The Last Shall be First: Finding Meaning in the Martial Arts

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A foreign martial arts teacher practices at Wudang. Source:

 

 

Barnum’s Daughter

 

I was recently watching the news when I saw a brief segment on “the last” Japanese swordsmith.  The whole things is a little overwrought as there are lots of individuals making swords in Japan today, and (multiple) government offices in place to make sure that they will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. While alarmist, I am no longer surprised by this sort of rhetoric. For better or worse, it has become a defining feature of the modern martial arts and all of the other cultural practices that are associated with them. I usually just brush it off. Yet it can be jarring to those who have less experience with it.

By any metric Heather* is a pretty worldly individual.  A Hollywood veteran and longtime producer of reality TV shows (touching on everything from home improvement to dating contests), she could only be described as a modern daughter of P. T. Barnum. She can regale one with tales of writing room misbehavior or the wholesale fabrication of budget numbers on those home renovation shows that dominate the American dream.  She had recently “retired” and moved to Ithaca to take up a teaching position, and at the time of this conversation we lived in the same apartment complex.

Heather approached me on her bike as I was working through a new jian (double edged straight sword) set. “Hey, I didn’t know you were a martial artist!” she proclaimed. “That is what finally chased me out of TV.”  Asking for clarification it turned out that it was not actually Wudang Jian that had done her in.  Rather, she had been working on the project titled “The Last Samurai”* when she finally decided to retire.  I asked her to explain, which she did at length, finally concluding

“Look, I don’t know anything about the martial arts, but I know a racket when I see one. That guy wasn’t “the last Samurai.” What does it even mean to be a “Samurai” in Japan today? And God only knows how any of this could have been significant to the poor kids we dragged over there to meet him.”

After pausing to ruminate she continued, “That was how I knew it was time to get out.  Sure, the dating shows are all staged, and no one has yet pulled a dish out of the oven that actually looks like it does on the Food Network.  I could do all of that. But when it came to martial arts documentaries, it was a sign. I just knew I couldn’t do this anymore.  That’s when I knew it was time to do something real, and finally put my MFA to good use.”

I had never heard this part of Heather’s story before and stood there at an actual loss for words.  After a career spent fabricating the budgets of home improvement shows, it was martial arts mythmaking that finally brought down a jaded Hollywood producer.

 

A trip to any public park in China would seem to indicate that the average of traditional martial artists is increasing. At the same time these individuals may have a greater need for strong social networks and more resources to devote to finding them.

 

The Last Masters

 

As I reflected on the recent story of the “last” Japanese swordsmith (who, I suppose, is responsible for outfitting the aforementioned “last” Samurai) it occurred to me that that these were not just any random lineage myths or poorly researched newspaper articles.  Rather, they were widely shared stories that lamented or prophesized the end of the martial arts altogether.  Indeed, they have acquired the status of cultural touchstones. Both practicing martial artists and the mainstream media seem to relish stories promoting some teacher, or school, as either the first or (more commonly) the last of their kind.

All sorts of practices and institutions come to an end, and yet the media rarely remarks on their passing.  The martial arts are, if nothing else, survivors. While the end of the Chinese martial arts has been regularly prophesized since the end of the Ming Dynasty in the 17thcentury, they are still going strong. Given their frequently predicted demise, on some level I think it would be appropriate to conceptualize the Asian martial arts as a community that exists in a state of perpetual revival (understood in the Religious Studies sense of the word). Yet what makes the image of the end of Kung Fu, the last Viking or the final Samurai so appealing?  Where do these images get their emotional appeal, and why are they embraced with seemingly equal enthusiasm by those both within the traditional martial arts community and those who only know these practices through their mediatized image? As we unravel the puzzle of the perpetual demise of the martial arts, we may gain additional insight into the modern social functions which these practices perform.

 

Yang Style Taiji in Shanghai, 2005. The traditional Chinese martial arts are always forced to create a sheltered space within the larger community. Source: Wikimedia.

 

 

“Tradition” as Fetish in the Martial Arts

 

As we review the various historical essays within Kung Fu Tea’s archive, one might be forgiven for concluding that the Chinese martial arts are not so much a smoothly transmitted system as an assortment of stochastic discontinuities held together by the fervent belief that they ought to be (or at one point in the distant past were) a cohesive whole.  I find it useful to sit back and consider how much (or rather, how little) my Wing Chun training (a product of the 1950s) has in common with either the Dadao clubs of the 1930s, or the Red Spear village militias of the 1920s. These two distinct visions of the Chinese martial arts were among the largest social movements of their day. Collectively they trained and organized many millions of people.  And yet the Red Spear militias that once rules China’s northern plains seem to have had little impact on the surviving martial arts.  If this is true for huge social movements that existed less than 100 years ago, how much further removed is my understanding of the Chinese martial arts from one of Qi Jiguang’s Ming era soldiers, or an ancient scholar-warrior welding a bronze sword?

Nevertheless, the threads of culture provide continuity that bridges our personal, localized or purely internal, experience of reality. It is here, rather than in embodied practice, that scholars might start their search for a more stable understanding of the Chinese martial arts.  More specifically, it is within their long tradition of shared stories, literary references, venerated figures, imagined geographies and even values (though these do tend to shift from era to era) that Chinese martial culture finds (and contests) its central coherence.  It is within this most basic stratum that our search must begin.  And it is here that we first encounter the uniting fear of the “end” of martial practice.

Within a Confucian lineage system intergenerational transmission, whether genetic or social, is the great responsibility. Fathers must have sons to inherit the land, and in turn they must provide sacrifices to the ancestors. Knowledge, which existed in perfect clarity in the past, must be faithfully transmitted. The martial arts, understood as systems of military defense at both the local and imperial levels, was no exception.  Driven by the importance of the military examination system, archery manuals became one of the most successful genres of popular literature in the late imperial period. Likewise, the act of boxing is irreducibly social.  Neither teacher nor student can exist without the other.

It is thus interesting to note that within the very first stratum of existing Chinese martial arts manuals (16thcentury) we find authors like Qi Jiguang and Yu Dayou already concerned that the nation’s hand combat practices are in decline and in need of revival.  Cheng Zhongyou likewise undertook his important study of the Shaolin pole method both because he wanted to make it available to other members of the gentry seeking to train village militias, but also because he was worried that their “original” method would be lost in a deluge of second-rate imitators.  Already within the oldest stratum of printed (sometimes commercially distributed) works on the Chinese martial arts, we see a concern with their end.  This is truly remarkable as these same authors (and many other nameless instructors within their generation) were responsible for laying the foundation of the martial arts that we now enjoy today.

This basic complex of social values largely survived the transition to ideological nationalism, and market-based methods of transmission, during the late Qing and early Republic period.  In the period of “self-strengthening” (1860s-1890s) the entire nation was seen as under threat, and the martial arts came to be understood by some individuals as a way of preserving what was essential within Chinese society to resist the West. Thus fears about the disappearance of boxing could be mapped directly onto a larger historical dilemma. Likewise, Republic era reformers sought to place the traditional martial arts at the disposal of the nation building project, and (drawing on the Japanese example) saw within them the tools necessary to forge China into a single, modern, people.  When individuals foresaw or debated the end of boxing, they were at the same time ruminating on the nature of the modern Chinese state, its values, and relationship with society.

Yet such discussions still emerge with some frequency in the Western media and martial arts circles. And it goes without saying that the cultural values that underlay these discussions are quite different from traditional Confucianism’s concerns with faithful transmission on the one hand, or the sorts of all-encompassing nationalisms that characterized the 1930s on the other. Is there a single theoretical lens which we might apply to the narrative of the vanishing Kung Fu master which both explains the popularity of the story today, while still (within reason) shedding some light on its previous manifestations?

Martial arts historians and social theorists alike would probably begin by pointing out that it is quite significant that the West encountered these hand combat systems during the great period of imperial expansion in the late 19thcentury, and then again during the era of the consolidation of the global financial order in the immediate aftermath of WWII.  This suggests that we cannot separate the social function of the martial arts from the emergence of late capitalism and modern consumer culture.

Indeed, modern capitalism plays the pivotal role in the post-WWII dissemination of the Asian martial arts.  It gave rise to a set of economic, social and personal insecurities which came to define Western culture, and then promised the delivery of goods, ideas and practices that could solve these same issues.  The first two of these issues are perhaps the easiest to understand. The rapid opening of markets to global trade flows always creates sets of winners and losers as the increased flows of new types of goods eliminate some jobs and threaten the fabric of traditional communities. While most individuals will be better off (in the long run) as the national economy expands, they will now be forced to deal with the basic existential questions of life (who am I, what is my purpose) without the support of the types of traditional communities and institutions that sought to provide those answers in the past.

The surplus of goods which modern capitalism facilitates seems to always be accompanied with a deficit in social meaning.  Increasingly individuals are left to their own devices to determine what makes them unique, which groups (if any) they are part of, and what larger purpose they are meant to fill. Unsurprisingly individuals seek to find meaning within the sorts of goods and experiences that they consume.  For instance, I might signal, and develop, a certain type of identity through the clothing that I wear, the type of car that I drive (or don’t drive), and the hobbies that I fill my free time with.

Yet in a world where everything can be purchased, and any individual with the same set of means might purchase a similar set of goods, how secure is such an identity? The perfectly interchangeable and anonymous nature of markets threatens the ability of these institutions to provide answers for the terrible existential questions of human existence that are always looming in the darkness.  One logical response to this is to remove certain goods from the universal marketplace, thus preserving their cultural power by providing a non-economic gateway to their use.  This strategy has been seen many times in history, but in the current era it seems to most closely approximate our current anxiety over cultural appropriation.

Several theorists have noted that we respond to the anxieties and threats of the modern consumer society by seeking something that exists beyond mere economic exchange with which to anchor identity.  Given their importance to the counter-culture movement of the 1950s-1970s, Asian philosophies, religions and modes of aesthetic expression were often adopted as strategies for resisting the commercialization and hollowing-out of Western life.  Chinese Daoism, Japanese film and, of course, the martial arts all exploded into the popular consciousness as a new generation sought to find a better set of values to anchor their lives in a rapidly changing post-War West.  Strictly speaking, none of these things were actually “new.” Most of these images and ideas had been available to Westerners since the 1920s.  The supply was already present.  It was the post-war reevaluation of modern life that provided an explosion of demand.

Nevertheless, one must think carefully about how individuals, from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, actually encountered these ideas and practices.  The old standby is to assert that Judo or Karate was popularized by vets returning from the occupation of Japan (or perhaps a stint in Taiwan). There is certainly some truth in this statement.  And yet most of the vets who took up martial arts in the 1960s had never been stationed in Okinawa, Japan or Taiwan.  Some key individuals and future tastemakers had.  Don Draeger and R. W. Smith are both important examples of how a certain vision of the Asian martial arts was exported to the West.

Yet the vast majority of individuals who followed in their virtual footsteps had neither the life experience or financial means to travel East and South East Asia, documenting the martial arts.  Some may have encountered aspects of these systems as “dirty fighting” in boot camp. Yet for the most part they came to Judo, Karate and later the Chinese martial arts through newspaper and magazine articles, TV specials and commercial transactions carried out in strip mall dojos dotting the American post-war landscape.

The central paradox of consumer culture is now laid bare.  It promises to sell us goods, ideas and practices that can substitute for the loss of older types of community.  Yet the very fact that such goods can be purchased by anyone leads us to question their authenticity and efficaciousness. If personal-transformation and escape from the woes of late capitalism can really be purchased for $60 a month, and I hand over my $60, what exactly have I escaped?

Once we have reached this point a variety of thinkers, from Slavoj Zizek to Jean Baurdrillard, could be invoked to help. Zizek’s work on “Western Buddhism” is in many ways particularly relevant here.  But I would like to turn to a different source as it brings the discussion back to the frequent appearance of the words “last” and “first” in our discussions of the martial arts.  Specifically, Amanda Fernbach’s 2002 Fantasies of Fetishism: From Decadence to the Post-Human (Rutgers UP) deserves consideration.

Specifically, the logic of Fernbach’s argument suggests that procumers (consumers who simultaneously produce Western martial arts culture through their participation in these systems) seek to solve the essential dilemma of counter-culture consumerism by reformulating their practice as a type of fetish.  While the martial arts will continue to be distributed through a competitive marketplace this move relieves the latent anxiety about the authenticity of these goods. Specifically, discourses focusing on the origins or ending of an art serve to form a relationship between the practice and its students in which the now fetishized art becomes a powerful tool of its own marketing as well as a symbol of its own legitimacy.

Fernbach notes that the origins of the notion of “fetish” seems to lie in the colonial trade that occurred between Portugal and West Africa.  Fetish goods were spiritually powerful, culturally defined, objects which could not be traded.  Their exchange lay outside of normal economic channels, and they were believed to have a transformative effect on individuals or communities.  Given our attempt to apply all of this to a discussion of the martial arts in the early and mid-twentieth century, it is important to note that the core concept of the fetish really derives from imperialist discourse and denotes an area that is somehow insulated from socially corrosive market forces.

This notion (focusing on the object which resisted exchange) would go on to inform the basic anthropological definition of the fetish which saw them as otherwise mundane objects thought to be endowed with tremendous spiritual powers (often used in worship). More specifically, they could grant great strength or ability to someone with the proper knowledge of their use. Freud took this basic notion and instead focused on the absence, or the fear, that might cause one to seek out a fetish in the first place.  Fernbach finds his treatment of the concept wanting in a number of respects.

Karl Marx, on the other hand, found modern fetish goods within the Western economic marketplace. Here the good most certainly exchanges hands through trade.  Yet some aspect of its value (perhaps its prestige, or ability to act as a status symbol) might outstrip its actual utilitarian worth.  The fetish is thus a second good, encoded in the value of the first, which we might purchase within a marketplace.

Each of these definitions of the fetish are related to the others. Yet the original notion of an area (seemingly) protected from the corrosive effects of trade seems most relevant to what we see-or seek-in modern martial arts.  Still, Freud’s very different take on the problem reminds us that what is often most important in understanding human behavior is the fear of the thing that is lacking.

Nor is the Marxist interpretation without some merit. As with any good in the marketplace, one must increase the demand for your product through advertising. Creating discourses that fetishize aspects of the martial arts communicates to consumers that they will receive value that goes above and beyond the simple instruction that we are outwardly paying for. For instance, when I put my child in a Taekwondo class she doesn’t just learn the basic kicks and punches that I am paying for.  Undoubtably there will be a brochure in the school’s lobby informing me that she will also gain “self-confidence,” “discipline” and the ability to “work with others.” These are all core social values and a good example of the Marxist theory in action.

Still, I suspect that there is a more primal layer of myth creation that underlies all of this, one better explored through the older anthropological understanding of the fetish. As adult consumers look for a tool of self-actualization, guided perhaps by latent Orientalist notions about a “purer” East, they build a belt of protective fetish fantasies around the martial arts precisely to “save them” from the taint of the mundane. Perhaps the easiest of these fantasies to construct (and hence the most widespread) is that of origins and endings.

Such stories effectively sperate the martial arts from the world of endlessly repeatable consumer consumption by positing the existence of temporal discontinuity.  It is time itself (or what Eliade might have called “sacred time”) that places the martial arts beyond the reach of “mere consumerism,” but not actual consumers. That which has vanished from the world can no longer be sold, even if I feel that I can access some aspect of this shared sacred past in my weekly Kung Fu classes.  To be on the verge of disappearance is to also to be on the verge of having the sort of cultural surplus that we always bequeath of the long lost masters.  To be the “last master” is to be remembered. At least in our more romantic imagination. One suspects that in real life practices vanish precisely because no one cares to remember them at all.

Likewise, something on the verge of extinction is also a candidate for revival. Ip Man became the “grandmaster” not because he was the first, or the best, Wing Chun practitioner. Rather, he was venerated by generations of students in Hong Kong and the West for “saving the art” from extinction. Whether that was actually the case is a topic for another day. But I don’t think that anyone doubts that Ip Man has come to be seen as an epochal figure in the Southern Chinese martial arts that the “generation” of most modern Wing Chun students is now counted from.  His career is interesting precisely because it illustrates how closely linked the death and rebirth of an embodied identity can be, not just in historical practice but also in the stories that we come to tell.

 

 

Taijiquan teacher and students in a park. Source: http://english.cntv.cn

 

 

Conclusion

 

To be a member of the last (or first) generation of an art is find a place in history that appears to be beyond the whim of market forces. As witness to historical events it is hoped that one gains a sense of identity and purpose.  Indeed, one may even wish for a bit of immortality.  Given the universal appeal of these outcomes it is perhaps not surprising that media markets, in both the China, Japan and the West, have fetishized the imminent death of the martial arts. This often functions as a democratizing move. Lamenting their passing, or attempting to spark their revival, have become critical modes by which countless students experience these practices.  And many more media consumers are exposed to the same feelings (often in a more nationalistic or cultural guise) as they consume news stories about the disappearance of these once great cultural artifacts. When these fetishes are exposed (throwing us back into the “desert of the real”), the result can be the sort of destructive feeling of disillusionment that Heather experienced upon actually coming face to face with Japan’s “last Samurai.”

Any student of martial arts history can illustrate, in great detail, that we are not the first generation to read premature obituaries of Kung Fu’s passing.  Nor, through the simple process of extrapolation, are we likely to be the last. Yet when examined through the lens of Fernbach’s theory of the fetish it quickly, becomes apparent that the sorts of popular narratives that we tell about the death and rebirth of the martial arts are very important. The process of fetishization which she outlines (and is particularly amenable to the study of physical or embodied practices) suggests not just a mechanism by which these practices yield real transformative influence on the individual level, but also suggests much about the social ills that they seek to respond to. A theoretically informed examination of the martial arts suggests much about the terrain that lays behind us, and what we might yet become.

 

*All names and program titles have been changed to protect the innocents.

 

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If you enjoyed this discussion you might also want to read: Bruce Lee: Memory, Philosophy and the Tao of Gung Fu

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Performance Ethnography and the Martial Arts Studies Reader

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As the indomitable Professor Farnsworth would say, good news everyone! The long anticipated Martial Arts Studies Reader (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) is now shipping.  Weighing in at 244 pages, and featuring articles by over a dozen of the most respected names in the field, this volume is sure to be referenced for years to come. Its timely chapters can easily be integrated into a wide variety of course reading lists. And if you look closely, you may even find my latest paper on the lightsaber combat community. This book will be of interest to both scholars and practitioners seeking to understand the evolution and social meaning of the modern martial arts.  Featuring articles by Peter Lorge, Douglas Wile, Meaghan Morris and D. S. Farrer, it is sure to find a place on all of our holiday gift lists.

 

Speaking of which, D. S. Farrer has been kind enough to post the text of his chapter on performance ethnography. His paper opens a window onto the sorts of content that one will find in the Martial Arts Studies Reader. It also provides students with a great discussion of one of the most important research methodologies being employed in the field today.  Take a look at the volume’s table of contents, read Farrer’s chapter, and order your copy today!

 

Table of Contents
Introduction: “What, Where and Why is Martial Arts Studies?” Paul Bowman
2. “Early Chinese Works on Martial Arts” Peter Lorge
3. “The Battlefield and the Bedroom: Chinese Martial Arts and Art of the Bedchamber” Douglas Wile
4. “Martial Arts by the Book: Historical European Martial Arts” Daniel Jaquet
5. “The Phone Book Project: Tracing the Diffusion of Asian Martial Arts in America Through the Yellow Pages” Michael Molasky
6. “Martial Arts, Media, and (Material) Religion” Esther Berg-Chan
7. “Liminoid Longings and Liminal Belonging: Hyper-reality, History and the Search for Meaning in the Modern Martial Arts” Benjamin N. Judkins
8. “‘He’s an Animal’: Naturalizing the Hyperreal in Modern Combat Sport” Janet O’Shea
9. “Martial Arts as a Coping Strategy for Violence” Sixt Wetzler
10. “Performance Ethnography” D. S. Farrer
11. “Martial Arts Studies and the Sociology of Gender: Theory, Research and Pedagogical Application” Alex Channon
12. “Masculinities, Bodies, and Martial Arts” Dale C. Spencer
13. “Martial Arts as Embodied, Discursive, and Aesthetic Practice” Tim Trausch
14. “Carnival of the Drunken Master: The Politics of the Kung Fu Comedic Body” Luke White
15. “Learning from Martial Arts”  Meaghan Morris and Paul Bowman

 

Chapter 10: Performance Ethnography
DS Farrer
The human mind is apt to perceive many things, and more so according as its body can be disposed in more ways. —Spinoza, Ethics IIP14 (1977: 52)

 

Performance ethnography, where the researcher sets out to learn a martial art, or other skill, is a somatic extension of participant observation where the body may become both subject and object of research.  This chapter traverses essential features of ‘how to do’ performance ethnography in martial arts research, thereby introducing a methodological toolkit to a new generation of ‘fighting scholars’ (García and Spencer 2013). Perfor-mance ethnography itself, however, is an open quarry for further research. Hence, in addition to a discussion of practical, methodological concerns, this chapter aims towards a fresh theoretical understanding of performance ethnography in terms of ‘immanence’ and ‘emergence’, where the method facilitates creative outcomes, knowledge or theory to surface from within a community of martial artists, dancers or other skilled practitioners (Deleuze 1988, 76).

 

 

 

Of Pens and Swords: Jin Yong’s Journey

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In recent years Louis Cha’s novels have become subjects for comic book artists.

 

 

The Loss of Heroes

The Chinese martial arts community has lost two giants.  The death of Rey Chow (who was instrumental in jumpstarting Bruce Lee’s martial arts films) and Louis Cha (who wrote under the name Jin Yong) comes as a double blow. Granted, neither man is remembered primarily as a practitioner of the martial arts.  Yet as story tellers they had a huge impact on the development of the shared web of signs, meanings and desires that would shape the development of the Chinese martial art community from roughly the 1950s until the present. As scholars we need to pay close attention to this cultural web as it is the software that structures the human experience.  While not strictly determinative, none of us will strive to accomplish that which we cannot imagine.

Both of these figures are deserving of an essay. Yet at the moment I find myself drawn to reflect on Cha. His stature as a literary figure, and frequent forays into modern Chinese politics (both from the editorial page and his service on various governmental committees) are fascinating in their own right. Yet I will admit to having some ambivalence regarding the cultural impact of his novels. To put the question simply, I find myself wondering what Hong Kong’s martial culture would look like today had “Jin Yong” accepted a newspaper job in Taipie in 1947 rather than Hong Kong.

Simply asking such a question smacks of heresy. In many ways Loius Cha is synonymous with Hong Kong, his adopted home. He was the co-founder, and long-time editor, of the Ming Pao daily, a major publication. While Cha is still remembered for his blistering anti-Beijing editorials during the Cultural Revolution, he became the first (non-Communist) Hong Kong resident to meet with Deng Xioping as he sought to steer China on a more open path.  And with over 100 million copies sold (not counting untold pirate editions), as well as derivative films, TV programs, radio dramas, comic books and video games too numerous to count, Cha’s novels are quite possibly Hong Kong’s most important cultural export within the Chinese cultural zone. Yet his impact on the Southern Chinese martial arts has been complex.

Perhaps the best way forward would be to review the contours of a remarkable career as we ask how it was that Cha, and a generation of immigrants like him, came to call Hong Kong home.  This may suggest something about Cha’s impact on the development of Southern Chinese martial culture in the post-1949 era, as well as the continuing echoes and reverberations of his legacy today.

I should state for the record that I do not claim to be an expert in the analysis, or criticism, of Cha’s work, and have only read a few of his in novels in translation. I am sure that there are others who are better qualified to write an essay such as this.  Nor is that admission an artifact of false modesty.  The immense popularity of Cha’s novels have actually sparked the creation of an entire academic subfield (some of which even appears in English) dedicated to the study of his legacy. Still, his influence on the world of actual Chinese martial arts practitioners has been so great that I cannot leave his passing in silence. The complexity of his relationship with this community seems to stretch far beyond the platitudes that we encounter in his many newspaper obituaries.

 

 

Jin Fong reviewing a copy of his own work. Source: BBC

 

 

Making a Hero

Like so many others, Cha first arrived in Hong Kong as a way station as he was headed somewhere else. He was born as Zha Liangyong in 1924 in Zhejiang province.  His family had deep, multigenerational, scholarly credentials and it was only natural that Liang would also find a career in literature. But his pathway was far from straight. He exhibited his trademark penchant for fiery political rhetoric as a youth and was expelled from high school in 1941 after publicly denouncing the KMT’s government as “aristocratic”.  Indeed, he would continue to identify himself as “anti-feudal” and “liberal” throughout his life.

After graduating from (a different) high school in 1943, Cha was accepted at the Department of Foreign Languages at the Central University of Chongqing.  His initial plan was to become a foreign service officer or diplomat.  However, he quickly dropped out of this program, and applied to study international law at Soochow University.

To help finance his studies Cha took a job in journalism with a major British owned paper. Fortuitously his company transferred him to the Hong Kong office in 1947. Things did not go well for all of Cha’s family who stayed behind after the Communist takeover in 1949.  His father was arrested as a counterrevolutionary and executed in the early 1950s. Critics, like John Christopher Hamm (who has written one of the best English language studies of Cha’s work), note that his early novels are marked with a profound awareness of the plight of exile, alienation and loss.  Like so many others who had come to Hong Kong for business or work, it quickly became apparent that there was no going home. Cha would be forced to build a new life in a largely Cantonese city under British colonial rule.

In the early 1950s Cha befriended Chen Wentong, a fellow journalist, who worked at the same paper.  He encouraged Cha’s interest in writing and in 1955 (writing under the pseudonym Jin Yong) he began to produce the first of the serialized wuxia novels that would make him famous.  In English this story’s title is typically rendered The Book and the Sword.

In 1959 Cha and his high school classmate, Shen Baoxin, established the Ming Pao daily newspaper with Cha serving as editor. The small paper started off as a home for “Jin Yong’s” increasingly popular novels, but it has since grown to be on the largest Chinese daily papers.  In its first two decades Cha was responsible for writing not just the serialized novels but also the daily editorials and many small features.  It is reported that at times he was publishing more than 10,000 characters a day.

In total Cha produced 14 novels and a single short story under the Jin Yong pseudonym. Then, in 1972, he retired and announced that he would concentrate on consolidating and editing his already extensive literary legacy.  This was a complex undertaking as these novels had first appeared as serialized newspaper columns, which operated under their own set of literary conventions. In 1979 Cha released the first “complete and definitive” set of novels, many of which had been streamlined or slightly reworked in the editorial process.

The 1970s-1990s were a period of increased political activity in Cha’s life. He had always maintained an interest in politics (often understood through a more traditional Chinese cultural lens focusing on “the national interest”). Initially this led Cha to make many enemies on the left when he forcefully denounced the Cultural Revolution. Still, his reputation as someone capable of bringing together complex competing perspectives led to an invitation to meet with Deng Xiaoping and his subsequent appointment to the committee drafting Hong Kong’s Basic Law.  Cha resigned that position in 1989 in protest over the Tiananmen Square Incident. Yet in 1996 he was once again working on the important Preparatory Committee, prior to the 1997 handover.

Not content to rest on his literary or political laurels, Cha pursued his lifelong fascination with Chinese history by pursuing a Doctorate in Oriental Studies at Cambridge University.  His degree was awarded in 2010 when he deposited his dissertation focusing on imperial succession in the early Tang dynasty.  Cha remained an important public figure throughout his life and his works have remained popular. A highly publicized English language version of his Condor Heroes series released its first installment in 2018. Cha died on October 30th2018, at 94, after a long period of illness.

 

A recent English language translation of one of Louis Cha’s classic Wuxia novels.

 

 

Contextualizing a Life

John Christopher Hamm has argued that it is impossible to understand Jin Yong’s meaning or social significance without thinking very carefully about the environment that this literary phenomenon emerged in.  Hong Kong’s newspapers were already well acquainted with the notion of serialized martial arts novels well before Cha’s arrival in the city.  Indeed, the region had a rich, well-established, tradition of Kung Fu novels stretching back through the 19th century.  Many of these were firmly rooted in Cantonese colloquialisms and local heroic figures.  While one must be careful not to draw what were always shifting social borders too strictly, these stories typically appealed to the transient workers and merchants who came to Hong Kong to do business before returning (either at the end of a season or a career) to some other location in the Pearl River delta.

With the national upheavals of the late 1930s and 1940s, the city’s complexion began to change quite rapidly. Increasing numbers of displaced persons made their way to Hong Kong in an effort to escape the turmoil elsewhere in China. Since these Northern immigrants had the means to travel, they were often better off financially and more educated than much of the local population. Following the 1949 liberation of China by the Communist Party, they streamed in, effectively overwhelming the Guangdong culture that had dominated Hong Kong since its inceptions. It is interesting to note, parenthetically, that Ip Man and Louis Cha arrived in the city within a year and a half of each other, though they represented different cultural currents.

Like Cha these individuals slowly came to the realization that the 1949 crisis was not a limited event like the others that had marked China’s tumultuous 20thcentury. Rather than a temporary haven, Hong Kong had become their home for the imaginable future.  Cultural clashes were common.  Local Cantonese residents referred to these newcomers as “outlanders.”  For their part the Northern refugees tended to see Hong Kong as a cultural wasteland. Cantonese culture was dismissed as backwards and new radio stations, theater groups and even newspapers quickly sprang up to cater to these northern “outlanders” who brought their own ideas about what modern Chinese life should be.

The Ming Pao daily was one of these institutions. And as Hamm notes, Jin Yong’s novels were a clear departure from the local kung fu tales that had previously dominated Hong Kong story telling. Acutely self-aware, his stories focused not on local heroes, but epic tales of contests for control of the Central Plains during periods of foreign occupation. When the heroes suffered their inevitable defeats, they retreated to the fringes of the empires and went into exile, just as Jin Yong’s readers had.

This is not to say that Jin Yong’s work didn’t have immense appeal, or that it was incapable of reaching a cross-over audience. As so many writers have recently noted, his novels have proved to be culturally enduring precisely because they speak to individuals across the geographic, ideological and economic lines that have traditionally divided the Chinese cultural area. They have managed to do so in large part by advancing an appealing, nuanced, vision of Chinese nationalism.  Self-determination and cultural identity seem to rest at the heart of Cha’s understanding of patriotism.  And in his later works he goes to lengths to praise China’s many ethnic minorities (particularly the ones that have contributed to its martial arts traditions) advancing a more open and liberal vision of what Chinese nationalism might be.

All of this is combined with a reverence for traditional Confucian values, particularly when they order the relationship between teachers and students, family members or leaders and followers.  Yet the feudal past, in which all of his stories are set, is not accepted uncritically.  Cha remained deeply suspicious of the feudal and aristocratic, and so his characters can be seen to wrestle with, and critically examine, practices that no longer work in the “modern” world of the 14thor 15thcenturies.

A lack of Cantonese colloquialisms notwithstanding, these themes were likely to have a broad appeal within Hong Kong society. Cha made sophisticated discussions about identity, belonging and the nation available to those with a variety of educational and cultural backgrounds.  Yet these stories always originated from a specific place, or point of view. Nor can one help but wonder what other vision of martial arts culture they displaced, or pushed to the margins, as Jin Yong attained a sort of hegemonic dominance within the Wuxia genre.  In my own research I frequently run across accounts of martial arts students in the 1960s and 1970s who, while enthusiastic to learn the southern martial arts, carried with them different visions about the values or identities that motivated these systems.  Generational conflict over such matters is not unique to this case. Though as I read one testimonial after another as to how critical Cha was to defining the world view of a generation of Southern martial artists, I cannot help but wonder what he displaced, and to what degree he helped to shape the disjointed expectations of the period.  Indeed, in my own account of Wing Chun’s history during the post-war era, Jing Yong’s novels are more likely to play the role of “loyal opposition” than protagonist.

 

Cha, second from left, in 1960, with the cast of the film “Return of the Condor Heroes.” Source: The New Yorker

 

The Journey North

The burgeoning hostility of local Hong Kong residents towards Northern visitors or residents is nothing new. It is easy to find recent newspaper articles and editorials referring to Northerners as “locusts” who sweep in to consume not just cheap goods, but increasingly the best real estate and jobs, pushing long-time residents ever further from the center. In the wake of his death some individuals openly wondered whether a figure like Cha could succeed today given the open hostility to immigrants.  The great irony, of course, is that the majority of Hong Kong’s “legitimate” residents today were once northern transplants themselves, and Cha’s stories helped their parents to negotiate an environment that was not always friendly, familiar or welcoming.

By becoming the quintessential Hong Kong storyteller (a lack of Cantonese roots notwithstanding) Cha is once again acting as a cultural bridge. Amidst all of the anxiety about the death of the Hong Kong film industry, and the future of the Southern Chinese martial arts (which are being priced out of the city by skyrocketing rents), it is easy to forget that in some ways the Cantonese martial arts heroes are now more popular than ever throughout the PRC.  Ip Man has become a household figure (and his art has exploded in popularity) not just because of his association with Bruce Lee. Rather, Wilson Ip’s 2008 film and its many successors have been key in spreading this bit of Southern culture throughout the mainland.

It has been noted (by myself and others) that the vision of Ip Man that these films conjure does not bear a close resemblance to the real life (and rather well documented) figure. In the place of the undeniably mercurial and modernist Ip Man, what do these films present?  A figure that in many ways splits the difference between the traditional Kung Fu genre and one of Cha’s stories.  Yes, the action is still gritty and “realistic” with minimal wire work.  But we now have a hero who exemplifies martial virtue, who demonstrates Confucian values in his relationships, who is a patriot who fights for China, and in defeat he retreats in exile to the edge of the empire. Does that sound familiar?

The flavor of these films is undeniably influenced by the Hong Kong tradition. Yet the mold that shapes the stories bears an uncanny resemblance to the ideal hero (a patriot who endures rather than wins) as laid out in Cha’s many novels.  Where as Ip Man and Louis Cha had once existed as contemporary historical figures, whose lives ran on parallel tracks, their legacies now interact in complex ways.  Rather than simply displacing the Pearl River Delta’s traditional Kung Fu narrative, Cha seems to have provided a pattern by which its heroes can travel North, testing their own fortunes in the Central Plains.

 

oOo

If you enjoyed this essay you might also want to read:  Lives of Chinese Martial Artists (14): Ark Yuey Wong—Envisioning the Future of the Chinese Martial Arts

oOo

 

Through a Lens Darkly (56): New York City’s Kung Fu and the Roaring 1920s

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Introduction

While I have a few connections in New York City’s TCMA community, it has always been my experience that one turns up different sorts of insights by getting out and exploring the terrain on one’s own.  It was with that notion in mind that my wife and I set out to reconnoiter the older Manhattan Chinatown, which now seems almost quaint when compared in scale to its larger and more vibrant neighbor in Queens. The weather was great, and we got some memorable photos of tourists from China stopping to take photos of Chinese-American businesses and families.  The gods of globalization move in mysterious ways.

The afternoon was not a total bust.  We briefly made contact with two people working on Xingyi in a local park, though it was abundantly clear that no manner of martial art was going to distract the local residents from the many card games that dominated the district.  After purchasing a book (by my friend Mark Wiley) from a local martial arts business, we were able to learn a little more about the neighborhood’s martial arts scene.  Things sounded quiet, but we found out about two other instructors (Taijiquan and Wing Chun) who occasionally taught in the same park.

Still, there was very little evidence of the vibrant martial arts scene that had been so prominent during the late 1970s and 1980s. While the gentrification that has reshaped so much of the island was less evident south of Canal Street, Chinatown evolves and changes, like everything else.  It seems that the warehouse schools which I read about in memoirs and doctoral dissertations have suffered the same fate as many of the more colorful elements of New York life.

In search of some historical perspective my wife and I next visited a local non-profit dedicated to preserving as much of Chinatown’s local and oral history as possible. The young employees (all in their 20s) thought that our subject sounded fascinating. Yet as they searched their databases and various key-word indexes they didn’t hold out much hope of finding anything useful. While they approached their job with infectious enthusiasm, they freely admitted that most of the neighborhood’s older residents didn’t share their zeal for preserving the past.

In fact, convincing older Chinese-Americans to sit down for oral history interviews was proving to be every bit as difficult as one might suspect.  While there was some interesting history available on various musical and opera societies, once the tape recorders were turned on no one seemed willing to admit to knowing anything about martial arts instruction or Lion Dancing. In fact, the young researchers who staffed the office were hopeful that as a “total outsider” I would have better luck than them when it came to interviewing individuals and ferreting out this chapter of the historical record.

The situation was even bleaker when looking for resources that might discuss martial arts training in the pre-war period.  Outside of a few stories and names, not much of substance seems to have survived. Giving me a mournful look, my ever-earnest historical guide explained that with so few surviving sources much of the texture of the community had been irrevocably lost. So ended my hopes of unearthing a rich trove of New York’s early Chinese martial arts history.

Or so I thought. Research is a funny thing.  All of our sources are oddly specific, and even the most comprehensive database catches only a fraction of what is already sitting in some archive or library. While conducting a search for Chinese newsreel footage of martial arts practice during the Guoshu decade (1928-1938), I stumbled across something much more valuable. I found perhaps the best preserved and oldest footage of North American Southern Kung Fu practice that I had yet seen.  Even better, it was shot on the same New York City streets that my wife and I had recently explored.

 

 

The Footage

Anyone interested in viewing this film can do so by clicking this link. This priceless visual record has been preserved on a reel of out-takes and raw newsreel footage that is held by the Historic Film archive.  The entire reel is quite important as it helps to contextualize how images of the Chinese martial arts were classified and framed at the time of their production and cataloging.  All of the clips on the reel were produced during the 1920s and most of them focus on scenes of entertainment. The period’s jazz tradition is well represented, and scenes of Chinese-American life find themselves juxtaposed with visual records of the African-American community.  It should be noted that there are multiple recordings of Chinese New Year Festivals on the reel, suggesting a persistent interest in the subject.

At minute 19:42 viewers will encounter footage of a New Year celebration which happened on January 10th, 1929. In addition to the more common scenes of enthusiastic crowds, fireworks and Lion Dancing, two minutes of footage was also shot of the sorts of martial arts exhibitions that accompanied these festivals. While such exhibitions are occasionally noted in period newspaper reports, this is the most complete visual record of such a performance (in North America), that I have yet encountered.

This material rewards a close examination. None of this footage has been narrated, nor are there scene cards. As such I suspect that most of this material was probably treated as “out takes.” Still, it’s a rich source.  While we might lament that we only have two minutes of material, by the standards of a 1920s newsreel, two minutes is an eternity.

This footage is composed of a series of much briefer clips (most ranging in length from 10 to 30 seconds) which focus on the performance of individual martial artists, all performing on a single day in what appears to be the same crowded outdoor venue.  In total 11 sequences are shown, each focusing on some sort of forms performance. Both unarmed and weapons sets are represented in the sample, as well as a few two-person weapons sets. (For the sake of clarity this post is discussing only the martial arts demonstration, and not the excellent Lion Dance footage found on the same newsreel which probably deserves specialized treatment of its own).

If we assume that most of these sets could be introduced, set up and performed in about two minutes, it seems that the original demonstration was at least 22 minutes long. Even more remarkable is that very few individuals (maybe one or two) made any repeat performances in this show. Thus it took at least a dozen martial artists to stage this demonstration.

Most of the individuals in the show were wearing regalia suggesting that they had just come from (or were headed to) Lion Dancing.  The standard uniform appears to have been a white shirt, black bowtie and Kung Fu pants, but a number of individuals can also be seen to wear the typical street clothing of the period. All of the performers in this film are male (though I have seen newsreel footage of female martial artists in NYC in the 1930s).  Some are dressed as common laborers, while other have the air of shopkeepers or clerks.

 

 

A detailed breakdown of the film is as follows:

19:49-19:53     Unarmed Solo Set 1 (conclusion)

19:54-20:05     Unarmed Solo Set 2 (opening)

20:06-20:29     Unarmed Solo Set 3 (opening)

20:30-20:36     Solo Weapon, Eyebrow Staff

20:37-20:40     Solo Weapon, Southern Style Long Pole

20:41-21:08     Solo Weapon, Pudao

21:08-21:22     Solo Weapon, Hudiedao (Butterfly Swords)

21:23-21:32     Two Man, Long Poles

21:33-21:52     Solo Weapon, Rattan Shield and short saber

21:53-21:55     Two Man, Spear vs. Shield and Sword

21:56-22:00     Two Man, Spear vs. Shield and Sword

 

 

 

Analysis

So what sort of demonstration are we looking at? To begin with, one of remarkable sophistication.  The conventional narratives suggest that modern Chinese martial arts schools, as we know them today, did not begin to appear in Chinatowns in cities like New York, San Francisco and Toronto until the 1950s.  Prior to that it is not the case that the martial arts were never taught. Rather, their instruction tended to be sponsored by the various fraternal societies, theater groups and criminal organizations that dominated much of these neighborhoods’ associational life. Indeed, as Charlie Russo has demonstrated in his book on the Bay Area martial arts community, the first generation of public instructors often opened their school after having first established a reputation in community these group. For their part, the various Tongs are generally thought to have been more interested in training “street soldiers” capable of collecting gambling debts, acting as bouncers in a variety of establishments and dealing with belligerent tourists.

Still, the existence of this film problematizes any attempt to bifurcate early 20th century Chinese-American martial arts into a “practical” pre-war phase and a post-war era that might be more recognizable.  While it seems unlikely that any of the individuals received their instruction in public commercial martial arts schools in New York City during the 1920s (to the best of our knowledge there simply weren’t any), it is now clear that there were a large number of individuals who were regularly gathering to train in the traditional martial arts.  Further, staging a Lion Dance and demonstration with as many individuals as we see on this film suggests a fair degree of organizational sophistication.  While they may not have been organized as a public school, it would appear that their institutional Kung Fu must have been pretty good.

What about their physical practice?  All of this film was shot from a single elevated camera angle, so the various martial artists move in and out of the frame.  This combined with the repetitive nature of many Southern sets, and the short duration of most of the clips, makes it very difficult to positively identify the various forms being displayed. After sharing this film with Hung Gar instructors on various continents, and a couple of Choy Li Fut students, we were not able to identify any of the sets with 100% certainty.  Most of the unarmed and weapons work bears a resemblance to pre-Wong Fei Hung style Hung Gar. Alternatively, the one set in which we see the rattan shield and sword combined with tumbling is highly suggestive of some sets that are still practiced in Choy Li Fut.

Identifying these sets has proved to be somewhat frustrating. The film suggests that the general movement culture (or possibly “habitus”) of the Southern Chinese folk arts have remained remarkably consistent over the last century. It was genuinely interesting to see how the seventh performer moved with the hudiedao. Figuring out just what these guys were doing might be an important clue in reconstructing the early TCMA community as it existed in New York city during the 1920s. If anyone has any insights into the identities of these sets (or better yet, the martial artists) please leave a comment below.

 

oOo

If you enjoyed this essay you might also want to read: Lion Dancing, Youth Violence and the Need for Theory in Chinese Martial Studies

oOo

 

Through a Lens Darkly (56): New York City’s Kung Fu and the Roaring 1920s

No Comments

 

 

Introduction

While I have a few connections in New York City’s TCMA community, it has always been my experience that one turns up different sorts of insights by getting out and exploring the terrain on one’s own.  It was with that notion in mind that my wife and I set out to reconnoiter the older Manhattan Chinatown, which now seems almost quaint when compared in scale to its larger and more vibrant neighbor in Queens. The weather was great, and we got some memorable photos of tourists from China stopping to take photos of Chinese-American businesses and families.  The gods of globalization move in mysterious ways.

The afternoon was not a total bust.  We briefly made contact with two people working on Xingyi in a local park, though it was abundantly clear that no manner of martial art was going to distract the local residents from the many card games that dominated the district.  After purchasing a book (by my friend Mark Wiley) from a local martial arts business, we were able to learn a little more about the neighborhood’s martial arts scene.  Things sounded quiet, but we found out about two other instructors (Taijiquan and Wing Chun) who occasionally taught in the same park.

Still, there was very little evidence of the vibrant martial arts scene that had been so prominent during the late 1970s and 1980s. While the gentrification that has reshaped so much of the island was less evident south of Canal Street, Chinatown evolves and changes, like everything else.  It seems that the warehouse schools which I read about in memoirs and doctoral dissertations have suffered the same fate as many of the more colorful elements of New York life.

In search of some historical perspective my wife and I next visited a local non-profit dedicated to preserving as much of Chinatown’s local and oral history as possible. The young employees (all in their 20s) thought that our subject sounded fascinating. Yet as they searched their databases and various key-word indexes they didn’t hold out much hope of finding anything useful. While they approached their job with infectious enthusiasm, they freely admitted that most of the neighborhood’s older residents didn’t share their zeal for preserving the past.

In fact, convincing older Chinese-Americans to sit down for oral history interviews was proving to be every bit as difficult as one might suspect.  While there was some interesting history available on various musical and opera societies, once the tape recorders were turned on no one seemed willing to admit to knowing anything about martial arts instruction or Lion Dancing. In fact, the young researchers who staffed the office were hopeful that as a “total outsider” I would have better luck than them when it came to interviewing individuals and ferreting out this chapter of the historical record.

The situation was even bleaker when looking for resources that might discuss martial arts training in the pre-war period.  Outside of a few stories and names, not much of substance seems to have survived. Giving me a mournful look, my ever-earnest historical guide explained that with so few surviving sources much of the texture of the community had been irrevocably lost. So ended my hopes of unearthing a rich trove of New York’s early Chinese martial arts history.

Or so I thought. Research is a funny thing.  All of our sources are oddly specific, and even the most comprehensive database catches only a fraction of what is already sitting in some archive or library. While conducting a search for Chinese newsreel footage of martial arts practice during the Guoshu decade (1928-1938), I stumbled across something much more valuable. I found perhaps the best preserved and oldest footage of North American Southern Kung Fu practice that I had yet seen.  Even better, it was shot on the same New York City streets that my wife and I had recently explored.

 

 

The Footage

Anyone interested in viewing this film can do so by clicking this link. This priceless visual record has been preserved on a reel of out-takes and raw newsreel footage that is held by the Historic Film archive.  The entire reel is quite important as it helps to contextualize how images of the Chinese martial arts were classified and framed at the time of their production and cataloging.  All of the clips on the reel were produced during the 1920s and most of them focus on scenes of entertainment. The period’s jazz tradition is well represented, and scenes of Chinese-American life find themselves juxtaposed with visual records of the African-American community.  It should be noted that there are multiple recordings of Chinese New Year Festivals on the reel, suggesting a persistent interest in the subject.

At minute 19:42 viewers will encounter footage of a New Year celebration which happened on January 10th, 1929. In addition to the more common scenes of enthusiastic crowds, fireworks and Lion Dancing, two minutes of footage was also shot of the sorts of martial arts exhibitions that accompanied these festivals. While such exhibitions are occasionally noted in period newspaper reports, this is the most complete visual record of such a performance (in North America), that I have yet encountered.

This material rewards a close examination. None of this footage has been narrated, nor are there scene cards. As such I suspect that most of this material was probably treated as “out takes.” Still, it’s a rich source.  While we might lament that we only have two minutes of material, by the standards of a 1920s newsreel, two minutes is an eternity.

This footage is composed of a series of much briefer clips (most ranging in length from 10 to 30 seconds) which focus on the performance of individual martial artists, all performing on a single day in what appears to be the same crowded outdoor venue.  In total 11 sequences are shown, each focusing on some sort of forms performance. Both unarmed and weapons sets are represented in the sample, as well as a few two-person weapons sets. (For the sake of clarity this post is discussing only the martial arts demonstration, and not the excellent Lion Dance footage found on the same newsreel which probably deserves specialized treatment of its own).

If we assume that most of these sets could be introduced, set up and performed in about two minutes, it seems that the original demonstration was at least 22 minutes long. Even more remarkable is that very few individuals (maybe one or two) made any repeat performances in this show. Thus it took at least a dozen martial artists to stage this demonstration.

Most of the individuals in the show were wearing regalia suggesting that they had just come from (or were headed to) Lion Dancing.  The standard uniform appears to have been a white shirt, black bowtie and Kung Fu pants, but a number of individuals can also be seen to wear the typical street clothing of the period. All of the performers in this film are male (though I have seen newsreel footage of female martial artists in NYC in the 1930s).  Some are dressed as common laborers, while other have the air of shopkeepers or clerks.

 

 

A detailed breakdown of the film is as follows:

19:49-19:53     Unarmed Solo Set 1 (conclusion)

19:54-20:05     Unarmed Solo Set 2 (opening)

20:06-20:29     Unarmed Solo Set 3 (opening)

20:30-20:36     Solo Weapon, Eyebrow Staff

20:37-20:40     Solo Weapon, Southern Style Long Pole

20:41-21:08     Solo Weapon, Pudao

21:08-21:22     Solo Weapon, Hudiedao (Butterfly Swords)

21:23-21:32     Two Man, Long Poles

21:33-21:52     Solo Weapon, Rattan Shield and short saber

21:53-21:55     Two Man, Spear vs. Shield and Sword

21:56-22:00     Two Man, Spear vs. Shield and Sword

 

 

 

Analysis

So what sort of demonstration are we looking at? To begin with, one of remarkable sophistication.  The conventional narratives suggest that modern Chinese martial arts schools, as we know them today, did not begin to appear in Chinatowns in cities like New York, San Francisco and Toronto until the 1950s.  Prior to that it is not the case that the martial arts were never taught. Rather, their instruction tended to be sponsored by the various fraternal societies, theater groups and criminal organizations that dominated much of these neighborhoods’ associational life. Indeed, as Charlie Russo has demonstrated in his book on the Bay Area martial arts community, the first generation of public instructors often opened their school after having first established a reputation in community these group. For their part, the various Tongs are generally thought to have been more interested in training “street soldiers” capable of collecting gambling debts, acting as bouncers in a variety of establishments and dealing with belligerent tourists.

Still, the existence of this film problematizes any attempt to bifurcate early 20th century Chinese-American martial arts into a “practical” pre-war phase and a post-war era that might be more recognizable.  While it seems unlikely that any of the individuals received their instruction in public commercial martial arts schools in New York City during the 1920s (to the best of our knowledge there simply weren’t any), it is now clear that there were a large number of individuals who were regularly gathering to train in the traditional martial arts.  Further, staging a Lion Dance and demonstration with as many individuals as we see on this film suggests a fair degree of organizational sophistication.  While they may not have been organized as a public school, it would appear that their institutional Kung Fu must have been pretty good.

What about their physical practice?  All of this film was shot from a single elevated camera angle, so the various martial artists move in and out of the frame.  This combined with the repetitive nature of many Southern sets, and the short duration of most of the clips, makes it very difficult to positively identify the various forms being displayed. After sharing this film with Hung Gar instructors on various continents, and a couple of Choy Li Fut students, we were not able to identify any of the sets with 100% certainty.  Most of the unarmed and weapons work bears a resemblance to pre-Wong Fei Hung style Hung Gar. Alternatively, the one set in which we see the rattan shield and sword combined with tumbling is highly suggestive of some sets that are still practiced in Choy Li Fut.

Identifying these sets has proved to be somewhat frustrating. The film suggests that the general movement culture (or possibly “habitus”) of the Southern Chinese folk arts have remained remarkably consistent over the last century. It was genuinely interesting to see how the seventh performer moved with the hudiedao. Figuring out just what these guys were doing might be an important clue in reconstructing the early TCMA community as it existed in New York city during the 1920s. If anyone has any insights into the identities of these sets (or better yet, the martial artists) please leave a comment below.

 

oOo

If you enjoyed this essay you might also want to read: Lion Dancing, Youth Violence and the Need for Theory in Chinese Martial Studies

oOo

 

Martial Classics: The Complete Fist Cannon in Verse

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A period depiction of Ming Soldiers involved in the Piracy Crisis which inspired Qi Jiguang’s now famous discussion of military training. Source: Ming Qiu Shizhou Taiwan Zoukai Tu (Victory in Taiwan by Qiu Ying [pseudonym Shizhou] of the Ming, 1494 – 1552).  Click here to learn more about this important source.

Translator’s Note

Here is the full translation of the Qi Jiguang’s Fist Method as it appears in the Wubei Zhi, offered as a follow-up to my initial discussion of the challenges of translating this text into English verse. If you are coming to this discussion for the first time, you may want to read that initial essay before proceeding on. I want to make this available to everyone who expressed interest and to anyone else who might find it helpful. I do not intend this to be authoritative or even unchanging. Input and discussion is always wanted and appreciated. I hope you find it enjoyable to read. 

 

Historical context

“拳經捷要篇 -The Essential Chapters of the Fist Cannon” was first published in Qi Jiguang’s seminal training manual “JiXiaoXinShu”. It was later republished in the Wubei Zhi in it’s complete form. Understanding the content of this work is dependent upon understanding its historical contexts both in the military and broader social or societal arena. 

 

Social 

There are several social factors of this period in the Ming Dynasty that one must take into account when trying to place this treatise in its proper context. The traditional hereditary military system was breaking down. There were simply not enough officers or soldier being produced from those families to keep the Ming military at its former glory. The breakdown of Ming forces contributed to a rise in social violence including, rebellions, highway men and banditry, organized cannibalism, and other fairly horrific behaviors that occur when populations become desperate and have nowhere to turn.

While violence and crime were important factors in daily Ming life, there were also more positive influences. Printing and publishing saw an enormous rise during the Ming as did literacy. With a more literate populace, the demand for books of all types grew. Printed books became big business. The publishing boom of the 16th century produced thousands of texts to be consumed by a growing lettered class. It is in this environment that we find the rise of the martial arts/military treatise purchased by non-military readers. 

As the Literati grew in numbers, more and more books on every subject were produced. Those with an interest in military or martial affairs now had the ability to study these topics even if not born into the military class. People like Mao Yuanyi who wrote and compiled the largest written document on military affairs in the Chinese language, the Wubei Zhi, were able to access this information without being a member  of a hereditary Military family. This brought an entirely new perspectives to discussions of the martial arts. 

It is difficult to say when the Martial arts manual that we know today truly came about, but we have little evidence of these texts prior to the Ming dynasty. Surviving martial art texts from before the Ming are often vague and general, offering more strategic and tactical insight and philosophy than step by step instruction of technique. The true illustrated martial arts text was, more than likely, a product of the Ming publishing boom as the audience for such texts grew. 

Qi’s first book “JiXiaoXinShu” was published in this environment and one can make a convincing case that this is the oldest example of a martial arts manual for the training of individual skills. Where as prior, this information was most  likely held by the military families as “trade secrets,” Qi decided to include examinations of various martial arts for the battlefield and focus on the individual training of troops. 

 

Military

Qi Jiguang wrote “JixiaoxinShu” in the late 1500’s near the end of the Ming Dynasty. The circumstances of his writing this book and subsequently re-editing it later, concern the Woku Coastal pirate crisis. The Woku, more commonly referred to as ‘Japanese Pirates’, were an enormous problem for the Ming at the end of the 1500’s. These bands of raiders, which consisted of mostly local Chinese citizens (often former fishermen or merchant sailors), were  bankrolled or under the command of self appointed Japanese Sea Lords. They operated under the nose of the Ming government, effectively undermining their trade war with Japan. 

Not only were the raids themselves a security problem for the region, but due to rampant corruption, many local authorities were actually collaborating with the Woku. This allowed them to bring their raids far inland and away from the coast. They were able to reach and pillage communities that were previously considered safe. 

Assigned to the region was another famous and influential writer of the Ming dynasty, General Yu Dayou, author of “Jian Jing”. General Yu was frustrated with the lack of support he received from the Capitol, who in turn withheld funds and equipment due to lack of real progress in the crisis. General Yu insisted that he needed more fire arms and ships to adequately meet the threat. The government refused. 

When General Qi arrived on the scene, he knew that asking for material support would be a fools errand. Instead, he came up with progressive if not novel approaches to the lack of technology and men available to them. He formed a mercenary army, consisting of volunteers from the affected farming communities. He specially chose these people as they were used to hard work, they were defending their homes, and they would be paid for their trouble. The problem was, that in the past, soldiers and military personnel came primarily from the hereditary military families and had some experience in the act of warfare. This system had begun to break down in the mid-Ming, which also contributed to the public’s general lack of faith in the imperial forces. 

Because these recruits were not from traditional military back grounds, there was a need to train them from the ground up. It is this method that Qi later detailed in his treatise “JiXianXinShu”- the New Methods of Military Effectiveness. One of the unique features of this book is that it is one of the first military treatises to cover the training of individual martial arts by soldiers. Since the men he was using a the time did not have formal training in military exercise or fighting on the battlefield, Qi included the training regimens for several weapons and one chapter devoted to empty handed technique. 

The martial arts that Qi choose to represent in his writing is linked to the strategies that he devised for the crisis. The spear takes the lead followed by the shield and dao, sported by archers with both conventional and fire/explosive arrows.At the end of the section is talk of the staff and finally is the bare handed section. Qi’s reason for including unarmed martial art is, as he states, mainly for conditioning and keeping the troops occupied and focused. While these techniques may have found some direct application in friendly wrestling bouts of the sorts that soldiers have while encamped, even Qi states in his introduction that there is little use for such things in the theater of war. 

 

 

The Art Represented 

Much of our discussion of Qi’s unarmed method must remain conjecture. The names of each technique are familiar to modern practitioners of Chinese martial arts. Many of these names appear in several separate martial traditions. Taijiquan, for instance, shares a fair number of these names within the various lineages of the art. Some historians have taken this to mean that this document is the direct antecedent to the art of Taijiquan. While it is difficult to say if there is a direct connection, or if Qi’s writing indicate the survival of an art that has been practiced since the Ming, it should be remembered that the names and techniques described here are actually shared by several styles including Baji, Fanzi, Pigua, Cha Quan, Tang Lang (mantis), and many others. Qi says that he has taken these techniques from various sources. It could be that the origins for the names are to be found in them, and thus may indicate an unbroken “lineage” into modern times. 

However, if one looks at the situation of new conscripts learning new skills and bringing them back to their home villages, a migration of common names through a wide variety of people and communities does not seem so far fetched. Let’s remember that Qi’s book was published and sold to non military readers as well and that it did gain a following among the literati. If these techniques were used in the training of provincial troops from surrounding areas, these men would take these technique, names, and sequences home with them and repurpose them for the needs of the community. It is in my opinion easy to assume that this is at least one factor in the creation of styles that share technique nomenclature yet no apparent technical base or common lineage. 

The techniques themselves seem to be centered around what could be deemed “fast wrestling” today. Fast wrestling is a sport in which wrestling moves are performed as quickly as possible and points are scored with successful throws without the use of extended ground fighting. Essentially, pin them as fast as you can. Battlefield techniques do not usually include lots of wrestling. But grappling and wrestling are far more useful than hitting in this context. Qi admits that this is included for exercise and conditioning only and has little direct relevance to war. 

Qi also makes the claim to have extracted these techniques as the best examples from the famous styles being practiced during the day. He then lists many of them with the impression being given that this is very much like a hybrid style made up of techniques from others. Some may be tempted to call this “mixed martial arts.” However, I believe it is an error to equate the purpose of Qi’s fist method with the modern sport of MMA. Martial arts have always borrowed and taken from other arts to add and expand their own. It does not follow that the mixing of techniques from different traditions was particularly rare or frowned upon. The sport of MMA is a mix of martial art for a single purpose of getting the most effective techniques for submitting your opponent. The use of fighting in the armed forces is much broader and, in Qi’s method, the unarmed exercises serve health and fitness purpose almost exclusively. In that sense at least, it is not that different from many modern practitioners of taijiquan practice today. 

 

Translation notes

Qi Jiguangs’s Empty-handed method is perhaps one of the best known Ming era martial arts texts. This is in large part due to the fact the many of the names of techniques used in this text are still found in martial arts today. Many traditions (most notably Taijiquan) cite this document as an early predecessor to the modern arts they practice. These arts often refer back to this document without much in the way of analysis. As the names are often popular, they have over the years acquired some conventional glosses. I have made a directed effort not to simply use these familiar translations but rather to render the name in as clear language as I can to describe the action taking place or to give a clearer context with the language. No doubt this might cause some initial confusion amongst readers who are looking at this through the lens of their own art. But, I am approaching the text as a separate practice, however influential it might have been. 

One specific note that should be pointed out is the translation of the word “Quan” 拳. While the word is a familiar suffix denoting a martial art, it is used in a few different ways in this text. In the past the word has ben translated as “boxing”. I have stayed away from that gloss for the most part as its is imprecise within the discussion we are currently having. I will at times translate it as “fist” to stay within the idiom, but when discussed in general terms, I have used the rather wordy “unarmed techniques/combat”. By using both approaches I hope that it reads more naturally without forcing the reader to code switch as much. 

 

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Ting from the Great Ming Military blog, Clifford Lao, and Ma Xianfeng for their invaluable help and input in the subtleties of Literary Chinese and Ming history. Thanks also go to Ben Judkins for allowing me the platform to present my work. It is my sincerest wish that practitioners of martial arts will find these at the very least interesting if not illuminating to past practices. I also hope that it encourages more people to make their own translation attempts of these texts. Multiple perspectives are always needed.

 Any errors are my own and I accept any and all criticism or correction.

 

 

拳經捷要篇

Essential Chapters of the Fist Cannon

〔此藝不甚預於兵,能有餘力,則亦武門所當習。但眾之不能強者,亦聽其所便耳。於是以此為諸篇之末。第十四。〕

[While this art is not very useful for preparing troops (for war), it can help with excess energy, or as an initial practice of martial arts. However, most people cannot become strong this way. They only listen to their own ears (only do movements with which they are familiar). Therefore, this section is placed at the end of the other sections as per it’s significance. Chapter 14]

拳法似無預於大戰之技,然活動手足,慣勤肢體,此為初學入藝之門也。故存于後,以備一家。學拳要身法活便,手法便利,腳法輕固,進退得宜,腿可飛騰,而其妙也,顛起倒插 ; 而其猛也,披劈橫拳;而其快也,活捉朝天;而其柔也,知當斜閃。故擇其拳之善者三十二勢,勢勢相承,遇敵制勝,變化無窮,微妙莫測。窈焉冥焉,人不得而窺者,謂之神。俗 云:「拳打不知」,是迅雷不及掩耳。所謂不招不架,只是一下;犯了招架,就有十下。博記廣學,多算而勝。

Unarmed combat seems to offer nothing in the way of the preparation for large scale war, but the exercising of the hands and feet forms habits for moving the limbs as a unit, making this practice a doorway to learning the art (of war).  This chapter is provided last to complete the preparation of skills.  To learn the fist (unarmed techniques) it is necessary to have the body mechanics lively yet simple, the hand work simple yet keen,  footwork is light, giving the ability to advance and retreat at will and legs that can leap and jump. How wonderful it is; To rise high and fall low, and how fierce; the chopping across with the fists, how quick; lively grasping for the sky, and how soft; to know how to endure and evade. For this reason I have chosen 32 of the best unarmed techniques, each one follows from the previous, with applications to an opponent, it can be adapted in unpredictable ways. How refined, how deep! The uninitiated will watch you and claim you are a supernatural master. A common saying; “The fist hits without knowing”, surely it is like trying to cover your ears before the thunder.  They say no provocation, no resistance, just one action will bring them down; attack will provoke resistance, then ten attacks of their own will follow. Play the game but remember the larger lesson, Those that strategize and plan will be victorious. 

古今拳家,宋太祖有三十二勢長拳,又有六步拳、猴拳、囮拳,名勢各有所稱,而實大同小異。至今之溫家七十二行拳、三十六合鎖、二十四棄探馬、八閃番、十二短,此亦善之善者也。呂紅八下雖剛,未及綿張短打,山東李半天之腿,鷹爪王之拿,千跌張之跌,張伯敬之打。少林寺之棍,與青田棍法相兼;楊氏 鎗法與巴子拳棍,皆今之有名者,雖各有所取。然傳有上而無下,有下而無上,就可取勝於人,此不過偏於一隅。若以各家拳法兼而習之,正如常山蛇陣法,擊首則尾應,擊尾則首應,擊其身而首尾相應,此謂上下周 全,無有不勝。

The Ancient Schools of the Fist; Taizu has 32 stances of long fist, also six step fist, monkey fist, decoy fist, the names of the stances each have their own qualities, but in reality they have a great amount of similarities and only small differences. Today the styles of note are Wen Family 72 step Fist, 36 locks, 24 throws of Testing Horse, 8 dodging turns, and 20 short (hits). Lu hong’s 8 take downs, although it is strong, it does not match the “cotton fist” or “Short Hit”. ShanDong’s Li BanTian’s kicks, Eagle Claw King’s grappling, 1,000 throws of Zhang’s throwing (method). Zhang BaiJing’s striking. The staff methods of Shaolin Temple and QingTian compliment each other, Yang Family Spear and Baozi style staff, this is all we have today, although they have their own strengths. Some systems may have the upper and not the lower, or have the lower and not the upper, victory may be possible for one man, but this is not a comprehensive approach. If each Family Fighting method is combined and practiced, the principle of the Mountain Snake Formation, strike the head and the tail must follow, strike the tail and the head must follow, strike at their body and both head and tail must react. This is what is meant by upper and lower are together, and victory is certain. 

大抵拳、棍、刀、鎗、叉、鈀、劍、戟、弓矢、鈎鐮、挨牌之類,莫不先有拳法活動身手。其拳也,為武藝之源。今繪之以勢,註之以訣,以啟後學。既得藝,必試敵,切不可以勝負為愧、為奇,當思何以勝之,何以敗之 !勉而久試,怯敵還是藝淺,善戰必定藝精。古云:「藝高人胆(膽)大」,信不誣矣!

Overall, the practice of the fist, saber, spear, fork, trident, sword, halberd, archery, hook, scythe,  and others in this class, first have the fist method to train the movement of body and hands.  And therefore, this method of unarmed combat is the wellspring of martial arts. Here the movements are transmitted by illustrations of the stances, explanation of the secrets, introducing the student to the method. Those that have learned this will surely test the enemy, do not be ashamed of the outcome, instead, ponder why you were victorious or how you were defeated. Make a concerted effort and experiment for a long time, if you lack courage your skill will be shallow, good fighting surely decides the essence of the art. The ancients have said; “The exulted artist is a man with great bravery”, trust this without reservation. 

余在舟山公署,得參戎劉草堂打拳,所謂「犯了招架,便是十下」之謂也。此最妙,即棍中之連打。

When I was in ZhouShan, I was able to train with Liu Cao-Tong in boxing at the public hall, they say “If one commits only to blocking, ten more blows will come”,  just as with the very clever staff attack of chaining strikes together. 

1.

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

Lǎn zhā yī chūmén jiàzi

biàn xià shì shà bù dān biān

duì dí ruò wú dǎn xiàng xiān

kōngzì yǎn míng shǒu biàn

Tie Your Coat and come outside,

Single Whip with sudden stride,

Without the courage to advance,

Sharp eyes fast hands will have no chance. 

 

2.

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

zāozhe jiàokǔliántiān

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. 

 

3.

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

Tànmǎ chuán zì tài zǔ

zhū shì kě jiàng kě biàn

jìngōng tuì shǎn ruò shēng qiáng

jiē duǎn quán zhī zhì shàn

Testing Horse was Song TaiZu’s,

Stances all can drop and move, 

Attacking and dodging will give you strength,* 

Receive their punches in short range

 

4. 

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

Ǎo dān biān huánghuā jǐn jìn

pī tiāo tuǐ zuǒyòu nán fáng

qiāng bù shàng quán lián pī jiē

chénxiāng shì tuīdǎo tài shān

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. 

 

5.

七星拳手足相顧

挨步逼上下隄籠

饒君手快腳如風

我自有攪衝劈重

Qīxīng quán shǒuzú xiānggù

āi bù bī shàngxià dī lóng

ráo jūn shǒukuài jiǎo rú fēng

wǒ zì yǒu jiǎo chōng pī zhòng

In The Seven Star Fist, the hand follows the feet,

Stepping in close, upper lower to beat, 

The enemy limbs are fast like the wind, 

My own heavy chops will disturb them to win.  

 

6.

倒騎龍詐輸佯走

誘追入遂我回衝

恁伊力猛硬來攻

怎當我連珠砲動

Dào qí lóng zhà shū yáng zǒu

yòu zhuīrù suì wǒ huí chōng

nèn yī lì měng yìng lái gōng

zěn dāng wǒ liánzhū pào dòng

Ride the Dragon Inverted to feign a defeat, 

As they enter I turn and reveal my deceit. 

His attack it is fierce his hits they are strong,

But my beating continues, he can’t last for long! 

 

 

7. 

懸腳 虛餌彼輕進

二換腿決不饒輕

趕上一掌滿天星

誰敢再來比亚

Xuán jiǎo xū ěr bǐ qīng jìn

èr huàn tuǐ jué bù ráo qīng

gǎn shàng yī zhǎng mǎn tiān xīng

shuí gǎn zài lái bǐ yǎ

Hang up the Leg as bait for a trick, 

It’s not easy to follow when I switch it to kick,

My Palm makes him see the heaven and stars,

To fight me again, afraid all of them are. 

 

8.

丘劉左搬右掌

劈來腳入步連心

挪更拳法探馬均

打人一著命盡

Qiū liú zuǒ bānyòu zhǎng

pī lái jiǎo rù bù lián xīn

nuó gèng quánfǎ tànmǎ jūn

dǎ rén yīzhe mìng jǐn

Hill Attack changes left with a palm to the right,

They chop, I come in with a heart level strike,

Further I go with Testing the Horse, 

With one hit I end them with just the right force.

 

9.

下插勢專降快腿

得進步攪靠無別

鉤腳鎖臂不容離

上驚下取一跌

Xià chā shì zhuān jiàng kuài tuǐ

dé jìnbù jiǎo kào wú bié

gōu jiǎo suǒ pī bùróng lí

shàng jīng xià qǔ yī diē

Hidden Below drops down fast with the legs, 

Step in and knock them down  off a few pegs,

Hooking the foot and locking the arm,

Feint high, go low, trip and do harm. 

 

10.

埋伏勢窩弓待虎

犯圈套寸步難移

就機連發幾腿

他受打必定昏危

Máifú shì wō gōng dài hǔ

fàn quāntào cùnbù nán yí

jiù jī lián fā jǐ tuǐ

tā shòu dǎ bìdìng hūn wēi

Lying in Wait for the beast in it’s den,

The inch step corrals them like they’re in a pen,

Continuously kick with the legs and the thighs,

Receiving a hit means they surely will die. 

 

11.

拋架子槍步披掛

補上腿那怕他識

右橫左採快如飛

架一掌不知天地

Pāo jiàzi qiāng bù pīguà

bǔ shàng tuǐ nà pà tā shí

yòu héng zuǒ cǎi kuài rú fēi

jià yī zhǎng bùzhī tiāndì

Throwing Technique enters, splits and then hangs,

Take advantage with kicks fearing them seeing your plans,

Fly to the left across from the right,

Fend off with one palm and out go the lights!  

 

12. 

拈肘勢防他弄腿

我截短須認高低

劈打推壓要皆依

切勿手腳忙急

Niān zhǒu shì fáng tā nòng tuǐ

wǒ jié duǎn xū rèn gāodī

pī dǎ tuī yā yào jiē yī

qiè wù shǒujiǎo máng jí

Defend from their legs with Pluck the Elbow,

I intercept close watching high and then low,

Chopping and pushing and pressing you need,

To hit them not rushing your hands or your feet.

 

 

13.

一霎步隨機應變

左右腿衝敵連珠

恁伊勢固手風雷

怎當我閃驚巧取

Yīshà bù suíjīyìngbiàn

zuǒyòu tuǐ chōng dí liánzhū

nèn yīshì gù shǒu fēngléi

zěn dāng wǒ shǎn jīng qiǎo qǔ

Instant Step waits for the time it can change,

Kick with both legs when you come into range,

Their stances are solid, their hands like the wind,

Why accept the attack when I can dodge it to win?

 

14.

擒拿勢封腳套子

左右壓一如四平

直來拳逢我投活

恁快腿拳不得通融

Qínná shì fēng jiǎo tàozi

zuǒyòu yā yī rú sì píng

zhí lái quán féng wǒ tóu huó

nèn kuài tuǐ quán bùdé tōngróng

Grabbing and Seizing envelopes the foot, 

Left and Right press Si Ping standing with root,

A straight punch comes in, lively I throw, 

So that his kicks and his punches, they all are too slow. 

 

15. 

井欄四平直進

剪鐮踢膝當頭

滾穿劈靠抹一鈎

鐵樣將軍也走

Jǐng lán sìpíng zhíjìn

jiǎn lián tī xī dāngtóu

gǔn chuān pī kào mǒ yī gōu

tiě yàng jiāngjūn yě zǒ

Blocking the Well stance goes directly ahead,

Scissor their knee while blocking the head,

Roll, pierce, chop, lean, wipe off, and hook,

Armored Generals themselves to their cores will be shook.

 

16.

鬼蹴腳槍人先著

補前掃轉上紅拳

背弓顛披揭起

穿心肘靠妙難傳

Guǐ cù jiǎo qiāng rén xiānzhe

bǔ qián sǎo zhuǎn shàng hóng quán

bèi gōng diān pī jiē qǐ

chuān xīn zhǒu kào miào nán chuán

The Ghost Kick begins and shoots out toward them first,

Rush in, turn and hit them, their heart will then burst,

Stand with them on your back like a coat,

An elbow to the heart is no playful joke. 

 

17.

指當勢是箇丁法

他難進我好向前

踢膝滾躦上面

急回步顛短紅拳

Zhǐ dāng shì shì gè dīng fǎ

tā nán jìn wǒ hǎo xiàng qián

tī xī gǔn cuó shàngmiàn

jí huí bù diān duǎn hóng quán

Directed Defense Stance has feet like a “T”,

My defenses make it hard to attack me freely,

Kick the knee, turn, and jump up to their face.

Fast Red Fist short range to show them their place.

 

18. 

獸頭勢如牌挨進

恁快腳遇我慌忙

低驚高取他難防

接短披紅衝上

Shòu tóu shì rú pái āi jìn

nèn kuài jiǎo yù wǒ huāngmáng

dī jīng gāoqǔ tā nán fáng

jiē duǎn pīhóng chōng shàng

The Beast Head comes in if the opponent is near.

When we meet, my quick footwork will grip him with fear.

Feint low, go high, they cannot defend,

Receive his short chops and charge into them.

 

19.

中四平勢 實推固

硬攻進快腿難來

雙手逼他單手

短打以熟為乖

Zhōng sìpíng shì shí tuī gù

yìng gōng jìn kuài tuǐ nán lái

shuāng shǒu bī tā dān shǒu

duǎn dǎ yǐ shú wèi guāi

Middle Siping is pushing with root,

Hard attacks and quick footwork are both rendered moot, 

With two hands their one hand is quickly subdued,

A short hit from here is skillfully shrewd. 

 

20.

伏虎勢側身弄腿

但來奏我前撐

看他立站不穩

後掃一跌分明

Fú hǔ shi cèshēn nòng tuǐ

dàn lái zòu wǒ qián chēng

kàn tā lì zhàn bù wěn

hòu sǎo yī diē fēnmíng

Subduing the Tiger leans back for a kick,

But, he returns my attack I must brace forward and quick. 

I look and see that his stance is not steady,

I sweep him behind before he is ready. 

 

 

 

21.

高四平身法活變

左右短出入如飛

逼敵人手足無措

恁我便腳踢拳捶

Gāo sìpíng shēn fǎ huó biàn

zuǒyòu duǎn chūrù rú fēi

bī dírén shǒuzúwúcuò

nèn wǒ biàn jiǎo tī quán chuí

High Siping method is agile and changes, 

Like flying zig zag in and out of short ranges 

Block the enemy limbs so they cannot attack. 

My foot it may kick and the fist can beat back. 

 

22.

倒插勢不與招架

靠腿快討他之贏

背弓進步莫遲停

打如谷聲相應

Dào chā shì bù yǔ zhāojià

kào tuǐ kuài tǎo tā zhī yíng

bèi gōng jìnbù mò chí tíng

dǎ rú gǔ shēng xiāngyìng

Inverting Thrust does not provoke with a guard,

With quick tripping legs their foundation bombard,

Stretch the back like a bow, step in with a dash,

The valley will echo with the hit’s sudden crash. 

 

23. 

神拳當面插下

進步火焰攢心

遇巧就拿就跌

舉手不得留情

Shén quán dāngmiàn chā xià

jìnbù huǒyàn cuán xīn

yù qiǎo jiù ná jiù diē

jǔ shǒu bùdé liúqíng

Spirit Fist blocks in front to invade down below,

Step in, gather fire, use your chest as bellows, 

Meeting skill, simply seize them and make them fall down,

Raise your hand to prevent them from gaining new ground. 

 

24.

一條鞭橫直披砍

兩進腿當面傷人

不怕他力粗膽大

我巧好打通神

Yītiáo biān héngzhí pī kǎn

liǎng jìn tuǐ dāngmiàn shāng rén

bùpà tā lì cū dǎn dà

wǒ qiǎo hǎo dǎtōng shén

One Lash hacks across and down,

Block their legs and face them down,

Fear not men who’s strength is crude,

They’ll talk with gods through my hits true.

 

25.

雀地龍下盤腿法

前揭起後進紅拳

他退我雖顛補

衝來短當休延

Què de lóng xià pántuǐ fǎ

qián jiē qǐ hòujìn hóng quán

tā tuì wǒ suī diān bǔ

chōng lái duǎn dāng xiū yán

Ground Dragon trains the legs to go low,

Lift them then enter with a heavy red blow,

They run from me, fine, I will still take the day,

Rushing in close to block, stop or delay.

 

26.

朝陽手偏身防腿

無縫鎖逼退豪英

倒陣勢彈他一腳

好教他師也喪身

Zhāoyáng shǒu piān shēn fāng tuǐ

wú fèng suǒ bī tuì háo yīng

dào zhènshì dàn tā yī jiǎo

hǎo jiào tā shī yě sāng shēn

The Hand of Dawn’s body slants defending from feet,

Seamlessly lock them to compel a retreat.

Knock Down the Pillar by quickly kicking their thigh, 

Teach them so well, their own master will die. 

 

27.

鷹翅側身挨進

快腿走不留停

追上穿莊一腿

要加剪劈推紅

Yīng chì cèshēn āi jìn

kuài tuǐ zǒu bù liú tíng

zhuī shàng chuān zhuāng yī tuǐ

yào jiā jiǎn pī tuī hóng

The Eagle’s Wing inclines in close,

Footwork fast and continuous,

Chase them down and kick through their base,

Chop, shear, and push you must keep the pace. 

 

28.

跨虎勢那移發腳

要腿去不使他知

左右跟掃一連施

失手剪刀分易

Kuà hǔ shi nà yí fā jiǎo

yào tuǐ qù bù shǐ tā zhī

zuǒyòu gēn sǎo yīlián shī

shīshǒu jiǎndāo fēn yì

Ride the Tiger moves and kicks,

Hide your legs with subtle tricks,

Sweep your heel both left and right,

The hand can slice them like a knife.

 

29.

拗鸞肘出步顛剁

搬下掌摘打其心

拿鷹捉兔硬開弓

手腳必須相應

Ǎo luán zhǒu chū bù diān duò

bān xià zhǎng zhāi dǎ qí xīn

ná yīng zhuō tù yìng kāi gōng

shǒujiǎo bìxū xiāngyìng

The Crossed Phoenix Elbow steps out pounding  to start,

Then fast going under to palm strike their heart,

Like an eagle with talons grab and tear them asunder,

Surely hand must unite with foot that is under. 

 

30.

當頭炮勢衝入怕

進步虎直攛兩拳

他退閃我又顛踹

不跌倒他他忙然

Dāngtóu pào shì chōng rù pà

jìnbù hǔ zhí cuān liǎng quán

tā tuì shǎn wǒ yòu diān chuài

bù diédǎo tā tā máng rán

Block the Head Canon charges in with out fear, 

Step in like a tiger, throw both fists like a spear,

When they dodge I will trip them and stomp them again,

Even if they don’t fall they must start again.  

 

31.

順鸞肘靠身

搬打滾快他難遮攔

復外絞刷回拴

肚搭一跌誰敢爭先

Shùn luán zhǒu kào shēn

bān dǎgǔn kuài tā nán zhēlán

fù wài jiǎo shuā huí shuān

dù dā yī diē shuí gǎn zhēngxiān

Tame the Phoenix by leaning and use the elbow.

Move, strike, and roll, they have no where to go,

Return to the outside and twist them to bind,

Throw them down, to fight back they’d be out of their mind.

 

32.

旗鼓勢左右壓進

近他手橫劈雙行

絞靠跌人人識得

虎抱頭要躲無門

Qí gǔ shì zuǒyòu yā jìn

jìn tā shǒu héng pī shuāng xíng

jiǎo kào diē rén rén shí dé

hǔ bàotóu yào duǒ wú mén

Banners and Drums comes in to suppress,

Approaching them chopping like crossing the chest. 

Everyone sees the throw with the twist,

Embracing the Tiger no way to resist.

End

 

A contemporary depiction of Qi Jiguang’s troops from the recent film, “God of War.”

 

Notes

* Readers may note that this is alternate translation of this passage and differs from the one discussed in the previous post. As previously noted, this is an evolving work and I am open to ideas and suggestions:

Testing Horse was Song TaiZu’s,
Stances all can drop and move,
Advance attack, retreat to dodge,
Come in close with a fist barrage.

 

oOo

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

oOo

 

References

Brook, Timothy. The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties. Harvard University Press Pape ed. History of Imperial China. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013, ©2010.

Dardess, John W. Ming China, 1368-1644: A Concise History of a Resilient Empire. Critical Issues in History. World and International History. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, ©2012.

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

He, Yuming. Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series. Vol. 82, Home and the World: Editing The “Glorious Ming” with Woodblock Printed Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013.

Huang, Ray. 1587, a Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline. New Haven: Yale University Press, ©1981.

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

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

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

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

Ma, Mingda馬明達. 無系列Wu Xi Lie. chu ban. ed. Vol. A113-A114, 武學探針Wu Xue Tan Zhen. Taibei Shi: Yi wen chu ban you xian gong si, 2003.

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

Miracle, Jared. Now with Kung Fu Grip!: How Bodybuilders, Soldiers and a Hairdresser Reinvented Martial Arts for America. McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2016.

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

Sawyer, Ralph D. The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China =: [wu Jing Qi Shu]. History and Warfare. Boulder: Westview Press, 1993.

Shapinsky, Peter D. Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies. Vol. 76, Lords of the Sea: Pirates, Violence, and Commerce in Late Medieval Japan. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 2014.

Swope, Kenneth. Campaigns and Commanders. Vol. 20, A Dragon’s Head and a Serpent’s Tail: Ming China and the First Great East Asian War, 1592-1598. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, ©2009.

Tong, James. Disorder under Heaven: Collective Violence in the Ming Dynasty. Stanford University Press, 1991.

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

 

 

Chinese Martial Arts in the News: Oct. 22 2018: Archery, Kung Fu Villages and the Lives of Detective Dee

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Introduction

It has been a busy weekend, so this news update will be brief. Nevertheless, I wanted to comment on some of the more interesting stories that have been floating around. 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

I recently published an essay on Kung Fu Tea noting the importance of examining martial culture when trying to discern what is really happening in a given art or practice. Our first big news item really drives that point home. It starts off with a brief nod to the near extinction, and then spectacular resurrection, of traditional Chinese archery all within the space of a few decades.  Of course, someone needs to be making all of the bows to supply a new generation of enthusiastic archers, and that too came very close to being lost.

In the 1950s and 60s, when the artisans of Beijing’s last seven bow-making workshops were reassigned to state collectives, a craft that had been practised for more than 3,000 years came to a sudden halt. By the mid-90s, all remaining bowyers had passed away, with the exception of Yang Wentong. Come his death, it was believed, all knowledge of traditional Han Chinese ox-horn bow making would be lost forever.

Obviously, there is a lot more to the story of the revival of China’s traditional archery.  But I was still very happy to see an article (and video segment) like this in the South China Morning Post.

 

 

I was recently reading something by Paul Bowman in which he reviewed the ways that various newspapers in the UK have discussed the martial art over the years.  I think that one of the phrases he applied to articles in the Daily Mail was “perpetual wide-eyed wonder.” That immediately popped into mind as I looked at their latest photo essay titled ‘Everybody was kung fu fighting’: Inside the Chinese village where all residents practise martial arts.

If memory serves we have heard about this village in Guangxi before.  They seem to have some sort of communal (early morning and evening) martial arts training, but sadly this article never actually states the style.  What we do get it is yet another variant of the burning of the Shaolin Temple myth, complete with a wandering survivor who takes up residence in the village, founding its current martial arts tradition.  Good stuff!

 

A Chinese Kung Fu teacher visiting a school in Africa.

 

At first glance our next article appeared to be a boilerplate account of the sort of educational exchange program that governments frequently sponsor.  Basically, a few dozen Chinese physical education instructors were sent to the USA to visit and observe how teaching was conducted in local classes.  And of course they also taught some Kung Fu to the American kids.  I was surprised that the style they introduced was Five Ancestors Fist, a very important southern school.  Suddenly I want to hear more!

 

Senior woman doing Tai Chi exercise to keep her joints flexible, isolated.

 

Taijiquan was one of the big winners of the last news cycle.  A couple of studies had come out on the practice’s ability to build strength in older students, and this unleashed a torrent of near identical articles in several outlets. My favorite was titled “Building Strength Through Tai Chi” in the Seattle Times.

Watching a group of people doing tai chi, an exercise often called “meditation in motion,” it may be hard to imagine that its slow, gentle, choreographed movements could actually make people stronger. Not only stronger mentally but stronger physically and healthier as well.

I certainly was surprised by its effects on strength, but good research — and there’s been a fair amount of it by now — doesn’t lie.

What caught my eye about this one is that the author is actually something of a skeptic.  Rather than seeing Taijiquan as a progressive exercise that can be done at many levels of intensity, the assumption seems to be that it is useful only as a sort of remedial rehabilitation program for senior citizens who are looking to build the physical capital necessary for a more “strenuous” (western style) workout. Taijiquan gets a lot of good medical press these days, but this article made me stop and wonder how common these attitudes might be in certain corners of the medical profession. Not actually understanding much about the art in question, it would be difficult for such experts to visualize what it might do for a wider range of patients.

 

 

Speaking of senior citizens doing taijiquan, Netshark had a fun video of an “Auntie” who decided to release stress during an epic two hour Golden Week traffic jam by exiting her car and practicing her solo set. Can’t find time to train?  Seriously kids, no excuses.

 

 

I wasn’t quite sure how to classify the next story.  It touches on a number of topics including contemporary film, ancient Chinese history and 20th century crime novels. It turns out that Detective Dee has had many careers through the ages.  This is a really good article to read if you are interested in the interplay between history and popular culture. And somehow it all ends up as a series of kung fu films. I personally found this to be one of the more surprising and enjoyable articles in this month’s review.

 

 

Quick, what is your favorite martial arts film?  Now what are your top 50?  If you are still working on that second question Newsweek has some suggestions.  Incidentally Ip Man (2008) comes in at 35.  If you want to find out what they chose as #1 you will need to read the article. In addition to the list, this piece also provides a capsule overview of the genre.  It should be noted that they employ a rather loose definition of what counts as a “martial arts film.”

 

Collin Chou as Seraph in Matrix Reloaded.

 

Do you remember watching the the fight with Seraph (Collin Chou) in the first Matrix sequel? I do. It might have been my favorite fight sequence in that film. And it turns out that the film’s creator originally intended for it to be carried out by Jet Li, who was very interested in the part.  But in a recent interview he went into more detail as to why he ultimately turned it down. It seems that the film’s producers were interested in capturing more than just his on screen performance.  They were looking to use motion capture technology to digitally record Jet Li’s movements and build some sort of database.

 “I realized the Americans wanted me to film for three months but be with the crew for nine,” Li recently mentioned during a Chinese talk show appearance. “And for six months, they wanted to record and copy all my moves into a digital library. By the end of the recording, the right to these moves would go to them.”

I thought this story was interesting as there are many projects (in the commercial, scholarly and non-profit sectors) that are digitally cataloging the movements of various martial arts masters. Some of these archives are used to produce films and video games, and other go into cultural institutions.  Jet Li’s story is revealing as it illustrates some issues with what happens to all of this intellectual property.  Are we simply recording for posterity something that is communally owned (an unchanging folk tradition)? Or are we instead attempting to capture a effervescent moment of performance by an individual artist who holds a unique IP claim to their own interpretation of the work.  Li seems to have decided that the situation was more the latter and, in his case, walked away from the film.  This story is all just a footnote in the history of the Matrix, but it raises interesting ethical and theoretical questions for students of martial arts studies.

 

 

So long as we are on the subject of film, I should mention that there is one upcoming movie that I very much want to see.  The central premise of the “Kung Fu League” is a fantasy team-up between some of the genera’s greatest characters, Wong Fei Hung, Huo Yuan Jia, Ip Man and Chen Zhen. Clearly its a gimmick, but I am genuinely interested to see how figures from different eras and niches within the kung fu universe are made to address each other.  This seems like the perfect time for some inter-textual comedy and reflection on the development of the genre.  It will be interesting to see what the director ultimately does with it.

 

Alexander Bennett in Kendo gear.

 

The next couple of stories step back from an exclusive focus on the Chinese martial arts.  Our first piece is a discussion in the Japan Times of Alexander Bennett’s latest book, Japan: The Ultimate Samurai Guide. Or maybe it should really be titled “an insider’s guide to surviving in the world of the Japanese martial arts.”

You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t, at least momentarily, considered joining a martial arts club upon moving to Japan. However, comparatively few actually take the plunge. One of the biggest hurdles is that clubs can seem to be worlds unto themselves, inaccessible to non-Japanese, even those with fluency in the language. Knowing where to start, especially if you have no previous martial arts experience also puts up barriers: Which is the right martial art for you? What should you look for in a teacher? How can you hope to compete when everyone in the club already seems to have a black belt?

This is where “Japan The Ultimate Samurai Guide,” authored by longtime kendo practitioner Alexander Bennett, hopes to step in, providing answers to some of these questions from the perspective of an insider. The book is part encyclopedia of martial arts — a historical resource tracking the evolution of Japanese martial arts over the last millennium — and part present-day guide to surviving in the world of budō and, more generally, in Japan.

This all sounds very interesting.  I really enjoyed Bennett’s work on the history of Kendo, and he is well positioned to write a popular yet highly informed guide to the wider world of Japanese martial arts.  I suspect that this one will end up on my Christmas list.

 

Me leading a break out group of students through a lightsaber set at Ithaca Sabers.

 

And now for a few stories touching on one of my personal research areas which seems to be getting a lot more exposure in the news lately. First off, a local TV channel visited the lightsaber class that I run here in Ithaca. You never know how these things will go, but I thought that the final story came out quite nicely. Are you interested in what lightsaber combat might look like if approached as a traditional martial art?  If so you can check out the full story here.

Of course, that is not the only version of lightsaber combat that you will find.  Lots of people get into the practice because they are looking for a fast paced combat sport where they don’t have to invest years in martial arts training to do something that they enjoy.  This recent report on the Nerdist followed one individual’s journey to a “full contact” saber tournament held in Las Vegas (where else). Its actually quite an interesting piece as it visits a few different corners of the “combat sport” side of the lightsaber community.

 

An assortment of Chinese teas. Source: Wikimedia.

 

Kung Fu Tea on Facebook

A lot has happened on the Kung Fu Tea Facebook group over the last month.  We looked at antique weapons, pontificated about the value of seminars, and learned what happens when Capoeira meets Kung Fu! Joining the Facebook group is also a great way of keeping up with everything that is happening here at Kung Fu Tea.

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

Who “Killed” Kung Fu: Habermas and the Legitimization Crisis within Traditional Martial Arts

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“A Sword Fight.” 1917, magic lantern slide showing Wang Wen-lin and Wang Shhh-Ching. Source: The Digital Collections of Springfield College.

 

Zombies

The air is distinctly crisp, the end of October is upon us, and Halloween rapidly approaches. Clearly, it is time to talk about zombies.  We seem to go through periods of collective fascination with the image of empty human husks shambling across a barren landscape, neither truly alive or dead. These monsters fascinate us not because of their cunning or strength. Taken one at a time they are incapable of accomplishing any goal. Their only defining characteristic is a paradoxical immunity to death.  They just keep walking across the historical landscape.

Jurgen Habermas had a lot to say about zombies though, to the best of my knowledge he never used the term. Rather than the Walking Dead on the outskirts of Atlanta, he was more concerned with the sorts of failed states that sometimes appeared on the historical stage.  In his writing on the “Legitimization Crisis” (1973) he noted that the loss of popular support didn’t always result in revolution or state collapse.  Instead one often encountered a situation where the institutions of government continued to amble along (often for an improbable length of time), and yet found themselves unable to effectively call on society’s resources to accomplish their core political goals. The government had clearly lost its authority, yet no replacement could be seen on the horizon.

Both a social theorist and public intellectual, Habermas is one of the great thinkers of the 20thcentury.  This does not mean that his work has been universally accepted. He famously clashed with Derrida, and Habermas wrote a widely cited essay in the early 1980s taking aim at the excesses of post-modern thought.  Still, as the Western democracies approach a critical historical crossroads while gripped by social and political paralysis, it’s hard to see his work on the origin and nature of the legitimization crisis as anything other than prophetic.

To oversimplify, Habermas began by asking students to think carefully about how authority emerges and functions within a social system. Such systems are composed of the governmental institutions (both formal and informal) that wield authority, socio-cultural considerations (values, identities, norms, etc) and economic exchanges (who gets what resource).  In a well-functioning social system it may not be necessary to split out these various realms as they will tend to blend into one another, supported by overarching social discourses.  Individual values will uphold political authority, as will economic markets.

Issues arise when competing discourses emerge and the fractures between these realms become more pronounced. Or we might imagine them as being constructed or reconstructed by a new set of competitive discourses.  More specifically, a “crisis of legitimacy” erupts when citizens cease to believe that a political system reflects their socio-cultural values, or that the old values that it is based on continue to have utilitarian (political/economic) value.  In this instance their “life world” (lebenswelt) ruptures. One would hope that the political system would adapt to the new reality, but that is never the only possibility. It might rupture into competing factions (civil wars) or simply shamble along as a failed state, incapable of drawing on the creative resources of society.

That brings us back to the zombies. One does not have to watch the news for very long to realize that modern nation states are not the only institutions that can suffer this fate. Indeed, we are increasingly surrounded by all sorts of economic and cultural institutions who have been crippled by rapid social change. If I were to level a single criticism at Habermas it would be that he drew the boundaries of his discussion of the legitimization crisis much too narrowly, focusing primarily on states. Historical investigation would seem to support the hypothesis that all sorts of other social values and cultural institutions must fall into crisis before the nation-state (typically a very resilient entity) is imperiled. Thus, for the logic of Habermas to be true at the macro level (something that is hard to empirically test) it must first hold true at the at the micro level (which is more easily observed).

Admittedly, such a project would explicitly contradict Habermas’ avowed goal to re-establish “grand theory” as a valued realm distinct from the plebeian world of “empirical testing.” I personally have always been a bit suspicious of “grand theory,” probably because it is not very helpful when one is attempting to write local history. In any event, good theories should be portable, and all sorts of “life worlds” (including the martial arts) could be thought of as possessing governing structures, social/cultural values and mechanisms of economic exchange.  In fact, one would be hard pressed to come up with a more apt description of the social structure of traditional martial arts communities.

 

 

A detailed look at a pair of Shuang Gau. This is pair measures 95 cm in length and may be of a similar vintage to the swords seen in these images. Source: http://www.swordsantiqueweapons.com/s1015_full.html

 

 

Who Killed Kung Fu?

It is not difficult to perceive the signs of a legitimization crisis within the traditional martial arts. Class enrollments are down almost across the board and many schools struggle to stay open.  Traditional styles are openly derided in one-sided contests with MMA or Muay Thai stylists on social media. There even seems to be fewer martial arts movies.

Yet not all of the trends are easily interpreted.  There is more high quality popular, and even academic, publishing on these systems being produced and consumed than ever before. Judged by the quality of the information we have access to, we are living in the golden age of kung fu scholarship. Yet popular magazines are struggling.  While the potential market for information on the traditional martial arts is expanding in terms of the number of serious readers, its dollar value has radically diminished. While this trend has hurt traditional publishers and book sellers, more small scale “prosumers” are putting out content (typically on Youtube or Facebook) than ever before.

The general state of affairs might best be summed up as one of confusion. The leading traditional forces that have structured the Chinese martial arts community still exist. We still have large lineage-based schools. There are a number of stylistic and regional associations, as well as commercial producers of both books and training gear. Yet they all seem unable to lead the community toward a meaningful revitalization effort.  In the mean-time, large numbers of students adopt unorthodox modes of practices or simply leave the martial arts all together.

As with zombies, I am not aware that Habermas ever mentioned the martial arts community.  Yet if he did, I suspect that he would not be surprised by the general state of affairs.  Drawing on the more sociological aspects of his work, I he would note our situation is particularly complicated as we face a legitimization crisis on not one, but two, fronts.  Further, these two sources of tension might interact with each other in complicated ways.  All of this, in turn, stems from a change in the cost of communication, making transformative contact between people much less expensive than it had been. Yet to see how a change in one social variable (the price of communication) might lead to two slightly different types of legitimization crises, we first need to revisit the last era of major social/political realignment within the Chinese martial arts.

During the Republic period internal communication within China was relatively expensive. Even the Chinese government, which dedicated substantial resources to the project, found it practically impossible to transmit its point of view on critical diplomatic issues to citizens in Western countries.  In this sort of situation, effective communication required a sponsor with substantial resources. This forced the Chinese martial arts into alliances with various political actors.  Traditionally these had either been the Imperial military, or local social elites who needed to maintain a degree of order within their own village, marketplace or clan. As such, Chinese martial arts networks derived their legitimacy from their relationship with regional or clan based identities. At the risk of vastly oversimplifying a complicated situation, it was their tight alignment with these narrow forces that gave them access to (and legitimacy within) local communities.

None of this was particularly helpful to the wave of national reformers who came to power after 1911. Seeing the importance of budo in the creation of a cohesive and modern Japanese state, they wished to do something similar in China.  Yet that required talking and thinking about the martial arts in a fundamentally different way.  What had been particularistic and local now needed to be universal and open.  Whereas local elites had benefited from their relationship with martial arts societies, these allegiances needed to be transferred to the national level.

A variety of new institutions were created to do just that.  Formal establishments like the New Wushu and Guoshu movements sought to give the state direct control over the organization of local martial arts societies. Other reformers (such as the Jingwu movement, and much of the Taijiquan community) favored a less statist (but equally nationalist) strategy in which universal creation myths were promoted and “lineage” communities that may have once been very local were reimagined as being national in scope.

It should be remembered that this new vision of the Chinese martial arts did not emerge in a vacuum. Rather, it was the result of a sophisticated debate on what the “new China” should be.  Nor was the victory of these views immediate or even total. A full blown legitimization crisis emerged within the Chinese martial arts.  The Guoshu program looked very powerful on paper, but most of China’s local martial artists simply ignored its tournaments and directives as they did not directly address their values or local needs. Worse yet, many intellectuals within the May 4thmovement openly derided its goals and methods. The result was a long legitimization dispute which Jon Nielson and I described in our book.

Yet from this transformation arose the system of allotting “authority” within the traditional Chinese martial arts that most of us now take for granted.  A system of dual legitimization was created.  Formal political institutions (first Guoshu, and later Wushu) claimed legitimacy through their adherence to scientific and modernizing principals which placed the martial arts at the disposal of the state.  This became the dominant way in which the Chinese martial arts were legitimated within the PRC.  In this case the “political element” of the community was a set of actual formal institutions answerable to the government.  Outside of that realm, a new set of “traditions” were made available to national, and then universal, communities. Regardless of your location or country of birth, one could experience some aspect of the Chinese nation by studying in any one of these open, commercial, schools.  They reconfigured China’s traditional folk arts in such a way that they were now available to students anywhere in the world.  This social system gained dominance in Taiwan, the South East Asian diaspora and the West.

 

A “Sword Dancer” by Hadda Morrison. Source: Harvard Digital Archives.

 

Recent changes within the Western social realm have created a new set of challenges for this second mode of legitimization. The rise of a renewed emphasis on empirical verification in many places in Western society during the 1970s-1990s posed a direct challenge to all sorts of “arguments by authority”. One of the places that we can see this playing out is in an erosion of public trust in all sorts of “expert” bodies. The decline of traditional religious communities might be another place (though here we must also account for the modernization and related secularization hypotheses).

Rather than allowing either the nation or “tradition” to arbitrate what techniques were effective (and therefore legitmate), a new generation of martial artists, not culturally beholden to the norms of the previous systems, advocated putting such practices to the test.  This tendency has long been present in the West.  Indeed, we can even see it in Bruce Lee’s writings in the 1970s.  Yet by the 1990s this was increasingly the dominant current of thought which would give rise to practices like the Mixed Martial Arts.

It is critical to realize that the traditional arts involved in these disputes are in crisis not simply because they often lose in Youtube challenge matches. Being repeatedly pummeled in viral videos certainly doesn’t help their cause. Yet even if they were to win there would still be an almost identical crisis of legitimacy as the older generation of Masters (who hold the keys of “tradition”) no longer have the ability to determine when violent conflict is publicly allowed and how it will be socially interpreted.  Under these circumstances even a win represents a loss of standing for the traditional faction as it suggests that young fighters training under “scientific conditions” can succeed largely without their blessing.

I was recently part of an (extended) conversation that illustrated this situation quite nicely. It began when I was chatting with a Wing Chun instructor of my own generation about the state of the art today. While others take a dim view of “kids these days,” he has a cheerful disposition and is something of an optimist. He is also an outspoken advocate of placing non-cooperative sparring (often with people from outside your style) at the center of serious Wing Chun training.

Needless to say, doing so tends to have a definite effect on one’s body structure. You can still apply Wing Chun concepts to most competitive sparring sessions, but it doesn’t look like a sticky hands drills.  Nor does it look like anything you would see in the unarmed forms (unless you really knew what you were looking for).  In fact, my own Sifu (who also engaged in some similar practices) often told me that in actual combat my fighting should not look like Wing Chun.  I shouldn’t necessarily appear to have any style at all.  My movements should just appear to be clean and effective.

As more and more Wing Chun students start to spar at local “open mat nights,” my friend was happy to note that he could see visible changes within the physical culture (perhaps the “habitus”) of the younger generation of students. At least that was his opinion.  He noted that the tactical and athletic issues facing students today are vastly different than sixty years ago when Ip Man (who, for the record, was also an innovator) began to teach in Hong Kong.  Our approach to the art needs to adapt just as his did.

This opinion was not shared by an older instructor in the same field who I had spoken with some time earlier.  Sparring, especially with random individuals from outside one’s style, was a problem in his view.  It led to students becoming “confused.”  What the younger sifu saw as an “effective defense” in a practical situation, he perceived only as sloppy and ill informed. Indeed, he proclaimed that this wasn’t kung fu at all.  Mirroring a criticism I have heard dozens of other times, he decried such sparring as “mere kickboxing,” and proclaimed that in fact no actual martial art was being practiced. In his view, if one’s Wing Chun did not look the same in a fight as in the training hall, it wasn’t Wing Chun at all. Nor was he willing to concede that modern combat sports (such as boxing, kickboxing or MMA) might be “authentic” martial arts that also required huge amounts of dedication and training.

Beyond merely being a difference of opinions, it is also worth noting that these instructors drew their personal authority from very different sources.  The more senior instructor leaned heavily (as one might guess) on tradition and lineage as a source of authority.  The younger coach based the legitimacy of his views in large part on the success of his students in many local mixed style tournaments.  In the social world of the older Sifu, only the authorized guardians of tradition were able to judge if something met the criteria of “good” Wing Chun.  But in a public boxing match, anyone can add up the points on the score card at the end of a fight.

The real threat to traditional modes of legitimization within this particular community is not that the younger Sifu’s students might be seen losing a fight on Youtube. Authorities have always found it easy to explain away “dissidents with bad attitudes” when they lose.  The actual crisis occurs when more modern interpretations of Wing Chun are seen to publicly win, providing an alternative framework for judging the legitimacy of someone’s training practice.

Beyond this we must also consider the economic basis of these arts. Who can teach, and who can profit, from the dissemination of knowledge? While related to the issue of authority, movement in this area can also trigger a distinct set of legitimization crises.

In a 2014 paper, Adam Frank looked at the issue of “family secrets” in one Taiji community regarding who was authorized to benefit from teaching or withholding this information. When this community had few contacts outside of China, and little opportunity to benefit from lucrative teaching positions in Europe and North America, there was less concern as to who taught this material.  Once the international profile of the school began to rise, a reconsolidation occurred in which some previously authorized teachers were marginalized within the community, thus reassigning the “right” to teach the complete art to a smaller number of “family members.”

Students of Martial Arts Studies are free to have a variety of opinions about this, and all sorts of values are implicated in the story that Frank lays out.  Yet from Habermas’ perspective, such an outcome was not unexpected.  One would naturally expect that the economic aspect of how benefits are apportioned within the community to match the “political” dimension of how authority is defined. In a stable social system those who are widely perceived as the legitimate teachers should be the one’s to economically benefit from the spread of the community. This would provide them with an incentive to make sure that the system perpetuates itself.

Yet these bearers of tradition are not challenged only by shifts in social/cultural values.  The radical decrease in the cost of communication has impaired their ability to monetize their authority, even in areas of the community that share their values. Selling books and magazine articles was, in the past, a critical aspect of building a strong community.  From the 1970s-1990s it allowed leaders to both profit from their teaching while ensuring that their understanding of a system’s values and techniques remained hegemonic.  Again, in a stable social system the political, economic and social discourses reinforce one another.

The rise of social media dealt a serious blow to the martial arts publishing industry. In its place we now have an explosion of Youtube channels in which the very same senior students and junior instructors (and sometimes simply random class members) who would have previously been the core consumers of centrally distributed materials, are now producing their own instructional content.

This is an important phenomenon as it reflects a shift in the values within the underlying social system. It is easy to criticize the uneven quality of much of this free material, but even a sceptic must stand back and admire the sheer volume of information that is now being produced.  While in a previous generation one might have defined their identity (at least in part) by the sorts of media that one bought and consumed, individuals now make similar judgements based on what they produce and disseminate.  In the age of the “prosumer” (or producer/consumer), broadcasting your views on Wing Chun has become a valid way of performing one’s membership in this community.  Needless to say, this explosion of free communication has made it nearly impossible for the guardians of tradition to dominate the economic exploitation of the art.

Indeed, many of the most profitable and fastest growing areas within the TCMA seem to be the most marginal. The announcement of newly discovered lineages, weapon sparring leagues, or attempts to “rediscover” lost arts through the interpretation of historical texts all elicit excitement.  And at least some of these things should.  Yet in some respects they all diminish the center’s ability to monetize its claims to traditional, lineage based, authority.

 

A photograph (probably 1930s) showing a marketplace martial arts demonstration. Note the Shuang Gau led by the man on the left. Source: The personal collection of Benjamin Judkins

 

The Stakes

So how does it all end? Within the popular press we are frequently treated to dire predictions about the death of kung fu.  I think it is worth remembering that the martial art have suffered other legitimization crises in the not so distant past and they are still very much with us today.  Indeed, a brewing crisis seems to be exactly what opens to the door to “political change” (in the sense that Habermas used the term) within a social system.

Perhaps the most obvious possibility is that the utilitarian and empirical values that are widely held by practitioners of the various arts come to be written into our collective understanding of their “traditional” identity.  Given that these notions of “tradition” were almost entirely socially constructed in the 1920s-1950s, that may be less difficult than one might at first glance suppose. Indeed, if you carefully read the front-matter of many of martial arts books produced between the 1910s and the 1940s you will discover that in point of fact the martial artists of the Republican period can provide a lot of ideological cover for today’s rationalizers and modernizers.  Alternatively, a shift in our current social values might lead Western consumers back towards a more community focused appreciation of the martial arts at some point. These sorts of trends are very difficult to predict in the long run.

A less pleasant possibility, however, is increasing schism.  The issues in these disputes are not merely ones of style or effectiveness. While those points may be debated, more fundamental questions about our core social values and identities are clearly implicated in all of this.  How do we know good kung fu when we see it, and who is allowed to make that determination? As Paul Bowman noted, the gap between traditional modes of establishing authority, and those favored by either utilitarian norms or academic training (in the case of historical debates), is unlikely to be bridged. It is when a substantial segment of the community increasingly tunes out, or simply walks away, that we see the emergence of zombie institutions.  They continue to shamble along, but with no real ability to draw on the resources of their members or to respond to their essential demands.  It remains to be seen how all of this will play out in the current era, but like the younger Sifu discussed above, I remain optimistic.

 

oOo

If you enjoyed this essay you might also want to read: Reflections on the Long Pole: History, Technique and Embodiment

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Salvaging History and Saving the Martial Arts

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Hong Kong harbor at night. Source: Wikimedia.

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

oOo

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

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

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

 

The Varieties of Uniformity

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

 

 

The Japanese and Chinese Cases

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

Conclusion

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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