1000 Words for Rebel-Bandit

Winter is such a good time for working-out and getting extra sleep; not a great time for sitting in a chair and  writing.   But you're in luck because this book in my lap is due back to the library and it's full of notes that would be lost if I didn't do this blog thing now.  Also, I'm sipping some super-duper, so secret 3-ears-never-hear Chinese herbal tonic.

In my quest to try to understand the origins of Chinese Martial arts I've come to the conclusion that in the past there were people who practiced a religious tradition of exorcistic theater interlaced with Daoist liturgy, meditation, and daoyin, who used sophisticated internal martial arts technology, healing, talisman, re-telling history, with dance, puppets, mudras, music, processions, and animal sacrifice-- all together in a single art-event, ritual happening.  The people practicing these traditions did so through violence times, sometimes as participants in rebel movements, sometimes as part of bandit societies, and sometimes as citizens of weak or powerful central governments.

And I have also come to the conclusion that all of these skills could be arts unto themselves, that individuals throughout the ages have sometimes chosen to be exclusively musicians, or martial artists, or dancers.  And, each of these traditions easily lend themselves to composites of more than one art.  For instance, it was common for a scholar, a man who had passed an Imperial exam, to spend his evenings singing or reciting the histories while playing music with friends in a wine house.  It was also common not to do both. (Just a note here, because it keeps coming up:  For some reason only historians understand, a person who passed the lowest level of the Imperial exam is generally referred to in English texts as a member of the gentry or the elite.  I'll never be comfortable with this.)

I recently read David Robinson's  Bandits, Eunuchs, and the Son of Heaven, Rebellion and the Economy of Violence in Mid-Ming China .  Great book!  Remember that lame cliche that goes, there are a 1000 words for snow in the Eskimo language.  Well, reading this book one is inclined to think there are a 1000 words for rebel-bandit in Chinese.

Here are some of the fun ones:  ..."(W)ulai" (local tough), "liumang" (hooligan), "youshou" (loafer), "xianshou" (idler), "wangming" (desperado), "guanggun" (bare sticks), and "wuji zhi tu" (unregistered ones) on the one hand, and [there are] more ambiguous appellations, such as haojie (unfettered hero, "haojun" (unfettered hero), "renxia" (knight errant), and "youxia" (wandering knight errant) on the other. (p.21)

Robinson breaks through a lot of conventions.  He chooses to write about the middle of the Ming Dynasty (around 1500) because it is considered a time of relative peace, but he shows us how totally violent it was.  He challenges the standard focus on "gentry," meaning men who have passed the lowest level of civil exam, and instead looks at the entire breath of men and women, powerful, and not so powerful.   But his particular interest is the unfettered man of force and his ability to transcend and traverse all levels of society.

"Illicit violence was an integral element of Ming society, intimately linked to social dynamics, political life, military institutions, and economic development.  Nearly everyone in China--from statesmen and military commanders to local officials and concerned social thinkers, from lineage heads and traveling merchants to farmers , transport workers, and peddlers in the street--grappled with the question of how to use, regulate, or respond to violence in their lives." (p. 2)

"The role of marital arts, martial ethos, and military institutions in late imperial society forms an important if still little-explored facet of China's economy of violence.  Violence in theater, literature, and the visual arts provides valuable insight into the economy of violence, as does the role of physical and symbolic violence in religious practice, doctrine, and imagery....and popular concepts of honor, justice, and vengeance in various parts of China during the different historical periods...(p.2)

Robinson focuses on violence closest to the capital, exploring the idea that it would be more likely that the government would have some sort of monopoly on violence nearer to the capital than in far away provinces.  In fact, if that was true, and the 40,000 pirates off the southern coast (far from the capital) at the time would suggest it was, than violence was everywhere--because the capital was teaming with bandits and rebels.

....[P]rohibitions forbade bearing arms in certain contexts, most notably the strict laws against arms in or around the capital, especially the imperial palace.  Despite the extra security measures taken in Beijing, the prohibition against bearing arms in the capital was not observed.  Gangs of lahu, or urban gang members, brandishing knives, metal whip-chains, cudgels, swords, and various other weapons were frequently reported on the streets of Beijing during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.  The violations certainly owe something to Beijing's enormous and very mobile population (between 800,000 and one million by 1500). (Robinson p.93)

He convincingly argues that it was common for bandits and various sorts of highway robbers to be part of patronage networks.  These networks protected them to some extent but also meant that local magistrates or other types of officials or men of power were getting a cut of the loot.  This allowed for complex negotiations which might mean that a particular group of bandits lived in one region and robbed in another.  The Ming Dynasty was enormously wealthy and probably the best commercial environment on earth at the time.  It may have also been the most crime ridden because nearly everyone was "on the take" in one way or another.

This jives with Esherick's description of Shan Dong province during the late Qing Dynasty in The Origins of the Boxer Uprising.  Esherick describes a situation where it was common for bandits to rob neighboring towns across provincial boarders but to play the roll of protector for their own villages.

During the Ming Dynasty these patronage networks permeated the society right up to the eunuchs surrounding the Emperor and even the Emperor himself.  (In 21st Century China we call these networks "guanxi" or "connections," and the result is widespread corruption.  However the current government seems to have effectively suppressed armed bandits on horseback.)

There is a huge ethnic component to the violence and banditry but it is sometimes hard to sort out.  I also recently picked up a book by David A. Graff called Medieval Chinese Warfare, 300-900. Graff explains several things which are highly relevant.  During the lead up to the Tang Dynasty (600 CE) the region we call China developed every conceivable method for putting together groups of men to fight. That accumulated knowledge of military organizational experiments was well documented and continued to be used in all subsequent Dynasties to gather huge armies, militias, retainers, or rebels.  The other factor is that while infantries were used extensively and, if well trained, could be effective on the battle field, they were most useful for occupying an area or defending against a siege.  Cavalries were what won most battles and most wars.  Graff picked the year 300 to start his study because that was the era when the technological innovation of stirrups became pervasive.  Cavalries were made up mostly of Turks and Mongolians.  Lastly, reading about the early Tang Dynasty it is easy to get the impression that China has at least nine distinct regions capable of raising armies for the purpose of defending themselves or attacking their neighbors.  A civil war with nine different regions competing for dominance is always brewing underneath the apparent stability of every "Chinese" Dynasty.

Jumping back to the Ming Dynasty,  the Turks are gone (they went to Turkey) but there are lots of mounted Mongols serving as elite forces guarding the boarders, putting down uprisings, and sometimes protecting trade routes or even the capital.  There were also Hui people, Muslim families who are ethnically Han, who lived largely in the regions just south of the capital.  The Hui were heavily represented in the cavalries, and in the military in general.  The regular, and the various irregular but official, troops lived in large concentrations near the capital.  When the country was not actually at war, the horses used by the cavalry were supposed to be kept 'ready for action' by families registered for that purpose.  So war horses were widely available throughout the empire.  And everybody had weapons.

Robinson found this legal code:

Everyone who privately possesses armor for horse or men, shields, tubes of fire [a primitive gun], a catapult for throwing fire, banners and signaling devices and the like--military equipment that is forbidden to the people--will, for one such item, receive eighty strokes of the heavy bamboo.  for each [additional] item, add one degree.  If he manufactures the items privately, add to the punishment for possessing it privately, one degree.  In each case, the punishment is limited to one hundred strokes of the heavy bamboo and exile to 300 li.  If it is not complete [so it can not be used], there is no penalty.  He may be ordered to deliver it to the government.  Bows and arrows, lances, swords, and crossbows, as well as fishing forks and pitchforks, are not within the category of prohibited objects. (Robinson p.91)

Eunuchs are an interesting part of the story.  Many of them came from Hui villages.  There are accounts of whole villages castrating their young men because they heard that the Emperor was seeking new eunuchs.  It was common in certain regions for the third son to be castrated in hopes that he could become a eunuch.  So there were a lot of eunuchs running around (just in case you were wondering).  Eunuchs did fight, and often commanded troops. Just as an aside, I wonder if there were martial arts practices specifically for eunuchs? Is this another possible source for the development of internal martial arts? It would make sense because without the male hormones they wouldn't be able to build or keep muscle.   They would have had a type of weakness which did not have to be cultivated, but which might lead to a unique sort of martial prowess.  After reading about all the eunuchs, I'm starting to believe the story that Dong Haichuan (the founder of Baguazhang) was, as rumored, a eunuch.

The complete separation of civil and military (wen and wu) legal systems was a real disaster because it meant that wherever a military group was stationed, small groups of soldiers could rob and loot without being subject to the civil authorities.  This led to all kinds of patronage and intimidation.  And if you got pretty good at organizing bandit groups, why not strike out on your own?  Even start a rebellion?  Individuals with in these bandit groups often managed to keep their identities as soldiers or imperial cavalry, sometimes going back and forth, or simply maintaining both identities simultaneously.

In order to maintain control, both the central government and local government often chose to enlist, appease, or co-opt rebel-bandits:

Integrating these various kinds of violence into a bureaucratic order was always a calculated risk, and the line dividing defenders of the imperial order from its challengers often blurred with disturbing ease.  Writing on developments in Jiangxi during the early sixteenth century, Lin Ruozhou observed, "One variety of fierce bare sticks initially claims to be assisting officials to kill bandits, but in the process colludes with them, storing stolen goods for profit.  Later these folds take up for a living the false accusation of commoners to extort goods from them.  The only thing they fear is the return of peace." (Robinson p.90)

There is lots of cools stuff in this book.  At one point the wife of a rebel-bandit named Tiger Yang takes over and goes on a series of raids on the capital before finally being caught and executed.  At another point 350 monks from Shaolin Temple are used to help put down a rebellion but 25% them are slaughtered in the first battle.

It is easy to forget that food was always scarce in the old days.  Soldiers often worked for free in the hope of being fed.  One common system was that as soldier's family was responsible for keeping him supplied with food or money.  It was a form of tax on the family, and since not everyone had family serving in the military it was a tax with some prestige.  Still families often wanted to get out of it, which was made easier if the soldiers were far away, or if they were gone for a long time.  Sometimes they were two months away from receiving a message for as long as twenty years.  Long enough to start a new family.

Bandits, Eunuchs, and the Son of Heaven is not light reading, but it is very readable!  If you like this topic, I recommend it.  I got the book because I read the "Conclusion" on Google Books (p. 163) and found it intriguing.  Perhaps you will do the same?

The Banquet

Sometime last year I was talking with George Xu and a few other people out in the park.  We were talking about making mistakes, ways of training, and the unique skills of various martial arts masters.  George filled his torso with qi and turned it to the side in the opposite direction of his chin, then he put one hand behind his back and with the other he made the "lan" movement, a horizontal clearing action like opening a sliding door.  All this was a simultaneous gesture to accompany the statement, "If anyone can show me a mistake I am making in my gongfu, any mistake at all, I will right away throw a banquet for that person!"

Now, being the person I am, with the agenda I have, I must point out to my readers the obvious theatricality of his gesture.  Despite the fact that he has generally focused only on the fighting aspects of martial arts, he has obviously acquired some theatrical skill.  But why a banquet?

The answer has to do with the importance banquets have in Chinese culture in creating, establishing, transforming, and re-making, patronage networks and alliances.

Many years ago, I showed up a little late to a modest banquet George Xu was putting on for a visiting martial arts master at a local restaurant.  The visiting master, about 10 of George's students, a translator and an official from the Chinese consulate, were all already seated when I arrived.  As I walked up to the table I made some unconscious sound, I don't know what it was.  But suddenly people at the table in front of me split apart and someone gave up a seat for me.  The seat they gave me was right next to the translator who was a woman probably in her 40's.  As I sat down, introductions were made, everyone took a second to  acknowledge me and then the woman translator leaned over and whispered something in Shanghai dialect in my ear.  I whispered back an apology in English saying that I really didn't understand any Chinese.  The conversation at the table was mostly focused on asking the visiting Master questions.  We were taking turns posing questions to be translated.  When it was my turn, I asked about the master's early training, how old he was when he started training and what style he studied first.  Before the question was translated George looked at me and said, "That is a stupid question, who cares? you waste time."  As we ran out of good questions to ask, conversations broke out around the table.  The translator and I started talking about this and that, and then she said, "You have a really good Chinese accent.  Excellent."  Again I told her that my Chinese was quite limited.  She ignored this and complemented me again.  It was so weird.  I asked her, and other Chinese speakers at the table what was going on.  Why didn't she believe me?  It turned out that whatever that sound was that I made as I walked up to the table was heard as some kind of entirely appropriate status commanding greeting.  No one seemed willing to believe that I could make such a sound by accident.

Here is a description of the basic ranking at a banquet.

George Xu told me recently that in China when people throw banquets for him, since he doesn't smoke, no one at the table smokes.  This is often appreciated by the guests because it means they get to save money on cigarettes.  Normally, if there is a higher status master at the banquet, George will sit next to the right of the other master and be forced to inhale all the second hand smoke.  The way it works is that there is a pecking order in which people are allowed to offer the master cigarettes.  As soon as he finishes one, the next person in the chain will offer, and so on.  I imagine that it would be a big deal, though invisible to an outsider, if the master accepted a cigarette out of order.

Banquets are places where people are often asked to tell stories, to play music, to sing songs, or to perform feats of martial prowess like forms, breaking bricks, sticking bowls to their abdomin that can not be pulled off, breaking chopsticks on their throat, circus stuff, or even accepting friendly challenge matches.  Lots of drinking happens too.

George tells me that in his travels around China he will often take martial arts masters out for lunch or dinner (a mini-preliminary-banquet).  The irrepressible George Xu will often explain to a given master what he thinks the masters problems are, what mistakes the master is making in his martial training or practice.  Most masters immediately try to push the table out of the way so they can test his theory with a full power fight.  It is rare that they actually want to entertain the question of their own failures, or regard his challenge as an opportunity to learn.  Most of the time he manages to calm them down, saying that fighting would be a waste.  After all, he would be forced to fight like a wild animal and there would be no art in it.  Kind of reminds me of the famous dueling scene from Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai:  "Ah, a tie."  "No, I won!" ....

Reading Chinese history, or any history for that matter, it becomes apparent that industrial commerce has created a world of food abundance which was unknown 160 years ago.  Hunger was common and most people lived with food "insecurity" on a daily basis.  Banquets were probably an important way of establishing confidence in the social networks which would provide food to everyone at the banquet. Each person attending a banquet represented not only themselves but lineages, ancestors, big families and many other types of social networks.  These networks necessarily involved men of marital prowess who fought both to gain food resources (like land, water, livestock, money, equipment, and safe roads) and to protect the network from bandits, rebels or other types of raiders.  The volatility of food resources was in constant play with wide spread violence and ever changing power dynamics.  Banquets were a way of establishing patronage alliances, or mending them when they went sour.

The large size of the Chinese empire, its cities, and its wealth, required the constant mobility of men at arms.  The diversity of mutually incomprehensible languages in China meant that communication was often a problem.  The banquet ritual was probably a way to make sure, as we like to say, everyone was on the same page.

So, my current theory is that martial arts were an extremely important part of the banquet ritual, and the banquet ritual was widespread even among the many non-Han Chinese ethnic groups.  The basic ritual involves two tables; a small one against the north wall with offerings for the ancestors, and a large table with offerings for the living.  We could venture now into the realm of rituals, food offerings to the gods and to ancestors, but the subject is to big and unwieldy.  Banquets are important rituals in Europe too.  It's possible to over play the importance of banquets in Chinese culture and it's possible to under play them.  It's also such a big subject I want to avoid saying something definitive.   Most likely there is a lot of variation in practice.

So rather than stick my foot in my mouth, here is a post I wrote for Rum Soaked Fist forum about the purpose of martial arts forms:

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Yes, forms can be used to train meditation, spacial awareness, integration, or to remember enormous amounts of kinesthetic information and...yes, a hundred other things, but it is a mistake to think those can't be trained some other way. Forms are just one way, not the only way.

The problem here is that we should be asking "How" and "When" questions more than "What" and "Why questions. The history of these arts has been intentionally corrupted and distorted. If we assume we already know "How" forms were used, then we prejudice the answers to "What" questions.

How were forms used historically? When were they performed? Given the traditional contexts in which they were used, how well did they function?

Here are some theories (yes, it's all conjecture...reality based conjecture):

1. Banquets and feasts are key Chinese religious and social institutions which were essential to creating alliances between powerful martial leaders, local officials, rebels, bandits, and other stake holders--especially in times of food insecurity. Because it was very often necessary to make alliances with people from different regions, language groups, or ethnic origins, martial arts forms (along with other demonstrations of martial prowess, singing, music, etc...) played a key roll in sealing agreements. A public exchange of forms showed a willingness to put-out and forms were thought to display "zheng," a righteous upright nature.  (Calligraphy was also thought to display "zheng.")

2. Troops were often stationed at one location for a few years, and then rotated out, back to their homes--but they were still, in a sense, "on-call." They would also gather periodically for training. It might be that having a form that you practiced with fellow troops when you were together, and then on your own, when you were at home, gave a strong sense of continuity and shared fate--essential elements of a "call-up" army. It was common for troops to be brought from disparate parts of the country where different languages were spoken--they couldn't converse as a way of bonding, so they did forms.

3. In the past, theater and exorcism were one subject. Da (hitting/fighting) is one of the five key components of theatrical training (the other four are singing, reciting history, acting, and dance). Jinghu, Chinese opera, like most if not all Chinese theater styles or jia (literally families), begins with stances (often held for an hour at a time, sometimes measured by an incense stick in the hand), the stances are then connected by transitional movements. The performer is also the conductor, unlike most western traditions, the music follows the movements (they did not need music to practice the forms). The individual aspects of the stances and movement are all taught in great detail, but every movement must be perfectly integrated into a single whole body movement with a seamless flow of qi. A theater performance is a form--identical in nearly every way to a martial arts form.
Forms are just a component of a type of theater which did not always need to be entertaining in the western sense of the word, often it was for the gods--or some other not-so-obvious purpose.

4. Whenever I go into a park early in the morning in a Chinese city, I find a spot and do my forms. If I see some people doing forms which are similar to forms I know, I do those first. If not I just keep going through my forms. Inevitably someone comes up to me and tries to figure out how I'm related to them through lineage, or if not them, someone else in the park. It's a ritual. Forms are like ID cards in China, they say...this guy is a human. It's deep stuff.

5. Forms are a good way of measuring time, before clocks they insured you were practicing a minimum amount of time.

Empty Like a Puppet

I have written elsewhere about martial arts forms being an inheritance from the ancestors of that art. That practicing a particular tradition is a process of reanimating the movement of the ancestors who created it.  I have also written about how practicing a form may correct the errors in the form you inherited, in effect healing those in the past.  And I have also written about how practicing a form can heal your parents, your genetic ancestors, through gongfu as a conduct correcting process.  Gongfu can be understood as a process of developing efficiency which rectifies the inappropriate, aggressive, and wasteful movement (jing) and breathing (qi) habits which we learned from our parents.

All of this is akin to a daily personal exorcism.  I have also argued that traditionally it was understood as an exorcism, which goes a long way toward explaining why, when itinerant beggar-monks and priests wanted to ask for money, they would perform martial arts-- demonstrating the merit-worth they had accumulated and shared through this process.*

A common criticism of Chinese Martial Arts is that it is full of empty forms.  Most schools make an effort to teach "applications" for each movement in a form.  Applications are demonstrations of how a conflict might transpire.  But applications themselves don’t really work.  Gongfu is what works.  Gongfu is a quality of movement which has efficacy regardless of the techniques employed.  If you have gongfu, you have it when you are taking out the trash or setting the table--or even when performing an exorcism.

Conceptualization of the underlying metaphors of Chinese art and culture is key to understanding the arts in greater depth. Because people generally bring their own concepts and metaphors to the arts they inherit, it is very easy to lose sight of the vision which created the art in the first place.  That loss of vision leads first to frustration and then to either radical modification or outright destruction of the arts.
But I'll come back to that later.  Here is a quote from History in Three Keys:

Some of the conclusions derived from the serious study of Chinese popular culture in the postwar decades are relevant to our understanding of the embeddedness of Boxer religious experience in... [Northern Chinese] culture.  One such conclusion is that, at the village level, the sharp boundaries between the "secular" and the "sacred," to which modern Westerners are accustomed, simply did not exist.  The gods of popular religion were everywhere and "ordinary people were in constant contact" with them.  These gods were powerful (some, to be sure, more than others), but they were also very close and accessible.  People depended on them for protection and assistance in time of need.  But when they failed to perform their responsibilities adequately, ordinary human beings could request that they be punished by their superiors.  Or they could punish them themselves.  "If the god does not show signs of appreciation of the need of rain," Arthur Smith wrote toward the end of the nineteenth century, "he may be taken out into the hot sun and left there to broil, as a hint to wake up and do his duty."  This "everydayness" of the gods of Chinese popular religion and the casual, matter-of-fact attitude Chinese typically displayed toward their deities doubtless contributed to the widespread view among Westerners, both in the late imperial period and after, that the Chinese were not an especially religious people.  It would be more accurate, I believe to describe the fabric of Chinese social and cultural life as being permeated through and through with religious beliefs and practices.

But not always with the same degree of intensity and certainly not with equal discernibleness in all settings.  This is another facet of Chinese popular religion that, because it does not entirely square with the expectations of Western observers, has occasioned a certain amount of confusion and perplexity.  Sometimes religion appears to recede into the shadows and to be largely, if not altogether, absent from individual Chinese consciousness.  But at other times it exercises dominion over virtually everything in sight.  Thus, the martial arts, healing practices, and the heroes of popular literature and opera often inhabit a space in Chinese culture that seems unambiguously "secular."  But it is not at all unusual, as clearly suggested in the accounts of Boxer spirit possession transcribed at the beginning of this chapter, for these selfsame phenomena to be incorporated into a fully religious framework of meaning.

Confucianism is founded on the idea that we inherit a great deal from our ancestors, including body, culture, and circumstance.  We also, to some extent, inherit our will, our intentions, and our goals.  The Confucian project is predicated on the idea that we have a duty to carryout and comprehend our ancestors' intentions in a way which is coherent with our own circumstance and experiences.  In practice, it is entirely possible that we have two ancestors who died with conflicting goals, or an ancestor who died with an unfulfilled desire, like unrequited love, or an ancestor who wished and plotted to kill us.  Our dead ancestors have become spirits whose intentions linger on in us to some extent in our habits and our reactions to stress.  It is the central purpose of Confucianism to resolve these conflicts and lingering feelings of distress through a continuous process of self-reflection and upright conduct--so that we may leave a better world for our descendants.  The metaphor is fundamentally one of exorcism.  We empty ourselves of our own agenda so that we might consider the true will of our ancestors (inviting the spirits), then we take that understanding and transform it into action (dispersion and resolution).  Finally we leave our descendants with open ended possibilities, support, and clarity of purpose (harmony, rectification, unity).

As gongfu practitioners we are emptying our practice of the inappropriate conduct of our ancestors and our teachers.  The forms should be empty.  That is part of the original vision of what they should be.

The theatrical exorcistic traditions (Nuo) which I have been reading about in Jo Riley’s book Chinese Theater and the Actor in Performance, begin with a ritual emptying of the performers/exorcists bodies.  They remove the three hun and 7 po (together ten spirits, which polarize in our bodies and which disperse at death, hun up, po down) and using protective talisman they put the hun and po in vessels for safe keeping.  They can then perform the exorcisms while possessed by martial deities, spirits or powerful allied demons, without fear of harming themselves.

Jo Riley explains that the physical training of jingju (Beijing Opera) begins with a process of emptying.  The movements of Northern Shaolin form the basis of jingju basic training.  She posits that the actors have a duel role as exorcists and as performers who must be empty in order to fully embody the theatrical and religious rolls they are playing.  My experience studying Noh dance/theater in Japan directly parallels this.  My Noh teacher taught us two forms and two songs to go along with them.  When we were performing we were instructed to be as empty as possible.  It was explained to me that a great performer is sometimes empty enough that the actual spirit of that particular dance will descend the tree painted at the back of the stage and enter the performer.

Daoist Meditation takes emptiness as it’s root.  All Daoist practices arise from this root of emptiness.  The main distinction between an orthodox Daoist exorcism and a less than orthodox exorcism is in fact the ability of the priests to remain empty while invoking and enlisting various potent unseen forces (gods/demons/spirits/ancestors) to preform the ritual on behalf of a living constituency, or the recently dead.

Calligraphy was historically understood in the same way.  To learn calligraphy was to copy the exact calligraphic movements of a righteous accomplished ancestor.  First one would empty themselves and meditate on the ink and the blank piece paper, then on the writing to be copied.  Through the brush, one would execute movements which would manifest on the page while simultaneously transforming (zaohua) or rectifying ones heart (zheng xin).  In the mature expression of Calligraphy both as an art and for talisman making, potency is a direct result of the artist or priests ability to first empty, and then manifest the characters internally as well as on paper.  That potency (qi) is then transmitted to those who see the writing; transforming, inspiring, protecting, purifying or healing them.

Music, medicine, and cooking can all be understood this way too.

Puppetry performances,--according to my informants in Taiwan, as well as the writings of Kristofer Schipper, and Jo Riley-- are sometimes considered the most potent of all forms of ritual exorcism.  This is because puppets are truly empty.

Emptiness is a key metaphor of Chinese culture.  A culture which favors actions over explanations.  Actions become polysemous, embedded with layers of meanings, meanings which can even seem contradictory.  There is rarely an orthodoxy of meaning.  The meaning of a particular action, in this case "emptiness,” can change as it traverses through strata of society, time, region, gender, family, or identity.  Emptiness is a key metaphor in a “realm of action” which is operative in a very wide and varied set of contexts.

In martial arts, particularly the internal martial arts, emptiness is the basis, the ground, the root of action.  We should expect the forms to be empty.  We should expect to feel nothing, taste blandness, see darkness, and hear silence.  When you do your forms and routines, be empty, like a puppet.

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*It's probably also true that people would donate because they thought the monks were entertaining.  It's a lot less likely that they would donate because they thought the monks were ruffians.

Martial History Magazine

Jason Couch of Martial History Magazine sent me this article he put together Chinese Martial Arts in 19th Century China.  He has collected a bunch of short pieces written by Westerners about fighting in China.  I found them all interesting and worth taking the time to read and ponder.   It is just a blog post and I appreciate that sometimes we just want to get something up and out to world, but I would like to know more about the reasons each of these Westerners were in China at that time, and perhaps something about their views on other subjects; where they pro-Missionary?  Were they involved in trade or education?  Did they learn the local language?  Stuff like that.  Maybe that information is not available but as he says there are some contradiction among the accounts and it would be helpful in trying to evaluate the informants against each other.

The first section on grabbing each other's queues is something I hadn't read before but I think it is important to understand that Han people were required to wear their hair in a queue as a sign of subordination which was the hair style that Manchu had historically used for their slaves. Slaves would have been tied up at night by their queues.  The humiliation associated with the queue could get pretty twisted.

It's also quite clear from the texts that there is plenty of overlap between theater and fighting--and there is even some recognition and discussion of the religious component of the arts.  Great stuff.

You might want to check out some more of Jason's articles too,  The Boy Scouts in War, or The First Thanksgiving.

Guns, Whiskey, Kungfu, and Indian Dance

I did not come from a guns and whiskey family.  But I recognize that of the four major American folkways, only one has ever taken any real pride in men dancing:  Rednecks.  For this gift of beauty and freedom, I am an honorary redneck.
Some people might say, “Scott, you’ve been practicing martial arts so long you have gongfu on the brain.”  It’s a possibility, I admit.  Sometimes I get excited and I start to see martial arts in everything (Richard Rorty would call it the narcissistic tendency of powerful ideas).  I can use Kungfu power to scrub the dishes.  I can use maximum muscle tendon twisting to wring-out the laundry.  I can set the table “the way a beautiful woman would do it,” (that’s an alternate name for Baguazhang seventh palm change).

But Chitresh Das, my Kathak (North Indian Classical Dance) teacher always said that Kathak had roots in the warrior tradition.  Ladies of ill repute did the same style of dance, under a different name of course, but that does not discount it’s warrior origins.  All Indian Classical dance has some version of deity invocation as well.  Kathak is done with 5 to 10 pounds of small bronze bells wrapped around the ankles and calves.  While it makes little sense from a guerrilla warfare point of view, an assembly of several thousand warriors stamping the ground with all those bells would rival the terror inducing sounds of a line of M1 tanks.  Besides, they function as armor for the lower leg and weight training.  Oh, and every movement from the warrior dances of Arjuna to the blood lusts of the Goddess Kali, to the dragon-tail pulling antics of Baby Krishna, to the flower picking of Princess Rada --can all be done with martial power and embodiment.  In fact, the stances and silk-reeling of Chen Style Taijiquan feel like kissing cousin’s to the Indian tradition I learned.

I’ve had a taste of several different styles of African and African Diaspora Dances but my actual training was in Congolese and African-Haitian Dance.  My Congolese Dance teacher, Malonga Casquelourd, learned to dance from soldiers on army bases.  Malonga’s father was a high ranking soldier in the Congolese Army and the family followed his deployments around the country.  Malonga had a fighter’s body and spirit.  Both Congolese and Haitian styles of dance have specific war/fighting training in them, but even the dances for funerals (sometimes confrontational), dances for dating/mating (also prone to challenges), and dances for work--all can be seen through my martial artist lens. The embedded fighting techniques are hidden everywhere in plain sight, they only need to be practiced as fighting, with a partner, to become functional.

Without the Redneck contribution to American tolerance, we would, as a culture, be cut off from understanding what it is to be a man who dances.  World-wide, a significant part of what it is for a man to express himself through dance is a demonstration of his ability to fight, a show of martial prowess.  (And I dare say, the same is often true for women.)

Wing Chun Kung Fu Opera

In China, the traveling theater functioned as a subversive organizing tool and a way to hide martial arts training.  It was a religious devotional act, watched by the gods (they would literally carry the statues of the gods out of the temples to watch the performances), it was sometimes a ritual exorcism too.  The theater was the source of most people's knowledge of history, and it's characters were both gods and heroic ancestors.

There are various versions of the origins of Wing Chun Kuen but no-one knows for sure as there are no written records as the legend was passed down verbally from master to student.

During the Qing Dynasty period Southern China was in turmoil and many rebellious groups hid there and concealed their true identities from the ruling Qing government. These rebellious groups where supporters of the old Ming Emperors and their descendants, and they sought to overthrow the Qing. Many of them were the survivors of the armies, trained in Shaolin Kung Ku, that were defeated by the Qing. These rebels formed Unions / Associations / Societies as a cover for there activities. One of these Associations was called Hung Fa Wei Gun. This group had a large northern element, including the Hakka people, it was these that started an Opera Troop so they could travel around the country without causing suspicion. They taught the southern people Opera and their Shaolin Kung Fu.  After a time the Qing government found out about this and closed the Association down forcibly. It was many years before the people dared to start an Opera Troop again. They eventually did and called the Association “King Fa Wei Gun”. This became a centre for Opera and Martial Arts training.  After a few years the King Fa Wei Gun purchased two Junks for the Opera troops to travel around the country.

The rest of the article is here, and there is some more here. (hat tip to Emlyn at Jianghu)

Masters of Internal Arts

Adam Hsu said in his last book that many traditional Shaolin systems have high kicks which are non-functional because they come from Chinese Opera.  In fact he calls them Opera Kicks.  Since the traditional Northern Shaolin system I learned has many different types of high Chinese Opera kick, I might be inclined to argue that they do indeed have a function.

For instance I might say that they increase the size of your martial frame, ultimately allowing for the development of superior power.  Or I could say that the great flexibility that these practice kicks develop makes all lower kicks safer.  Or I could say if you can kick high with power and control, your low kicks will have even more power and control.  Or I could say high kicks force you to use the correct muscle groups, accomplishing the same thing that other schools achieve by having students hold their legs in the air at waist level while distributing qi to all the extremities.

Yes I could make all those arguments, but I don't think they would get anywhere with someone who has decided that the traditional arts need to be repaired because they have become degraded by theatrical development.  (No one knows exactly when this degradation was supposed to have happened but somewhere between the great Han (200 BCE) and the fall of the Qing (1908)).  Their argument is actually hard to follow.  It requires that you believe there was a time in the past in which people practiced pure martial arts when in fact evidence for such an era is scanty at best.

However, I'm not going to make those arguments.  Instead I would like to argue from my own experience.  I live in a time of great peace.  In an era where wealth and hygene are taken for granted.  In my 20's I was part of a milieu which was enthralled with ideas about how to create improvisational theater and dance--developing methods and practices of mind which would enable us to adapt spontaneously to anything anyone threw at us.  That experience, urban public school, and perhaps my Jewish home style of ferocious passionate argumentation, gave me a set of skills that has made it nearly impossible for me to get in a real fight.  Believe me, it's not from lack of willingness to fight.  I spent several years under George Xu, where I was walking around seeing other people's movement in slow motion, watching their bodies for weaknesses I could exploit, the way my mom would look at a chicken before pulling off its limbs.

So here is my argument.  I've been practicing Northern Shaolin for over 30 years and I've been teaching it for 17.  I took the summer off from teaching children and I've recently started back up again.  My advanced students have already learned the lowest stances of any martial arts tradition, and most of the high kicks and airborne kicks that I teach.  But they need polishing.  I have each of them working on their own short routine this week.  I call it 3-2-1.  Three kicks, two stances held with fire in the eyes for 3-5 seconds, and one sudden unpredictable change in direction.  They can put it together anyway they want and I'll add more elements to the task next week.  At 42 years of age, I'm still doing these kinds of high kicks, like barrel turn slap the foot above your head into a sudden butterfly kick and then into a spinning double jump in the opposite direction of momentum---how is it that I am not getting injured?

I'll tell you how.  Because I'm doing taijiquan, xingyiquan and Baguazhang.  I'm doing internal arts when I do these high kicks.  Sure, it looks like Shaolin, but if it wasn't the purest internal practice I can pull off, my muscles would be ripping, my ligament falling off the bone.  It's not that it would be impossible to do this kind of practice externally at my age, it's just that the risk of injury is so high, and the healing time for even minor injuries is so long, that I couldn't possibly teach or perform.

And that's my argument.  There is more reason for a 40 to 60 year old performer to make their martial displays internal than there is for any bodyguard or officer in the military.  The incentive is just better.


It's not that I can't see the other argument.  Seeing real combat against drilled and tested troops doesn't inspire much need for cultivating qi.  But imagine an officer with 10,000 troops on the boarder for 10 years and nothing to do, because just his presence on the boarder is keeping the peace--yes I can imagine him developing internal arts.  He has to practice anyway because he might even see some action if things go badly.  But most likely he is going to end up back in his home village, perhaps  working on a farm.  There is some incentive, but it isn't a very strong one.

The same lack of strong incentive is probably true for caravan guards but I don't honestly know how this business worked.  I'd think that it was mostly a numbers game.  More guards than bandits and you're safe; fewer and you start to look like a car with "The Club" but no alarm.  A deterrent perhaps, but not enough to dissuade bandits who are pretty sure you've got treasure.

But I have no doubt that bodyguards, officers in the military, and Chinese theatrical performers-- all practiced internal martial  arts.  They all contributed something.  Each of these lifestyles would attract kinesthetic people like me, who get high on working out, playing rough, and looking for extraordinary beauty in motion.  The question I'm asking is, who of the three had the strongest incentive to develop internal martial arts?

Tell me what you think of my theory.

Okay, we didn't talk about the heath-nut contribution to internal martial arts.  Can we save that for another day?

History in Three Keys

A review of:  History in Three Keys, The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth, by Paul A. Cohen, Columbia University Press, 1997.

So I was doing a little workshop with George Xu last month and he was talking about using Spiritual Fist.  Spiritual Fist is what we might call an unconscious level of mastery.  Once all the internal and external types of integration, embodiment, differentiation and liveliness are in the right order, they are harmonized by the spirit.  That is, we experience the motivation for movement coming from outside the body.  This is called Spiritual Fist, or Shen Quan in Chinese.

So I said, "Shenquan?  Isn't that what the Boxers called themselves before the Boxer Rebellion?"

"Yes," said George, "That is what they called themselves.  True.  But all Chinese arts are called Shen at the most advanced levels."  And then after thinking for a moment (we were practicing some circular explosive movement during this conversation) he said, "The Boxer's problem was that they lacked Harmony.  Right?"

Harmony, I thought to myself, what?  Then it occurred to me and I said, "That's what they changed their name to, Yihequan, literally --One Harmony Fist."

George looked perhaps flustered for a moment, but he quickly dropped the issue and moved on to showing us another inner secret.

It was a stunning reminder that ways of knowing and understanding history often do not transcend culture and language.  I have no idea what harmony could mean in that context.  (Yihequan is sometimes translated, Fists United in Righteousness.  Did he mean they weren't righteous? enough?)

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The Boxer Rebellion of 1898-1900 was a bloody uprising in north China against native Christians and foreign missionaries and at times Ching Dynasty Troops.  They dressed in Chinese Opera costumes and claimed to be invincible to bullets.  Using swords, spears and magic, they took to burning large parts of Beijing, Tianjin and other cities.  The boxers were finally put down by foreign troops who took the opportunity to demand concessions and loot the imperial palace.

__________

Paul A. Cohen's book, History in Three Keys, has a simple enough premise which he uses to divided his book into three parts.  The first part is his best shot at what actually happened.  The facts and documents sorted in such a way as to give the most likely account of what happened.  The second part of the book is an account of what people said and thought about the event at the time.  The third part of the book is about how the memory of the events lived on and were manipulated in political debates over the next 80 years.

The first section is only 42 pages long and starts off pointing out that, most people know more details about the Boxer Uprising than they do about the Taiping rebelion, even though the scale of the Taiping Rebelion (20 Million dead over 20 years) dwarfs that of the Boxer Uprising (10's of thousands dead over a year or two), and Taiping was led by a man claiming to be the brother of Jesus Christ.  He then recommends people read Esherick's Book, The Boxer Uprising, because Esherick did such a good job of showing the local development of the Boxer Movement.  But Cohen puts together an excellent summary of the events and adds to Esherick's take details about the wider effects of the event particularly in the far north.  He also includes details on the large numbers of Chinese Christians killed by the Boxers.  The largest Christian groups in China were, ironically like the Boxers, both anti-foreiner and participants in mass possession rituals.

The second section attempts to delve into the mindset and experiences of the people who participated and witnessed the Boxer Movement.  In order to do this, my regular readers will love this! he dives into studies of African religion.  He does this, of course, as a way to gain perspective on Chinese popular religious practices of possession and trance.  (I'm feeling an African Bagua part 3 coming on!)

The entire second section is great.  He presents an enormous amount of evidence that, although the Boxer Uprising was a unique event, it's defining characteristics were far from rare.  Theatrical presentations were the most widespread form of religious activity in China.  So called Chinese Opera is a type of martial arts training.  Accounts of trance based forms of conditioning against bladed weapons are found through out the Ching Dynasty.  Possession rituals were much easier to do and more common in the north than they were in the south (which explains why Taiwan is not a good model for understanding north China).

In chapter 4 titled, Magic and Female Pollution, he explores the boxer beliefs about women and the wider exceptance of those beliefs across northern China.  For instance, when boxers actually got shot and died, or when they tried to burn down a single house they said was owned by Christians and it spread to everyone elses house too, they claimed it was because a woman contaminated the scene.  (I can see how this kind of thinking gets started, whenever I have trouble finding something like my keys or a book, I right away blame my half-wife.  I mean who else could it be, right?)

The book explores how the Boxers' were viewed by other Chinese at the time in many complex and interesting ways.  However, it is safe to say that belief in their magical powers and martial prowess was widespread.  Ideas which connect religious devotion, theatrical (Opera) characters, magic, and martial arts were not only widely held; they were the stuff daily life was made of.

The Boxers regularly attributed the casualties they suffered in fighting with foreigners in Tianjin to the latter's placement of naked women in the midst or in front of their forces, which broke the power of the Boxers' magic.  The story was also circulated and widely believed by the populace that a naked woman straddled each of the many cannon mounted in the foreign buildings in Zizhulin, making it impossible for the "gunfire-repelling magic" (bipao zhi fa) of the Boxers to work properly....

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Dirty water, as a dextroyer of magic, was unquestionably related in Boxer minds to the most powerful magic-inhibitor of all: women, and more particularly uncleanness in women, a category that, for the Boxers, included everything from menstrual or fetal blood to nakedness to pubic hair.  Water was of course a symbol of yin, the primeval female principle in China, and there was a long-held belief that the symbolic representation of yin could be used to overcome the effects of such phenomena as fire (including gunfire), which was symbolic of the male principle, yang.  Several groups of rebels in the late Ming had used women to suppress the firepower of government troops.  During the insurgency of 1774 in Shandong, Wang Lun's forces used and array of magical techniques, including strange incantations and women soldiers waving white fans, in their assault on Linqing.  the imperial defenders of the city were at first frustrated by the effectiveness of the rebels' fighting tactics.  An old soldier, however, came to the rescue with this advice: "Let a prostitute go up on the wall and take off her underclothing...we will use yin power to counter their spells."  When this proposal was carried out and proved effective, the government side adopted additional measures of a like sort, including, as later recounted by Wang Lun himself, "women wearing red clothing but naked from the waist down, bleeding and urinating in order to destroy our power."

Such magic-destroying strategies were clearly well established in Chinese minds.  The nurse who took care of the famous writer Lu Xun when he was a little boy once told him the following story about her experience with the Taiping rebels:  "When gorvernment troops came to attack the city, the Long Hairs [the Taiping] would make us take off our trousers and stand in a line on the city wall, for then the army's cannon could not be fired.  If they fired then, the cannon would burst!"

Paul A. Cohen does not appear to be a martial artist or a person with a performing background, so he doesn't go into depth with either of these.  However, he makes it clear that martial arts and theater were always part of the mix.  Here is an excerpt from an article about a famous martial artist whose martial arts family were leaders of the Boxers.  That means that in addition to being Traditional Chinese Medical Doctors, bodyguards and caravan guards, they performed magical spells to protect themselves while killing Chinese Christians, while dressed in Chinese Opera costumes, possessed by hero-gods of the theater.

Pei Xirong was born in 1913 in Raoyang county in Hebei province. His father was a core member of the Yi He Tuan [the Boxers], and his mother had also participated in the ‘Red Lantern’ movement [the female part of the Boxers movement, dealt with extensively in Cohen's book]. His uncle, Qi Dalong, was a bodyguard in the caravan agency established by Li Cunyi who guarded caravans traveling between Tianjin and Gubeikou. When the Allied Forces invaded Tianjin, he and Li Cunyi battled against the invaders at Laolongtou Train Station. He fought courageously, sustaining several wounds.

The third part of Cohen's book is also good.  (I quoted from it twice in my review of Rovere's book about xingyi in the Chinese army.)  It deals extensively with the process of internalization and self-torturous humiliation that came to produce the modern ideas about pure Martial Arts and the guoshu movement (national arts).

One reason this is personal to me is that in the period directly after the Boxer Uprising, my first teacher's teacher, Kuo Lien-ying studied and performed the roll of monkey in Chinese Opera as a teen-ager.  The character/god of monkey was one of the most common gods to possess the Boxers during battle. Kuo also competed in Leitai fights (staged on a platfrom), he could still sing Opera parts 70 years later, and he was still doing drunken monkey gongfu too. Kuo was part of the pure martial arts movement, and guoshu, and an early student of Wang Xiangzhai. He worked as a bodyguard too. And he could tie a rope dart around his chest under his coat and shake in such a way that the dart would fly out and stick into a tree. And he could tie up any of his actively resisting students with the same technique.  None of his students learned the rope dart. And the one student who learned drunken monkey no longer practices. I think we owe it to the last generation, who brought these fantastic arts to us, to try an recover as much of the full picture as we can.

The last section of Cohen's book deals with the Cultural Revolution.  It has a few interesting facts.  Probably the most prominent cultural reference to the Boxers during that time, a time when George Xu was fighting in the streets on a daily basis, was a play called Shen Quan, Spiritual Fist.

If we are ever going to have a chance of understanding what the origins of Chinese Martial arts are, we are going to have to drop the stories of purely rational martial tough guys.  There is still so much that can be recovered from these arts, because they were designed as storehouses of knowlege.  Perhaps, once upon a time, there were legitmate arguments for dicarding central aspects of the tradition, but now, that time has passed.  Nobody believes anymore that womens' underpants can protect them from bullets.  It's time to see the whole thing for what it is and what is was---a deeply religious, theatrical, health sustaining, fighting arts tradition.

More Humiliation

I just finished reading Paul A. Cohen's book, History in Three Keys, The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth.  Expect a positive review in the next week.   I mention it now because some quotes from the book are included in the review below.

I bought a copy of, The Xingyi Quan of the Chinese Army, Huang Bo Nien's Xingyi Fist and Weapon Instruction, by Dennis Rovere, with translation by Chow Hon Huen.  It's published by Blue Snake Books, Berkeley, California.  It's a waste of money.  I bought it because Dojo Rat gave it a positive review. I realize now that he gave it a positive review because he thought it might be of interest to those of us who like history.  Well--I'll be damned--I'm going to get my money's worth by having some fun reviewing it!

The book is a translation of a short manual about Xingyi training from the 1920's, supposedly used by Chang Kai-sheik's army and the KMT.  It would have been a pamphlet except that Dennis Rovere added a lot of his own useless material, explanations and pictures.  With the exception of a section on Bayonet Fighting, which we will address shortly, the original manual is nearly identical to material already published in nearly every Xingyi book.  Take for example this translation by John Groschwitz, The Xingyi Boxing Manual.  This kind of manual is meant to be memorized and contemplated, but every single detail needs to be taught and digested over years.  They all read like a teacher's lecture notes.  (That's OK, I guess, but did we need another one?)

Why was the manual published in the first place?  Dennis Rovere doesn't seem to know.  The answer is that it was a salvo in a political debate of the 1920's.  Take for instance this satirical note by Lu Xun (probably the best known intellectual of the "New Culture" movement) comparing Kungfu guys to the Boxer Uprising, published in New Youth, 1918:

Recently, there have been a fair number of people scattered about who have been energetically promoting boxing [quan].  I seem to recall this having happened once before.  But at that time the promoters were the Manchu court and high officials, where as now they are Republican educators--people occupying a quite different place in society.  I have no way of telling, as an outsider, whether their goals are the same or different.

These educators have now renamed the old methods "that the Goddess of the Ninth Heaven transmitted to the Yellow Emperor"..."the new martial arts" or "Chinese-style gymnastics" and they make young people practice them.  I've heard there are a lot of benefits to be had from them.  Two of the more important may be listed here:

(1)  They have a physical education function.  It's said that when Chinese take instruction in foreign gymnastics it isn't effective;  the only thing that works for them is native-style gymnastics (that is, boxing).  I would have thought that if one spread one's arms and legs apart and picked up a foreign bronze hammer or wooden club in one's hands, it ought probably to have some "efficacy" as far as one's muscular development was concerned.  But it turns out this isn't so!  Naturally, therefore, the only course left to them is to switch to learning such tricks as "Wu Song disengaging himself from his manacles."  No doubt this is because Chinese are different from foreigners physiologically.

(2)  They have a military function.  The Chinese know how to box; the foreigners don't know how to box.  So if one day the two meet and start fighting it goes without saying the Chinese will win.... The only thing is that nowadays people always use firearms when they fight.  Although China "had firearms too in ancient times" it doesn't have them any more.  So if the Chinese don't learn the military art of using rattan shields, how can they protect themselves against firearms?  I think--since they don't elaborate on this, this reflects "my own very limited and shallow understanding"--I think that if they keep at it with their boxing they are bound to reach a point where they become "invulnerable to firearms."  (I presume by doing exercises to benefit their internal organs?)  Boxing was tried once before--in 1900.  Unfortunately on that occasion its reputation may be considered to have suffered a decisive setback.  We'll see how it fares this time around.  (This is from p. 230-231 of Paul A. Cohen's, History in Three Keys.)

The introduction of Rovere's book claims that the famous martial artist's Sun Lutang and Wang Xiangzhai both taught for the KMT. The question however, is not who taught there, but what was being taught.  If you pick up a copy of Marrow of the Nation and read chapter 7, you'll see that the Guo Shu (national martial arts) movement was wide spread in the 20's.  No doubt xingyi was part of the curriculum.  But I've yet to see any evidence that students of the military academy actually developed into top level martial artists-- perhaps they did--but that would be beside the point.  The point being that what mattered was organization, leadership, machine gun practice, strategic thinking, etc.  Bayonet training was the one form of hand-to-hand combat training that had some significance for modern warfare.  And that training came directly from the West where it was well developed.

Quoting from History in Three Keys again:

In a letter to his sister, Pvt. Harold Kinman of the First Marine Battalion, who initially saw combat in the Philippines, then in China, and after recovering from a wound in the U.S. Naval Hospital in Yokohama, again in the Philippines, provided an American perspective on the march from Tianjin to Beijing [this of course during the Boxer Rebellion, 1900]:  "That march is imprinted on my memory that nothing can efface.  It was full of terrible experiences, short of water, and forced to march after you were almost unable to walk.  Fighting for your life every day, surrounded by Chinese Imperial troops numbering from 30,000 to 40,000 strong.  Cutting your way out at the point of a bayonet while the shot and shell were flying all around you."  On one occasion, after "putting the Chinese to utter rout," the marines watched as the crack British cavalry, composed of Sikhs, turned and fled in the face of a Chinese charge.  Appalled at the "cowardice" of the Sikhs, the Americans, according to Kinman, sprang to their feet and charged the Chinese cavalry with fixed bayonets:  "There were hundreds killed and wounded we gave no quarter nor asked for any so you see we took no prisoners we killed them all that fell into our hands.  I will now close by wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year."

Nearly half of The Xingyi Quan of the Chinese Army, is dedicated to Bayonet Fighting.  It makes the claim that Xingyi is used to teach bayonet fighting, that the techniques originally come from spear fighting.  It is obvious to anyone looking at the pictures that this is just a political claim, meant to give xenophobic cover to what was essentially a humiliating imitation of "Foreign Imperialist" training methods.  All the techniques pictured in the book can be found in any army manual, anywhere.  The book makes four claims for the uniqueness of Xingyi Bayonet training; 1) the back heel is down, 2) stick to the threat's weapon rather than knock it, 3) don't hit with the butt of the gun, 4) don't lunge.  All of these claims are obviously absurd.  Just look at the pictures I pulled off of Google Images.  They also have nothing to do with Xingyi.

Needless to say, I do not recommend the book.  I don't know what Blue Snake Books was thinking when they published it.  However, I did get a good laugh out of this bio:

Dennis Rovere is an internationally recognized expert in military, close combat and Chinese military strategy.  He is the first non-Asian to receive special recognition as a martial arts instructor from the Government of the Republic of China, and the first civilian to train with the Bodyguards Instructors' Unit of the Chinese Special Military Police (Wu Jing).  Since receiving his instructor's certification in 1974, Mr. Rovere has taught martial arts to both civilians and military units, including reconnaissance instructors and UN peacekeepers....

Them's some pretty heady credentials I've never heard of, and what is an architect from Calgary teaching those UN peacekeepers anyway?

UPDATE:  A link to this post got a whopping 36 Comments on a Forum called Rum Soaked Fist! My Youtube Videos African Bagua 1 & 2 and  Pure Internal all jumped up about 600 views in the last day.  I'll put my response to all the controversy in the comments section below, and on the forum.   Join the fray!

Boat Burning Festival

Here is a knowledgeable article from the Wall Street Journal on Boat Burning in Southern Taiwan.