The Origins of the Boxer Uprising

The more I think about it, the more I like Joseph W. Eshrick's The Origins of the Boxing Uprising.  He published this book in 1987 (UC Berkeley Press) and the fact that I hadn't read it before now, shows where the holes in my (self) education are.  (Please feel free to suggest related books in the comments, even if you think I have read them, I'm sure my readers will be appreciative too.)

I suspect by now my regular readers join me in being easily offended by the lack of scholarship and basic questioning in the history sections of most martial arts books.  While we are justified in finding this failure inexcusable, we must answer this question:  Why would 20th Century martial artists deliberately obscure their history?

In the process of explaining the origins of the Boxer Uprising of 1899-1900, Eshrick gives us many clues which will help us understand what martial arts were in the 1800's.  Let's first imagine that the same individual people took on at least three of the following if not all of the following roles:

• Performing Chinese Opera


• Practicing Martial Arts


• Devotees of Martial Deities or other heterodox (fanatic) cults


• Bandits (Rarely robbed their own villages, which meant that in places like Western Shandong province people often thought of their neighboring villages as being full of thieves.)


• Officially organized volunteer militias


• Anti-bandit gangs (These were created because official militias couldn't cross provincial boundaries, much like American Sheriffs can't cross state lines.)


• Political Rebels and Revolutionaries

20th Century people who wanted to create revolution, preserve religion, train martial arts, or perform opera, all had incentives to cover up the connectedness of these historic endeavors; to claim they were always separate and to attempt to reform traditional practices so that they would appear to have always been separate.

Everyone wants to say that their system of martial arts was used exclusively by bodyguards.  No one wants to say their martial art was developed by a group of Opera performers who practiced in secret over generations in order to train groups of rebels which were consistantly put down by the central government.

Modern people tend to think of stage performing as a non-religious practice.  But Chinese Opera was performed for the Gods.  The statues of Gods were carried out of the temples and set up facing the stage before performances.  That's the meaning of Ying shen sai hui, one of the names given to Chinese Opera.  In fact, attending the Opera was probably the most widespread collective religious act in China.

People who got part time work as bodyguards had reasons to be great showman.  Anything which would spread your reputation or demonstrate your prowess served duel purposes, it could get you new business and it could disuade criminals from challenging you.

The standard way for martial artists to attract new students was to give public performances with acrobatics and other feats of prowess. (What? you knew that?)

So called, "Meditation Sects," often practiced martial arts along with popular ethics (keeping precepts), healing trance (qigong) rituals, and talisman making.  Performances of quan (boxing) were often used to recruit new members.

All rebellions in China were religiously inspired to some degree.  "Meditation" sects were generally more rebellious than the other popular "Sutra" chanting sects.  The lines (or slopes) between illegal and legal were different from village to village, province to province, and year to year, depending on how much civil unrest and civil war there was.  [During the 1800's each "Meditation" sect associated itself with a particular trigram from the Bagua, like Kan (water), Li (fire), Xun (wind) etc... The trigram they chose likely represented the category of deity they were devoted to (through sacrifice, invocation, possession, channeling etc...).  This practice gives some credence to my theory that Baguazhang was given its name because it emerged from a Daoist lineage which performed secret ceremonies which ritually included all known religious traditions and experiences. Each type of experience was cataloged in the performers body and remembered as belonging to one of the the eight trigrams (bagua).  There were many large and small rebellions by these groups, one in the early 1800's was actually called the Bagua Rebellion and had troops separated into trigrams.]

In 1728, "...the Yong Zheng Emperor issued the only imperial prohibition of boxing per se that I have seen.  He condemned boxing teachers as 'drifters and idlers who refuse to work at their proper occupations,' who gather with their disciples all day, leading to 'gambling, drinking and brawls.'"(Esherick p. 48)

According  Avron Albert Boretz’s 1996 dissertation: Martial Gods and Magic Swords: The Ritual Production of Manhood in Taiwanese Popular Religion, the devotees of martial deities in Taiwan train martial arts and are heavily involved with smuggling, drinking and petty crime.  So it seems reasonable to assume that some of the boxing teachers the Emperor is condemning are leaders of small religious cults, and some are just Dojo Rats.

Quan, boxing groups which trained in public squares and performed and competed at festivals, were quasi legal because they promoted martial virtue (wude) and actively prepared young men to take the military entrance exam.  Boxing groups could be non-religious; However, it is hard to know because they were mainly reported in official documents only when they were part of "meditation" cults.  Heterodox religion was more illegal than boxing by itself, even if the sect didn't practice boxing.  Still sects were very popular and wide spread.

Most of the time when martial arts are reported in the official histories it is because they were involved in an unorthodox cult.  So most of what we know supports the idea that martial arts and religion were intimately connected, we simply don't have much information about non-sectarian martial arts.  It is probably true that there were individuals who practiced only forms, applications and sparring like the our modern day stereotypes, but it is very unlikely that "a pure martial arts" lineage or family ever existed.  Everybody had a gongfu brother, uncle, or great uncle who crossed over into performance, ritual, religion, banditry or rebellion.

Boxers captured by the Americans

Esherick gives a lot of attention to the overlap between martial conditioning practices like iron t-shirt or golden bell, and invulnerability rituals which incorporate magic, talisman, trance, and possession by local deities and heroic characters from popular opera.  There is a continuum from, "Go ahead, hit me, I can take it!" passing through, "Blades always miss me" moving toward,  "Due to my amazing qigong, blades can not cut me," and finally ending up with, "Bullets can't harm me, I am a god."   Setting aside the question of how well any of these techniques work, it isn't hard to see why 20th Century martial artists, opera performers, religious devotees, and revolutionaries would all want to disassociate themselves from these practices.

In the scramble to invent history, dotted lines have been drawn between "real iron t-shirt" for "real" martial artists, "tricks" used by street performers, "qi illusions" used by magicians and charlatans, and suicidal devotion to a cause--like standing in front of a tank.

It is time to admit that in the 20th Century, embarrassment has been a driving force in the creation and reformulation of martial arts, especial where history is concerned.

Three Powers

Something that all martial arts share is the three powers.  The powers are:

1. Front and Back


2. Left and Right


3. Up and Down

An individual fighter or a martial arts system can be assessed based on how effectively the three powers are used.

Front and back power is the most common and the least powerful of the three, but without it you will always be too close or too far away.  It is the kind of power used in a 'steppin'a'jab, steppin'a'jab' type technique.  It usually involves a shift of weight.  It can be accompanied by a snap or a push or a twist or any old force multiplier.  The main issue in training front back power is getting the student to not lean.  With leaning the power becomes 'front only' power and while most of us would prefer not to get hit by a football linebacker, such power is vulnerable to attacks from other angles and is easily diminished by getting out of its direct path.

Left and right power is characteristic of anyone with fighting training.  The key for a beginner is turning at the kua, the hip socket.  If you turn from the spine or from somewhere on the leg, right and left power will become 'right only' power.  I can't really think of a kungfu technique which will function against a resisting opponent without left and right power.  If you are going to use more than one hook punch, you must have this kind of power.  If you are going to execute a throw without following your opponent to the ground, you must have this power.  Left and right power is the most strategic of the three powers.  It opens up possibilities.

Up and down power is by far the most powerful of the three.  Effective use of up and down power will increase your power by about 8 times.  Can you stop an upright man from rising by pressing down on his shoulders or on his hips?  No, even without any training, if you ask a  man to bend his knees but keep his back straight, you can not hold him down by pushing on his shoulders.  It would take 8 men pushing down to stop him from coming up.   But up and down power is difficult to use.  The exceptions to this are stomping on someone when they are down, and downward elbow strikes, both are very powerful techniques and take little training.  But when using downward power like a chop or a hammer punch, most people become stiff and carry their own body weight rather than putting their weight on their opponent.  Alternately people are too loose and risk tearing their own shoulder joint.  When trying to use force upwards, most people float and become too top heavy, making them easy to unbalance or topple.  An effective upper-cut, as a lower level technique, relies heavily on accurate targeting.  At the higher levels of skill an uppercut is simply unstoppable, regardless of where it hits you.

The three powers are also sometimes called the six dimensions of power, or six harmonies.  To use each of these powers effectively the two aspects of each power must be inside of each other.   A movement forward must have backwards movement already active inside of it.  A leftward movement must already be moving right.  And so on.  This is written in the Taijiquan classics and many other sources.

These three powers are actually a state of mind.  Together they are a posture which leaves no opening for an attack.  Through the use of these powers the body disappears and we begin to fight using the limitlessness of space.  Baguazhang mud walking without these three powers becomes hard parched earth.  The taijiquan form without these three powers is frail and trivial.

But fighting skills aside, these three powers are luminosity (ming).  This is what brings tea ceremony to life.  This is the archetique's eye.  By this, we are humbled before great art.

Uniform Density

George Xu gave me a great correction this weekend.

Level one:  The whole body should be experienced as having uniform density.

Level two:  The body and the surrounding environment should be experienced as having uniform density.

Of course this is training for what we often refer to as "mind," but in this context it is somewhat absurd to call it mind since it is equally an experience of "body."

I had already done this practice, I just hadn't tried to put it together with my fighting skills.  The basic invocation of the deity Ziwei used in Orthodox Daoist ritual and jindan (internal alchemy) includes the description, "His skin is onyx-black like the night sky."

More Rain, More Books, More Ideas

My computer has been having a crash fest lately and that's a good thing because it put my nose into some great books I'll be blogging about over the next month.

Class was canceled this morning.  We were caught in a down pour even though Yahoo Weather was predicting 1% chance of rain.  We finished standing and did push hands under the trees for a little bit anyway.

This weekend I saw George Xu, also in the rain, and he delivered a few printable topics.

The 5 Types of Training Predators Do:

1. Power stretch


2. Standing still with the mind outside the body


3. Slow movement


4. Fast movement


5. Shaking

Power stretch means stretching from the inside out.  Standing with the mind out side the body means the mind is on the prey and the surrounding environment.  Slow movement includes stalking, shrinking and expanding, six dimensions power, etc.... Fast movement must be unconscious of the physical body.  And shaking is used to insure that the prey can not fight back once it has been seized.

Fear vs. Danger: The Real History of Martial Arts and Trance

Sgt. Rory over at Chiron has been talking about the difference between fear management and danger management and the comments are interesting.  Basically Sgt. Rory says that a lot of martial artists are using a fantasy of martial prowess to convince themselves that they are capable of real fighting.  They do this with a combination of bravado, group think, and talismanic power emblems like 'The Black Belt.'  For someone like Sgt. Rory, who does danger management for a job, fantasies can get you killed.

So the real question is, if martial arts were created for real situations, why is everyone acting so dumb?

In other posts and in his book,  Sgt. Rory has made much of the powerful hormone cocktail that takes over your body and mind when you are in a real fight.   How did traditional martial arts deal with this?  They must have known about it.  Why isn't it a part of the average dojo training these days?

Early Chinese martial arts were trance based.  They started from experience and worked backwards.  The first experienced fighters who set out to train students did so by scaring them 'out of there wits.'  As these arts developed they started to include ear splitting metallic gongs and frenetic drumming.  They told frightening war stories and sang haunting songs filled with enmity.  These were soon followed by the invocation of supernatural forces and drunk dancers channeling gruesomely demised soldiers. The teachers were using these techniques to trigger the powerful hormone cocktail in their students so that they would know what to expect.

Cults devoted to martial hero/demons are as old as Chinese civilization itself, and they are still with us.  These days they are more associated with outcast smuggler types, but historically they were the village militia.

Violent situations are full of surprises.  There isn't just one type of trance which is "best" for all fighting situations.  There are many different types of trance.  As martial cults developed they taught different types of trance, often associated with different deities or animal spirits.  Often a movement style or sequence would be taught first and then, after some amount of practice, the spirit would be invoked, at which point the routine would be dropped.   The 'student' was practicing going berserk.  They were practicing being on a high dose of naturally occurring hormone cocktail.  They developed many measures to test if the trance was real including inability to feel cuts or burns and various degrees of memory loss.

When the really fight was about to happen, they would put themselves into trance, essentially preempting the 'shock' or the 'freeze.'

The big problem with this type of training is that it shortens your life.  That hormone cocktail is really bad for your long term health.   The kinds of permission people give themselves when they are in deep trance tend to lead them to bad decisions.  Also the wild movements people do, and injures they ignore, when they are in trance really hurt the day after.



What began as trance invocation movements became dances and martial arts forms.  One of the early purposes of martial training was to make ones body strong enough to survive the more extreme trance possessions the early 'teachers' developed.  Over many generations these martial 'forms' started to include actual 'techniques' and even 'applications.'  It was a slow evolution.  In peaceful times everyone did the forms as entertainment and the music got better, and then as times turned for the worse, they re-invoked the spirits and sanctified the ground with blood.

It isn't hard to see how great performers grew out of this tradition, especially if you know that trances weren't just used for movement but to get people talking and singing.  Poetry was written in trance too.  Imagine a bunch of talented people on stage all in deep trance and each invoking different historical figure improvising their way through history with swords and masks and you are more than half way to Chinese Opera.

It's a long story for another day how all this interacted with the military, but it is an important story because although Chinese armies did sometimes use people in trance, they also had good reasons for discouraging it.

Religion and martial arts parallel each other in that both have had a long history of social movements trying to distance themselves from trance without every totally dropping it.  As we all know, doing these martial arts forms and drills without the trance or the music became a way to train fighting all on their own.  In the religious realm, meditation, stillness without going into trance and without any deity invocation, became a religious practice all on its own.

On the other hand some people became experts in many types of trance.  I believe that Baguazhang was originally a collection of eight classes of god/demon possession.  Each one distinct in its powers but woven together through ritual walking.  Such a collection of forces would have been a very secret transmission.  Althought people would have encountered it, there was no system until someone came along and transformed the god/demon forces into types of qi named after the types of gods each represented --heaven qi, earth qi, wind qi, water qi, thunder qi, fire qi, mountain qi, and lake qi.

Speed and Age

Long ago I accepted the idea that martial arts don't need to train speed.  Why?  Because an old man will pull his hand out of the fire as fast as a young man will.

Is this fair?  As I get older, 41 now, I'm starting to see why older people jump less, and less high.  The effort of jumping can be painful.  And pain is such a good trainer, if it hurts we do it less, and if we do it less we do it not as well.

If you fight in the ring, you need a lot of stamina because staged fights are artifically long for enternainments sake.  And the longer you do something in a short period of time, the slower it tends to get.  So for ring fighting, you need to train speed.

But in a real fight the length of time is likely to be short.  In a real fight the pain an older person might have from moving fast will likely be covered up by the hormone cocktail.  It will only be felt afterwords, perhaps even days later.   So training speed is not necessary.

Instead of training speed, internal martial artists train smoothness.  And we train integrity.  Because, although an old man can pull his hand out of the fire as fast as a young man, for the old man the very act of pulling out at high speed is likely to tear a muscle in the elbow which takes months to heal.  While the young man will likely say "ouch," and forget about it.