of the martial arts find social and personal meaning in these practices.  But it is striking how often the identities and norms that they discover are essentially “national” in character, especially when we remember that at least some of these practices are actually older than (or contemporaneous with) the nation-states that they are thought to embody.

Troops from the Ma Clique train with Dadao, probably in north western China. Photographer unknown. Notice that most of the individuals in this formation are very young and also lack any form of rank or insignia on their uniforms. I suspect that these are raw recruits or members of a paramilitary group.

Bringing Nationalism into the Chinese Martial Arts

There are certain ideas and concepts that have a powerful effect on how we perceive and understand our world.  “Capitalism” is certainly one of these.  I have noticed when teaching classes on political economy that my students often have a very difficult time imagining, let alone really understanding, how a feudal economy worked.  “Religion” is another one of these conceptual frameworks that tends to impact how we see and understand the world.  A modern western approach to religion as an individual matter of conscious does not always aid understanding of other cultures, or even different periods of our own history.

“Nationalism” is perhaps the best example of a concept that has had a striking impact on how we perceive and imagine our world.  Once we have learned about and experienced the existence of national identities, it becomes very difficult to imagine what life was like without them.  This is precisely why we see cartoons projecting these images onto ancient mythical pasts.  The idea of the nation has fenced in our collective modern imagination in some very real ways.

Individuals within the state of China during the Ming dynasty did not think of themselves as “Chinese.”  They certainly knew what government they were subject to, but with the exception of a tiny number of officials and government functionaries, it seems unlikely that anyone took the political state of China as the basis for personal identity.  Instead individuals would have identified themselves in a number of different (often overlapping) ways.

In Southern China perhaps the most relevant identity revolved around one’s clan affiliation and extended family.  Language and ethnicity were also important markers of social belonging.  But so was one’s city or village of origin.  Likewise, individuals who practiced the martial arts did so because they were soldiers, militia members, actors, medical professionals, private guards or engaged in traditional self-cultivation practices.  It is highly unlikely that anyone devoted themselves to these systems simply because they were “Chinese.”

This basic pattern held firm up until the end of the 19^th century.  In fact, many intellectuals did not begin to seriously consider the question of “the nation” until they started to study western models of modernity and revolution around the final decades of the Qing dynasty.

But what is a nation?  This seemingly universal concept actually poses quite a problem for historians and political scientists.  In the current era national identity has become a ubiquitous feature of life.  In the popular imagination it has acquired an air of immortality.  It is projected onto an infinite past and future.  Russians are sure that they have always been “Russians,” just and the Scots are sure that there has always been a Scotland.

Yet the great scandal of these identities is their actual youth.  While collective communities have always existed, the existence of nations, and the belief that these groups should form the boundaries of politically legitimate states, is relatively new.  The first nations to appear on the world stage emerged only a few hundred years ago.  In fact, Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm, while differing on the details, all agree that the rise of nationalism can be thought of as a byproduct of cultural, economic and political changes that occurred with the emergence of modernity in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

Each of these three theorists of nationalism has made important contributions to the discussion.  Due to the constraints of time and the specific argument that I wish to make about the Chinese martial arts, I would like to limit these remarks to Benedict Anderson.  His volume, Imagined Communities (1983, 1996 Verso) has had a profound impact on the discussion of nations and nationalism in the academy.

Anderson begins by noting that nations are an extension and a continuation of prior cultural forms.  They emerged (and filled a role) at a time when hierarchically organized, multi-ethnic empires were on the wane.  As “sacred languages” (Latin, Classic Arabic) gave way to local vernaculars, new patterns of communication and organization became possible.  Likewise, as philosophical thinkers moved away from sacred or “messianic time,” where current events are prefigured in the past and realized in the present, new modes of empty linear time were imagined that allowed for a more rational (and profane) understanding of causality and social relationships.  Anderson identifies this last transition as being particularly important as it allowed for the imagination of larger and more complex communities, all acting simultaneously, progressing through linear time.

One place where Anderson departs from his predecessors is in locating the earliest realized national impulses in South America.  He argues and demonstrates in some detail that it was the bureaucratic pilgrimages of local officials, who by fault of their birth were barred high office in Europe but were free to move from office to office in the administrative area in which they lived, that first lay the foundations for the growth of national awareness within a bounded geographic area.

This process was made possible by the prior invention of “print capitalism.”  This combination of limiting geographic institutions and the spread of print capitalism led to the initial development of nationalism, first in the Americas and then in Europe.

In a longer essay it might be interesting to consider how these processes played themselves out in China.  In Europe Latin, the sacred language, was displaced, in favor of local print vernaculars.  Yet in China Mandarin retained its hegemonic position throughout the polyglot empire.

Again, bureaucratic pilgrimage seems to have played a key role in shaping the emergence of national consciousness in both the western colonies and Imperial China.  Douglas Wile has written at length about the how the political careers of the Wu brothers may have shaped both their perception and attitudes towards the state as well as the subsequent development of their approach to Taijiquan.  Of course the nature of these two sets of pilgrims were quite different, so careful thought would be required before applying Anderson’s model to China in the middle or late 19^th century.

Rather than delving deeper into these similarities and differences I would instead like to engage another of Anderson’s insights that seems more directly related to the problem at hand.  Put simply, once invented the idea of “the nation” became impossible to control.  As economies and social systems modernized, national identity proved to be a powerful tool with which states could martial the resources and loyalty of society.  In basic terms, the nation brought society and the institutions of the state into a much closer alignment than they had ever enjoyed before.

Across Europe revolutionaries reimagined their campaigns as nationalist crusades for self-determination.  Likewise authoritarian empires and states began to ask how they too could capitalize on the institutional empowerment that accompanied nationalism without having to devolve too much power or authority to the masses.  The international system is fundamentally social in nature.  Once the advantages of a nation-state system became clear there was nothing stopping its adoption by a large number of groups, some of whom had quite different political and social agendas.

This brings us back to post-1911 China.  The revolutionaries who overthrew the Qing were very much aware of the potential benefits of the nation-state model of social organization.  Yet this new system was very different from how China had been organized or imagined in the past.  The Qing, like every dynasty before them, had overseen a multi-ethnic, polyglot empire united by a common language, a ruling ideology and force majeure.

While populations living in the large coastal cities were quick to adopt a more modern Chinese national identity, the interior peasants, still living a distinctly pre-modern life, remained strongly embedded in more traditional networks of identity and loyalty.  And even in the major urban areas reformers doubted the patriotic devotion of many of their countrymen.  Would they really be willing to sacrifice themselves as part of a national struggle?

Strengthening and deepening this nascent Chinese nationalism became a major priority of reformers and political leaders from a variety of backgrounds.  They realized that this could not be carried out without a new set of institutions.  And at the same time they also sought to reform the general health and public hygiene of the masses.

It rapidly became apparent to a number of social elites, both in the worlds of politics and the business, that the traditional martial arts might hold the keys to promoting a more robust and energetic form of nationalism among the public.  This solution was not entirely unique.  Chinese reformers were well aware of the militarized physical culture that was being promoted in Germany prior to WWI.  A number of individuals worked hard to import that same system to China.  Other intellectuals were more impressed with Japanese efforts to promote the martial arts and “Budo” as way of uniting the population and instilling within them a “warrior spirit.”

Given the importance of martial practices in these two states, why couldn’t China do something similar?  The difficulty was that the traditional Chinese martial arts were firmly embedded in a pre-national identity complex.  They seemed out of step with the larger program of rationalization and westernization that dominated the May 4^th national discourse.

The first step in using the martial arts to build the Chinese nation would be to purge them of their superstitious, feudal and backwards elements.  Lineage organizations, secrecy and esoteric practices were all deemed unfit for a new set of “national arts.”  What was needed was a set of universal exercises to strengthen the physical and spiritual health of the people so that China could compete as a nation among nations on the global playing field.

Andrew Morris has devoted much time and effort to flushing out the connection between nationalism and the martial arts in this period.  Chapter Seven of his monograph Marrow of the Nation gives a good overview of the efforts to modernize and reform the martial arts during the Republic period.  A much more detailed discussion of how the efforts of specific groups (including the Jingwu Association and the Central Guoshu Institute) related to shifting trends in Chinese nationalist thought can be found in his 2000 article “Native Songs and Dances: Southeast Asia in a Greater Chinese Sporting Community, 1920-1948” in the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies (31:1 pp. 28-69).

In a different article I would like to look at the nuances of the types of nationalism promoted by the various martial arts groups that dominated this period.  But for the moment it is probably enough to speak in more general terms.  Both the Jingwu and the Guoshu movements sought to use the martial arts to strengthen the feeling of nationalism among Chinese individuals both within the state and in the larger diaspora.

Jingwu’s strategy for accomplishing this goal was unique.  While promoting a modernized and sanitized version of the martial arts, they claimed that by stripping away layers of feudal superstition they had revealed what was “essentially Chinese” about these practices.  Thus anyone, regardless of their gender, ethnicity or even country of origin could have a direct embodied experience of the primordial Chinese national heritage simply by signing up for classes in one of their branch locations.

Jingwu also worked hard to modernize both the image and the substance of the Chinese martial arts.  They focused their proselytizing efforts on middle class urban dwellers, a group that had traditionally shunned martial arts instruction.  But once the martial arts were reimagined as a way of conveying the “national essence” through passing on embodied cultural knowledge, these old prejudices lost their prior social significance.

Benedict Anderson would also be quick to note that Jingwu enthusiastically harnessed the full potential of the era’s print capitalism.  They published libraries of instructional manuals, reams of newspapers (both national and local) and various memorial projects.   They argued that to modernize the martial arts, and to preserve and promote their essentially national nature, it was important to move them firmly into the literary sphere.  Of course this also helped to create a virtual community of like-minded readers and martial arts practitioners, united in both technique and study, which stretched from Beijing to South East Asia.

The Central Guoshu Institute was created by the Nationalist Party for the explicit goal of promoting the martial arts as a mechanism to strengthen the nation both physically and socially.  Morris notes that the KMT was much more instrumental, and state focused, in their approach to physical culture than Jingwu.  Jingwu made a great showing of staying out of partisan politics while focusing its attention on China’s martial heritage.  The Guoshu movement, on the other hand, sought to indoctrinate the masses with greater loyalty not just to the nation, but to the party and Chang Kai Shek.  While it continued to pay lip-service to the idea of traditional martial culture, it saw nationalism more as a solution to immediate political, economic and social concerns.  Above all the martial arts were a tool to promote state building.

While this revolutionary and statist approach came to dominate the areas of China controlled by the KMT, Morris demonstrates that it proved to be much less attractive to diaspora Chinese populations.  These communities stuck with the earlier approach to the martial arts that they learned in the 1920s.  In fact, Jingwu is still more popular in South East Asia than it is in China today.

Andrew Morris’ historical research on this question points to a fundamental issue that students of Chinese martial studies should be aware of.  Yes, multiple national movements attempted to harness the power of Wushu to promote Chinese nationalism during the 1920s-1940s.  We are actually still living with the results of many of these policies and strategies today.

Yet there was never one united view of the nature of the Chinese nation, where it gained its strength or what its ultimate destiny should be.  These were all questions that were contested by political thinkers.  When attempting to understand where a given martial arts movement or manual fits into the broader picture of the era we need to be sensitive to this variation.  While the nationalism of Jingwu and that of the Central Guoshu Institute may sound very similar to us today, they were distinct and competing philosophies at the time.

Imagining other Communities: Local Martial Arts as an Escape from the Nation

Nations are not the only imagined community that historical or cultural researchers will encounter.  Some theorists have argued that in the face of globalization other sorts of identities, such as local or regional loyalties, should come to the fore.  This is an interesting point to consider as Southern China and Hong Kong had a front row seat to the eruption of 19^th century globalization.

The area’s economy was heavily dependent on both trade and commerce.  In fact, Guangdong had been dependent on food imports from at least the early 19^th century as so much of its land had been turned over to commercial agriculture (silk, tea, opium, etc.) and handicraft production (iron, salt, paper, porcelain).  It did not take long for the traders of Guangzhou to discover that in many respects they had more in common with their fellow merchants in Hong Kong and Vietnam than they did their ostensible political masters in Beijing and Nanjing.

Language also proved to be a challenge for the smooth development of Chinese nationalism.  Following Anderson’s expectations “print vernaculars” did develop in southern China during the early 20^th century.  In Paper Swordsmen John Cristopher Hamm notes that martial arts novels produced in southern China began to go out of their way to include unique Cantonese expressions and pronunciations in their prose to increase their identification with a local readership. Yet in this case, commercial decisions on the part of printers served to undercut the growth of a unified Chinese nationalism rather than support it.  Instead such stories further bolstered the growth of a unique, and stubbornly independent, local identity.

It is also interesting to reconsider Benedict Anderson’s contention that the lessons of nationalism were available to all to learn.  Certainly the political leaders of both the Nationalist and Communist parties were acutely aware of the benefits of a mobilized and nationalist citizenry.  But what lessons about “the nation” had local citizens and elites learned by the end of the 1940s?

This picture was much more mixed.  The KMT had few supporters left in Guangdong by the time that their government fell in 1949.  Long before that many individuals had given up on the party as being hopelessly corrupt, venial and incompetent.  Huge amounts of wealth had been forcibly extracted from local merchants to support nationalist causes like the Northern Expedition.  Nor had the Nationalist proved to be all that effective in protecting the nation from the Japanese.

Just as in Japan the creation of a unified national identity had been one part of a larger policy in which huge amounts of wealth were transferred from the population to the government to support the building of a modern state.  But unlike the case of Japan during the Meiji Restoration, it was not always apparent to the residents of southern China that they had gotten their money’s worth.

As we have already seen elsewhere, it is clear that a sense of Chinese nationalism did emerge in Guangdong and Hong Kong following the fall of the Qing dynasty.  Yet we should probably not be too surprised to discover that by the 1950s residents of Hong Kong were facing a more complicated situation.  Many of these individuals were refugees from other areas who had just witnessed a succession of national crisis in a short period of time.  Other individuals were local residents who felt that their regional culture was increasingly besieged and under threat not just from the forces of modernization and imperialism, but by the recent influx of new refugees from the north.

When thinking about this later group it is interesting to briefly consider what we already know about the creation myths of the various local martial arts styles that were being popularized and taught during this period.  Most of these myths focus on the burning of the Shaolin Temple and the escape of the five elders who go on to teach Kung Fu and to create revolutionary organizations dedicated to the overthrow of the Qing and the restoration of the Ming.

The Wing Chun creation myth is actually a classic example of this more general genre of storytelling.  Ip Man’s version of the story is perhaps the most widely known.   It has all of the elements that one expects to see in a southern Chinese Kung Fu creation narrative.  We should also note that the story is basically free from modern nationalist elements.

One may be tempted to point to Ng Moy’s almost obligatory charge to resist the Qing as proof of Wing Chun’s nationalist character.  Yet a moment’s reflection casts serious doubt on this reading of the story.  Again, there are all sorts of socially constructed communities, and sometimes they come into contact with each other.  Clearly this element of the Southern Shaolin narrative points to ethnic conflict, but is it necessarily “national” in character?

The question can be addressed from a number of angles, but the answer always appears to be no.  From 1911 onward Chinese intellectuals explicitly sought to create a multi-ethnic nationality, as we see in much of Western Europe and the Americas.  By the 1950s few people doubted that you could be both Manchu and Chinese.  The early five colored flag was designed specifically to illustrate the fact that Chinese nationalism was not based on ethnicity (at least not officially.)

Of course the story of the burning of the Shaolin Temple predates the emergence of modern nationalism as a mass phenomenon in Southern China by at least 100 years.  B. J. ter Haar has conducted the most detailed historical study of the emergence of and interpretation of this myth that I have yet to see.  His discussion of it, both in the context of criminal brotherhoods and martial arts societies, is well worth reading.

Ter Haar points out that one cannot simply understand the Manchus as a competing alien nation in these stories.  Indeed, at the time that they spread there was no understanding that China was simply one nation among many, competing on equal terms.  That is a much more modern way of looking at history.  Instead China was understood as what was “central.”  What lay outside its borders was dangerous, and often explicitly demonic.

In many of the more detailed versions of the story of Shaolin’s destruction detailed in his work the Qing are explicitly identified as a demonic, rather than simply an alien force.  As ter Haar and others have argued, the charge to “resist the Qing” in 18^th and 19^th century folklore and local uprisings tends to be an expression of millennial religious thought rather than some sort of modern nationalist cry.

In comparison the story of Huo Yuanjia promoted by the Jingwu Association is explicitly nationalist and modern in character.  Huo dies as a martyr for the Chinese nation.  There is basically no other way to read this story.  The folklore surrounding the destruction of the Shaolin temple is much more complicated by comparison.

All of this begins to reveal one of the central problems with nationalism.  Once you accept that you are a member of a unique nation, by extension so is everyone else.  Whereas China once occupied a unique place as the “Middle Kingdom” mediating between the Heavens and the Earth, now it is simply one more player in an increasingly tiresome political game.  As Anderson noted the existence of sacred languages and “millennial time” allowed individuals the comfort of projecting their individuals or collective defeats against a larger cosmic backdrop that assured their future vindication.

Yes, the Shaolin Temple has been destroyed but the story is not yet over.  It has become imminent within us.  We have been drawn into what Eliade might call “sacred time.”  And do any of us really doubt how the story will the ultimately end?

Weber characterized modernization as the descent of an iron cage for good reason.  Yes there is great efficiency to be gained.  Nor is there any doubt that both the state and society will be better able to achieve their goals.  But an increasingly rational world also imposes its own psychological costs.

While reading various statements by members of the Jingwu and Guoshu organizations I was struck by the fact that they had little nostalgia for the past.  Universally they agreed that China had once had a great martial culture, but it had all gone so horribly wrong.  To be more precise it was their job to save the martial arts from their own past.  The national reform movements of the 1910s-1940s were forward looking and relentless in their optimism.

This is very different from the sense that you get when researching the local styles of Southern China.  In purely commercial terms they were more popular than their national competitors in the 1920s-1930s.  By the 1950s in Hong Kong they had no serious challengers with the exception of a few traditional northern schools.  But their rhetoric is always tinged with a heavy dose of nostalgia.

For them the future is cloudy.  The great masters lay always in the past.  Nor do they look to the future for salvation.  Instead through their myths they gaze beyond the concerns of modernity and the nation in an attempt to reconnect the practitioner with something larger.  This is not Jingwu’s vision of “essentialist nationalism.”  Instead it might better be thought of as a return to the logic of ritual grounded in Millennial Time.

Conclusion

When researching the modern Chinese martial arts it is impossible to avoid the topic of nationalism.  This is especially true if you are interested in the period from roughly 1910-1950.   The development of various martial arts movements helps to open a window of understanding onto the evolution of nationalist identities at the popular level during this period.

The previous essay also suggests that some caution is required when thinking about this subject.  Various martial arts organizations promoted differing ideas about the origin, nature and purpose of nationalism during this period.  Further, these debates appear to have been quite self-conscious.  Thus when studying the various national reform movements or elite writing on the martial arts we need to be sensitive to the contours of this discussion.

Likewise we must remember that at the popular level the situation was even more complicated.  At times the larger discourse on nationalism was embraced enthusiastically.  The Jingwu Association’s rapid spread during the 1920s is a good example of this.  At other times, such as within Hong Kong’s Cantonese speaking population during the 1950s, the martial arts seemed to turn their back on both modernity and the nation, seeking instead to reconnect with other ways of imagining the local community and reestablishing bruised identities.

One of the dangers with national level narratives is that you lose the ability to distinguish these more granular trends.  In the future focused regional or local studied may help us to better understand exactly how martial artists engaged with various nationalist discourses, and why they sometimes chose to set them aside.

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If you enjoyed this post you might also want to read: The Soldier, the Marketplace Boxer and the Recluse: Mapping the Social Location of the Martial Arts in Late Imperial China.

oOo

Introduction

Gu Ruzhang is one of the best known martial artists of the Republic of China era.  He is remembered today as a pioneer who helped to bring Northern Shaolin to Southern China.  Most accounts of his illustrious career start with his appearance at the first National Guoshu Exam held in 1928. At the conclusion of this tournament he was awarded the title of “guoshi” (national warrior) and came to the attention of important military leaders in the Nationalist Party (GMD).  They would subsequently sponsor his teaching mission to the South.

Unfortunately these accounts omit some of the most interesting aspects of Gu Ruzhang’s life and career.  Perhaps the real question that we should be asking is what unique set of circumstances led him to Nanjing in the fall of 1928 in the first place?   We have already seen that a close examination of the careers of other martial artists can expand our understanding of both civil society and martial culture.  My own personal background is not in Northern Shaolin, nor am I really qualified to speak to the specific substance of Gu Ruzhang’s martial method or training system.  However, a brief outline of his career does open a valuable window onto the rapidly evolving realm of the civilian fighting systems in the Republic of China period.

Much of my own research focuses on the evolution and development of Southern China’s martial culture in the 19^th and 20^th century.  Gu Ruzhang is a central figure in many of these discussions precisely because he crossed cultural boundaries and helped to promote and popularize different approaches to the Chinese martial arts.  For those reasons alone his career might make an interesting case study.

Still, none of us are free to make our lives exactly as we wish.  Gu Ruzhang’s career was both constrained and enabled by powerful forces within Chinese society.  Some of these were the direct result of the political turmoil that China experienced in the first half of the 20^th century.  Others were a side-effect of the rapid modernization and urbanization of the state’s traditional economy.

Gu Ruzhang’s story is as much about political history as it is anything else.  By exploring these sometimes neglected aspects of his life and career I hope to shed a light on the basic forces that were shaping the development of the traditional Chinese martial arts more generally.  His career coincided with a period of immense change in the way the traditional fighting styles were imagined and taught.  I hope that a brief discussion may help to clarify why these changes began to emerge when they did.

Gu Ruzhang: Creating a Tiger

Gu Ruzhang’s life has become the subject of many legends and stories.  Some of them are basically true, others are vast exaggerations.  Nor did he leave a body of literature behind as did some of his contemporaries.  All of this makes documenting his life somewhat challenging.  The following account will try to stick to the “known facts” while placing them within the proper historical context.

Gu Ruzhang (“Ku Yu Cheung” in Cantonese) was born in 1894 in Jiangsu province in Funing County.  It doesn’t appear that his family was rich, but his father did run a successful armed escort company which employed a number of local martial artists.  These sorts of businesses thrived and prospered at the end of the Qing dynasty.  As the government’s grip on society weakened it became increasingly dangerous for either people or goods to travel on the roads.

Local highway men were a constant concern.  One of the most common solutions that merchants employed was to hire specialized armed escort companies to accompany their caravans.  In fact, by the final decades of the Qing dynasty such firms had become one of the leading employers of martial artists.

Gu’s father is said to have been an expert in Tan Tui (springing legs) as well as the art of throwing blades.  These skills were an important part of his professional reputation, though of course by this point in time most bandits (and the armed escorts that dealt with them) also carried modern and effective firearms.

Like many martial artists of the time, Gu’s father was basically illiterate.  This did not make running a business any easier and he appears to have wanted to provide his children with the benefits of at least a basic education.   In 1901 Gu was sent to complete a year of primary schooling.  It should be noted that Gu was the second son (he had one older brother and a younger sister), so we can probably assume that his schooling was less extensive than what his older brother might have received.

In 1906 his education changed from the literary to the strictly practical.  From the age of 11 Gu was instructed by his father.  He was first introduced to the form Shi Lu Tan Tui.  Unfortunately this course of study was also fated to be short lived.  Within two years his father was struck with a lingering illness that left him confined to his bed.

What happened next is a little unclear, but it appears that he advised his children on their future educations shortly before he died.  Gu reports that his father recommended that he seek out Yan Jiwen (a former college who had also been a player in the local escort industry) in Shandong to continue his martial training.

However the youth did not set off all at once.  Instead he stayed with his mother for an additional two years.  This was probably in observance of the traditional mourning period.  After that he left for Nanjing where he was enrolled in a middle school to continue his formal education.

Unfortunately that situation does not seem to have agreed with him.  One year later (in 1911) he and a classmate (who was also a cousin) named Ba Qingxiang set out for Shandong to find “Great Spear Yan.”  At the time Gu was likely 15-16 years old.

It is interesting to note the timing of this career change.  The Qing dynasty was overthrown in 1911-1912.  The nation was full of revolutionary sentiments and young men across the state felt a powerful “call to arms” in this period.  The martial arts (which had suffered badly in the wake of the Boxer Uprising) also began to become more popular in this period.  This was especially the case of anything that could claim to be tied to Shaolin or the secret societies that had resisted the now discredited Qing government.

Again, we don’t actually have any day to day accounts of what Gu was thinking or feeling.  Yet I find it to be suggestive that it was at this specific moment that he decided to dedicate himself to the study of the martial arts.

Gu and Ba apparently had little trouble locating Yan Jiwen or convincing him to teach them.  At the time he was actually running a small school and he seems to have been happy to take on the task of instructing the son of his friend and former colleague.  Ru began his training by relearning his Tan Tui sets to his new teacher’s satisfaction.  At that point he was introduced to the ten sets of Northern Shaolin, a variety of weapons forms, Iron Palm training and Small Golden Bell Qigong.

Gu stayed with his new teacher for quite some time.  He studied in residence in Shandong for at least eleven years.  In 1922 Gu received world of his mother’s death.  Decorum mandated that he return to his home village and observe the proper period of mourning.  At this point Yan proclaimed that Gu’s education was complete and he was ready to head out into the world.

The next two to three years were spent back in Jiangsu province.  During this time Gu lived with his cousin Ba and worked to hone his skills. Yet once again his career plans changed.

Rather than opening a school or joining a military academy, Gu reappears in the historical record in 1925, employed as a clerk in the office of the Finance Minister in Guangdong Province.  Many of the better known legend of Gu’s martial feats date to this period.  For instance, this was when he supposedly killed a Russian War Horse with a single blow from his iron palm.

Of course the really interesting question is not whether Gu actually killed the horse, but what he was doing in Guangdong at all?  After all, this job was pretty far from home?  Nor was it what he had spent the last 13 years training to do.  Why might a resident of Jiangsu (or northern China more generally) decide to move to a very different cultural and geographic climate in late 1924 or early 1925.

Gu did not leave us with a diary of his day to day thought, but one suspect that the very destructive Second Zhili–Fengtian War of 1924 may have had something to do with this decision.  This conflict pitted the more liberal (western backed) Zhili faction against the conservative (Japanese backed) Fengtian clique for control of Shanghai (including both its rich legal and illegal trade networks).  Things quickly escalated from there and the conflict became the bloodiest of Northern China’s many warlord conflicts.  Almost all major urban areas in northern China suffered some damage as a result of this war, and in some placed the destruction was extensive.

It is not a surprise to discover that a number of individuals (Gu among them) decided that Guangdong looked like a good bet in 1924-1925.  The Soviet backed clique of the KMT (headed by Chiang Kai Shek) was enjoying a moment of peace and security as its northern rivals ripped themselves apart.

It is likely that Gu (and others like him) believed that Guangdong was good place to start fresh.  While a smaller port than Shanghai, the area was still connected to international trade.  Even if the pace of social reform and economic growth was generally a little slower in Guangdong, by the 1920s it should have been possible to build a new life here.

Unfortunately Gu arrived just in time for another catastrophe, this one of an economic nature.  The Hong Kong Strike of 1925-1926 was one of the most economically disruptive periods in the entire history of the Republic of China.

Not surprisingly this event had an important impact on a number of regional martial arts organizations.  In fact, it affected pretty much everything in the local economy and society.  Yet it is seemingly never remembered in our discussions of the era’s martial arts?

The origins of this trade embargo can actually be found in Shanghai and the aftermath of the Second Zhili–Fengtian War.  Resentment of foreign interference was running high after this destructive conflict.  Shanghai, which had both a substantial foreign presence as well as a highly unionized workforce, became the epicenter of this growing resentment.

The Communist Party sensed an opening and moved quickly to educated workers, draw up lists of demands and organize student protests.  Initially much of this agitation focused on Japanese owned spinning mills.  A series of escalatory confrontations at one mill led to a Japanese manager shooting and killing a demonstrator.  At that point the city exploded like a powder keg.

Large groups began to protest in the international settlement.  Demands ranged anywhere from a release of protesters held by the police to the end of extraterritoriality and even foreign investment in China.  Eventually large numbers of protesters attempted to storm a British police station (they were intent of freeing some jailed comrades) which resulted in British, Chinese and Pakistani law enforcement officers opening fire on the crowd.  There were dozens of casualties.  Within days similar massacres played out in different cities around the country.

Very quickly the anger of the Chinese people shifted from the Japanese to the British.  Hong Kong remained a center of the UK’s commercial strength in the region and it was a highly identifiable target.  Both the KMT and the Communists initially supported plans to boycott foreign good and trade with Hong Kong.  Businesses that flaunted the boycott found themselves the target of often violent reprisals.

The social effect of all of this was devastating.  The economies of Guangzhou and Hong Kong were deeply linked and (truth be known) highly dependent on trade.  When that trade was severed the entire area suffered a massive and immediate drop in GDP.  This in turn led to a collapse in employment and government revenue.  Probably 50% of the region’s GDP evaporated in a few months.

In a future post I plan on talking about how these events affected the Choy Li Fut, Hung Gar and Wing Chun communities.  But for right now, let’s consider what this probably did to Gu Ruzhang.    The entire reason that he had moved to the south was probably to get away from exactly this sort of social disruption.  Further, he got a job as a low level clerk probably because he had the benefit a few years of formal education and there was not much else for a wandering martial artist to do.

After all, the military (traditionally the largest employer of martial artists) had long since been professionalized and the armed escort companies (the second largest employer of hand combat professionals) had been put out of business by cheap and reliable train travel about a decade years earlier.  In short, the martial arts world of his father and teacher had ceased to exist.  Gu was probably working as a filing clerk because he needed the job.

This was the basic situation before the local economy took a massive hit.  One wonders whether rumors of his Kung Fu prowess began to emerge during this period because he was forced to fall back on his martial skills and public demonstrations to support himself.  After all, the famous story of killing the horse with a single punch is, at the end of the day, a pretty typical example of a public performance where organizers are selling tickets and contestants are competing for money (all protests to contrary notwithstanding).

Fortunately Gu’s luck begins to improve at about this point in our story.  Once again it is a shift in national politics that opens a new set of possibilities.  With the major northern cliques left bloodied and exhausted from their recent confrontation, Chiang Kai Shek lost little time in exploiting his opening.  Following the end of the Hong Kong Strike in 1926 (which had lasted substantially longer than he planned) his forces began the now famous “Northern Expedition.”  This campaign allowed the general to consolidate large parts of China under his direct control.

Still, there is more to unifying a nation than seizing territory.  The KMT created multiple programs to promote a sense of nationalism and shared identity.  One of the more interesting of these (building off of the earlier success of the Jingwu Association) sought to use the traditional martial arts as a tool of state building.

Of course in the 1920s there was very little about the Chinese martial arts that was actually “unified” or “modern,” let alone supportive of the KMT.  The Japanese had demonstrated that the martial arts could be a critical part of the nation building process, but to do this the government must first assert regulatory and ideological control over this section of civil society.  In politics a message that cannot be scripted or guided is not a tool, it’s a liability.

The new organization meant to unify the martial arts community behind the aims of the state was the Central Guoshu Institute.  The group was founded as the dust was still settling from the Northern Expedition and its headquarters were located in Nanjing.

Gu Ruzhang appears to have been hired on as a drill instructor at the Central Guoshu Institute soon after its creation.  However, that is not where he would come to national prominence.  Members of the Guoshu Institute realized that they needed to convince martial artists around the country to participate in their program (one that most boxers had been doing perfectly well without) if they were going to succeed.  To spread their mission they organized the First National Guoshu Exam in October of 1928.

The novel undertaking was a three way combination of a Qing era military exam (minus the traditional emphasis on archery), a boxing tournament and a modern, spectator-centered, sporting event.  The relatively young Gu Ruzhang entered the tournament and on its final day was named a “guoshi” or national warrior.  At the time it was the highest honor that the KMT could award to a martial artist.

Gu Ruzhang: The South Bound Tiger.

The organization of the initial National Exam had been rushed.  There were the sorts of problems with the format and programing that one might expect from a new effort.  Still, many members of the audience found the entire thing enthralling.  One of the most enthusiastic converts to the new Guoshu program was General Li Jishen.  At the time he was the governor of Guangdong and Guanxi and the commander of the Eight Army.

Li decided that he would enthusiastically support the Guoshu initiative.  It seemed to be the ideal way to strengthen and unify the area under his command.  Of course the traditionally hierarchic structure of martial arts associations could also be converted into an inexpensive mechanism for spreading ones political influence throughout society.

He invited Gu Ruzhang and four other individuals to return with him to Guangdong where they would establish the Liangguang Guoshu Institute.  Collectively these individuals became known in the press as the “Five Southbound Tigers.”  Together they had an impressive background in the northern arts including Taiji, Bagua, Liuhe Quan, Cha Quan, a wide variety of weapons and of course Northern Shaolin.

This was not actually the first time that the northern arts were to be publicly taught in the south.  That honor is usually awarded to the Jingwu Institute which had opened multiple clubs in the area in 1920 and 1921.  It should also be remembered that, unlike most other areas of the country, the Jingwu Association in Guangdong remained strong until the Japanese invasion in 1938.

Unlike the Jingwu Association, the new institute was conscious of the need to recruit some southern stylists for the teaching staff.  This went a long way towards not alienating the local population.  It hired Zhang Liquan, a White Eyebrow expert, among a handful of others.  Gu Ruzhang himself was well known for cultivating a positive relationship with a local Choy Li Fut clan.  Still, the vast majority of the organization’s teaching efforts were to focus on the orthodox (e.g., northern) Guoshu curriculum.

General Li’s branch of the Guoshu Institute formally began accepting students in March of 1929.  It had an initial enrollment of a little under 150 students and its offered classes 5 times a day (three two hour session and two one hour slots).  Following the lead of the Jingwu Association, the new club made deals with local schools, government offices and companies to provide in house instructors for a set fee.  For the most part it seems to have been government agencies that took them up on this offer.  It appears that a very large percentage of their student base were workers from various KMT controlled offices.  Initially enrollment was limited to men, but special classes for women were eventually created.

While enrollments were good, they were not spectacular.  The fact that so many of the new students were employees of the KMT leads one to suspect that it was going to take the new organization a while to penetrate deeply into the already crowded local market  for martial arts instruction.

Despite these shortcomings, or maybe because of them, the governor and the Liangguang Martial Arts Institute announced a road map to radically reform the martial arts of Southern China.  The first stage of this process was the registration of all martial arts schools in Guangdong and Guangxi.  The next step was to be a total ban on the creation of any new schools or associations other than those created by the staff of the Guoshu Institute.  Lastly the organization would begin publication of a new martial arts magazine explicitly dedicated to advancing the nationalist “Guoshu philosophy.”

With the full power of the provincial government and the Eighth Army backing the orders, it seems at least possible that these policies could actually have been implemented.  Clearly General Li Jishen was quite sincere in his desire to turn the local martial arts community into a tool to be exploited by the state.  With perfect hindsight it is hard to see how the execution of such a plan could have been anything but disastrous for Guangdong’s flourishing indigenous martial arts community.

Political calamity intervened before implementation of the new policies could begin.  In May of 1929 General Li Jishen resigned as governor and traveled to Nanjing with the intention of mediating a dispute between Chiang Kai-shek and the “New Guangxi Clique.”  Negotiations between the groups went badly and Li Jishen was arrested and held until his eventual release in 1931.

General Chen Jitang was then appointed the new governor of Guangdong and Guanxi.  One of Chen first acts was to eliminate his predecessor’s cherished Guoshu program.  I suspect that this action was politically motivated.  Perhaps he saw the organization as a threat, or maybe he did not want to align himself with a wing of the GMD that was so much under the influence of Chiang Kai-shek’s vocal supporters.  Whatever the real reason, Chen claimed to be acting out of an urgent need for fiscal responsibility.

The total budget of the Institute was around 4,500 Yuan a month.  This was a substantial figure, but probably in line with the costs of a major social engineering project like that which Li had envisioned.  The Liangguang Guoshu Institute folded after a mere two months of operations, a victim of internal politics within the GMD.

The upshot of this rapid fall was that a number of prominent northern exponents were left unemployed and more or less stranded in Southern China.  This seeming setback created new opportunities that spread the northern arts more effectively than anything the Guoshu Institute had ever managed to do.

After all, most of the instruction that the school had offered was focused on a handful of civil servants.  This likely reflects the fact that it was government pressure and subsidization that supported the original Institute, not public demand.  Chen’s forced dissolution of the Institute allowed its instructors to enter the much broader marketplace for private instruction.  It was within these smaller commercial schools that northern styles, such as Bak Siu Lam and Taiji, really took hold and began to spread in the south.

Gu Ru Zang proved to be among the most influential of the remaining staff.  In June of 1929 he created the Guangzhou Guoshu Institute.  It seems likely that this new, smaller organization, had some level of official backing and that it clearly fell within the broader Guoshu movement led by the Central Academy in Nanjing.  The group was housed in the building of the National Athletic Association.  That said, the new institute did not continue the grandiose mission of its predecessor.  It did not attempt to regulate or lead the local martial arts marketplace.  It essentially became just one more martial arts school among many.  Ironically that appears to have been the key to its long term success.

Conclusion: Gu Ruzhang as a Wandering Tiger

One might assume that after his return to the South, and his subsequent establishment of a successful martial arts institute, Gu would settle down.  Unfortunately it was not to be.  He left the region following the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931.  I have not been able to locate precise information on what he did next.

In 1932 Ho Qian, a high official in Hebei Province, hired Gu to act as a head instructor at the Heibi Military Academy.  Such appointments were very prestigious and highly sought after.  This kind of government sponsorship was seen as legitimating the efforts of a martial artist.  Gu also opened a traditional medicine clinic in 1932.  Yet once again the Master showed no interest in putting down roots.

In 1934 he returned to the south, this time to receive an appointment as the Chief Guoshu Instructor for the Eight Army.  This would be the last major assignment of his career.  In 1938 the Japanese invasion reached Southern China.  Most martial arts schools closed their doors or went underground.  The Central Guoshu Institute retreated with the government to the far interior of the country.

In the early 1940s Gu Ruzhang announced his retirement from the world of the martial arts.  At that point he disappeared from public view.  I have not been able to find much information on the final years of his life.  He is known to have died in 1952 and a few of his students have asserted that heart problems were to blame.  He was only 58 years old at the time of his death. 

Still, his career spanned three decades in which the traditional martial arts were transformed, modernized and socially repositioned for even greater success in the future.  Gu taught literally thousands of students in his lifetime and played an important role in preserving and passing on China’s martial culture.

It is certainly interesting to watch how the Chinese martial arts evolved throughout his life.  As a child they were the essential skills of bandits and paramilitary guards.  Later they fell on hard times.  Then in the 1920s and 1930s the traditional combat systems were systematically re-imagined as an aid in building and promoting a new vision of Chinese nationalism.  Each of these shifts reflected larger changes in the China’s economic and political situation.  These in turn manifested themselves in very specific ways in Gu’s life and career.

Introduction

As I mentioned last week, I am currently in the middle of a couple of writing projects.  As such, our weekend post will be covered by Douglas Wile, author of the SUNY Press volume, The Lost Tai Chi Classic (1996).  In addition to being a friend of Kung Fu Tea, Wile must also be considered to be one of the essential (indeed foundational) thinkers within the field of Martial Arts Studies.  We are very lucky to have him with us on the blog.

In this article, published in the most recent issue of Martial Arts Studies, Wile takes a closer look at the evidence surrounding a number of recent document finds that purport to rewrite the history of Taijiquan.  Moving beyond these texts he then asks what these controversies signal about the state of martial arts studies, and larger questions of academic debate, thought and freedom, in China.  This article is a must read for students of Chinese martial studies.  Enjoy!

Abstract

Martial arts historiography has been at the center of China’s culture wars and a cause célèbre between traditionalists and modernizers for the better part of a century. Nowhere are the stakes higher than with the iconic art of taijiquan, where, based on a handful of documents in the Chen, Wu, and Yang lineages, traditionalists have mythologized the origins of taijiquan, claiming the Daoist immortal Zhang Sanfeng as progenitor, while modernizers won official government approval by tracing the origins to historical figures in the Chen family.

Four new document finds, consisting of manuals, genealogies, and stele rubbings, have recently emerged that disrupt the narratives of both camps, and, if authentic, would be the urtexts of the taijiquan ‘classics’, and force radical revision of our understanding of the art. This article introduces the new documents, the circumstances of their discovery, their contents, and the controversies surrounding their authenticity and significance, as well as implications for understanding broader trends in Chinese culture and politics.

Click here to read the article.

Introduction

Given that this post will be released on Columbus Day, I thought that it might be fun to think about some “new world” martial arts history.  Lau Bun was both a colorful and critical figure in the early Bay Area Chinese martial arts scene.  If you are interested in learning more about him or other individuals like T. Y. Wong, James Lee or Bruce Lee, be sure to also check out my review of Charles Russo’s recent book Striking Distance: Bruce Lee and the Dawn of Martial Arts in America.  Enjoy!

 Choy Li Fut’s place in southern Chinese martial culture.

Let me ask you a question.  What was the largest and most socially important martial art in Guangdong during the late 19^th and early 20^th century?  What was the first martial art to organize an extensive network of public commercial schools in all of the province’s major towns and cities?  Which southern Chinese martial art was the first to establish a permanent public school in the United States?

A few names often spring to mind.  Hung Gar is synonymous with southern boxing, and it was pretty popular.  But it’s not the answer we are looking for.  Wing Chun was an obscure regional style that few people had heard of until the 1960s.  And while many individuals studied one or more of the “Five Family Styles” they were highly fragmented.  White Crane was a popular import from Fujian (another southern province with a distinguished martial tradition), but that is not the answer either.

In the late 19^th century Choy Li Fut became the public face of the southern martial arts throughout the Pearl River Delta and much of the province.  It was one of the most commercially successful schools of hand combat ever practiced in the region, and it commanded the loyalty of tens of thousands of students.  Through its various charitable associations and Lion Dance teams it managed to extend this reach even further.

Choy Li Fut tended to have strong working class associations in the early 20^th century.  It was a popular martial art among handicraft artisans, porters, sailors and workers.  The Hung Sing Association became an early supporter of the Community Party and as a result was closed by the right-wing Nationalist Party (the GMD) after its purge of leftists elements in Shanghai (and around the country) in 1927.

Most southern martial arts schools were forced to close again with the Japanese invasion, and then with the Communist victory in 1949.  Needless to say, the Cultural Revolution also took a toll on the practice of all traditional martial arts in mainland China.  Like Wing Chun and Hung Gar, Choy Li Fut survived the 1960s and 1970s in exile.  It was practiced throughout the Chinese diaspora in places like Hong Kong, Singapore, and even California.

As a result of this highly disrupted history, many hand combat students today (both inside and outside of China) no longer understand the important role that Choy Li Fut played in the development of Southern China’s modern martial culture.  The art has yet to spawn a major media franchise (something that has benefited both Hung Gar and Wing Chun).  Still, if we wish to better understand the Southern Chinese martial arts, it is necessary to take a closer look at both the legends and history that surround this style.

Of course Choy Li Fut is also interesting as it was one of the first Chinese martial arts to be openly taught in the United States of America in the post-WWII era.  During the 19^th century different Tong had engaged in military training, created militias and hired enforcers.  One of the first concerted efforts at southern “martial training” in the US that I am aware of occurred in 1854 in the months leading up to the Weaverville War.

Still, these early experiments did not lead to long-term public instruction in the martial arts.  It is also an interesting philosophical exercise to consider whether training with the trident and musket to fight in a battle would be considered to be an example of “martial arts practice” by most modern observers today.  When it came to hand combat, it appears that Chinese fighters in the US were just as likely to study western boxing as anything else for most of the late 19^th and early 20^th century.

Lau Bun: A Pioneer of the Chinese Martial Arts in America.

Most observers of the Chinese martial arts agree that Lau Bun was the first individual to open a permanent, somewhat-public, Chinese martial arts school on the American mainland.  That fact alone makes him an important figure to know about.  However, the details of his life are fascinating for other reasons as well.  As well as illustrating many aspects of the Chinese American experience, his career demonstrates the many ways in which the martial arts intersected with, and were useful to, the broader political-economy of immigrant communities.

Whether it was providing physical protection, settling disputes, or creating a sense of cultural continuity, Lau Bun’s life provides us with an interesting window into how the martial arts interacted with, and were used by, the broader Chinese society in the early 20th century.  For that reason I felt that a brief biographical sketch of his career would make a valuable contribution to our lives of the “Chinese Martial Artists” series.

Before starting I should state that my own background is not in Choy Li Fut.  Rather, my interests in this subject are purely historical and social.  When discussing the background of Choy Li Fut in China I have relied on Zeng Zhaosheng’s 1989 volume Guangdong Wushu Shi (A History of Guangdong Martial Arts).  I have drawn the basic facts of Lau Bun’s life from a 2002 article entitled “Remembering Lau Bun” by Doc Fei-Wong published in the July edition of Inside Kung Fu.  Lastly I would like to thank Derek Graeff for his insights into the history and development of the American Choy Li Fut community.

Lau Bun was born in Taishan in Guangdong province at the end of the Qing dynasty in 1891.  Taishan is southwest of Jiangmen and sits on a coastal region of the Pearl River Delta.  The area is known for both its musical traditions (something that Lau Bun enjoyed and promoted throughout his life) as well as its large expatriate community.  The local language spoken in the region is Taishanese, a cousin of Cantonese.

Large groups of Taishanese speaking immigrants left for the American west in the middle decades of the 19^th century.  Some of these individuals worked for the railroad, while others took service jobs in gold mining communities or worked in San Francisco.  Until very recently, Taishanese was the most commonly encountered dialect spoken in Chinese American communities.

While the working conditions endured by these early immigrants were bleak, the wages they earned were often quite generous compared to what was being made in their home villages.  Family members in America often mailed home some of their salaries as “remittances” which became an important source of liquidity in the local economy.

Lau Bun was born into a family situation that was deeply dependent on the tides of late 19^th century globalization.  His father worked in California and sent home the remittances that supported his mother and siblings.  This source of income allowed the divided family to enjoy a comfortable standard of living.

For Lau Bun this meant that his family could afford to hire martial arts teachers to instruct him (recall that at this point the idea of the “public commercial school” had not yet become standardized across the region).  Accounts state that his early teachers may have exposed him to Hung Gar and Mok Gar.  For whatever reason, the family continued to look for a teacher and eventually settled on a well-known Choy Li Fut teacher named Yuen Hai.

Yuen Hai was trained at the Hung Sing Association Hall in Foshan, north east of Taishan.  Following the death of the legendary Jeong Yim (who did much to establish Choy Li Fut as a major force in the Pearl River Delta region) Yuen Hai was sent to Taishan by the new leader of the organization (Chan Ngau Sing) for the express purpose of opening a Choy Li Fut school and promoting the spread of the style.  This probably happened in 1893-1894, but there is no universally accepted date for the death of Jeong Yim which complicates our account.  It is also important to note that these sorts of assignments are not all that uncommon in Choy Li Fut’s history and they may help to account for the arts rapid geographic spread in the late 19^th century.

Yuen Hai’s career was rich and varied.  He quickly became caught up in the expatriate driven economy that was so important to the region.  When he first moved to the area he rented space in clan temples to conduct his classes.  This was a fairly common practice in the era, especially in Guangdong where clan associations were strong and owned most of the real estate.  Later Yuen Hai traveled to Indonesia where he worked a five year stint as a private bodyguard for a wealthy businessman.  After returning to the region he once again took up teaching Choy Li Fut.

It was at this point that Lau Bun began his studies with Yuen Hai.  He also is reported to have learned a “Shaolin Five Animals Form” from his teacher’s wife, who was also an accomplished martial artist.  Most accounts of Lau Bun’s life are brief and do not give exact years.  Still, we can make some informed guesses about when this instruction started.

The Boxer Uprising in 1900 proved to be a watershed moment for martial artists across the country.  In Guangdong the provincial governor had every martial arts school and association in the province closed in the wake of these events.  This order was taken quite seriously and was actually implemented by local officials.  The great fear was that local martial artists would seek revenge against foreign traders in the region, or engage in copy-cat anti-Christian violence, giving the British a pretext to seize the entire Pearl River.  Nor was this fear unreasonable.  The British were looking for an excuse to expand their holdings in the area.

As a result of this order the Hung Sing Association in Foshan was forced to close its doors, and many of its instructors actually ended up going to Hong Kong for a few years to seek other means of employment.  I expect that the same thing happened in Taishan, and that Yuen Hai’s five years contract working as a bodyguard in Indonesia probably spanned the period from 1900-1905.  It just wasn’t possible to teach for much of this time.

After 1903-1905, the order restricting martial arts schools was eased.  The Hung Sing Association in Foshan reopened its doors, Chan Wah Shun rented a new school space in the Ip family temple (effectively inaugurating the modern era of Wing Chun) and Yuen Hai returned to Taishan and resumed teaching Choy Li Fut.  Still, his teaching career had been disrupted at a critical time, and this may have limited the size of the organization that he could build.

Luckily the remittances from America allowed the families of his students to pay consistent tuition.  Lau Bun studied diligently and eventually became his teacher’s successor.  I point this out because I find it interesting that apparently none of Yuen Hai’s first generation of students (who studied with him from 1894-1900) remained in the lineage after the Boxer Uprising.  This is a valuable reminder of how volatile events were at the turn of the century and the impact that they had on the development of the martial arts.

Lau Bun had sufficient time to complete his martial arts training, but the situation in southern China was becoming strained by the middle of the 1920s.  Warlordism became a major problem and the Nationalist government struggled to assert control of the country.  The economy of Guangdong was slow to industrialize in the 1920s and did not receive the same level of investment as more quickly growing areas like Shanghai.  Economic opportunities started to dry up, crime and narcotics became an increasing problem, and in 1927 the Hung Sing Association was officially suppressed by the Nationalist Party because of its association with leftist political elements (the CCP).  Adding to this general sense of calamity, as some point during this period Lau Bun’s father appears to have died.

Sometime in the 1920s Lau Bun followed the path of so many of his countrymen before him and decided to seek his fortune in America.   However, this process was now vastly more complicated than it had been half a century years earlier.  A series of legislative acts passed between 1870 and 1924 essentially banned all legal immigration from China.

In fact, in the year 1924 the U.S. Border Patrol was created under the Department of Labor.  Its original task was to patrol the Mexican border.  Their assignment was to find and stop Chinese immigrants who entered Mexico as part of their effort to immigrate illegally to the United State.

Nevertheless, would be Chinese immigrants did have one thing on their side.  The great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 resulted in the destruction of most of the state’s immigrations records.  This allowed large numbers of illegal Chinese immigrants in the US to claim citizenship directly or to claim to be children of a family who were legally citizens.  This was the basic situation that Lau Bun faced when he decided to immigrate.

In the early 1920s, he left China and entered Mexico like many other immigrants of the period.  After crossing the border he became a “paper sons” by taking on the name Wong On.  This false identity allowed him to claim that he was the son of a legal resident.  Unfortunately there were some unanticipated complications in this plan.

American law enforcement officers were well aware of these schemes and continued to work to identify and deport recent Chinese immigrants.  Lau Bun’s rise to fame actually started in 1930 when he got in an altercation with a group of immigration officials in Los Angeles.  After fleeing from a regular police officer who tried to detain him, he found himself cornered in building by a number of immigration officials who had arrived as backup.  He fought with and successfully resisted four or five of these officers before jumping safely from a second story window and making his getaway.

News of Lau Bun’s adventure and “successful” confrontation with the immigration authorities spread quickly in the still relatively small Chinese American community.  When he arrived in San Francisco in 1931 his reputation assured him a hearty welcome from the powerful Hop Sing Tong.  He was hired to act as a guard or bouncer for various night clubs and gambling houses, and at some point during the 1930s (again, accounts vary) he established the Wah-Keung Kung Fu Club of Choy Li Fut.

This was a small private school.  Its original purpose was only to teach the martial arts to a group of younger members of the Hop Sing Tong who would likely also have gone on to work in the local community as guards or bouncers.  However, as Lau Bun’s stature in the community grew there was more interest in his martial arts background and his understanding of traditional Chinese medicine (both herbalism and bone-setting).

His school expanded and eventually evolved into the Hung Sing Studio of San Francisco.  By the early 1950s there was no longer a functioning Hung Sing school in Foshan, and so Lau Bun’s lineage took on added importance.

The new school quickly became heavily involved in community affairs.  Lau Bun enjoyed traditional music and he trained a Lion Dance society.  He provided traditional medical treatments to members of the local community, and was occasionally looked to as a broker or go-between to settle disputes.  Lau Bun also engaged in extensive fundraising (which sometimes included public Kung Fu displays, a rarity at the time) for the Chinese Hospital in San Francisco.

During the 1930s the demand for Kung Fu instruction, even within the Chinese American community, was quite slim.  However, as servicemen returned from fighting in the pacific in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, interest in the martial arts increased.  Some of this curiosity began to be directed at the Chinese fighting arts starting in the late 1950s, and by the late 1960s (thanks to the Bruce Lee phenomenon) what started as a trickle had become a flood of outside interest.

Lau Bun’s career is interesting precisely because it spans two eras.  When he first arrived, dominant white society had adopted a stance of active hostility towards Asian Americans.  Lau Bun was fiercely loyal to his community, and drawing on the tradition of the Foshan Hung Sing Association (which was famous in the 19^th century for its “Three Exclusions” policy), refused to teach Kung Fu to non-Chinese individuals.  Still, given the active hostilities between these communities, and the general lack of knowledge that the Chinese fighting arts even existed, one suspects that that beatniks from San Francisco were not exactly knocking down the door of the Wah-Keung Ckung Fu Club demanding instruction.

In the late 1950s and 1960s things were different.  Lau Bun was now in his 70s.  Both his reputation and school were well established.  The “yellow peril” that had dominated the 1920s and 1930s had all but disappeared from the public discourse.  In some ways community relations were much freer than they had ever been in the past.

And now a new generation of young adults actually was banging on the door of the Hung Sing Association asking to be admitted as students.  Bing Chan was the first of the San Francisco instructors trained by Lau Bun to begin to openly admit non-Chinese students to his classes.  Jew Long, who was Lau Bun’s actual successor, also began to work with Caucasian students at almost exactly the same time.

Students of Choy Li Fut and martial historians are lucky to have some home movies shot at a public demonstration, probably sometime in the early 1960s.  The atmosphere in these films is festive.  They record Lau Bun performing a butterfly sword routine, which is probably the earliest footage of the hudiedao being used in America that I have seen.  A wide variety of other demonstrations are also performed by second and third generation students.  It is interesting to note that not all of these students are Chinese. Larry Johnson, a student of Jew Long, can clearly be seen demonstrating the Tiger Fork in one section of the film.

So while Lau Bun never taught any non-Chinese students as a younger man, and he clearly suffered racism at the hands of the dominant social group, by the 1960s he was happily presiding over what had become an open and multiracial school.  In fact, Lau Bun is often credited as having introduced Anthony Qinn, an important Mexican American actor, to Kung Fu.  These short films are worth watching as they record a critical moment in the emergence of the Chinese martial arts in America.

Conclusion

Determining who first accomplished some feat is usually a difficult and thankless task.  There are suggestions that western police officers in Shanghai in the 1920s studied Chinese boxing, and it is well-known that a wide variety of martial arts were openly taught to westerners in Taiwan from 1949 to the present.  Still, I find it remarkable that it took as long as it did to establish permanent Chinese martial arts schools in the US.

Lau Bun opened the first known school, and his students (along with Ark Yuey Wong) were among the first individuals to openly teach the Chinese martial arts to all races in the US.  Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to reduce his life to a series of “firsts” or colorful anecdotes.  I prefer to focus on the ways that his biography demonstrates how the martial arts interacted with other elements of Chinese society, both in Guangdong and throughout the diaspora.

His life experience points to the importance of globalization as a central force in the social destiny of both southern China and the Chinese martial arts.  Further, I find it fascinating that within his lifetime the martial arts were used both as a tool to police the boundaries between communities, and as a doorway to bridge them.  That is a valuable lesson to remember as we think about the shifting relationships between the traditional Chinese martial arts, identity and nationalism today.

If you were looking for a figure to act as the foundation for a major martial arts film franchise, Lau Bun’s life would provide plenty of material.  If instead you are interested in the development of modern Chinese martial culture, his biography would also make for interesting reading.  I hope that this brief sketch inspires other academic students to start to investigate and write about the history of Choy Li Fut and its leading figures both inside and outside of China.

Introduction

The “writing sabbatical” continues and I am happy to report that the book chapters and papers are progressing nicely.   This weekend’s post comes to us from the early days of Kung Fu Tea, and it covers a topic that has played a central role in the creation mythology of many of Southern China’s martial arts.  It was also part of a small series of posts on the Red Boats that I wrote at the time (you can find a follow-up essay here).  Anyone interested in checking out the original comments and conversations can click here.  Enjoy!

Exploring the Red Boats

No subject has been more romanticized among students of Guangdong’s martial arts (and Wing Chun practitioners in particular) than the “Red Boat” companies of the Cantonese regional opera tradition.  Late 19^th and early 20^th century martial arts folklore claimed that remnants of the Southern Shaolin Temple (including the Abbot Jee Shin) found refuge among these wandering performers following the destruction of their sanctuary by the hated Qing government.

Such stories make a lot of narrative sense.  Because of their low social status, and ability to travel from place to place without engendering too much suspicion, opera companies would seem to be the ideal cover for individuals fleeing government persecution.  They were even expected to house martial arts experts among their casts of performers.

Of course the acceptance of these stories as historical facts requires us to overlook other inconvenient details, starting with the likelihood that the Southern Shaolin Temple, imagined in so many Kung Fu legends, never existed.  Further, the anti-government activities of the various secret societies and triad organizations in southern China during the late 19^th century had much more to do with criminal scheming and social posturing than they did any organized plan for actual political reform.  Things become more complicated in the first decade of the 20^th century when Sun Yat Sen begins to organize genuinely revolutionary activity among some of these groups, but that is not what most Kung Fu legends are describing.

Most of the stories that see opera groups as dedicated political cells (rather than convenient covers for wandering criminals) seem to date to the mid 20^th century or later. Some of them were not first recorded until quite recently.  In a recent post I looked at the actual history of political and revolutionary activities of Cantonese Opera troops.  It is true that these groups were often quite vocal in making political demands, and in one memorable instance even went into open rebellion against the state (along with many other elements of Southern China’s underclass.)  Still, a detailed examination of these episodes does not validate the historical accuracy of the Wing Chun folklore.  Rather it strongly suggests that the Red Boat Opera companies were never involved in the sorts of activities that are generally ascribed to them.

This does not mean that individuals interested in Wing Chun’s history are free to ignore the opera connection.  I suspect that it is actually very significant that the orthodox Wing Chun genealogies claim that Leung Jan was influenced by the Cantonese opera tradition during the mid 19^th century (probably during the Opera Ban following the Red Turban Revolt for reasons which I have discussed elsewhere).  In fact, Cantonese opera had a particularly close relationship with the southern Chinese martial arts and likely had a substantive impact on both their development and public perception.

It is not my goal in these posts to dismiss any connection between the two.  Rather, it may be necessary draw the line between folklore, on the one hand, and social history, on the other, in order to open a space for new research.  I think that this is a rich topic that could potentially yield findings that would be important not just for our understanding of hand combat systems like Wing Chun and Choy Li Fut, but also southern Chinese popular culture as a whole.

Unfortunately this is not the sort of thing that is easily summarized in a single blog post.  In my last essay on the topic I restricted my focus to the somewhat complex relationship between Cantonese Opera and revolutionary politics in the late Qing and Republic Periods.  In the current post I want to introduce some basic historical and social description about what life was like on the Red Boats.  Southern China was a dangerous place during much of their period of operation.  What precautions did they take when plying the waters?  How did the opera companies fit into the local economy of violence along the Pearl River Estuary?  Just as importantly, how did they manage to train their own apprentices in Kung Fu while constantly on the move?

The historical investigation of these questions is complicated by our reliance on oral accounts.  Specifically, we wish to know more about the Red Boats to expand our understanding of the development of the southern Chinese martial arts.  Yet from the 1970s onward (and the process rapidly accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s) martial arts culture has been read back onto the accounts of the Red Boats themselves.  This created a seamless system of self-reinforcing folkloric accounts easily mistaken for history.

Nor is this challenge restricted to the realm of opera.  Traditionally most individuals within Chinese society held the martial arts in low esteem. They were not an integral part of how people remembered their own cultural past.

Yet after the Kung Fu Craze of the 1970s, where these traditional fighting systems came to be accepted as a legitimate marker of Chinese identity, this changed.   Increasingly they have come to be projected back onto the past, often in very creative (if totally anachronistic) ways.  In the final section of this post I hope to examine a few examples of this process as it relates to Cantonese opera and consider how we might attempt to control for it.

In a future installment of this series I will examine some 19^thcentury accounts of Cantonese opera performances, particularly as they related to “military plays.”  I will also take a closer look at what we think we know about how these groups learned their martial arts in the first place, as well as the realities of river violence and piracy during the late imperial period.  Hopefully this series of posts will lay the groundwork for future research on the relationship between the martial arts and opera as related strands in the region’s popular culture.

Lastly, I should say a few things about my sources.  There are really only a handful of books and articles in the scholarly literature that focus directly on the history and description of Cantonese opera as it relates to questions of interest to martial artists.  This blog post relies heavily on two sources.  The first is an article by the anthropologists Barbara E. Ward titled “The Red Boats of the Canton Delta: A Historical Chapter in the Sociology of Chinese Regional Drama” (Proceedings of the International Conference on Sinology. 1981. pp. 233-258.)  Her work is based on a very large number of interviews (conducted between approximately 1975-1980) with individuals who lived and performed on the Red Boats.  Ward also conducted extensive ethnographic research with Cantonese Opera companies in her home city of Hong Kong (where she was employed as a professor of Anthropology at Chinese University of Hong Kong.)

The other source that I have turned too in writing this is a Master thesis by Loretta Siuling Yeung titled “Red Boat Troupes and Cantonese Opera.”  This research was completed much more recently (2010) and was supervised at the University of Georgia.  Yeung also conducted a number of interviews, but seems to have relied much more on the historical and secondary literature.  This change in research strategy is certainly understandable given the lack of surviving veteran Red Boat performers in 2010 and the academic goals of a Master’s thesis.  In general the historical accounts of Yeung and Ward are quite consistent.  Still, the differences which occasionally appear are also quite suggestive.

Understanding the Red Boats as a Physical, Economic and Social System

The Red Boats present the student of popular culture with a number of paradoxes.  The era in which they plied the waters of the Pearl River was absolutely critical to our understanding of Cantonese opera.  In fact, this is when many of the traditions and customs that we now think of as “ancient” and “timeless” first emerged.

Barbara Ward has noted that echoes of life on the Red Boats can be seen in many aspects of modern, theater-bound, opera troops in Hong Kong.  Everything from the arrangement of dressing rooms to the details of incense burning rituals looks back to life on the boats.  Throughout the post-war period veterans performers who had actually lived on the boats were lionized and idealized by their younger peers.  Yet a number of very basic questions about these vessels remain unanswered.

During the 1970s Ward and others were able to locate a number of individuals who could give very detailed accounts of what the structure of these boats had been like.  Interestingly almost all of the actual Red Boats were internally identical.

The vessels were all made to the same basic specifications and were owned either by the opera guild or some other group of individuals (I have not yet been able to answer this question).  Individual opera companies generally rented these vessels for years at a time, and were responsible for hiring their own crew of sailors.  The high degree of standardization between boats allowed for companies to change ships with little disruption as the social structure of their company was designed to be compatible with any of the 60 or so specially built Red Boats which sailed the waters of southern China.

The era of the Red Boats was also much briefer than most martial artists realize.  When speaking of these opera companies I suspect that the vessels themselves were really only part of the entire equation, and possibly a small one at that.  For me the most interesting aspect of Ward’s extensive research was the discovery that each Cantonese Opera company had a shared social structure optimized for both performance and life on the boat.

These groups were not generalists or traveling troubadour/mercenaries.  Rather they were units composed of highly specialized performers supported by an elaborate physical and administrative infrastructure.  The real “technology” of these companies, the thing that accounted for their remarkable success, was actually organizational in nature.  It was their own internal structure and group cultural.  The physical layout of the boats both reflected this and helped it to gel.  In fact, Ward found that by the 1980s (more than 30 years after then last voyage of a Red Boat) it remained remarkably intact.

No historical account, either in Chinese or any other language, mentions Red Boats in southern China prior to the 1850s.  It is possible that they were introduced as a social and economic system for organizing opera performances just prior to the Red Turban Revolt of the 1850s, but if so they made very few voyages before the decade long opera ban that followed the end of that conflict.  The real start of the era of “Red Boat” activity was in the 1870s.  From that time forward these vessels became a conspicuous aspect of local popular culture.

The purpose of the Red Boats was to allow opera companies to travel from one temple festival to the next during the performance season.  Almost all of these voyages were actually carried out through southern China’s extensive river system.  These were not ocean going vessels and were not actually capable of moving along China’s coastline.  Occasionally a pair of boats (they always traveled two at a time) would be dispatched to fill a contract in Macao, but that was really as far into “open water” as any of these vessels ever ventured.  Even that journey was probably a harrowing experience for the cast and crew.

The Red Boats themselves appear to have been an artifact of one stage of the economic development within the Cantonese opera industry.  Clearly it took a lot of capital to build these ships, and individual companies had to earn a lot of money to pay the rent on them.  Prior to the 1850s most opera companies still traveled by water (with few roads in the region almost everyone in southern China did).  But there was nothing remarkable about their vessels and I have yet to see evidence indicating that the internal structure of these companies were standardized to the same extent that would later become common.

During this earlier period the region’s economy was generally smaller and it does not appear that traveling companies could make all that much money.  But as revenues grew in the middle of the century it became possible for the opera guild to invest in new technologies that would streamline the performance process.  In short, the Red Boat system that modern martial artists seem to be so interested in really appears to be an artifact of economic changes that were just starting in the middle of the 19^th century.

The Red Boat opera companies reached the peak of their popularity in the 1920s.  This was really their golden era.  After that they became a victim of their own success.  Traditionally Cantonese operas were only performed on makeshift temporary stages that were erected as part of a temple festival.  The temples offered these performances to the local gods, and were responsible for raising the funds that were used to pay the actors who stage the performance.  The entire community would then come out to watch the show.

In the middle of the 19^th century southern China had no (or very few) dedicated theaters.  It took a substantial investment of capital to build the Red Boats, but they were still a stop-gap solution for the opera guild.  The truth was that owning land and building theaters was incredibly expensive.  There simply wasn’t enough money in opera to make that viable in most places.

However, the rapid economic growth of the 1920s started to change all of this.  As opera companies grew rich, and more people flocked to cities, suddenly it became possible to build permanent theaters.  Access to these structures was still controlled by the guild, but the cost of staging a performance was vastly lowered if one did not have to travel to it.  And when it was necessary to travel to the countryside to fulfill lucrative festival contracts, a company could simply book passage on the new steam ships and trains.

Red Boat opera troops continued to travel through the 1930s but the institution was in decline even at that point.  The Japanese invasion in 1938 put a stop to much of this activity.  Rumor has it that they even bombed a pair of boats (possibly the last ones) moored in the harbor of Guangzhou.  Other accounts state that the last known sighting of a pair of Red Boats was in Macao circa 1950.

A number of people have asked me why the Red Boats were never really resurrected after WWII.  I think that the answer is basically financial.  The boats themselves represented a certain level of capital investment which made sense when the Cantonese opera companies were starting to enjoy a surplus (due to changes in the structure of the local economy) but could not yet afford speedier forms of travel and permanent theaters for off-season performances.  The Red Boats helped to give shape to the internal culture of the modern Cantonese opera company, but once they ceased to fill their basic economic function they were quickly discarded.

I doubt many performers were all that nostalgic about this change in 1940s and 1950s.  All of the accounts collected by Yeung and Ward indicate that life on these vessels was a challenge.  Generally speaking these vessels traveled in pairs (termed a “Heaven Boat” and an “Earth Boat.”)  Both Red Boats housed between them about a 140-160 people in spaces that were only 80 Chinese feet long by just 10 feet wide.  Ward states that a full Opera crew included 62 actors, 12 musicians, 11 full time administrators/managers, 9 “costume men”, 10 property handlers/stage hands, 2 barbers, 4 laundry men, 7 cooks, 12 boatmen, 4 professional guards, a ship’s doctor, captain and other officers.

As performances became more elaborate in the early 20th century a third vessel was often added to the armada.  Its job was to carry the increasingly complex scenery and props which were becoming a part of newer styles of stage performances.  It was simply termed the “Scenery boat” was not made to any special specifications.

Each of these vessels had a raised deck on the stern and rows of cabins running down the sides.  They also had a mast that could be raised or lowered.  About half of the individuals on the boat were the performers, apprentices, musicians, property managers and administrators who made up the opera company proper.  They monopolized the cabins and area below decks.

Again, the internal layout of each of these vessels was standardized and basically identical.  Both Yeung and Ward confirm that the names of the various cabins were even standardized from ship to ship.  The “cabins” (really more like double bunks which could have privacy screens installed) were on the port and starboard side of the ship and were separated by a “hall” that was only a few feet wide.  Some of these bunks had better circulation and views than others.  Cabins were assigned by lottery at the start of each season and no one wanted to draw cabins with such poetic names as “Trash Heap” and “Mosquito Den” (which Ward speculates may actually have been unfortunately literal).

Interestingly Ward points out that all members of the opera company actually had equal chances of drawing a good birth going into the lottery, meaning that potentially a raw apprentice would end up with the best assignment on the boat.  Of course he probably would not keep it, but according to both rules and tradition the more senior members of the company would have to bid to buy it from him.  This could be a valuable boon for a young individual with very little access to money, and it is a fascinating way in which resources were redistributed (albeit on a limited scale) from senior members of the company to junior ones at least once a year.

Given everything that one reads about the cruelty of opera training, not to mention impoverished parents selling their children to traveling groups of performers, I thought that this was an interesting bit of evidence as to the willingness of these groups to actually make some investment in their youngest members.  It should also be noted that even the most junior apprentice in the opera company was still “senior” to 50% of these individuals on the craft.

Of course they would have been the crew.  With the exception of the Captain and the ship’s doctor, the crew and officers did not have any place below decks.  They worked and lived on the surface of the vessel, rolling out blankets and sleeping on the decks at night.  The crew included a number of sailors, but also more specialized individuals such as cooks, barbers, members of armed escort companies tasked with providing security for the vessel and general officers.

None of these individuals were attached to either the opera company or the vessel itself.  Instead the company rented the vessel for the season and then was responsible for finding and hiring a crew.  Ward suspects that most of the individuals who signed on for such missions were from the caste of “Boat People” who were so common on the waterways of southern China at that time.

Generating enough revenue to sustain an operation of this size and complexity cannot have been easy.  The ability to manage this complexity, staying both booked and on schedule, was really the great innovation of the Red Boat system.  Again, their greatest assets appears to have been organizational in nature.  I find it particularly revealing that a company traveled with no fewer than 11 full time managers and many other individuals who roles essentially boiled down to “performance logistics.”

Martial artists often wonder to what degree we can think of the Red Boat opera companies as semi-specialized bands of who may have adopted the role of “pirate” or “mercenary,” if not outright “rebel.”  Obviously we have much less information about what earlier groups in the 18^th or early 19^th century were doing.  Yet by the time the Opera Ban is lifted it is pretty clear that this is not usually the case.  These companies were highly specialized economic units.  Their vessels are not well suited for either open water sailing or combat.  In fact, they actually turned to local specialists for their defense.

Violence on the Red Boats

Having laid out a description of the basic character of the Red Boat opera companies I would now like to return to a more focused discussion of their relationship with civil violence in the late Qing and Republic periods.  Again, this is a broad subject, and it is not the sort of thing that can be tackled in a single blog post.  The current discussion is by necessity limited though I intend to return to these same themes in my follow-up discussion.

The threat of violence was an actual concern for members of the Red Boat companies.  In some ways they may even have been uniquely cursed.  When thinking about social conflict in southern China we often draw a distinction between the sorts of banditry that was common in the countryside versus the criminality and secret societies that plagued the cities.  Due to their peripatetic nature these troops were practically guaranteed to be exposed to both of these forces at one time or another.

Members of these companies were likely also vulnerable for other reasons.  The low social status of performers may have made it difficult for them to seek redress through established official channels.  Also, by virtue of their appearance at temple festivals, opera performances were linked to gambling and other sorts of commerce that was often controlled by organized crime.

Of course piracy was another major issue on China’s waterways in the 19^th century.  Robert Antony (Like Froth Floating on the Sea, 2003) identifies the period from about 1790-1810 as being the peak of the region’s piracy crisis.  While this sort of activity dropped precipitously after 1810 it never totally vanished.  One can easily add it to the already long list of concerns that the officers and crew of the Red Boats would have had to contend with

So how did the Red Boat opera companies handle these threats?  Wing Chun mythology suggests that it was by maintaining a separate set of more practical and deadly martial skills than those that were exhibited on stage.  For instance, in a number of stories the exiled Shaolin Abbot who has been hiding as a cook on a Red Boat reveals himself to be a martial arts master only after various members of the company fail to defeat a gangster who has been harassing the group.

The reality of the situation is probably more nuanced than these sorts of accounts would indicate.  As security on China’s roads and waterways broke down towards the end of Qing dynasty most merchants turned to “Armed Escort Companies” to provide safety for both goods and people while traveling.  In fact, these companies became a major employer of both civilian trained martial artist and retired military officers.  It is actually impossible to tell the story of the development of the modern martial arts without exploring these groups.

These security specialists employed a wide range of skills beyond Kung Fu.  Their most critical asset was actually their deep local knowledge, established relationships with local strong-men and their carefully cultivated diplomatic skills.  If these should fail many of these companies were also armed with relatively modern rifles, carbines and in some cases even state of the art handguns.

It is absolutely true that members of these companies also carried traditional weapons such as swords and spears.  Man of them had extensive training in hand to hand combat.  But if actual fighting could not be avoided very few individuals wanted to leave any of their bases uncovered.

It seems that the Red Boat Opera companies dealt with the turmoil of the 19^th and early 20^th century in exactly the same way that most merchants did, by hiring professional guards and escort companies armed with a variety of modern weaponry.  Even after the heyday of the armed escort company passed in the early 20^thcentury, the Red Boats continued to turn to dedicated professionals for their immediate security needs.

Barbra Ward relates the following oral account in her paper which provides some additional information on this subject:

“Informant S, male aged 72, February 1975: When I was a boy my father used to take me to the theater whenever he could because he liked it very much.  So we used to see not only the plays in our own town at the festival times but also those in neighboring towns and villages.  Sometimes we walked and sometimes we went by boat.  I remember the Red Boats were really like special ferry boats.  And they had guns too.  In those days public order was not reliable, and the ferry boats always used to carry armed guards.  There were usually three of them.  They stood on the top of the ferry boat (i.e., on the cabin roof. B.E.W.) to keep a look out.  Quite often, too, a sort of platform was built at the bow on which a small gun was mounted.  The ferry boat often had iron sheets built along the cabin sides for protection against gunfire.  I know that the Red Boats had the same arrangements about armed guards, and I think that they often had iron sheeting too.  I used to like to see the guns.” (Ward, 234-235)

Clearly the Red Boats took security seriously, and that meant turning to professionals with modern weapons.  In that regard they were very similar to pretty much every other ferry and commercial vessel of any size on the Pearl River at that point in time.

Of course this does not mean that martial arts would have been a useless skill outside of the stage.  As useful as a small artillery piece is, it may not help in an altercation in an urban environment or when dealing with petty crime.  And we know from a variety of period accounts that these were things that many martial artists had to deal with.  There is no reason to suspect that the Opera companies would have been uniquely exempt on that front.  Still, it is clear that when dealing with major threats to the ship or crew they, like most other civilians, turned to professional specialists in violence.

Purported image of late 19th century performers with a large planted wooden dummy on a vessel.  This image is commonly passed around the internet, but I have yet to actually confirm the photographer, subjects or original place of publication.

Before concluding I would also like to review a few points about martial arts and operatic training on the Red Boats.  Again this is a topic that has generated a lot of speculation among Wing Chun students and other martial artists.  I have read numerous accounts that have claimed that Wing Chun owes it compact nature to the fact that it was developed on a boat (or alternatively to fight on boats).  Of course not everything about the Wing Chun system (such as its weapons, either the three meter pole or the expansive footwork of the swords form) is really all that “compact” or well adapted to tight spaces.

The informants that Barbara Ward interviewed were all unanimous in declaring that martial arts training did not happen on the boats themselves.  Rather these skills were taught almost exclusively when the boat was moored and the crew was on dry land.  Why?  A quick look at the Ward’s reconstruction of the typical Red Boat reveals the reason.  There was simply no room to do anything other than sleep on these vessels.

Hallways were only a few feet wide and often had trunks along their edges reducing their actual width even more.  Stair wells were so narrow that individuals actually had to turn sideways to move up and down them.  And while there was open space on the fore deck and roof of the cabin (if the mast was raised) that area was typically occupied by the crew of the vessel.  In fact, Ward’s informants indicate that even basic performance and musical training happened exclusively on land.

Still, when you recall that these boats were essentially river barges rather than ocean going vessels, this actually makes a lot of sense.  They were never all that far away from the bank, and most of the trips between venues (where they might be tied up for three day or more) were not all that long.

Conclusion: The evolving relationship between martial arts mythology and our understanding of Cantonese Opera.

While we know a number of details about the history and operation of the Red Boats, there are still some of things that we are less sure about.  One of the most surprising of these is why these vessels were actually called “Red Boats” at all.  Most causal readers would probably assume that they were so named because they were painted red.

Yet Professor Ward’s informants in the 1970s (all individuals who had seen or lived on these vessels) disputed that.  They claimed that in fact the boats looked much like any other river going ferry.  Some stated that the boats were so named because they displayed red banners and advertisements when coming into port.  Ward herself wonders whether this was an ironic or self-deprecating pun based on the fact that high status official vessels were also called “Red Boats.”  She also speculates on the various associations of the color red with different local secret societies but comes to no conclusions (see pages 249-250).

Unfortunately there is little agreement on the basic facts of the situation.  While early accounts claim that the boats were brown, later sources and even government museum replicas (dating from the 1990s and 2000s), state that the boats really were red.  For instance, the Opera Museum in Foshan is one of the few places where scholars can go for reliable information about the history and development of Cantonese regional opera.  Their scale model of an opera boat is quite clearly painted red and white.  In fact, when Yeung did her research in 2009-2010 it does not appear that any of the later sources she used indicated that the boats were not red.  Who should we believe?

One would think that this would be an easy point to resolve.  All we would need to do would be to find a photograph of a Red Boat in the 1920s or 1930s and look at it.  And one might suppose that given the enormous popularity of Cantonese opera that we would be easy.  Unfortunately this is not the case.

We have many pictures of the performers that these boats carried.  We even have photographs of costumes and musicians.  But we have yet to identify a single surviving photograph or painting of an actual pair of Red Boats.  I have tried to speak with as much confidence as my sources will allow, but this surprising ellipse is a useful reminder of just how spotty the historical record can be.  On a fundamental level we just don’t know how these boats were decorated, or if they were decorated at all.

In general the sources that Ward dealt with were more numerous and closer to the actual events than the ones that Yeung had access too.  As such I am inclined to believe that these vessels were “red” only in symbolic terms, and probably looked much like any other ferry to a casual observer.  Their genius lay in their social organization, not their advertising.  I must admit that I also like the idea of them displaying red banners when they arrived at their destination.  That seems very plausible.

Still, this is no longer the dominant image of these vessels in either operatic or martial arts circles.  It would appear that sometime between 1970 and 2000 the “Red Boats” literally became red in the public’s imagination.  So what changed?

I suspect that a big part of this shift had to do with who could claim to be an “expert” on this aspect of southern China’s cultural heritage.  Prior to 1970 if you wanted to know about the Red Boats one would simply go and interview someone who lived on them or frequented their shows.  Martial artists probably would not have been considered a very credible source of information, nor would many people be all that interested in catering to their tastes or vision of the past.

Of course this was prior to Bruce Lee, Jet Li and the “Kung Fu Craze” that swept Hong Kong and Mainland China in the late 1970s and 1980s.  Despite the best efforts of previous generations of reformers, the martial arts were always viewed as a marginal activity within Chinese society.  Ergo their close association with the opera and military, both of which were also seen as very marginal activities.  When most Chinese individuals imagined their past the martial arts did not play a huge role in it, and if they did it was not necessarily a glorious one.

In the 1980s all of this changed.  A much wider group of people were now willing to accept the martial arts as a legitimate tool for both enacting and understanding Chinese identity.  This had an immediate and profound effect on the contours of popular culture.  Suddenly things were interesting to consumers precisely because they had a connection to the martial arts.

Martial arts tourism also became a major industry which picked up steam throughout the 1980s and 1990s.  Municipalities and individual institutions found themselves competing in a new industry based on a rapidly evolving “memory” of what the past had been.  I suspect that as the cultural prestige of the southern Chinese martial arts rose, its teachers were increasingly seen as “experts” to be consulted on the history of area’s opera tradition.

After all, these performance traditions played a critical part in the lore of groups like Wing Chun.  Their stories were colorful and often full of solid nationalist themes.  And of course they were likely to be an economic boon to whatever geographic unit could lay claim to them.

All of which brings me back to the model of the literally “Red Boat” housed at the Foshan opera museum. Astute observers will notice that in addition to the red paint another addition has been made to the model that does not appear in any of Professor Ward’s accounts or her own reconstruction of the boats.  Relying on the museum replica Yeung (in 2010) reports that the bow of each Earth Boat featured a wooden dummy for the opera singers to practice their Kung Fu on.  Further, the training apparatus in question looks suspiciously like a modern Wing Chun dummy.

I have got to admit that I have some very mixed feelings about this.  As a Wing Chun practitioner I would actually love for this to be true.  Yet it is strange that in 1975 none of Ward’s sources remembered this detail.  However in our current decade (well after the rise of Bruce Lee and even Ip Man) suddenly local experts “remember” that the boats all had dummies on them.

Again, it is hard to know what to do with this.  We have one photograph that appears to show two individuals on a boat with a dummy, much like the one that Yeung reproduces.  But I have never been able to actually confirm in concrete terms the origins or provenance of that image.

Readers should also recall that there were other sorts of dummies that were used in southern China.  Should we really expect of a modern Wing Chun dummy in 1870?  Or even in 1920?  Why not a Choy Li Fut style training device?  During that period it was the most popular regional art.

Finally, looking at the measurements and recreation provided by Ward I actually have some doubts as to whether a dummy would actually have fit on the deck at all.  After all, she has a cannon mounted in the middle of the platform where the martial arts student would have to stand in order to use the dummy.

Ultimately I doubt that the Red Boats included training dummies of the sort imagined by the Foshan museum model.  I do not doubt that dummies were part of opera training.  They are an important part of a number of local martial arts systems and it is hard to think of a reason why opera students would not have used them.  Yet this training, like pretty much everything else, probably had to wait until the apprentices disembarked onto dry land.

I suspect that this may be a good example of how martial arts folklore has come to be projected back onto Chinese popular history in unexpected ways since the 1980s and 1990s.  Prior to this time there would be no reason to think of Wing Chun teachers as “experts” in the history of Cantonese opera.  But after that time their stories became critically important to the many tourists who descend on Foshan each year hoping to hear about Cantonese opera’s connection to Wing Chun.

Popular culture is not static.  It is a dynamic thing.  This means that our view of the past is always changing and evolving as well.  It is not hard to see this process unfurl in academic discussions of China’s history, but it is also happening in popular conversations about the past and its relationship with modern identity.

I do not want to dismiss this changing discourse about the nature of the Red Boats and their relationship with the martial arts.  I think that these two issues regarding the boats’ appearance are pretty informative in terms of understanding what many individuals are looking for in the Chinese martial arts today.  Still, it is necessary to bracket this process if you are instead interested in understanding the evolution of the martial arts in the Late Imperial or Republic periods.  If one is unaware of the influence of these modern stories on how the past imagined, then history quickly becomes tautology.

How do historical or cultural students guard against this tendency?  In general Yeung’s thesis is pretty good, but it is clear that she was not really all that well informed about the local martial arts (her emphasis is on the musical and performance side of opera).  This may have hampered her ability to judge the credibility of different sources.

At the end of the day relying on accounts and documents close to the source is our best strategy.  When there has been a discrepancy between Yeung and Ward I have tended to favor the later precisely because her sources are more numerous and credible.  The real danger that arises when speculating about the past in the absence of primary documents is that we cannot tell when our thinking starts to go offtrack.  When the historical record is silent it is just too easy to support almost any argument no matter how spurious.

I hope that this blog post will help to address some of these issues, at least with regards to the Red Boat Opera companies and their relationship to Wing Chun.  In recent years this motif has been used to advance a number of competing theories about where the system originated and why it evolved in the way that it did.

Most of these claims are probably spurious. The Red Boat period of the Cantonese opera is both later and shorter than most people recognize (really circa 1870-1938).  These companies appear to have been highly specialized economic units and unlikely to have been involved in the sorts of radical politics which later martial arts folklore seeks to link them too.  Lastly, while the Red Boats inhabited a dangerous world, they often relied on professional guards armed with modern weapons to protect their property and lives.  In that sense they were very much like any other travelers on the Pearl River at that point in time.

Nevertheless, I suspect that opera was linked to the development of a number of important styles in Southern China.  Competition between opera troops to showcase the newest and most exotic skills on stage helped to spread different styles throughout the region, and likely even acted as vector for new hand combat traditions to enter southern China in the first place.  In asking these questions about where exactly the “history” ends and modern “folklore” begins, I do not seek to discount the contribution of Cantonese opera.  Rather I would like to open a space where their actual accomplishments can be investigated and understood aside from their more recent reputation.

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If you enjoyed this essay consider reading: The Red Boats and the Nautical Origins of the Wooden Dummy.

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A Quick Update

My other writing projects are continuing well, though weekends are never quite as productive as one might hope.  But my loss may be your gain in the shape of some fresh material here on the blog.

It seems that among martial artists there has been renewed interest in “stone locks” and other types of traditional Chinese strength training equipment in the last few years.  I have already covered this topic once before.  Nevertheless, I now feel compelled to share a recent find with the readers of Kung Fu Tea (see above).  This photograph ran on the UPI news wire service in 1961 and I was lucky enough to snag an original copy of the image in an auction.  Its caption reads:

Exercise is the order of the day-every day-for most of the 670 million people of communist China, and the Red regime stresses psychical fitness to produce better workers and tougher soldiers.  Upper: An elderly peasant on an agricultural co-operative in Liaoning province lifted two heavy blocks in one of the two daily calisthenic sessions which are required of all communist workers.

Its a very nicely composed image, though upon closer inspection one suspects that we are actually seeing a scene from a public demonstration rather than a typical daily exercise session.  There are certainly more people standing around applauding than one might otherwise be able to account for.  And if you look carefully at the lower right hand corner of the image it appears that there is another strongman lifting a set of stone wheels that are obscured by the individual in the center of the frame.

The Cold War rhetoric in the caption is quite interesting and it reminds us of what was once a common context in which the Chinese martial arts were discussed.  Of course, all of this has long since vanished from our collective memory and been replaced with more recent images of figures like Bruce Lee, Ip Man and the ubiquitous Shaolin monk.  At some point in the future I hope to delve further into the Cold War inflected images of the martial arts in “Red China” that frequented the pages of Western newspapers between the 1960’s and the 1980’s.  Hopefully this photograph will serve as down payment on that conversation.

Still, it is always fascinating to see a vintage image of stone locks in use.  Those interested is seeing more great images (or reading about their use) may want to check out a short interview that I recently did for the Red Pagoda gallery.  Its a quick read, and the blog’s photography and design is really excellent.   Click here to read more:

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If you enjoyed this you might also want to see: Through a Lens Darkly (25): A Sawback Dadao in Hangzhou

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Introduction

I am happy to report that all of the conference papers and book chapters I have been working on for the last month are now finished.  Unfortunately, my blogging sabbatical must continue a little while longer. I am now preparing to hop on a plane for a few weeks of transoceanic travel and presentations.  In the mean time, I would like to leave you with a few of the keynotes and round-tables from this summers Martial Arts Studies at Cardiff University.  The organizers of the event have been kind enough to upload these to YouTube and its the next best thing to being there (though admittedly, being there in person is way much more fun).

The first “guest posts” in this series is a real treat.  Professor Meaghan Morris is an important pioneer in the fields of film and cultural studies.  Her writings on the Hong Kong film industry have helped to forge a strong intersection between these fields and martial arts studies.  Anyone who considers themselves to be a Kung Fu film fan will find many new ideas to ponder in her paper, and those who are newer to the genre may even pick up a few recommendations for films to see and themes to watch for.  Enjoy!

Disenchanting Jianghu: Historical Experience and the Kung Fu Refusenik in Cinema by Professor Meaghan Morris.

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Looking for something to read?  Why not check out this essay:  Do the Chinese Martial Arts have One “Martial Culture” or Many?

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Introduction

One of my few disappointments about the 2017 Martial Arts Studies conference was that a change in travel plans forced me to miss the final afternoon of the event.  As such, I was not able to take part in the closing workshop which addressed a number of topics that are important to the emerging field of Martial Arts Studies.  Of these the most basic would have to be, “How do we talk about our personal experience with these fighting systems in our academic studies of them?”  Luckily this debate was just posted on YouTube, and I plan on watching Parts I and II on my flight to Korea.

Click here to go directly to Part I.

Here is what the conference program had to say about the workshop:

At this year’s Martial Arts Studies Conference, we will set aside time for workshops and a round table panel discussion that will explore key problematics pertinent to anyone researching, writing about or teaching martial arts.

This problem has been well posed by Loïc Wacquant, who puts it like this:

How to go from the guts to the intellect, from the comprehension of the flesh to the knowledge of the text? Here is a real problem of concrete epistemology about which we have not sufficiently reflected, and which for a long time seemed to me irresolvable. To restitute the carnal dimension of ordinary existence and the bodily anchoring of the practical knowledge constitutive of pugilism – but also of every practice, even the least ‘bodily’ in appearance – requires indeed a complete overhaul of our way of writing social science. (Loïc Wacquant, ‘The Body, The Ghetto and the Penal State’, Qual Sociol, 2009, p.122)

Not everyone working in martial arts studies will regard themselves as a social scientist, and not everyone need be completely satisfied with Wacquant’s own solution. (Wacquant mixes different styles of writing, different modes of address: sometimes literary/descriptive, sometimes confessional, emotional, ethnographic, sometimes analytical, and so on.) But all of us working in martial arts studies will benefit from thinking about this problematic further.

Some of the questions that spring up here include:

·      What concepts, metaphors, images and vocabularies are best able to convey embodied knowledge, skill, technique, experience?

·      Does one have to experience a martial art to be able to know it or write about it?

·      Is the written word actually capable of communicating any of this?

·      Might other, newer media be any better?

·      In addition to the question of how to go ‘from the guts to the intellect’, is it possible to ‘go from the intellect to the guts’, and be able to truly experience what others experienced, as in projects that try to reconstruct lost or past physical knowledge, such as HEMA?

·      Do we need a complete overhaul of our ways of thinking and our styles of academic writing?

In order to dedicate time and space to these questions, we will first break out into different groups and then regroup for a round-table panel and discussion.

The break out groups will be self-selecting and organised by the familiar ways we already tend to categorise the main kinds of approach to martial arts. So there may be a group focusing on weapons-based arts, another focusing on grappling styles, another on striking, pugilistic martial arts, and another on internal martial arts, one on reconstructed arts, and so on.

After working in our groups, we will all reconvene together and spokespeople will report back to everyone about each group’s main findings, issues, agreements and disagreements, which will lead into an open discussion.

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Looking for something to read?  Check out: Social Distrust and the Chinese Martial Artist

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