Salvaging History and Saving the Martial Arts

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Hong Kong harbor at night. Source: Wikimedia.

 

This weekend has been a blur of activity. Friday evening was consumed by the first “open mat” sparring night at the Central Lightsaber Academy (which was a blast), Saturday was devoted to a day-long seminar on Sicilian knife fighting (a grimmer vision of weapons training), and about half of Sunday was spent helping out with the Autumn open-house at another martial arts school here in Ithaca. I have barely had time to upload my photos and draft out some quick field-notes.

Still, a nagging feeling emerged as I began to meditate on these very different events.  While I have not had time to fully develop these ideas, I thought that it might be helpful to write down a few of my impressions. The golden thread uniting and giving meaning to each of the activities seemed to be a “hidden” discussion on the problems of transmission and market viability within the martial arts.

Or maybe that is not entirely correct. The discussion happened openly in the second event.  I hope to write a fuller account of the Sicilian knife seminar led by Sifu John Crescione in a future post. But from a social scientific perspective, one of the more interesting things that came up was a debate as to whether it would really just be better to let this art die out. Granted, no one in the room thought that this was a good idea, but Sifu Crescione noted that many of the “old timers” back in Sicily who had learned and studied practical knife fighting as a family based “combative practice” saw no point in taking on students or promoting themselves within the current revival of the Italian martial arts. For them, knife fighting was a direct response to a violent environment and teaching strangers better ways to kill each other was not a wise course of action.  If a changing world no longer required these skills, so much the better.

For other instructors, Sicilian knife fighting’s true value was found in areas outside prison yards and narrow alleys. It could give individuals a chance to reconnect (and even re-imagine) their heritage.  Acting as an intermediary between the “old master” and interested foreign students might open social and economic pathways for a more professionalized generation of instructors. Finally, there is a very exciting renaissance in all sorts of traditional Italian martial arts (including stick, knife and sword), and these skills have a special historical and cultural value within that context.

The complex dialectic relationship between regional identity and more universal notions of understanding national identity is one of the things that I find most interesting about this area. Yet equally important is the emergence of a thoughtful conversation seeking to tackle the relationship between martial practice and violence in a changing social environment. How a given master of the art defined the relevant community (his family, his city, a national organization, a global network) has an important impact on how they understand the future of the art.

 

 

These conversations are far from unique.  They are happening in many places within the martial arts world.  Consider the reoccurring debates as to whether the traditional Asian arts are dying in the West (and the East too for that matter).  I note that these debate(s) happen in the plural since I am aware of written discussions of this topic dating back to the 16th century, roughly 300 years before the Chinese martial arts as most of us know them came into being.  More recently, this was a popular topic in the 1910s, the 1920s, the 1940s, 1950s and the 1970s (post-Cultural Revolution in the PRC). The Chinese martial arts seem to exist in a state of a perpetual revival and re-invention, and the desire to “save” them is one of the motivations driving them into the future. I suspect that social elites within the Chinese martial arts community understand this, and that is why they so often push the narrative that kung fu is dying.  Nothing brings a community together quite like the threat of extinction.

Still, knowledgeable critics might point out that, “this time it is different.” The rise of modern combat sports (such as MMA or competitive BJJ) has sapped the traditional arts of their air of invincibility. As a result, it is harder to make the argument that these practices are “cool” no matter how many times Bruce Lee’s image finds itself on a magazine cover.  Still, boxing was a mainstay of American sporting life in the 1960s and 1970s, just when the martial arts were coming into vogue. And a quick review of the humor of that same period leads me to suspect that most people never viewed karate or judo as infallible.

A more serious problem might be the current real estate market. Old buildings are being redeveloped and rents are high.  Gentrification is a problem in many cities.  All of this has proved problematic for many martial arts schools and gyms. In my own research I have seen multiple schools lose their locations in an area of the country where real estate prices are relatively stable. In global cities like Hong Kong and Guangzhou (the home of the southern Chinese martial arts) the combination of declining student enrollment and skyrocketing real estate values have created a true crisis. That is an empirical fact.

When looking at cities like Hong Kong, New York or London, land is the one thing that they just aren’t making any more of. While many martial arts can be trained with minimal equipment, they all need space (more so if one practices with weapons).  So maybe this time it really is different?

Which brings me to another one of my weekend activities, the open house that I was tapped to help-out with at a local school here in Ithaca. To be honest, I thought that there probably wouldn’t be much for me to do.  It was one of those spectacular October days that comes too rarely. Who wants to spend their afternoon learning about the new class schedules when you could be outside taking in the fall leaves?

To my surprise the answer turned out to be about a hundred people.  The school was so packed with potential students that one needed excellent kung fu just to make it to the cheese platters.  One would never guess that the martial arts were “dying” as you surveyed this sea of humanity. Many of the institution’s current students were hard at work chatting up potential recruits for the school’s various classes.

That last detail, the multitude of the classes offered, is probably the critical part of this story. While this particular school has some very solid Asian martial arts (Silat, JKD, various types of kickboxing), it also offers a wide range of other fitness and martial arts training.  Various types of strength and conditioning classes are offered, as is a vibrant after school program for kids. A local BJJ teacher rents space there, as do more yoga and Pilates instructors than I can keep track of.

I am sure that many of you are familiar with schools that use this sort of business model.  Yes, real estate prices are high.  But the class rooms in this building see very little down time.  The end result is that rather than competing, the various types of modern and traditional martial arts, combative classes and fitness’s groups, actually end up subsidizing each other.

This isn’t to say that there is anything easy about running a school that looks like this, or that the strategy always succeeds. I have even heard some instructors criticize these sorts of arrangements as “selling out,” seeing them as sign of decay from the situation in the 1980s or 1990s where every class or style might maintain its own storefront and absolute sovereignty.  But what if we looked just a bit further back in time?  What might we discover about the “good old days?”

 

A quiet neighborhood in Hong Kong. Source: Photo by Russell Judkins.

 

As I milled around the packed open-house I found myself thinking about Alberto Biraghi’s memoir a Hung Ga Story: Me and Master Chan Hon Chung. This was a bit of a surprise as Hung Ga was one of the few arts that was notable by its absence at this event.  But something about the turnout, and the relationships I saw between people within the crowd, reminded me very strongly of Biraghi’s account (which I have previously reviewed here).

Once again, the problem was real estate.  This is not the first era in which this has become an issue within the Chinese martial arts. In truth, it has never been particularly easy to run a kung fu school in Hong Kong.  Most Sifus during the 1970s did so by teaching in the evenings in their own apartments after all of the furniture was cleared out of the way.  That is a reality that is often overlooked in all of the discussion of “roof top schools.”

The basic issue was that Hong Kong was already a densely crowded place in the late 1940s. The waves of refugees that poured in during the early 1950s, and then again in the 1960s, filled the city to a bursting point. Rents were high in comparison to wages, and if one was lucky enough to own a building, or a group of apartments, it wasn’t clear that running a martial arts school offered the best return on one’s investment (even in a period where the martial arts were relatively popular).

Biraghi provides a fascinating account of his various stays in Hong Kong during the 1970s, and his narrative offers insight into how instructors navigated these harsh economic realities. What became evident as I read his account was that his teacher’s social standing in the neighborhood was not simply a result of his title of Sifu.  Or rather, much more went into that title than simply running a martial arts school. It certainly helped that he controlled access to real estate in his building.

Chan Hon Chung’s property was full of a wide variety of small businesses, all renting space from him, and all contributing to the fabric of the local neighborhood. Yes, kung fu was more popular in the 1970s than today. Yet in this case, it still benefited from being subsidized by an entire web of economic and social relationships, many of which might have been only dimly visible to visitors coming to the martial arts school. The respect that Chan commanded as a “Sifu” was a reflection of this wider social reality which transcended his technical function as “only” a martial arts teacher, or “only” a landlord.  He opened a space where an economic and social community could exist.

When viewed from this perspective, the Ithaca open house seems less novel or “post-modern.” Martial arts schools have always been forced to deal with fundamental economic realities.  Sometimes a recession leaves lots of empty commercial real estate (e.g., the early 1980s), and one model school organization is possible.  In other periods real estate is relatively expensive and other modes of economic organization are necessary.

In either case, martial arts schools succeed through the act of community building.  They must build a compelling internal community for their own students, but also reach out and find a place in the broader neighborhood (where future students will come from).  In this respect it was interesting to note that the Ithaca school which I visited, and the Hong Kong establishment of the 1970s, came to slightly different solutions.  Reflecting the shop-based small scale manufacturing model of the time, Chan rented to businesses in a variety of different sectors of the economy.

In a modern consumer and service-based economy, my local school has instead specialized in a single sector (fitness and physical culture).  Its secret seems to be that it provides a range of classes designed to appeal to every member of a family, or various individuals in a group of college-aged friends. There is an after-school program for the kids, a yoga class for mom, and a JKD study group for teens. In that way it has become a “one stop shop” for an entire neighborhood.  Indeed, orienting its core identity around a neighborhood rather than just one style seems to be working out quite nicely.  But I doubt that this success would have come as much of a surprise to Chan.

This brings us to a critical question about history.  What is the purpose of writing and reading martial arts history? For many martial artists the answer seems to come down to authenticity.  We seek to legitimate our personal practice (at least in our own minds) by finding evidence that we are indeed part of a vast chain of practices crossing national and temporal boundaries.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with establishing a sense of belonging. Still, this exercise always makes me a bit nervous as it leads us to read our own practices and conceptual understanding backwards in time.  In so doing we can more easily see our own reflections, but we lose sight of the actual subjects of our initial fascination.  On some level we must take seriously the warning that the past is a foreign country, and people did things differently there.  What we gain by studying history is an appreciation for the vast complexity of the human experience.

Yet this discussion suggests that something else may be possible. While there is rarely a one-to-one correlation, I don’t think anyone disputes that past innovation impacts current practice.  In that sense a style’s history is a bit like its DNA.  Not in a simple a deterministic sense, but rather as a repository for a wide variety of potential behaviors and strategies, most of which lay dormant and forgotten at any moment in time.  Rather than tell us who we are, or what we must be in the future, history reminds us that tree of human experiences branches radically in both directions. Below us as roots drawing from the past, and above us as branches reaching rhizomatically to the future.

The nature of life is that things must change.  In every generation we must determine whether our communities will live on, which practices will be preserved, and how they will be developed. While our myths about the past may inspire us, I suspect that it is within those forgotten and “dormant” corners of our historical DNA that we will find the clues necessary to navigate a complex future.

 

oOo

If you enjoyed this essay you might also want to read: A Tale of Two Challenge Fights – Or, Writing Better Martial Arts History

oOo

Seeking Identity with a T-Shirt: Uniforms in the Martial Arts

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A vintage photo captioned “Acrobatic School, Hong Kong” in pencil. Note the simple matching shirts and hats. Source: Author’s personal collection.

 

The Varieties of Uniformity

 

My Monday evening study-group just passes a milestone. Somehow it never even occurred to me that this was on the horizon, though I was the one who (inadvertently) set things in motion.  An acquaintance organizes a local street festival and she generously offered to give our group booth space and some time for small demonstrations. I accepted her offer and, as I was starting to pull things together, decided that we could really use some T-shirts. Nothing all that formal, just enough to let people know who we were.

Many martial arts communities have standardized, highly “traditional,” uniforms. The elements of the Chinese martial arts world that I spend most of my time with do not. The Wing Chun school where I did most of my training even managed to resist the social pressure to adopt a system of colored belts or sashes. The only formal ranks we have are student, assistant instructor and Sifu.  Likewise, we all trained in T-shirts and jogging pants.  Some people wore shirts with the school’s logo, often the mementos of a previous seminar or summer-camp.  The more vintage such a shirt was the more respect it commanded. But most people just wore random athletic clothing. Matching T-shirts were generally reserved for some sort of public event.

So, with a public event of my own on the horizon, it seemed high-time to order a bunch of shirts for my training group here in New York. That announcement unleashed a fair amount of enthusiasm and my students have spent the last few weeks designing images, selecting colors and comparison shopping for price quotes.  These shirts have taken on a much more complex set of meanings than simply being a way to signal who we are in a crowd.  In a way its all very predictable. Everyone in this group has been working hard for months, and the class is developing into a tight knit community. I suspect that all of this emotional energy has been invested into the process of buying these shirts.  I hope they end up looking great as they now have a lot to live up to!

All of this got me thinking about the role of uniforms in the martial arts, and the differences that we see between styles and communities. Why is the training gear in some arts more formalized than others?  What are they attempting to signal, and to who?  Where did our notions of the “proper” martial arts uniform come from, and why does it change over time?

I suspect that pretty much everyone who practices martial arts wears a uniform, even if they are not aware of it. This does not mean that all uniforms have the same meaning, or that they come from the same place. Indeed, there is a huge amount of variation in the social construction of training clothing. While my Sifu’s school never had any sort of rules about training clothing, it was clear that a well-understood informal dress-code was in effect.  Everyone wore nearly identical darkly colored T-shirts and jogging pants.  Nor are they alone in this. As I have gone to various seminars and visited multiple schools, that same unspoken dress code seems to have spread quite widely throughout the Wing Chun community.  From a sociological standpoint such a widely shared “uniform” is quite interesting, even if few of these communities would admit to having a “dress code.”

Still, it is the differences in the ways that schools approach this aspect of material culture that is truly revealing.  To simplify what is a complex topic, one might think of any uniform as occupying a distinct place within a theoretical cube defined by three axis.  The vertical axis might represent the question of centralization.  Is your uniform defined and enforced by a central authority (high), or is it more a matter of group culture (low)?

The front axis can be thought of representing a uniform’s symbolic vs. functional attributes. Victor Turner noted that most material artifacts have both a practical and symbolic value.  Both are always present, but possibly not in the same degree. The stylized helmets worn in Kendo suggest a high degree of practicality, whereas the stripes of colored tape that adorn the Taekwondo belts of my many nieces and nephews would seem to function only as motivational tools.

The back axis of our graph might be thought of as measuring the degree of individual expression that one sees in a uniform. They function as markers of community identity precisely because of their ability to make everyone appear “uniform.”  And yet they must also express more individual characteristics, such as one’s rank or position in a community. On one end of the spectrum these markers may be kept to an absolute minimum (perhaps just a belt color). On the other side of the spectrum we might find the highly personalized armor favored by various HEMA fighters, or the explosion of patches on some Kempo uniforms.  One might also think of this axis as a measure of the degree to which consumer power can be used to personalize one’s image within the fighting community.

Any of these uniforms can tell us, at a glance, where someone stands within the larger martial arts community. Kendo players do not look like silat students, and they all appear quite different from the guys who gather for “open mat night” at the local BJJ school.  Yet I suspect that if we think about these uniforms in terms of the three axis of analysis outlined above, we might come up with some unexpected hypothesis about the differing social needs and functions that each of these communities fulfills, based on the sorts of material culture they exhibit. Alternatively, we might take a single school and think about how its uniform conventions have changed over time as a way of understanding that style’s unique historical evolution.

 

 

Rafu Dojo team at the Southern California Judo Tournament, April 1940. Collection of Yukio Nakamura. This photo was probably taken in the same decade as the one above. Source: http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2014/5/2/more-than-a-game-2

 

 

The Japanese and Chinese Cases

 

Perhaps there is no more striking example of this possibility than to consider the large archive of vintage photographs that I have collected on this blog over the years. A thought occurred to me as I looked over the various newspaper photographs, tourist pictures and postcards that I have posted.  About half of these images show Chinese martial artists, and most of the rest focus on Japanese subjects. Yet instances of easily identifiable uniforms are not equally distributed across these two groups.

Looking at just my collection of vintage (pre-WWII) postcards I noted only one example where civilian Chinese martial artists could be seen wearing a martial arts training uniform. And even in that instance the significance of their clothing was probably lost on Western viewers as not everyone in the picture was wearing exactly the same thing.  The only time that Chinese martial artists were reliably uniformed seemed to be when they were lion dancing or otherwise part of a public festival.  On the flip side, every single postcard of Japanese martial artists featured crisp white training uniforms, or matching rows of kendo gear.

Without a sufficient background in the social and cultural history of both countries, one might well misinterpret what was going on in these photographs, or extrapolate too much from them.  For instance, one might look at these two sets of images and erroneously conclude that the uniforms tell a story about modernism, in either its economic, cultural or national sense. In that case the prominence of standardized uniforms within the Japanese martial arts might be taken as a sign of the country’s successfully modernization and the victory of nationalism over regional identity.  Likewise, their absence in the Chinese case could indicate a certain “failure to launch.”  Indeed, it seems likely that this was exactly the message that many Westerners absorbed when they encountered these images in the early and mid 20thcentury. But was it really the case?

Let us begin by considering developments in Japan.  While many martial arts historians have written on the appearance of colored belts (first in judo, then in karate and other arts), I would like to instead turn our attention to the development of the ubiquitous training gi that they adorned.  The samurai did not train in these garments, so where did they come from?

As is the case with so much else in the modern martial arts, they sprung from the fertile mind of Kano Jigoro. Lance Gatling, a student of Japanese martial arts history with an interest in the history of uniforms, notes that in the 19thcentury Kano drew his students from two vastly different backgrounds. Naturally these sociological cohorts dressed quite differently.  Those coming from wealthy and socially elite households wore the latest fashions.  His less privileged students, who often lived with him and acted as houseboys in exchange for tuition, lacked hygienic and functional training clothing of any kind.  Calling on his background as an educator, it was clear to Kano that some sort of uniform was needed for both practical and symbolic reasons (Gatling, The Kano Chronicles).

 

 

 

Gatling notes that Kano adapted the hada juban, an inner-tunic worn underneath the kimono, for use as a training garment.  This was done by commissioning examples made from heavier fabrics that could withstand judo’s jacketed throws.  Later the garment was expanded to cover the knees and elbows to prevent abrasions or injuries on the rough training mats of the day. Simple belts were worn to keep the jacket in place.  Of course Kano later introduced a simplified system of symbolically colored belts when his classes became large enough that he could not easily visually locate his senior students.

All of this set a pattern that still conditions much of the public’s imagination as to how a proper martial art should appear.  For instance, when karate was introduced to mainland Japan from Okinawa, judo style uniforms were introduced to improve the arts’ public image and bolster its claims to social respectability.  And while colored belts are in no way traditional to the Chinese martial arts, it seems that most kung fu schools today have some sort of colored sash system simply to placate the demands of consumers.

Kano’s many marital arts reforms did not come about in a vacuum.  Japan was a rapidly modernizing and industrializing nation. He actively sought to create a corps of patriotic young men who could advance the Japanese cause at home or abroad, in military service or civil society.  Thus, the creation of truly uniform training gear, recognizable in any dojo one might enter, had important symbolic meanings.  This was an outward sign of the creation of an inwardly powerful and cohesive national consciousness.  To wear a gi and participate in judo training was to experience Kano’s vision of the modern Japan nation on an embodied level.

This contrasts with the situation in China.  Perhaps the most traditional form of training attire seen in that country’s many hand copied martial arts manuals (and a number of European postcards), was simply to strip to the waist, wrap one’s que around the head or neck, and get to work at a dusty or muddy outdoor “boxing ground.” Such attire was practical, yet it signaled little about the relationship between the martial arts and the community at large.  In other cases Qing era boxers can be seen performing in markets wearing generic heavily padded jackets to ward off the cold.  If Japan signaled its modernism and nationalism through its uniforms, one might conclude that China’s backward and politically fractured status also came out in its lack of standardized training attire.  That is probably why later Republican groups, like the Jingwu Association, went to such great lengths to create signature uniforms of their own (in their case the white buttoned jacket with the Jingwu logo).

While an attractive narrative, I think that this risks missing much of what was actually happening. The danger is that we have focused only on a single axis when in fact uniforms represent a more complex field of meaning.  For instance, Gatling notes that most early training gi were not purchased from a martial arts supplier as might be the case today.  Rather they were made by Japanese housewives and mothers according to patterns that were distributed in either magazines or by schools. Indeed, it may be just as interesting to consider the ways in which huge numbers of Japanese women experienced Kano’s nationalism as they painstakingly hand sewed these uniforms for their sons and husbands, rather than engaging in training themselves. Thus we need to be careful that we do not equate vertically enforced uniformity with economic industrialization or a lack of individual artistic expression.

There is also the interesting question of who gets photographed.  Most of the Japanese postcards in my collection were produced by Japanese photographers for sale to Japanese consumers. As such, they tended to focus on the sorts of progressive, middle class, scenes that Japanese consumers wanted to see. When modern scholars examine this ephemera we tend to see well stocked martial arts schools in reasonably urban areas.  We forget that in the countryside most students toiling in their school’s dojo lacked gi’s and many practiced in regular physical education uniforms.  Likewise, as more students were rushed into judo and kendo training as these disciplines were militarized in the run-up to WWII, it was increasingly common to find students simply putting their armor over their normal school uniforms. Gatling finds that while one might think that the rise in militarism would manifest itself in the spread of uniforms and the tightening of dress codes, in fact the opposite happened. In any case, this sort of nuance was unlikely to show up on commercially produced postcards.

 

A typical pre-1911 market place demonstration featuring socially marginal martial artists.

 

Most postcards showing Chinese martial artists were produced by European photographers and were sold to Western audiences.  They typically focused on more “rustic” street performances, poor soldiers or questionable bandits.  All of these groups were relatively marginal and (with the exception of the soldiers) unlikely to wear any sort of uniform. Images of bare chested martial artists remained common throughout the 1920s. But this doesn’t mean that uniforms were absent within the Chinese martial arts.

The Republic period actually saw a proliferation of uniforms.  The situation was different than in Japan as no single template emerged as the clear winner. Instead many things were happening at the same time. Most of these Chinese efforts were forward looking and modern in their sentiment.  This could be seen in the Jingwu Association’s crisp white jackets, or the sportscoats, knickers and canvas belts that Ma Liang dressed his military exhibition teams in.  Many reformers filled their manuals with photos of teachers and students who looked as though they were about to head out for a round of golf.  In other cases the traditional robes of Confucian scholars were favored by more senior members of the community. I have often wondered whether relatively affluent Chinese martial artists during the 1920s-1930s insisted on working out in their street clothes in an effort to draw a conscious distinction between their understanding of community and the one advanced by the Japanese martial arts.

More practical were the working-class schools in cities like Guangzhou and Hong Kong. During the Republic period innumerable classes and lion dance societies began to adopt identical, mass-produced, t-shirts.  Some of these were marked with the name of a school, while others were simply blank. Indeed, the practice of matching t-shirts being worn at a street festival has a long and distinguished history with the Chinese martial arts.  In actual fact they may be just as “traditional” as karate’s signature uniform, both of which date roughly the same period during the interwar years.  And both have proven to be remarkably stable over time.  They succeed precisely because they signal different sets of values and understandings of the community.

 

I made this slide for another paper, but it gives us a nice comparison of the “traditional” and “modern” training uniforms in the Southern Chinese martial arts. And there is always that one guy who doesn’t get the memo…

 

Conclusion

 

Uniforms are inevitably symbolic representations of the communities that produced them.  My students are excited to order a group of T-shirts not because of any practical need. Instead they are an expression of a new set of relationships, values and understanding of the self.  Clothing speaks both to the individual and larger audiences, stabilizing and celebrating our collective achievements.

When reviewing the Martial Arts Studies literature I am often surprised that we have little to say on the question of material culture within the martial arts. We explore these fighting traditions as both embodied practices and media discourses.  We look at their history and engage in conceptual debates.  Yet little thought is given to the systematic examination of the uniforms, the training tools, the weapons and even the real estate that we all depend on.

When studying “primitive” societies Anthropologists took a keen interest in understanding and analyzing the various facets of material culture. They realized that these objects held both utilitarian and symbolic value. They were the physical manifestation of social and cultural values.  Some of the insights that they suggest could not really be grasped through other modes of analysis.

I would like to propose that all of this also holds true for students of martial arts studies. Purchasing objects is one of the main modes of social activity that we see in an andvanced industrialized society, and that makes it doubly important to look carefully at the physical culture that is being consumed.  I suggested a fairly simple framework to help us think more carefully about the varieties of uniforms in this article, and I am sure that there are other models that would have been just as helpful. Regardless of what theoretical lens you choose to adopt, the next time you are visiting a school and someone hands you a t-shirt, a uniform or a training weapon, think carefully about the full range of values that they are expressing. Our material culture often says more about our communities than we might care to admit.

 

oOo

If you enjoyed this reflection you might also want to read: Folklore in the Southern Chinese Martial Arts: A Means to Create Economic “Value” or to Construct Social “Values?”

oOo

A (Taijiquan) Mystery in Yellow

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An English language edition of Chen Yanlin’s volume. While covers might be blue, red, yellow or purple, the dust jackets were typically the same yellow design seen on the original 1947 Shanghai release.

 

 

Unanswered Questions

 

Everyone likes a good mystery. They engage, they motivate and (whether we want to admit it or not) they make the hours vanish. That certainly explains at least part of the popularity of historical studies of the Chinese martial arts. Decades of nationalist myth-making and inspired entrepreneurial marketing have helped to create the impression that it is the veneer of history that determines the value of these practices. That has never actually been true. Still, once you move past the illusions of history and begin to dig into the sources, it is disturbingly easy to lose a weekend.

Let’s begin today’s investigation by asking two simple questions.  What was the first English language book on the Chinese martial arts, and when was it published.  Of course, such questions are never really that simple.  If we were to count as a “book” rough translations of Chinese language martial arts manuals republished in an English language magazine, the answer would be sometime in the 1870s.  If we insisted on two hard covers, but relaxed the requirement of commercial sales, then we have the case of a little-known English language xingyi quan manual (produced by a famous Chinese track and field coach) in the 1920s.

Still, neither of these answers feel quite right.  While both are important in their own right, these weren’t the sort of “books” that one might find sitting on a shelf in a shop.  Perhaps we should begin by narrowing things down a bit.  What was the first commercially printed English language book on Taijiquan to be widely distributed to a mass audience? If asked that way, it would seem that the answer must be Sophia Delza’s 1961 Tai Chi Chuan: Body and Mind in Harmony, a book that I have previously discussed here and here.

At least that is what I would have thought up until recently. I will readily admit to being neither a student of taijiquan, or an expert on its history, my own interests being more focused on the Southern arts.  Still, I have tried to keep up with everything published on the martial arts in the Republic period (1911-1949).  As such I was vaguely aware of Chen Yanling’s controversial 1943 book, Taiji Compiled: Boxing, Saber, Sword, Pole and Sparring. What I had missed was that this book was translated into English and distributed by at least three different Shanghai publishers in 1947.  By the 1960s additional English language translations would be produced in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and a number of these volumes would find their way into American and British martial arts schools.

Whether Delza’s volume, or a pirated edition of Chen’s, showed up in your neighborhood book store first remains an open question.  After a week trying to piece together this volume’s publication history I can safely declare that there is still quite a bit that we don’t know.  I would go so far as to suggest that we have a minor mystery on our hands.  Still, its early date of publication and wide circulation suggests that this book may be worth considering in greater detail.  If nothing else, its existence signals a growing curiosity about the Chinese martial arts long before the Kung Fu Craze of the 1970s came to fruition.

 

A typical example of the line drawn illustration in both the Chinese and English language edition of Chen, derived from earlier published photographs.

 

A Yang Family Controversy

 

Before delving into the publication history of the English language edition, it may be helpful to know a little more about Chen Yanling’s original volume. Anyone interested in checking out this work can find a copy at the Brennan Translations blog. Even a quick glance at the table of contents is enough to signal that this was a substantial work, and quite different from many of the simple technical manuals that dominated the era’s martial arts markets.  Chen’s work was appreciated as he sought to develop new philosophical concepts within the study of Taijiquan. Rather than simply rehashing the ancient myths he also looked at the art’s more recent history, particularly as it pertained to the experiences of the Yang family.  His work provided discussions of not just the solo unarmed set, but also push-hands and no fewer than three weapons. Readers could even find material from the Taiji Classics and Yang family teaching traditions in his publication. Needless to say, his book made quite a splash when it was released in 1943.

Not all of this attention was positive.  Chen’s work proved to be quite controversial within some corners of the Yang style. This was not so much a concern about the reliability of what he said, but the more complex question of whether he had the right to say it at all. Rumors started to spread that somehow Chen had swindled Yang Cheng-fu out of his family patrimony.

The story went that Chen, a diligent student, had approached Yang Cheng-fu and asked to borrow the family’s private manual for a single evening of study.  Knowing that anyone’s ability to work through such complex material in a single night was limited, Yang Cheng-fu relented.  However, he was unaware that Chen had hired seven copyists who would fully transcribe the book that night.  This material would then become the basis of this own 1943 publication, much to the displeasure of the Yang family. This would force them to eventually release their own version of these texts.

As martial arts legends go, I quite like this story. It reveals much about the values and anxieties of the individuals who passed it around.  But that is the actual intelligence value of any rumor.  They always reveal more about the motivations and fears of those who tell them, rather than their purported subjects.

While the controversy that Chen instigated was real, its actual causes were more prosaic. When discussing this book in a recent exchange with Douglas Wile, he noted that Chen Yanlin was in fact a student of Tian Zhaolin, who was a student of Yang Jianhou, the son of Yang Luchan. Chen’s manuscript was actually based on the study and transcriptions of Tian Zhaolin’s teachings.  In point of fact, the drive to systematically record this material (a common project during the Republic era) had been a collective undertaking led by several of Tian’s students.  They were enraged when Chen put his name on what had been, in their view, a collective project.  Wile related that the group was actually preparing to take Chen to court over his “theft” when Tian intervened to restore the peace between his students.

This bit of the manuscript’s history makes for a compelling story.  But the real mysteries emerge four years later, in 1947.  In many ways this was not a great era for the Chinese martial arts. The country’s long running civil war was heating up, the Guoshu Institute was in tatters and, after the initial enthusiasm for the dadao troops had subsided, the Chinese martial arts had taken a beating in the country’s newspapers over the course of the second world war. Given all of this, it might come as a surprise to learn that there was actually a small (but notable) spike in interest in the Chinese martial arts in the West during the late 1940s.

In an apparent attempt to capitalize on this interest, an English language edition of Chen’s book was released in Shanghai in 1947 by the well-known Willow Pattern Press. The edition was titled Tai-Chi Chuan: Its Effects and Practical Applications, and the author was listed as Yearning K. Chen. This latest iteration of the manuscript must have been a time consuming undertaking. Library catalogs list Kuo Shui-chang as the translator (I must rely on them as I do not own a personal copy of the Willow Patterns Press edition).  C. C. Chiu offered a new preface, specifically intended for Western audiences. It provided a health and wellness focused overview of the art, and a brief introduction to its author.

Sadly, I have not been able locate any substantive information on Kuo or Chiu.  That is an issue as even a cursory examination of the text reveals that what they provided is not a typical “translation” of Chen’s text.  Large parts of Chen’s text (including many of this more detailed discussions, and everything on Taijiquan’s history) have been left out of this volume.  In their place Western readers would find short introductions designed to get them up to speed on topics such as “Yin” and “Yang”, as well as the definition of Chinese boxing and taijiquan’s relationship to both philosophy and the martial arts.

The differences did not stop there.  These introductory notes were followed by multiple full chapters that attempted to rationalize the discussion of taijiquan and to present it to Western audiences within a scientific framework.  Topics covered included the art’s relationship with physiology, psychology and physics.  This last chapter, which featured a “proof” of the application of Newton’s laws to the martial arts, can only be described as a triumph of “scientism.” It would have made even the most diehard guoshu modernizer proud. Its pages featured rows of orderly equations and geometric diagrams.  To ask who “translated” this volume is really to inquire as to who wrote what was in many respects an independent book on taijiquan designed to cater to the (perceived) tastes of educated Western readers.

 

 

A modern (and mechanical) approach to taijiquan, featured in all of the English language editions of Chen. This specific example was printed in Hong Kong during the 1960s.

 

That said, this was not an entirely original undertaking.  The substantive discussions of both the solo form and push hands were taken directly from Chen, as were his pen and ink illustrations.  Yet even here, some subtle changes can be noted.  The Chinese language inserts that had labeled these illustrations in Chen’s original volume were deleted but not replaced in the English books.  Further, whoever wrote the new English text was familiar with, and had an appreciation for, Chen’s arguments.  While many of the discussions were new, care was taken to paraphrase quotes from the Chinese version.  These were distributed creatively throughout the English language text as its chapters and introductory discussions did not align with the underlying Chinese “original.”

In short, Kuo Shui-chang did not provide readers with a faithful translation of Chen’s work.  The entire first half of this book might be better thought of as a translation of a work that Chen did not actually write, but might have if he wished to appeal to a room full of western engineers and educators. In that sense the real value of this work is what it suggests about the growing demand for English language information in the late 1940s, and how elite Chinese martial artists perceived that cross-cultural desire.

Perhaps the clearest indication of the size of this demand would be the massive piracy campaign that this book experienced.  The original Willow Pattern Press edition was released in 1947.  Yet because of lax intellectual property rights, the book was quickly picked up by other distributors.  1947 dated editions were also produced in Shanghai by P. D. Boss and Millington.  While I assume that Willow printed the original book, it is actually hard to confirm the order in which they appeared.

Booksellers in Hong Kong also expressed enthusiasm for the volume.  Numerous, almost identical, printings were released that listed no publishing house or date. Many of these volumes listed their price as either “$10” or “H.K. $10.”  It is probably impossible to date these books with precision, but it seems that they were produced sometime in the 1960s.  I have a Hong Kong copy with a red cover, as opposed to the original Shanghai release that was blue.  Other colors can be found as well.  The version produced by the Sun Wah Printing Company may have been more legitimate than the others as they at least printed their name and the address of their offices on the title page.

By the 1960s these volumes began to find their way into circulation (and libraries) in the West, though I have not been able to determine if they had an official American distributor. I ran across one account of a student whose taiji class used this text as part of their study material during the 1960s. But that was not the end of the volume’s complex publishing history. Pan American Books in Taipei (Taiwan) released their own undated edition of the volume (probably in the 1970s).  And by the late 1970s multiple American publishing houses took advantage of the volume’s confused ownership to release their own editions.  The 1979 New Castle printing seems to be the most commonly encountered, though there are several others.

I have not had an opportunity to track down copies of all of these printings and subject them to a detailed comparison.  That would no doubt be interesting, and it might reveal more about this book’s circuitous travels through the post-war global environment. A detailed study of the similarities between Chen’s original 1943 volume and its strangely independent 1947 Shanghai translation could also be quite interesting for what it might reveal about the different intended audiences of both books.

While some details of this mystery are likely to remain unsolved, what we know about Chen’s book is quite interesting. During the course of my historical research I had basically concluded that Zhang, Chu and the other guoshu reformers had basically failed to create an image of the Chinese martial arts that would be appealing to Western readers or martial artists. In many ways Chen’s translated volume is a natural intellectual successor to their efforts, and its tortured publishing history suggests that there may have been a lot more demand than I was able to previously estimate from personal reminisces and newspaper accounts alone.  After all, no one bothers to pirate a book that doesn’t sell, and this book managed to stay in print for a very long time.

Cheng’s effort was the first English language book commercially printed on taijiquan, though Delza’s volume almost certainly arrived on the shelves of most American martial artists first. Still, Cheng has much to teach us, not only about the practice of taijiquan, but its post-war migration throughout the global system.

 

Acknowledgements: Special thanks go to two individuals who made this essay possible. First, I would like to thank Qin Qin (秦琴) from Henan Polytechnic University for sharing with me the discovery of a 1947 P. B. Boss edition of Tai-Chi-Chuan: Its Effects and Practical Applications. That was really what got me interested in looking more deeply at Chen’s contributions to the global spread of the art.  Thanks also go to Douglas Wile for providing invaluable context regarding the true origin of the controversy that surrounded the book’s 1943 publication.

 

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If you enjoyed this discussion you might also want to read: Prof. Maofu Gong Discusses the State of Folk Wushu and Martial Arts Studies in China Today

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Martial Classics: The Poetry of Motion – Qi Jiguang in Verse

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General Qi Jiguang. Source: Wikimedia.

 

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

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

 

The poetry of motion: Qi Jiguang in verse

By Chad Eisner

 

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

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

 

Translation versus Interpretation

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

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

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

 

Expansion and Contraction

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

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

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

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

 

Original by Gainsbourg: 

Laisse tomber les filles, laisse tomber les filles

Un jour c’est toi qu’on laissera

Laisse tomber les filles, laisse tomber les filles

Un jour c’est toi qui pleureras

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

Non je ne pleurerai pas

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

Je dirai ça t’apprendra

 

Translation by March: 

Hang up the chick habit

Hang it up, daddy,

Or you’ll be alone in a quick

Hang up the chick habit

Hang it up, daddy,

Or you’ll never get another fix

I’m telling you it’s not a trick

Pay attention, don’t be thick

Or you’re liable to get licked

You’re gonna see the reason why

When they’re spitting in your eye

They’ll be spitting in your eye

 

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

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

 

Image of a Taiji Boxer. Source: Burkhardt, 1953.

 

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

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

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

 

Verse structure

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

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

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

 

Rhyme scheme

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

Voice

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

 

Examples

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

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

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

Lazily Tie Your Coat and come to stand outside,

Sink into single whip, with single sudden stride

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

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

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

 

 

1.

Tie your coat and come outside,

Single Whip with sudden stride,

With out the courage to advance,

Sharp eyes fast hands will have no chance.

懶扎衣出門架子

變下勢霎步單鞭

對敵若無膽向先

空自眼明手便

“Lazily Tie the Coat” begins the set.

Lower your stance and lightly step into Single Whip.

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

Your sharp eyes and fast hands will be for naught.

 

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

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

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

 

 

 

2.

Golden Rooster stands on top,

Present your leg then sideways chop,

Rush in low and trip the bull,

They cry to heaven loud and full.

金雞獨立顚(顛)起

裝腿橫拳相兼

槍背卧牛雙倒

遭着叫苦連天

Jīnjīdúlì diān (diān) qǐ

zhuāng tuǐ héng quán xiāng jiān

qiāng bèi wò niú shuāng dào

zāozhe jiàokǔliántiān

Golden Chicken Stands Alone rises up.

Brandish the leg and cross the fists together.

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

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

 

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

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

 

 

3.

Testing Horse was Song Taizu’s,

Stances all can drop and move,

Advance attack, retreat to dodge,

Come in close with a fist barrage.

探馬傳自太祖

諸勢可降可變

進攻退閃蒻生強

接短拳之至善

Testing Horse was taught by Taizu.

Several stances can drop down and change.

Enter to attack and retreat to dodge with full vigor.

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

 

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

 

 

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

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

 

4.

Crossed Single Whip firmly pries it’s way in,

When finding it hard from their kick to defend,

Rush in with continuous, liftings and chops,

Knock down Tai mountain into low stances drop.

拗單鞭黃花緊進

披挑腿左右難防

槍步上拳連劈揭

沉香勢推倒太山

Crossed single whip advances with tight circles.

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

Rush in with continuous downward and upward chops.

Sink low into the posture, Pushing Mount Tai.

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

 

An opera performer holding a bian during a performance.

 

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

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

 

oOo

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

oOo

 

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

oOo

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

oOo

 

 

 

Political Extremism, Violence and Martial Arts

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A Preamble

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

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

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

 

 

The Problem of Violence

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Diverse students at a kickboxing seminar held in Ithaca NY.

 

Implications

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

oOo

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

oOo

Chinese Martial Arts in the News: September 24th, 2018: Shaolin, Bull Fights, and So Many New Books….

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Introduction

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

News from all Over

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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

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

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

Over 400 people including representatives of members and students from Chin Woo athletic federation branches at home and abroad as well as members of other martial arts groups participated in the worship ceremony. (PRNewsfoto/Publicity Department of Xiqing)

 

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

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

 

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

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

Martial Arts Studies

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

Chinese tea utensil. Source: Wikimedia.

 

Kung Fu Tea on Facebook

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

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

Rethinking Wing Chun’s Opera Rebels

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Cantonese Opera Performers in San Francisco, circa 1900. Chinese Opera and Popular entertainment has been linked to the martial arts since at least the Song dynasty. Even in the Han dynasty military performances were a central part of the “Hundred Events.”

 

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

 

Introduction

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The home of Wing Chun as we like to imagine it. The Cantonese Opera stage on the grounds of Foshan’s Ancestral Temple.

 

 

Wing Chun and the Red Boat Opera Rebels

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

“Chinese Stage Shows.” Cigarette Card. Source: Digital Collections of the NY Public Library.

 

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

A temporary stage erected for the Monkey God Festival, 2006. Almost all operas at temple festivals were traditionally performed on temporary stages like this one. Source: Photo by Samuel Judkins.

 

 

The Red Boat Revolutionaries: Creating a Legend

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

A model of a Red Boat of the type that carried Cantonese Opera companies in the late 19th and early 20th century.

 

Conclusion

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

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

 

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

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