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.
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.
L’associazione rappresenta in Italia l’Istituto Tiancai Taiji, fondato dal maestro Zhu Tiancai per diffondere il suo metodo nel mondo. Il maestro ne è presidente onorario ed il figlio Zhu Xiangqian responsabile tecnico. L’associazione opera a Ferrara e Bondeno, Firenze, Livorno, Roma, Ronchi dei Legionari (Gorizia) e Treviso (Santa Lucia di Piave) Per informazioni: info@tiancai-taiji.it
Jackie Chan’s remix of the Karate Kid is, among other things, an interesting commentary on the ability of the martial arts to create unexpected communities.
Are Martial Arts Political?
My friend, Paul Bowman, recently asked the rhetorical question, “Should martial arts be active or passive players in politics?” The question is rhetorical in a double sense. Paul never directly answers his own query, but instead outlines for readers of the Cardiff University School of Journalism’s blog some of the questions that we have been grappling with in the last few months. It is rhetorical in another sense because on some level it does not really matter what anyone’s answer is. One may wish to see your school have more or less political involvement, yet as a matter of basic historical fact the martial arts have often been actively involved in the major political debates of the day.
Yet on a day to day level most martial art training doesn’t seem to have anything to do with politics. Obviously, there are a few exceptions. Some capoeira schools might emphasize social equality in their selection of music or community activities. Likewise, the alt-right fight clubs that have been so much in the news seem to make a point of framing their activities through an overtly political lens. But in my (admittedly limited) experiences, these situations are the outliers, and not the norm. The challenges that most Western students face in the training hall are overwhelmingly personal and physical in nature. The frustration, pain and elation of training seem to fall on everyone, irrespective of ideology. It is these very personal experiences that dominate our practice.
Yet the personal has a way of becoming political. As I have previously noted, embodied experience, while engulfing in the moment, is never self-interpreting. Nor are identities self-constructing. Each of us receives a wide range of social, familial, economic, cultural and political cues as we attempt to sort out “what just happened” and “what sort of person am I.” If we were a student doing Kendo katas in the 1930s, the answer to that last question was quite clear. Through diligent training education officials intended that you would realize that you were a subject of the Emperor who knew that “death was as lighter than a feather.” One understood what it meant to be part of this shared category by taking part in a shared activity with all of the nation’s other school children. In the proper hands (or the wrong ones), the martial arts would seem to be machines for the construction of what Benedict Anderson called “imagined communities.”
Our personal experience of the martial arts is by definition an individual matter, and one that often appears far removed from political considerations. It is widely considered to be a breach of etiquette to bring up politics in the training hall (a point that I want to explore below). Yet the martial arts cannot exist as a purely solitary activity. As everyone who has ever examined these practices has noted, they are fundamentally social in nature. They arise from, and give new life to, social communities. Politics, in turn, is the mechanism by which societies allocate resources and responsibilities to various groups. While many individuals are drawn to the martial arts because they seek a uniquely personal experience of individual empowerment, the social nature of our communities makes them vulnerable to many competing political claims.
Prof. Stephen Chan discussing the finer points of the art with a group of students.
Understanding “Normal Politics”
How one evaluates this conclusion will vary. I suspect that for many readers the discovery that the martial arts are inherently political would be something of a disappointment. Given the ever-growing levels of polarization and acrimony between the left and right in both Europe and North America, many of us are actively looking for communities that offer a reprieve from the constant state of social warfare that we find in our social media feeds or on the 24-hour news cycle. I myself am highly sympathetic to this sentiment. It is hard to escape the feeling that the very word “politics” has come to be tainted.
Still, as a political scientist by training, I tend to see everything as having a “political” aspect. One might call it an occupational hazard. Yet politics actually takes many forms, several of which are not all that closely related to polarized left-right debates of the day. As a means of resolving our differences, within a nation, a community or an organization, politics is usually a better option than conflict or violence. Indeed, the creation of the right sorts of political institutions and norms can lead to long periods of stability, growth and social harmony.
The assertion that the martial arts are, and have always been, inherently political should not be seen as a condemnation. Rather, it simply acknowledges the fact that the communities we create are socially meaningful. We do not just generate feelings of personal empowerment. Through our practice we create ideas, norms, networks, and reserves of social and human capital. We cannot really understand the roles and meanings of the martial arts in the modern world without thinking carefully about the political implications of all of this.
Recently the association between certain violent white nationalist organizations and peripheral aspects of the MMA community has been grabbing headlines. Within the martial arts community this has been debated here and here. In my own response to these stories I attempted to introduce some basic principles from institutional analysis to ask how the spread of violent ideologies within something like the martial arts community might be contained.
All of this represents a good first cut at the problem. But if we are going to have a sustained discussion on the relationship between politics and martial arts, I suspect that these sorts of extreme cases might not be where we actually want to start. Before delving into the pathologies of political conflict, it is helpful to study more typical cases of ordinary competition. Only once we have established a baseline of how the martial arts might become involved in “normal” political disputes will have an ability to understand what has gone wrong in these other cases. Better yet, as we establish a baseline it becomes clear that under a fairly wide set of conditions martial arts communities can actually play an important role in bridging conflicts, building social trust and preventing the spread of violence. Indeed, seemingly apolitical choices regarding the structure and regulation of these communities, rather than anything inherent in the embodied practice of the martial arts themselves, will have a critical impact on their ultimate social destiny.
A class photo from a local lightsaber combat group in Ithaca NY. Note, this is not the community described in the text.
The Way of the Lightsaber: A Star Wars Story
How might the martial art actually help to repair a fractured political discourse? Perhaps an example from my recent ethnographic research with a hyper-real martial arts community might help to illustrate this potential.
It may come as a surprise to discover that not everyone in the lightsaber combat community is a diehard Star Wars “super-fan.” In my personal experience most hardcore fans, while they might collect lightsabers, do not find the notion of daily training in their use all that interesting. Likewise, while I have never met a person in a lightsaber combat class that really disliked the the Star Wars franchise, maybe half of the people could only be classified as “causal fans.” Indeed, it seems that more people actually stay in the lightsaber classes for the martial arts training and comradery than the Star Wars per se. That probably explains why one (paradoxically) does not always hear a lot of discussion of the films or other properties before, during or after your average class.
Still, there are the occasional exceptions. In one such case, earlier this spring, an emotionally charged debate briefly erupted about the merits of Rian Johnson’s highly controversial film, “The Last Jedi” (TLJ). One student (a young working-class Caucasian male), began to hold forth as to how the film was a political insult, overtly feminist and actually part of a well planned conspiracy by the Disney corporation to drive fans like him away so that they could “steal” the franchise for themselves. Statements like this are pretty common in on-line fan discussions, but not in this particular lightsaber class. It was all the more shocking as this particular student had never really expressed any animus towards the franchise before. In fact, he had never expressed any sort of political opinions at all.
What followed was a sharp exchange with a couple of other students who objected either to his perceived attacks on specific social issues (in this case gender inequality) or his notion that Disney somehow needed to “steal” a property that they already owned simply to spite him. At this point he declared that he was done with Star Wars and would be boycotting all future films, but not, of course lightsaber practice. Everyone left unhappy. Still, the next week everyone was back as if nothing had happened.
I have no idea whether the student in question made good on this threat to boycott the upcoming film, Solo: A Star Wars Story. I should probably ask him sometime. But in a sense, it doesn’t really matter. This guy is one of the more senior students at the Central Lightsaber Academy and a real stalwart of the local community. At the time he made two things perfectly clear: his utter contempt for what he saw as a personal political attack by Rian Johnson which “ruined Star Wars” and, secondly, that no matter how angry he was about this, it wasn’t going to impact his place in the lightsaber combat community. Nor has it. I forgot that this incident had happened until a recent article in the news sent me back to review some of my fieldnotes.
As anyone who follows the Star Wars fandom can attest, arguments such as the one documented above have been very common occurrences in the wake of the TLJ. Unfortunately, they don’t all have such tidy resolutions. Like so much else in our current environment, Star Wars has become a highly politicized subject. Progressive fans and commentators have associated characters like Princess Leia, Rose Tico or Rey with not only “The Resistance” against the First Order (a fascist political movement shown in the new trilogy), but also “the resistance” against Donald Trump. In an attempt to make amends for previous charges that the series marginalized minority or female characters, Disney has actively moved these progressive discussions to the forefront of multiple Star Wars properties. And while many fans have been happy to accept some projects (Rogue One has proved to be quite popular) while rejecting other films that they found to be flawed on a technical level (often The Last Jedi), a not insignificant and vocal minority of critics have connected their dislike of the recent films to a pattern of alt-right, misogynist and racist trolling.
Yet when looking at a heated facebook thread it can often be difficult to determine the size of these groups separate from simply their volume. Cultural critics have been left to wonder how much of this debate was being driven by Rian Johnson’s questionable directorial decisions (specifically, the pacing of the Casino sub-plot, and the general irreverence with which Luke Skywalker was treated), and how much of it was overtly political. In other words, was Johnson’s movie really that divisive, or did an already polarized American public simply adopt his film as a yet another proxy battlefield in the era’s raging political debates?
Morten Bay, a newly minted UCLA PhD and current post-doc at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School, recently decided to find out. He has posted an unpublished draft of a study that began by collecting all of the tweets directed to Rian Johnson for a seven-month period following the release of TLJ. These were coded as negative, neutral or positive, and then used to construct a database describing all of the accounts that had publicly engaged Johnson in the debate. (Obviously this debate happened in many other places as well, but the author was forced to stick to a sample set of about a thousand observations by the all too familiar constraints of budget, time and computing power.)
Interested readers can review Bay’s work here. I have quite a few thoughts on this paper (and a number of criticisms) but will resist doing a full review as it would take us to far afield from the politicization of the martial arts. Still, the broad contours of his findings are interesting and most likely reliable.
While the majority of Star Wars fans actually liked The Last Jedi, there was a sizable, and very vocal, minority who did not. And while some of them were genuine Star Wars fans who simply objected to Rian Johnson’s directorial choices (and sometimes engaged in troll-like behavior), a careful analysis of all twitter accounts in the dataset suggested that others were something else entirely. Bay found evidence that a large number of accounts egging on this corner of the twitter debate were linked to individuals who showed little interest in Star Wars and instead functioned as conservative or alt-right activists. More disturbingly about 5% of these accounts closely fit the profile of the Russian troll farms that had waged a campaign to sow social chaos and disinformation during the 2016 presidential election. Bay was able to confirm his suspicions when he showed that several of the most prolific accounts targeting Rian Johnson were later closed by Twitter in its purge of accounts known to be operated by Russian troll farms.
The good news is that if you have found yourself thinking that the recent discussion of pop culture franchises have become overly political, it is not just you. These properties have developed into sites of sustained political debates and even (at times) information warfare by those who wish to publicize claims of “social chaos” in the Western democracies. Even the entertainment franchises that used to unify society through a few hours of simple escapism are increasingly being weaponized as part of larger political conflicts.
It was Bay’s paper that inspired me to look back over my own fieldnotes for this period. I was forced to wonder at the different ways that similar debates played themselves out online versus within a lightsaber combat school. In both cases basic demographic characteristics were highly correlated with the roles that people assumed in arguing for or against TLJ.
Social scientists have known for some time that in the modern West political affiliation is just about the most fundamental type of identity that most people have. Indeed, Americans will switch religions to fit their politics long before they modify their political beliefs to satisfy the demands of religious teaching. Likewise, demographic factors (race, gender, education level, income, etc…) also tend to be highly correlated with partisan identification. It is thus not difficult to believe that the argument that erupted in the Central Lightsaber Academy that day was perhaps only peripherally about Rian Johnson. It stung the involved individuals precisely because personal frustrations and political identities lurked in the background.
This is also when a social scientist would expect to see some sort of more fundamental rupture in a community. When personal characteristics such as income, education, gender and ethnicity become politically salient they are called “social cleavages.” These divisions can structure large scale conflicts in both society and the polity (e.g., the working class vs. capitalist, urban vs. rural values, male votes vs. female votes).
Democracy tends to work the most efficiently when the various cleavages do not overlap. In that case a political party might sometimes form an alliance with urban factory workers, and in the next instance with rural agricultural interests. That sort of flexibility makes compromise easier and it tends to moderate political polarization. After all, your antagonists on one issue may be your allies tomorrow. In such a situation our cleavages are said to be “cross-cutting.” It is more complicated when our cleavages perfectly align with each other. When we can always guess someone’s party alignment based on their economic class, race and whether they live in an urban or rural mailing code, it becomes vastly more difficult for parties to make deals and reach compromises. The winning and losing coalitions are simply too stable. Neither side will have an incentive to lessen polarization, and politics rapidly becomes a zero-sum game. In this situation trust erodes, and in a few cases one side or the other will begin to look for ways to capture more of the gains of the political system by excluding the other from full participation in the decision-making process. That is the difference between vigorous debate within a democratic framework and a politically extremist attempt to unilaterally change the nature of the political community.
At least this is what we typically teach our students about social cleavages and voting in introductory classes on voting theory. And its why the debate within the Star Wars fandom is, to a political scientist like myself, so disturbing. It is yet another piece of evidence suggesting that increasingly all the most salient social cleavages in America today are overlapping, rather than cross-cutting. That portends bad things in the long run.
It is also why we should be interested in how martial arts communities function in these environments. In the case I outlined above a very vocal, surprisingly emotionally charged, outburst was quickly forgotten and put away. I suspect that if a similar conversation had erupted in an online environment the resolution would have been much different. Yet in this case the conversation happened within the walls of a martial arts school. And the martial arts have a unique ability to add yet another layer to one’s personal identity.
Of course, identity is always situational. How I define myself at any given moment depends in large part on where I am and what is socially appropriate at that time. But somewhere in the back of my head there is always that recognition that I am a “wing chun guy,” and there is always a spark of social recognition when I meet a fellow student of the Chinese martial arts. After all, there aren’t that many of us, and the one thing that each of us needs is a community.
Likewise, lightsaber combat can only be learned in a social setting. One has got to put in a lot of hours with many training partners to gain basic skills. Weapons work requires a lot of focus and trust, even when the weapons in question do not technically exist. One still has to trust that your partner will not hit you simply because they are tired and frustrated. And it is hard to deny the sort of visceral bond that is created (Victor Turner might have called it “communitas”) by simply going through this process together. While other markers of social status will always exist outside the school, martial arts instruction has a remarkable ability to take a diverse group of people, strip them of many individual aspects of identity, and then allow them to grow into a new sort of community together. We should not underestimate how powerful and rare that experience can be in the modern world.
When that happens there is the possibility that one will create a new identity which cross-cuts the existing social cleavage. As we saw in the case illustrated above, this can help to ameliorate other sorts of political debates. Indeed, our trust in, and dependence on, individuals who are very different from us within our martial arts communities may help to insulate us against more radical discourses that would seek to target them. Students of social capital would even suggest that trust is basically a learned skilled, and the lessons that acquire within a martial arts community can eventually be applied to other areas of the civil sphere. This in turn is critical to ensuring the proper function of modern democratic institutions.
A diverse group of Taiji students demonstrating the practices utility in cases of cardiac rehabilitation and recovery. Source: Harvard Journal of Medicine.
Conclusion
It is not difficult to look at practically any important problem in the world today (whether its economic, environmental, social or cultural) and to discern political forces lurking in the background. What is sometimes harder to remember is that most positive developments are also the result of careful institutional design and a different sort of political calculus. If we focus only on cases where extremist groups have sought to co-opt martial arts practices, it may be all too easy to conclude that there is something dangerous about the martial arts themselves. Lacking a complete view of the wider social context, researchers might conclude that these practices are inherently violent, in either a physical or a social sense. Social elites in late 19thcentury China certainly came to that conclusion, and the end result was a lot of legislation that further marginalized the martial arts community without addressing any of the more fundamental causes of social violence that it increasingly drove the logic of Chinese decline.
The foregoing essay has argued that the martial arts are interesting (and in some senses inherently political) because they are social practices that generate new types of community identification. This is precisely why Asian nationalists and reformers promoted them throughout the region’s turbulent 20thcentury. It is also why individuals who care about the quality of civic life in our ever more polarized world should also take these practices seriously. The embodied nature of martial arts practices has the potential to build community bonds that can cross cut other, highly politicized, social cleavages. Both on-line Star Wars conversations and embodied lightsaber practice generate communities. Yet one seems much more likely to resist politically induced conflict than the other. The promotion of these practices, when properly understood and carried out, could literally help to heal our civic institutions.
This is not to say that the creation of martial arts schools should be seen as a panacea. Given the realities of geography and economic inequality, it is unlikely that all martial arts schools will be equally diverse. Because these sorts of institutions are essentially voluntary organizations the danger is that we will choose to associate only with individuals who resemble ourselves. That outcome would be counterproductive as it might actually reinforce, rather than offset, the problem of overlapping social cleavages.
Yet in practice that does not seem to be an insurmountable problem, at least not in my area of country. Fellow kung fu students are rare, and lightsaber combat enthusiasts even more so. Economic necessity dictates that most schools are at least somewhat diverse as they are forced to recruit many types of students from a large geographic area just to make ends meet. And this is precisely why so many of us are willing to set aside random political discussions when we enter our training spaces. Good training partners (or instructors) are hard to find, and we all have a sense that in an increasingly polarized world there is something “more important” than the latest controversy to consume the 24-hour news cycle. Ironically, it is that seemingly agnostic impulse that suggest the real political value of the martial arts today.
Sabato 29 Settembre presso “La Tana del Serpente Bianco” a Bondeno (Ferrara) si è svolto un incontro degli insegnanti dell’Istituto Taijiquan Tiancai Italia per un aggiornamento ed allenamento collegiale e per delineare le future attività dell’Associazione.
***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.
Quarter note: Ta Ta Ta Ta Ta Ta Taaa
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 artsand 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.
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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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Sinology. Academia Sinica: Taipei, 1981.) notes that the first reports of specially constructed Red Boats do not occur until the 1850s.
Given the decades long prohibition of Cantonese Opera in the middle of the 1850s, they cannot have become common until the more peaceful late 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.
Oggi è il compleanno del Gran maestro Zhu Tiancai! Auguri da tuttli gli allievi e gli amici italiani! 今天就是朱天才老师生日！意大利学生朋友都祝生日快乐! Today’s Grandmaster Zhu Tiancai birthday! All Italian disciples and friends wishing a happy birthday!
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白猿偷桃 WHITE APE STEALS A PEACH 順德黃漢勛編述 by Huang Hanxun [Wong Honfan] of Shunde 山東蓬萊羅師光玉授 as taught by Luo Guangyu of Penglai, Shandong 攝影者：黃子英 photographed by Huang Ziying 校對者：黃翔 text proofread by Huang Xiang [published 35th year of the cycle, 10th month, 10th day (Nov 20, 1958)]
[translation by Paul Brennan, June, 2018]
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白猿偷桃 White Ape Steals a Peach 黃電明題 – calligraphy by Huang Dianming
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目錄 CONTENTS
第一式：中平雙蓄勢 Posture 1: STANDING STABLY, BOTH FISTS STORING POWER 第二式：入環單臂爪 Posture 2: KNEELING STANCE, SINGLE CLAW-ARM 第三式：提步右挫捶 Posture 3: LIFTING LEG, RIGHT SUBDUING PUNCH 第四式：穿手右統捶 Posture 4: THREADING HAND, RIGHT THRUST PUNCH 第五式：登山右挫捶 Posture 5: MOUNTAIN-CLIMBING STANCE, RIGHT SUBDUING PUNCH 第六式：扭步左黏肘 Posture 8: TWISTING STANCE, LEFT STICKY ELBOW 第七式：劈圈右仰膀 Posture 7: CHOPPING SWING, RIGHT PRESSING FOREARM 第八式：囘身刁踢腿 Posture 8: TURN AROUND, HOOKING HAND, SNAPPING KICK 第九式：圈捶連環腿 Posture 9: SWINGING PUNCH, CONTINUOUS KICK 第十式：入環右仰膀 Posture 10: KNEELING STANCE, RIGHT PRESSING FOREARM 第十一式：撤步掛統捶 Posture 11: WITHDRAWING STEP, HANG & THRUST PUNCH 第十二式：登山右劈軋 Posture 12: MOUNTAIN-CLIMBING STANCE, RIGHT ROLLING CHOP 第十三式：蹤步穿梭式 Posture 13: LEAPING STEP, SENDING THE SHUTTLE THROUGH 第十四式：封手雙飛腿 Posture 14: SEALING HANDS, FLYING DOUBLE KICK 第十五式：登山掛統捶 Posture 15: MOUNTAIN-CLIMBING STANCE, HANG & THRUST PUNCH 第十六式：登山右劈軋 Posture 16: MOUNTAIN-CLIMBING STANCE, RIGHT ROLLING CHOP 第十七式：橫圈大擺蓮 Posture 17: SWINGING PUNCH, LARGE SWINGING LOTUS KICK 第十八式：登山掛統捶 Posture 18: MOUNTAIN-CLIMBING STANCE, HANG & THRUST PUNCH 第十九式：蹤步右統捶 Posture 19: JUMPING STEP, SEALING, THRUST PUNCH 第二十式：登山番車式 Posture 20: MOUNTAIN-CLIMBING STANCE, ROLLING PUNCH 第二十一式：登山掛統捶 Posture 21: MOUNTAIN-CLIMBING STANCE, HANG & THRUST PUNCH 第二十二式：封手右撐腿 Posture 22: SEALING HANDS, RIGHT BRACING KICK 第二十三式：囘身掛統捶 Posture 23: WITHDRAWING BODY, HANG & THRUST PUNCH 第二十四式：跨虎挑統捶 Posture 24: SITTING-TIGER STANCE, CARRY & THRUST PUNCH
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螳螂國術學院第十一屆畢業禮 SPEECH FROM THE 11TH GRADUATION CEREMONY OF THE MANTIS MARTIAL ARTS ACADEMY 黃院長漢勛演詞 受業黃漢超節錄 by director Huang Hanxun (recorded by your student, Huang Hanchao):
五七年十月廿三日，螳螂國術學院第十一屆畢業典禮於東方體育會禮堂舉行，是晚，特級並高中初三級畢業同學四十餘人，曁新舊同學於會後舉行聯誼，會前，院長致詞，勗勉諸生，語多切中近來國術界之弊病，指出國術衰落之原因，並提出救正之方法，其言亟宜錄出以作改進國術者之參考，以下是院長演詞之節錄： On Oct 23, 1957, the 11th Graduation Ceremony for the Mantis Martial Arts Institute was held in the assembly hall of the Far East Athletic Club. On that evening, there were more than forty students graduating, from the beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels, as well as the special instructor level. At the close of the event, students old and new joined in camaraderie to give a demonstration. At the beginning of the event, the director of the school gave a speech to encourage all the students, in which he particularly discussed the problems currently facing the martial arts community, pointing out the causes of the decline of martial arts and putting forward methods of rescuing them. His important words should serve as a reference for how to improve the state of martial arts. Below is an excerpt from his speech:
國術衰落之原因 Causes for the decline of martial arts:
（一）病在學者好為人師，以致師道不尊： 1. There is a problem of students trying to be teachers, resulting in real teachers no longer being respected.
由於靑年多缺乏正確的練習國術認識，在未習拳以前，已懷有為人師的念頭，這不是說學者不應為人師，乃是說不應好為人師。蓋習拳者、日久功深，所謂三年一小成，十年一大成，未嘗無理，然在小成大成之期間，若不能大殺（苦練也）一番，功力必不進；苟無良師益友，技亦停滯不前，蓋拳技之道，泳涵愈久，功力愈精到。有習拳三年五年者，卽自視甚高，以為可以應世致用，為人師表；實不明拳理，不諳武術之興替。家法不明，而沾沾以將為人師而喜。懷此輕浮之心，國術何得不衰？ Young people typically lack proper martial arts knowledge, and yet before they have even begun training in a boxing art, they already have it their heads that they want to teach it to others. I am not saying that students should not become teachers. What I am saying is that they should not be using the art just to have something to teach. Practicing boxing arts requires a long time for skill to deepen, hence the expression “three years will give you a small achievement, ten years a large achievement”. This is not an unreasonable plan, but in the time between the small achievement and the large achievement, if you cannot fight your way through it (i.e. endure bitter training), your skill will most assuredly not progress the rest of the way. Or if you are without a close mentor, your skill would again stagnate and cease to move forward. It is the way of any boxing art that the longer you swim in it, the more refined your skill will become. Those who have practiced a boxing art for three to five years think highly of themselves and believe that they can function for others as a model teacher. But actually they still do not understand the boxing theory and are not experienced in the ups and downs of martial arts. Even though the methods of the art are not yet fully understood, they are nevertheless steeped in their happy plans of teaching these methods to others. With this kind of frivolous attitude, how could our martial arts not be in decline?
（二）雜誌、報章、電影、武俠小說之過事渲染： 2. Magazines, newspapers, films, and martial arts novels do a lot of exaggerating.
以上諸出版物並電影，本可以作復興國術之用，以前精武體育會就有此等組織，迺使國術一道，風靡全國，以實事求是，非投機取巧。可惜今日所見所聞，多以奇技相標榜，以異術相眩博，言過其實，描寫一人，務以出神入化之筆以吸引讀者觀衆。觀者不知，誤認天下間竟有如此奇人，學技之心隨之而興，以為自己亦可致此也。彼纔入學，則所親炙者多平平無奇，與傳聞所說大異，尋轉他學，亦復如此。輕蔑國術之心亦因之而起，彼習技之一股勇氣，化為子虛烏有，國術界因此而喪失不少人才。空腹高論，其不俾實際如此，國術何得不衰？ All of these forms of media have the potential to rejuvenate our martial arts. When the Jingwu Athletic Association made use of these kinds of media to make martial arts fashionable throughout the nation, they did so in order to show the reality of these arts and were not seeking to make a profit. Unfortunately what we see and hear nowadays is usually the flaunting of bizarre skills and the glorifying of crazy stunts. Depictions of individuals are exaggerated caricatures, and the writing is pushed to be as exciting as possible in order to attract audiences. Spectators do not understand and mistakenly think that people with such strange abilities exist. They are then inspired to learn those skills in the belief that they themselves can achieve them. Once they join a school, they discover that what they are being personally taught is average and unremarkable, vastly different from what they had heard about, and so they seek out other teachers to learn from in the hopes that it will be more like what they had expected. Then in their disappointment, they will consequently start to have contempt for martial arts, going from being mesmerized by the thought of the training to realizing it was all a hoax. Because of this, the martial arts world has lost many talented people. To have such “lofty dreams on an empty stomach” and not be able to make any of it come true, how could our martial arts not be in decline?
（三）不願公開獨到的拳術： 3. There is an unwillingness to publicly share unique boxing arts.
習拳技者知拳技易學難精，學者幾經苦練而後有所得，故任敎後，每想及得技非易，苟輕易以之授徒，心有不甘。的確，如果無心向藝，目拳術為交易之物者，自不應以高深之法理授之，然百人中豈無好學者？故不以獨到之技傳粗心浮意者可，不以獨到之技傳好學深思者則失之矣。俗謂說：「求師難，求徒更難。」若人人存有不傳獨得之技的念頭，而持之以終老，亦老死而矣。懷此自私之心，國術何得不衰？ Those who practice boxing arts know that these arts are easy to learn but difficult to master. Students have to go through a great deal of hard training in order to make any gains. Once practitioners start teaching, they constantly fret over how difficult it is to achieve skill, and so they sour to the idea of teaching just anyone. Indeed if a student does not care about the degree of craftsmanship involved and looks upon boxing arts as easy things, it seems natural that he should not be given instruction in advanced theories. But it’s a numbers game: among a hundred people, there is bound to be one who appreciates knowledge. Therefore while it is reasonable not to teach unique skills to those who are indifferent or impatient, it is a mistake not to teach these skills to those who love learning and contemplating. There is a common saying: “It’s hard to find the right teacher, but even harder to find the right student.” However, if everyone decided to keep their art to themselves and hold onto it until they die, it would also die with them. With this kind of selfishness, how could our martial arts not be in decline?
院長又提出救正國術衰落的幾點意見，他說： Director Huang then put forth these suggestions for rescuing our martial arts:
（一）敎者應以身作則，應有實在之經驗及拳術修養： 1. Teachers should set an example by actually going through the training process and mastering a boxing art.
濫竽充數者不論，有名師授受矣，如彼自以為名師而輕視他人，不屑與後生小子羣，授技只敷衍了事，不能做到學不厭，敎不倦，學者受此影響，亦會走上其師的老路，轉相授受，敎者卒不能以身作則，立定規模以示後學。故在為師者言，應有學不厭，敎不倦的精神，期以收默化潛移之效；另一方面言，本身亦應有實在之經驗及拳術修養，始能肩師道之任。故救正國術之病，不得不從為師者之以身作則起。 It means nothing to just fill up teaching positions. There are “famous teachers” giving instruction. If an instructor considers himself to be a famous teacher and looks down on other people, disdaining to be in the presence of the students, the instruction he gives will be barely mediocre. He has not been able to achieve the condition of [quoting from the Lun Yu, 7.2:] “learn insatiably, teach tirelessly”. Students will be influenced by this and instead only learn how to behave like that teacher. Such a teacher ultimately cannot set an example and ceases to be a good model for the students. Therefore to be considered a teacher, one should have the mindset of “learn insatiably, teach tirelessly”, which will have the effect of subtly influencing the students. On the other hand, he should also have actually gone through the experience of mastering a boxing art, and then he will be able to shoulder the responsibility of being a teacher in the first place. Thus rescuing our martial arts has to start with teachers setting an example.
（二）學者應走鈍的一路，不應走巧的一路： 2. Students should tread the boring path, not the exciting one.
心躁氣浮，為練拳術者之大忌，此一點使學者好為人師外，更阻碍拳術之進步。常見初習拳術者，每見老同學之演習，輒嘖嘖稱羨，彼不知練者費幾許精神時間，始克至此。於是每多蹈蠟等之弊，一技未了，又見異思遷，以巧的方法去獵取；不肯勤練，以鈍的方法去涵泳。拳術之道，易得易失，不經體驗，不知其中痛癢，而臨淵羨魚，不如退而結網，是待學者之善學而後國術有救正之可言。 A boxing arts practitioner is not allowed to have an impetuous mind and distracted temperament. That kind of thing is an even bigger hindrance to making progress than wanting to hurry up and be a teacher. Often when we see beginners watching their older classmates practicing, we hear them express their envy. But they do not understand how much determination and time was required to attain such a level. Therefore they tend to make the error of skipping steps. Before they have developed even a single skill, they see something different and their attention shifts, always in pursuit of exciting material, never willing to put in the hard training, which involves wading through the boring stuff. Boxing arts methods are easy to obtain and easy to lose. Unless you go through the experience, you will have no idea of the ordeals within the training. [from the Books of Han, bio of Dong Zhongshu:] “To stare at the water and wish for a fish is not as good as stepping back and making a net.” Only when the student has learned how to learn will he then be of use in rescuing our martial arts.
（三）應不畏艱難，多發明前人所未發的拳術眞理： 3. We should not shy away from the hard work of expressing boxing arts knowledge that previous generations did not.
欲使國術成為一門學，非要找出其能成為學的關鍵不可，是則有待於國術界同人之努力，而撰著專籍，尤為切要。從來拳術授受，多憑口耳，載籍實不足，而晚近有關國術之書籍，以排比編纂，鈔襲陳言為多，能有眞正經歷其境而登其堂而筆之於書者，實不多覩，以今日論，欲救正此等風氣，非用大心力以從事研究不可。發明前人所未發，實為當前國術界應有之責任，是亦為救正國術之一大方針也。 If we wish for martial arts to become a field of learning, we cannot do it unless we find out what the keys are to such knowledge. It then depends on the hard work of our colleagues in the martial arts community to carry out the crucial task of putting all that knowledge into specialized books. However, learning martial arts always requires some personal instruction, for books themselves are insufficient. In recent years, martial arts books have been getting systematically compiled, but they are usually just the copying of arcane texts. To be able to actually go through the training that those texts describe and then write books that are also based on one’s own experience of that training is something that is rarely seen. If we wish to fix this current trend, it cannot be done without a great deal of effort. To express what earlier generations did not is a duty of the martial arts community, and is also a major guiding principle in rescuing our martial arts.
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自序 PREFACE
余自出版螳螂拳術叢書以來，經十餘年之努力，至今已二十三種矣，惟不論拳與械均在數十式之間者，此拳僅得二十四式，得毋太短乎？曰：此拳原本如是，實無能使之為長也。螳螂拳是以一氣呵成見稱於世者，拳式長，動作多固然使練之者增加氣力於不知不覺間，但勿以拳式短，動作少而輕視其用氣用力必少也，苟能每拳俱認眞用力發勁亦頗使練之者大費精神矣。 此拳與「白猿出洞」正如牡丹之與綠葉互為襯托乃有益彰之妙也。卽亦如「螳螂出洞」「螳螂偸桃」之並重，故余以之緊隨白猿出洞之後而出版者，意卽使之易於相生相成之效也，余將賡續努力於螳螂拳之著述，成敗利鈍固所非計矣，幸海內外同道時錫南針為幸。 黃漢勛螳螂樓 戊戌年重陽 Since starting to publish the “Mantis Boxing Art Book Series”, I have given it more than a decade of effort, and there are now twenty-three volumes in it. Regardless of boxing set or weapon set, all of the sets contain a large number of postures, except the boxing set in this book, which has only twenty-four. If this seems too short, I can only say that this is the way the set was originally designed, and so I have no right to lengthen it. Mantis Boxing is consistently regarded as being comprised of boxing sets that are long and have many movements. Practitioners take it for granted that working on such sets will increase energy and strength, and they then think that one should not bother with boxing sets that are short and have few movements, dismissively assuming that they must be of little use for the training of energy and strength. But if we can wholeheartedly exert ourselves and express power in all of the sets, we will gain enormously in the development of spirit. This set and White Ape Leaves the Cave are as intimately connected as a peony tree and its leaves, benefiting each other wondrously, which is likewise true of Mantis Leaves the Cave and Mantis Steals a Peach, and for this reason the publication of this book follows close upon the publication of White Ape Leaves the Cave [although it actually ended up getting published before it], in hopes that this will more easily produce the effect of the two sets developing and fulfilling each other. I will continue to put effort into writing about Mantis Boxing, ignoring all thoughts of success or failure, for my hope is only to provide material that will serve as a guide for my fellow practitioners both within the nation and overseas. - Huang Hanxun at the Mantis School, 35th year of the cycle, Double Ninth Festival, [Oct 21, 1958]
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第一式：中平雙蓄勢 Posture 1: STANDING STABLY, BOTH FISTS STORING POWER
說明： Explanation: 假如我以東方作起式，則應是右東，左西，面北，背南矣。雙足合攏直立，雙拳收束至胸平齊以蓄中平之氣，目向左視，以俟拳式之展閉焉。 If you begin in the eastern part of the practice space, then the east should be to your right, the west to your left, north in front of you, south behind you. With your feet together, stand straight, your fists pulled up to chest level in order to store a balanced power. Your gaze is to the left, and you are ready to begin the boxing postures. See photo 1:
功用： Application: 螳螂派各拳多為中平作起式者，其次為四平式及背轉式，所謂中平，四平，背轉等皆是方向之區別耳！其雙拳之蓄勢則一，中平開始者是表示敵方將由我左方而來，因此要注視左方。四平則敵自我正面來故向前面視。背轉是敵由我右攻來，故亦向右注視焉，三式之區別處在此，祈留意及之。 The boxing sets in the Mantis system usually begin with this posture of “standing stably”, but sometimes there is the “four-level posture” and also the “back-turning posture”. They are different in terms of the direction they are facing, though they are the same in that the fists are storing power. When beginning in the posture of standing stably, I am showing that there is an opponent who is about to attack from the left, and thus I should be looking to the left. In the four-level posture, an opponent is attacking from in front of me, and thus in that case I should be looking forward. In the back-turning posture, an opponent is attacking from my right, and thus in that case I should be looking to the right. These are the distinctions of these three postures. Take note of them.
第二式：入環單臂爪 Posture 2: KNEELING STANCE, SINGLE CLAW-ARM
說明： Explanation: 循上式，左脚向西開出，右脚曲而跟進以成入環式，右拳化刁手，左手化掌隨步由下橫斜而出，如『定式』。 Continuing from the previous posture, your left foot steps out to the west and your right foot follows it forward, the leg bending, to make a kneeling stance, as your right fist changes to a hooking hand and your left hand becomes a palm, your hands going along with your feet by going across diagonally from below. See photo 2:
功用： Application: 彼自我中部攻來一拳，我撥消來手，右手反爪直取其下陰部，斯手極毒輕易不可用之，有人以為此式何必捨拳不用而用爪，此正是其妙處所在也，蓋襠下位置是下濶上窄者，若用拳旣勢不順而又出發點與終點大相逕庭，用爪則自下而上恰如彼特異之位置，斯為此式之妙處所在也。 An opponent attacks my middle area with a punch, so I deflect his incoming hand while my right hand goes out as a reverse claw [i.e. using the back of the wrist] to attack his groin. This technique is very cruel and so you must not use it rashly. Some people wonder why this posture requires a claw-hand rather than using a fist, but this is in fact the key to the technique. The area below the crotch is wider below and narrower at the top. Using a fist will not work as well going from the previous posture into this posture, but a claw-hand coming upward from below will fit just right into that particular place, and this is why it is key to the posture.
第三式：提步右挫捶 Posture 3: LIFTED LEG, RIGHT SUBDUING PUNCH
說明： Explanation: 循上式，先提右後脚以成獨立式，左掌向前由上封下，右拳從內穿出乃成挫捶如『定式』。 Continuing from the previous posture, your right foot lifts to make a one-legged stance as your left palm goes forward, sealing downward from above, and your right fist threads out from the inside with a subduing punch. See photo 3:
功用： Application: 彼以我低馬沉手取其下路，立卽轉取我上路，我乃提步使高，先封去來手，再用挫捶法自下逆抽而上，耑擊其頷下，登山挫捶為螳螂拳極普遍之拳法，提步挫捶不單是使勢高己也，譬諭我剛封來手而欲挫捶之俄頃，彼勉强軋我一脚以求解圍，我亦已捉住來手勢難縱之者，因亦提步卸去來脚而强用捶挫之。 The opponent takes advantage of my low stance and low hands attacking to his lower body by immediately changing to attack my upper area, so I lift a leg to make my stance taller while sealing off his incoming hand, then counter by sending a subduing punch upward from below to strike to his chin. A subduing punch in a mountain-climbing stance is a very common technique in Mantis Boxing, but a subduing punch with a lifted leg happens just this once. In the moment that I firmly seal off his hand to then do a subduing punch, the opponent does an emergency crushing kick to my leg to try to keep me from reaching him, so when I grab his incoming hand to make it difficult for him to get away, I also lift my leg to avoid his incoming foot and can then powerfully apply the punch.
第四式：穿手右統捶 Posture 4: THREADING HAND, RIGHT THRUST PUNCH
說明： Explanation: 循上式，左捶自下穿出，至右拳鋒外為止，時右拳亦可收回腰部矣，右脚落下以成騎馬式，右拳乃自腰部直統而出，左掌則貼於右肩之上如『定式』。 Continuing from the previous posture, your left fist threads out from below, and once it is to the outside of your right knuckles, your right fist can then withdraw to your waist. Then your right foot comes down to make a horse-riding stance as your right fist thrusts out from your waist, your left palm touching at your right shoulder. See photo 4:
功用： Application: 彼手來搭我之挫捶，我先用左手穿去之，乘勢落馬用統捶法反攻其中部，此式驟視之旣似「黑虎偸心」或「馬式補捶」，其練時固不必以右拳擦過左掌而出也，此式比平常之統捶更能增高其力道之處，厥惟由提步踏下標馬之勢，旣有居高臨下之佳妙，又有如波浪之滾進也。 The opponent blocks my subduing punch, so I first use my left hand to thread out and take it aside, then come down into a horse-riding stance to attack his middle area. This posture resembles BLACK TIGER STEALS THE HEART or HORSE-RIDING STANCE, FILLING PUNCH. When practicing it, it is not at all necessary for your right fist to scrape past your left palm as it goes out, and thus this posture can be a better means of increasing your power than with the ordinary thrust punches. Due to the lifted leg coming down darting into a horse-riding stance, this technique has the elegance of descending from a height and also has the quality of rolling forward like an unstoppable wave.
第五式：登山右挫捶 Posture 5: MOUNTAIN-CLIMBING STANCE, RIGHT SUBDUING PUNCH
說明： Explanation: 循上式，撑直左後脚以成右登山式，左手向前由上封落，右拳收近腰部，再反拳由下抽上如『定式』。 Continuing from the previous posture, your left leg presses straight to make a right mountain-climbing stance, your left hand going forward, sealing downward from above, as your right fist withdraws almost to your waist and then goes out upward from below with the fist turned over. See photo 5:
功用： Application: 彼招去吾統捶後，另以一手打來，我卽以左手封住來手，右拳由下逆衝而上，專擊其下頷，第三式提腿之功用已述之如上，登山之特長是進退之間旣靈活而又穩健，且由騎馬轉為登山步之間，亦標進同具有衝擊之無比力道也。 The opponent deflects my thrust punch, then sends his other hand to strike, so I use my left hand to seal off his incoming hand, and my right fist turns over and thrusts upward from below, striking to his chin. The application is the same as in Posture Three, in which it is performed with a lifted leg, but the advantage of performing this technique in a mountain-climbing stance is that within the nimbleness of advance or retreat there is also more firmness, and furthermore, the switch from horse-riding stance into mountain-climbing stance darts you forward to make this thrusting strike overwhelmingly powerful.
第六式：扭步左黏肘 Posture 6: TWISTING STANCE, LEFT STICKY ELBOW
說明： Explanation: 循上式，原步往右方一扭卽成扭步之勢，右拳改為刁手，往後一拉，左拳自下曲肘而上，與「崩步之第二十二式相同」如『定式』。 Continuing from the previous posture, your feet twist to the right to make a twisted stance as your right fist changes to a hooking hand and pulls to the rear, your left fist going upward from below with the elbow bent, the same as in Posture 22 of the Avalanche Steps set. See photo 6:
功用： Application: 彼欲以手來挑高我之挫捶，我食住其手刁之，往後一拉，左手自下曲肘托上以斷其臂部，此是合兩手之勢與力及上下分勢之法去應付對方一隻手乃佔有絕大優勢也，若對方見機則不俟合力分勢之成而先曲肘卸去之，乃可脫離險境也。（見領崩步法） The opponent tries to send out a hand to carry my subduing punch upward, so I receive his hooking hand and pull it to the rear, and my left forearm goes upward from below, elbow bent, to break his arm. This is a method of both hands working together to apply force upward and downward [i.e. your right hand bracing downward as your left elbow props upward], against a single arm, thus putting you in the superior position. If the opponent notices an opportunity, you will not have time for your hands to apply force together to make this technique, and you will instead have to pull your elbow back to keep yourself out of a dangerous situation. (It is the same technique as in the Avalanche Steps set.)
第七式：劈圈右仰膀 Posture 7: CHOPPING SWING, RIGHT PRESSING FOREARM
說明： Explanation: 循上式，先進左脚，右拳自後劈前向下如「過渡式圖」， Continuing from the previous posture, first your left foot advances as your right fist chops forward and downward from the rear [your left hand now touching the elbow area]. See photo 7a:
再進右脚以成入環步，手自右向左轉，復由內反出推前，右拳曲肘而向內，左拳貼於右腕之下如『定式』。 Then your right foot advances to make a kneeling stance as your [right] hand arcs to the left and then turns over from inside to push out forward, the center of your right fist facing inward, elbow bent, your left fist now touching below your right wrist. See photo 7b:
功用： Application: 彼沉肘避過我黏肘，再漏手攻我肘之下，我乃先劈去來勢，再進馬用仰膀法緊貼而傾跌之。 The opponent sinks his elbow to evade my sticky elbow and then slips the hand through to attack under my elbow, so I first chop away his incoming attack, then advance while using a pressing forearm technique to crowd him and make him topple.
說明： Explanation: 循上式，自左轉身，先收右拳於腰部，左刁手與左脚同時向後東方而出，如『定式』。 Continuing from the previous posture, your body turns around to the left, your right hand withdrawing to your waist, as your left hooking hand and left foot go out in unison to the east behind you. See photo 8:
功用： Application: 彼閃身過我後方，自我頭上劈來一捶，我若俟轉身迎架則失去主動與時間矣，因此乃用手腿合一之法破之，卽是以刁手搭去來手，脚則取其下路也。 The opponent dodges around behind me and attacks with a chopping punch toward my head. If I wait until I have turned around to block it, then I will have missed the moment, so I use a technique of sending out a hand and a foot in unison to defeat it, using a hooking hand to connect to his incoming hand while sending a foot to attack his lower area.
說明： Explanation: 循上式，不俟左脚落地，卽全身凌空踢出右脚，同時右拳亦自腰部橫圈過左方，如『定式』。 Continuing from the previous posture, without waiting for your left foot to come down, your whole body leaps into the air and your right foot kicks out, your right fist at the same time going from your waist and swinging across to the left [to strike against your left palm]. See photo 9:
功用： Application: 吾不俟彼招迎躱避卽以右脚繼出，使彼無從容應付之時間也，且恐威力不足更以右圈捶同時使用，以便威脅其上路也。 此法受之者固然認為險着，且用之者亦同具有冒險性之存在，是以非必用此法之時則以避免為佳。 Before the opponent has a chance to deflect or evade my kick, I immediately continue into sending out my right foot, causing him to have no time to deal with it. The power of this kick may be insufficient, so I add a right swinging punch at the same time into order to threaten his upper area. A training partner on the receiving end of this technique will consider it to be very dangerous, and the one performing it will also feel that it is too risky to apply. Therefore when it is not necessary to actually use this technique, it may be better to avoid doing so.
第十式：入環右仰膀 Posture 10: KNEELING STANCE, RIGHT PRESSING FOREARM
說明： Explanation: 循上式，落下踢出之右脚，拉埋左脚以成入環步，手則按照圈捶之勢不變，轉歸內復轉推出，如『定式』。 Continuing from the previous posture, your right foot comes down and your left foot pulls forward to make a kneeling stance, your hands staying in their swinging-punch position as they arc inward and turn over to push outward. See photo 10:
功用： Application: 彼欲以手來捉我脚，我不俟其捉卽落步用仰膀力推之，使解我危。 上式是絕高及全身凌空出擊之法，此式則是極低之法，合兩式卽成如波浪之形矣，絕高與極低俱不可能連續數式者乃勢之所然與必然之理也，仰膀是合兩手分壓推之勁道為用其勢至强也。 The opponent tries to send a hand to grab my foot, but I bring it down before he has the chance and use a pressing-forearm technique to strongly push forward, thereby keeping myself from falling into danger. The previous posture is very high, involving the whole body leaping into the air while sending out an attack, whereas this posture is very low. The two postures combined make an effect of a wave crashing down. Alternating between very high and very low cannot be continued through many postures, or what you are doing would become predictable to the opponent. The pressing forearm is a very powerful technique as it involves the pushing power of both hands combined.
第十一式：撤步掛統捶 Posture 11: WITHDRAWING STEP, HANG & THRUST PUNCH
說明： Explanation: 循上式，兩脚左右不變，往後一撤便成右登山式矣，右拳橫架於頭上，左拳直衝而出，如『定式』。 Continuing from the previous posture, without switching your feet, withdraw smoothly to the rear and make a right mountain-climbing stance as your right fist blocks across higher than your head and your left fist thrusts straight out. See photo 11:
功用： Application: 彼避過我仰膀，再自我頭上劈來一捶，我卽撤步以成登山勢，右手橫架來手，左拳直取其中路，忽進忽退，飄忽無定，使敵難於捉摸，斯為拳術之為拳術也，倘呆板進擊又有何術之可言哉！標前撤後，左右橫跨等均為攻守上不可缺小之法。 The opponent evades my arm and then does a chopping punch toward my head, so I withdraw a step to make a mountain-climbing stance as my right hand blocks his incoming hand and my left hand attacks straight to his middle area. By suddenly advancing as I suddenly retreat, I appear to be acting without any pattern, causing him to have difficulty understanding what I am doing. This is a primary technique in the art, but if you attack stiffly, it will be no technique at all. Seek forward while withdrawing to the rear, your feet stepping evenly so that your offense and defense will leave no gap.
第十二式：登山右劈軋 Posture 12: MOUNTAIN-CLIMBING STANCE, RIGHT ROLLING CHOP
說明： Explanation: 循上式，原步不變，僅全身向前一標約有半步之遙，右上手由上向前劈落，將至定點時與左掌相碰，而有「必卜」之聲如『定式』。 Continuing from the previous posture, with your stance not changing, your whole body shifts forward about a half step with your right hand going forward, chopping down from above, your left hand striking against it with an audible crack just before it reaches its final position. See photo 12:
功用： Application: 彼漏手殺落我左手處，我隨卽以上手反劈其手，其勢至快而力猛也，上式是倒撤而退後，此式是標前而進，退進之間純賴步法之精純方克置之於實用，若欲求進退迅速之法必先瞭解其原理，然後力行之乃克有成。 The opponent sends out a hand to smash down onto my left hand, so I then use my upper hand to chop down at his hand, an action that is fast and fierce. The previous technique involved withdrawing and now this one involves shifting forward. The switch from retreating to advancing depends entirely on skillful footwork in order for it to be effective. If you wish for your advancing and retreating to be done swiftly, you must first understand this principle, and then you will be able to succeed at performing these techniques with vigor.
第十三式：蹤步穿梭式 Posture 13: LEAPING STEP, SENDING THE SHUTTLE THROUGH
說明： Explanation: 循上式，小跳進前仍為登山式，先左後右兩手刁自上刁下，如「過渡式」甲、 Continuing from the previous posture, hop forward to again make a mountain-climbing stance as both hands, your left hand still behind your right hand, hook downward from above. See photo 13a:
再右前刁手不動，左後手化成兩指直向前揷出，作取眼法，如「過渡式」乙， With your right hooking hand not moving, your left hand changes to a double finger position and shoots out forward to do an eye attack. See photo 13b:
再原步不變，左指復化成刁手往後一拉，右刁手順手撞出如『定式』。 With your stance not changing, your left fingers than switch back to being a hooking hand, which pulls to the rear as your right hooking hand strikes out [with the wrist area]. See photo 13c:
功用： Application: 彼欲作撤退之勢，我追踪跟之，先以兩手封閉其手，然後用取眼法搶攻之，彼必以手來招吾之險着，我卽順手刁之，再以撞爪法攻其肋內肺腑焉。 The opponent tries to retreat, so I follow him, first using my hands to seal off his hand, then doing a snatching attack to his eyes. He is sure to send out a hand to deflect my dangerous technique, so I use my hands to hook onto it, then use a crashing claw-hand maneuver to attack his ribs and thereby his lungs underneath them [although the photo seems to show that the throat may be the target instead].
說明： Explanation: 循上式，先原步不動，右前手化作封手，由前陽手封後，左後手由後往前以陰手封落，如「過渡式圖」， Continuing from the previous posture, with your stance not changing, your right hand goes to the rear as a sealing hand, the palm facing upward, while your left hand goes forward and downward, also as a sealing hand, the palm facing downward. See photo 14a:
再全身往前跳起，當蹤之至高時右脚亦隨之撑起，但兩手仍不變原來狀態，如『定式』。 Then your whole body jumps forward [kicking out with your left foot] and your right foot goes out with a bracing kick when the jump is reaching its peak of height, your hands maintaining their position. See photo 14b:
功用： Application: 彼擬自我中下路攻來，我卽分陰陽手封閉之，彼以手為我控制，於是極力謀解脫，且欲退馬避我，我乘其退馬之際，空卽全身騰起用雙飛腿襲之。 The opponent tries to attack my middle or lower area, so I perform a sealing action with the palm of one hand facing downward, the other facing upward. Realizing I will now have control over his arm, he does his utmost to pull it back, trying to retreat away from me, so I ride along with his retreating by jumping into the air and surprise him with a flying double kick.
第十五式登山掛統捶 Posture 15: MOUNTAIN-CLIMBING STANCE, HANG & THRUST PUNCH
說明： Explanation: 循上式，將踢起之脚由原位置着地，以成右登山式，右拳曲肘橫架於頭上，左拳向前統出，如「定式』。 Continuing from the previous posture, your kicking leg comes back down to make a right mountain-climbing stance as your right fist blocks across higher than your head, the elbow bending, and your left fist thrusts our forward. See photo 15:
功用： Application: 彼避過我仰膀，再自我頭上劈來一捶，我卽撤步以成登山勢、右手橫架來手，左拳直取其中路，忽進忽退，飄忽無定，使敵難於捉摸，斯為拳術之為第術也，倘呆板進擊又有何術之可言哉！標前撤後，左右橫跨等均為攻守上不可缺小之法。 The opponent evades my arm [leg] and then does a chopping punch toward my head, so I withdraw a step to make a mountain-climbing stance as my right hand blocks his incoming hand and my left hand attacks straight to his middle area. By suddenly advancing as I suddenly retreat, I appear to be acting without any pattern, causing him to have difficulty understanding what I am doing. This is a primary technique in the art, but if you attack stiffly, it will be no technique at all. Seek forward while withdrawing to the rear, your feet stepping evenly so that your offense and defense will leave no gap.
第十六式：登山右劈軋 Posture 16: MOUNTAIN-CLIMBING STANCE, RIGHT ROLLING CHOP
說明： Explanation: 循上式，原步不變，僅全身向前一標約有半步之遙，右上手由上向前劈落，將至定點時與左掌相碰，而有「心卜」之聲如『定式』。 Continuing from the previous posture, with your stance not changing, your whole body shifts forward about a half step with your right hand going forward, chopping down from above, your left hand striking against it with an audible crack just before it reaches its final position. See photo 16:
功用： Application: 彼漏手殺落我左手處，我隨卽以上手反劈其手，其勢至快而力猛也，上式是倒撤而退後，此式是標前而進，退進之間純賴步法之精純方克置之於實用，若欲求進退之迅速之法必先瞭解其原理，然後力行之乃有成。 The opponent sends out a hand to smash down onto my left hand, so I then use my upper hand to chop down at his hand, an action that is fast and fierce. The previous technique involved withdrawing and now this one involves shifting forward. The switch from retreating to advancing depends entirely on skillful footwork in order for it to be effective. If you wish for your advancing and retreating to be done swiftly, you must first understand this principle, and then you will be able to succeed at performing these techniques with vigor.
第十七式：橫圈大擺蓮 Posture 17: SWINGING PUNCH, LARGE SWINGING LOTUS KICK
說明： Explanation: 循上式，先右拳不動，左掌化刁手往後刁去，如「過渡式圖」 Continuing from the previous posture, with your right fist not moving, first your left palm becomes a hooking hand and hooks away to the rear. See photo 17a:
再起右後脚至直橫向前掃去，同時右後捶則橫圈而前，以成如『定式』。 Then your right foot lifts and sweeps across in front of you as your right hand goes forward and across with a swinging punch. See photo 17b:
功用： Application: 彼自我腦後襲來一捶，我不待轉身卽先以手刁之，再乘全身轉過之勢疾起右脚用擺蓮腿法，橫掃彼腰脅之間也。 An opponent suddenly punches from behind, so without waiting to turn my body, I send a hand to hook onto his attack, then spin my whole body around with the action of quickly lifting my right foot into an [inward] swinging lotus kick to sweep across to his rib area.
第十八式：登山掛統捶 Posture 18: MOUNTAIN-CLIMBING STANCE, HANG & THRUST PUNCH
〔說明：〕 [Explanation:] 循上式，先將擺起之脚轉過左方至正後方為止，身再從左轉便成為左登山式矣，左捶橫上曲肘架於頭上，右拳直統而出，如『定式』。 Continuing from the previous posture, your swinging kick arcs all the way through to the left and comes down behind you, your torso at the same time spinning around to the left, and you make a left mountain-climbing stance, your left fist blocking across higher than your head, the elbow bending, your right fist thrusting straight out. See photo 18:
功用： Application: 與第十一及第十五式相同。 Same as in Postures 11 and 15.
說明： Explanation: 循上式，全身往前小跳，着地時仍為左登山式，兩手同時作雙封勢由上封下，如「過渡式圖」， Continuing from the previous posture, your whole body goes forward with a hop to come down into another left mountain-climbing stance, your hands at the same time sealing downward from above. See photo 19a:
再直統出右拳如『定式』。 Then your right fist thrusts out. See photo 19b:
功用： Application: 彼往後小跳，並出手攻我，我卽跟入先封來手，然後用統捶法攻之。 The opponent hops away to the rear and sends out a hand to attack me, so I follow him while first sealing off his incoming hand and then use a thrust punch to attack him.
第二十式：登山番車式 Posture 20: MOUNTAIN-CLIMBING STANCE, ROLLING PUNCH
說明： Explanation: 循上式，原步不動，右拳向上拉起，左拳由面前曲肘而出，如『定式』。 Continuing from the previous posture, with your stance not changing, your right hand pulls upward and your left fist goes out from in front of your face, the elbow bending. See photo 20:
功用： Application: 彼手來招，我卽順手一扣，再以左捶迎面打去。崩步拳之番車式為跨虎步。十八叟拳之番車式乃七星步，三套之同一手法而以步區別之，如要分別其佳劣，余曰：各擅勝場而已。跨虎是虛式隨時俱可出脚者，七星則易於變化換步，此式之登山步是穩健之步法也。 The opponent deflects my incoming hand, so I cover his hand and then use my left fist to strike to his face. (The rolling punch in the Avalanche Steps set is in a sitting-tiger stance. The rolling punch in the Eighteen Elders set is in a big-dipper stance. These three sets use the same hand technique in different stances. If you want to know which version is best, I say that each is the best for its particular situation. A sitting-tiger stance is an empty stance and is thus easy to kick from, a big-dipper stance is an easy position for switching into another position, and the mountain-climbing stance is a stance of solidity.)
第二十一式：登山掛統捶 Posture 21: MOUNTAIN-CLIMBING STANCE, HANG & THRUST PUNCH
說明： Explanation: 循上式，原步不變，左拳轉上曲肘橫架於頭上，右拳轉至腰部再直統而出如『定式』。 Continuing from the previous posture, with your stance not changing, your left fist arcs upward to block across higher than your head, the elbow bending, as your right fist arcs to your waist and then thrusts straight out. See photo 21:
功用： Application: 與第十一，十五，十八等式同。 Same as in Postures 11, 15, and 18.
第二十二式：封手右撑腿 Posture 22: SEALING HANDS, RIGHT BRACING KICK
說明： Explanation: 循上式，原步不變，兩手同時化成封手，分右陽左陰向左封去，如「過渡式圖」， Continuing from the previous posture, with your stance not changing, your hands both switch to sealing, your right hand with its palm facing upward, left hand with its palm facing downward, sealing away to the left. See photo 22a:
再撑起右脚，如『定式』。 Then your right lifts and does a bracing kick. See photo 22b:
功用： Application: 彼漏手攻我腰部，我卽用封手緊扣其腕肘之間，再以撑腿擊之。 The opponent evades my hand and attacks my waist, so I use sealing hands to close off his forearm, then attack him with a bracing kick.
第二十三式：囘身掛統捶 Posture 23: WITHDRAWING BODY, HANG & THRUST PUNCH
說明： Explanation: 循上式，先將撑起之脚往左後轉，轉至後方然後着地仍成左登山式，左拳橫架於頭上，右拳直統出，如『定式』。 Continuing from the previous posture, your kicking foot arcs to the left rear [with your body spinning leftward], coming down to again make a left mountain-climbing stance, as your left fist blocks across higher than your head and your right fist thrusts straight out. See photo 23:
功用： Application: 與第十一、十五、十八、二十一等式同。 Same as in Postures 11, 15, 18, and 21.
說明： Explanation: 循上式，拉起左前脚以成左跨虎步，右拳自前化掌撇落右大腿之上，然後轉往頭上斜斜架起，左拳轉去腰部再統出，如（揷捶之收式）如『定式』。 Continuing from the previous posture, your left foot pulls back to make a left sitting-tiger stance as your right fist becomes a palm, swings down against your right thigh, then arcs upward higher than your head to block away diagonally, and your left fist arcs to your hip and then thrusts out. It is the same as in the closing posture of the Charging Punches set. See photo 24:
功用： Application: 彼以脚撩陰，我先用掌拍消之，然後架於頭上以資掩渡，左拳直取中上路。 （全拳完） The opponent does a raising kick toward my groin, so I first use my [right] palm to slap it away, then bring it up to guard my head as my left fist attacks to his middle or upper area. (This completes the entire set.)
