Nationalist troops in a trench, Dadaos at the ready. Photo was probably taken sometime in the 1930s.

Rediscovering the Dadao: A Forgotten Legacy of the Chinese Martial Arts.

Any review of the history of the Chinese martial arts in the 20^th century will quickly suggest that these civilian art forms have, at various points, been co-opted and used to advance the aims of the state.  Both the Nationalist (GMD) “Guoshu” program and the later Communist (CCP) “Wushu” movement sought to use the martial arts to strengthen the people, improve public health and build a sense of nationalism.  However, these movements have also had a darker side.  In times of conflict both national and local leaders have used them to militarize the population, supporting paramilitary organizations and guerrilla forces.  These activities were widespread during both Second Sino-Japanese War (WWII from an American perspective) and the long running Chinese Civil War.  Some martial arts schools, such as the Foshan Hung Sing Association (which was closely aligned with the CCP during the 1920s and 1930s) continue to promote and glorify these stories today.

Nowhere is the association between the martial arts and the militarization of the population more evident than in the creation of “Dadao Teams” between the 1920s and the 1940s.  Receiving a contract to train one of these organizations on behalf of a political party, or other organization, was a major source of pride and an important form of economic patronage for civilian martial artists.  In southern China (my own geographic area of expertise) leaders in the Hung Gar, Choy Li Fut and Pakmei styles (among others) were all actively engaged in training of citizen militias which were subsequently embroiled in a number of conflicts.

It goes without saying that a truly effective militia would have to be armed with modern rifles.  However, the weapon that most captured the public’s imagination, becoming the defacto symbol of the paramilitary organization during this period, was the Dadao.  This blade caught the mood of the country for many reasons.  It harkened back to a romanticized view of the past, and it advertised the “martial skill” and attainment of the one who could wield it.  It was a visually impressive weapon and had a long association with the less pleasant aspects of Chinese law enforcement.  In fact, the Dadao was often an implement of terror.

This is the critical aspect of this weapon that is so often overlooked by modern martial artists with romantic notions about the past.  Individuals often wonder why Chinese troops were issued a cumbersome bladed weapon as late as the 1930s.  Surely this would be ineffective against Japanese machine guns and artillery?

China’s military officers were often poorly equipped and stretched to the limit, but they were not stupid.  They realized that the Dadao would have limited value on the modern battlefield.  Yet much of China’s brutal civil war revolved around capturing, controlling and projecting authority into villages and urban areas.  The Dadao proved to be an effective means of producing terror, and therefore compliance, within the civilian population.

The weapon had another advantage as well.  It could be produced very cheaply in almost any small shop or forge in the country.  China was certainly capable of producing modern weapons (though admittedly their quality was variable).  But it was still cheaper to arm the home guards, militias and second line troops with traditional weapons such as the spear and the Dadao.  These troops often receive the rudimentary training they needed from local martial artists, and while they were not effective on the battlefield, they could be a useful resource when it came to the more mundane tasks of maintaining order and dealing with traitors.  It was these two factors, the cheapness of the Dadao as a second line weapon, and the terror that it inspired as a tool of public control, that ensured the weapon’s survival well into the mid-20^th century.

Currently the Dadao is enjoying something of a revival among students of the Chinese martial artis.  The growing sense of nationalism within mainland China, and increased curiosity about history in the West, are conspiring to bring the Dadao back into the training hall after a nearly half century absence.  The recent uptick in the popularity of “realistic” weapons training also seems to be accelerating this general trend.  Further, it was so popular in the 1920s and 1930s that there are many different styles of use just waiting to be “discovered” and reconstructed.

Both practical and historical students of the Chinese martial arts might benefit from a brief description of these weapons as they actually existed and were used from the closing years of the Qing dynasty through the end of WWII.  We are also fortunate in that this period is extensively documented.  This provides us with the sorts of photographs and accounts that students of earlier periods of martial history can only wish for.  All of this makes the sudden rise and fall of the Dadao a good case study for change and adaptation within the Chinese martial arts more generally.

One could easily write a book on the Dadao and what it reveals about the evolution of the Chinese martial arts and their ever evolving relationship with society.  Clearly such a project is beyond the scope of this article.  Instead I hope to use a number of historically important pictures to suggest the basic outline of this story.  A more comprehensive treatment will have to wait for a later date.

However, there are number of outstanding issues that must be addressed before we can undertake even a brief review.  First, there is little consensus as to how to best translate “Dadao” into English.  The character used for “Da” means “big” or “large.”  “Dao” translates to “single edged knife.”  Unfortunately “Dao” does not imply anything about the length of the knife in question or its intended purpose.  A paring knife or a cavalry saber can both be referred to with this same term in Chinese.

This causes confusion when students of the Chinese martial arts speak in English with non-specialists.  They are often adamant that a Chinese military saber should be called a “knife”, which is technically correct in Chinese, but is absurd in English.  A literal translation for Dadao would be “big knife.”  Yet when talking about a weapon that might be three feet long and requires two hands to wield, such a rendering seems calculated to cause confusion.

Some martial arts teachers refer to the Dadao as the “military machete.”  While this does not attempt to be an exact translation of anything it does provide the reader with a basic visual image of what is being discussed.  The broad blade of the Dadao does (to some degree) resemble the short broad blade of a jungle machete.  It is also the sort of tool that one might expect military troops to carry.

Still, there are problems with this translation.  It implies that the Dadao might be a tool with some sort of practical application.  I suspect that this is mistaken.  I have never run across an account that indicates that these weapons were useful “camp tools” in the same way that a kukri or a machete might be.  The Dadao is a purpose-built chopper.  The blade of the machete is thin and flat to cut vegetation without resistance.  Most Dadaos have a much heavier blade with a triangular profile.  They are really only good for hacking through flesh and bone. The heft of the weapon is distinctively ax-like.

For all of these reasons I favor translating Dadao as the “military big-saber.”  This should be enough to convey that we are dealing with a single edged weapon that differs from other, more conventional sabers.  It also has the added advantage of being a somewhat popular solution to our linguistic quandary.

Our second problem has to do with the photos below.  I gathered most of these off the internet and while I have spent a couple of hours trying to figure out where they were originally published, that has not always been possible.  The circular republication of vintage material with no attribution of its ultimate origin is a problem in a lot of the Chinese language literature on the martial arts.  If any reader has firm information about the origins of an unlabeled photo, please let me know in the comments.  I am currently trying to collect this information.

Origins of the Dadao

Our first puzzle has to do with the early development and adoption of the Dadao.  While 20^th century examples of these weapons are quite common, very few examples can be reliably dated to the early Qing dynasty.  This is odd as Qing military regulations dictated that a number of these swords should be issued to every unit, but evidently they did not survive in great numbers.  Occasionally weapons turn up on the antique market with very early dates or are even attributed to the “Ming era.”  Great caution is required as few swords from the Ming period have survived at all and I don’t think I have ever seen a Military Big-Saber that dates to this period.

Still, one school of thought basically holds that the modern 20th century Dadao is a resurrection, or a re-imagination, of a classic Ming era weapon.  While similar weapons seem to have become less fashionable during the early Qing (though regulations did exist for its use in the army), stories of the Ming dynasty and the exploits of its heroes became quite popular in the 19^th century.  When republished these stories were often illustrated with copies of Ming era illustrations, or with new images of heroes dressed in Ming style cloths with antique weapons.  Their swords often featured ring shaped pommels and clip point blades.  In fact, many of the same fashion styles were preserved in both Mandarin and Cantonese theater companies so people were fairly familiar with them.

A Ming era publication that shows images of Dadao like swords. Images of these swords were probably popular in period publications because of their dramatic blades.

The end result of all of this is that the image and the lore of the Dadao was easily available for anyone seeking to resurrect the glory days of China’s martial past.  It was occasionally seen in the official military, and it was often featured in stories and popular fiction.  Further, the simple blade and ring pommel design would have been fairly easy to produce compared to the more complex dao’s of the mid-Qing.  Such swords were often favored by the various “Big Sword” militia groups that became increasingly common from the end to the Taiping Rebellion onward.  The arms of these groups carried romantic associations with the past and often included the ringed pommels.  However, they featured a wide variety of blade types from long sabers to short heavy choppers.  While the idea of the “Big Sword” was a common symbol in 19th peasant militias, I haven’t seen much evidence to indicate that they standardized on any one weapon in particular.

A second theory is that the modern Dadao actually has little to do with its ancient predecessors or weapons used by the Imperial military.  There is at least some evidence to support the assertion that a Dadao is basically an enlarged and modified farm tool.  This would hardly be the first time that a farm implement found its way onto the battlefield.  The Nepalese kukri was an agricultural tool long before it was used by the British Gurkha’s in WWI.  It might also help to explain why Chinese smiths often made the blades of the Dadao shorter than one might expect for a weapon.  They may have had some other pattern in mind when doing their work.

If you look at antique farm implements, or even wander around a traditional food market in Hong Kong or Shanghai, you will see lots of chopping knives that look like scaled down versions of a Dadao.  Often these seem to be favored by vendors selling tough skinned fruits or vegetables.  Butchers simply use the traditional cleaver.  Still, while similar in shape and function, there is a world of difference between the Dadao and a “watermelon knife.”

A third suggestion that I have seen offered is that the Qing era civilian Dadao is really a modified pole weapon.  The Chinese military traditionally employed a number of pole-mounted choppers, and the blades of these weapons resemble the basic size and profile of a Dadao.  The type of riveted handle seen on many Dadaos is also very similar to the long riveted tang that is preferred in the construction of large heavy choppers.  The handles of normal sabers or “Daos” are peaned in place, rather than riveted.

This theory may have something to it.  In antique auctions I have personally seen Dadaos constructed from much older pole mounted choppers whose shafts had been lost or broken.  This sort of recycling was pretty common on the “Rivers and Lakes” of China.  Further, for reasons that we will explore below, there are no standard measurements for what a “regulation” Dadao must be.  This is not say that various self-appointed experts did not have opinions on the matter.  They certainly did.  Yet seems that few manufactures were actually listening all that closely.  For instance, some examples being made up through the mid 20^th century continued to have very long handles.  It is not always clear whether a given weapon should be classified as a Dadao (Military Big-Saber) or Pudao (Horse Cutting Knife).

At the moment I do not feel that there is enough evidence to speak decisively on the evolution of the Dadao and its subsequent adoption by civilian martial artists.  What we do know is that the coming of the Qing Imperial army privileged the conventional saber as it could be used from horseback whereas the two handed Dadao is strictly an infantry weapon.  While the heavy chopper seems to have faded from public consciousness it never totally disappeared and it’s popularity among civilian martial artists, bandits, guards and paramilitary organizations exploded during the final decades of the 19^th century.  This resurgence in popularity was further boosted in the 1920s and 1930s.

These groups were likely attracted to the Dadao for three reasons.  First it provided a visual connection to the romanticized Ming dynasty.  Second, it was a simple weapon that could be produced practically anywhere.  Lastly, being a double handed weapon individuals who had grown up using farm tools (and that was pretty much everyone in China) could master it relatively quickly.  What it lacked in range or sophistication it made up for with its immense slashing and chopping power.

The Dadao as an Instrument of Police Control in Late Imperial and Republican China.

Modern researchers and collectors are fortunate in that we have copies of the official regulations governing weapons bought by the Qing government for the imperial armies.

While the single handed saber was clearly the preferred weapon, enough period choppers survive to attest their use in the Qing army.  These weapons came in two official varieties.  The “kuanren dadao” is a very large weapon, more on the scale of a horse knife.  The Qing-era “chuanweidao” is smaller and shows more similarities to the modern Dadao.

Period photographs give us a good visual record of how these swords were actually being used by the end of the Qing dynasty.  Not many photos of Qing era troops armed with any sort of sword at all survive from the final decades of the dynasty.  From the end of the Taiping rebellion on, all main-line Qing troops had modern rifles.  By the time of the Boxer Uprising they also had modern machine guns and artillery.  Officers continued to carry swords, but increasingly even these followed European patterns.

The one place where the Dadao really seems to have survived was in law enforcement.  Specifically, public executions and beheadings were often carried out with the dadao or some sort of similar, often very short, chopping blade.

The picture below records two executioners displaying their weapons prior to the public beheading of the perpetrators of the 1895 “Kucheng Massacre.”  This is an important photo for a number of reasons.  To begin with it has a clear provenance and is linked to specific, date, place and historical incident.

Executioners of the perpetrators of the Kucheng Massacre, 1895. USC Digital Collections.

The weapons being displayed are also quite interesting.  The gentleman on the left has what appears to be a fine Japanese Tachi.  Note that the flash from the camera has illuminated a section of active hamon at the base of the blade.  One can only wonder how this sword ended up in the arsenal of the local yamen.  It is a good reminder that the Chinese have been very interested in Japanese swords since at least the Ming.

The other executioner carries a short, heavy bladed chopper.  It has a simple guard and the handle, almost as long as the blade, is wrapped in cotton cloth (probably colored red).  The blade looks too small for its intended task, yet execution swords were often not much longer than this.

An executioner displaying a pile of heads along with his weapon. Note that the sword is a short heavy “jian” (double edged sword) rather than a Dadao. It should be remembered that executions were carried out with a variety of tools. Very often these are shorter than one would expect, but apparently that did not impede their efficiency. This particular photo probably dates to the 1920s and was published on period ephemera. It can sometimes be found on vintage postcards and stereoscope slides.

The Dadao was also seen in urban police and law enforcement units.  Chinese governments worked hard to establish modern law enforcement in the major urban areas between 1900 and 1930.  Some of these reform efforts drew on western ideas of “scientific” criminology and law enforcement, others did not.  Very often 3-4 different types of law enforcement might be operating in a major city at one time.  For instance, there might be a model western style police force under the control of one office, a group of plain cloths detectives (who were expected to be close to, or even part of, the criminal underground) who answered to a different office and lastly there were usually patrols of military police to maintain “public order” in the street.  In cities such as Shanghai the situation could be even more complex.

A Qing era police patrol. Note the mix of both modern rifles and a Dadao, used for executions.  This photo was a popular subject for reproduction and can sometimes be found on vintage postcards.

For much of the early 20^th century it was the “military police” that one would most likely see in public spaces.  Under both the Qing and Republic governments these individuals were normally regular infantry soldiers who were assigned to the task.  Often soldiers from a different part of China were chosen to be law enforcement officers as it was thought (usually incorrectly) that linguistic difficulties and regional animosities would make them less susceptible to local corruption.

These police officers would generally travel in small groups of between 4-6 individuals.  They might include an officer or a Sargent who acted as the leader, 2-3 individuals who could apprehend criminals, and an executioner.  Individuals who were caught stealing or causing disorder in the market place would be apprehended, bound and usually beheaded in the middle of the street after a very brief “trial.”

It is important to realize that early 20^th century China was a highly volatile place.  The government, whether run by the Qing, the Republic or individual Warlords, attempted to keep the population in check through what amounted to a continuing campaign of public terror.  This is how the Dadao was first seen by most of China’s citizens.  It was the living embodiment of the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence.

Nationalist soldier executing a member of the Guangzhou Commune, 1927.

Dadaos in the Republic of China and Warlord armies of the 1920s-1930s.

One cannot underestimate how strong these symbols are or how deeply engrained they become in the public psyche.  The situation in China was complicated by the fact that large parts of the nation’s leadership and population did not agree on who held actual political authority and the rights to exercise public violence that went with it.  As a result Nationalist (GMD) revolutionaries were quick to adopt the Dadao as a tool of public law and order after they succeeded the Qing.  They too employed military police and the display of the Dadao left the public in no doubt as to who could claim rightful control of the state.

An early image of an unknown group of soldiers, all armed with very long handled Dadaos. Probably 1920s.

Nor were they the only group to realize the political utility in the Dadao.  Bandit gangs and armies in the central plains and western China had long valued the Dadao for its more practical attributes.  As these gangs were gathered into the various “Warlord Armies” they took the Dadao with them.  Even though they were now armed with rifles, handguns and grenades, the Dadao remained a powerful symbol of both the personal and corporate “will to power.”

Member of a northern Warlord Army displays his Mauser handgun and Dadao. This picture probably dates to the 1920s.

A commonly republished photo showing nationalist soldiers in ranks all carrying Dadaos. Date unknown, probably 1930s.

It is worth remembering that a variety of blades were carried by Chinese troops between 1920 and 1945. Not even all “Big Sword” units were issued Dadao. This photograph shows the 8th March Army displaying a different style of double handed saber in 1933.

It was the soldiers of these western armies that would bring the Dadao to the attention of the wider world through their desperate attempts to defend the Great Wall against Japanese advances in 1933, and then the “Marco Pillar Bridge Incident” where they defeated a superior Japanese force using a Dadao charge in 1937.  In their hands the Dadao became a dual symbol to the outside world.  It represented the fact that the Chinese people were willing to fight for their own freedom (something that was often doubted in the West), but it also encapsulated and reinforced nearly a century’s worth of fears and prejudices.  The personal nature of this weapon seemed to suggest that the Chinese reveled in violence and brutality, and were still “less than civilized.”  In China public executions and the Dadao acted as a twin symbolic code for “political authority” and “legitimacy.” Unfortunately these symbols did not translate well in the more liberal west.

An American trading card from the 1938 “Horrors of War” series. This image was labeled “Chinese ‘Big Sword’ Corps Resist the Japanese.” Author’s personal collection.

The domestic situation in China was different.  If anything the importance of the Dadao as both a practical and symbolic weapon increased as the 1920s turned to the 1930s.  After the rupture with the Nationalist Party (GMD), and the subsequent outbreak of violence with the Japanese, the CCP began to form larger militia units.  These groups were expected to both fight the GMD and the Japanese, as well as to pacify and hold segments of the country side.  Once again, the Dadao was a featured weapon in their arsenal.

Other paramilitary groups, such as railway police units, were also quick to adopt the Dadao during this period.  As a matter of fact, it is among these other troops that the Dadao is most commonly encountered.  I have looked through enough photos of military units during the Republic of China period to conclude that the Dadao was actually rarely encountered among front-line infantry troops.  While there certainly were “Big Sword Teams” within the main body of the Nationalist Army, they were an exception rather than the rule.  Most often such swords are seen in the hands of special forces troops, military police, local militia, paramilitary revolutionaries and railway guards.  All of these groups were more likely to deal with the domestic population than the Japanese.

One of the most famous images of a Chinese soldier with a Dadao. Originally published as a postcard, the individual in this image is actually a railway guard.

The Dadao as a Paramilitary and Militia Weapon

Selection bias is an issue that every military historian must confront.  There are a handful of photographs and historical accounts of the Dadao’s use by Republic of China (ROC) troops which have had a disproportionate impact on how we imagine the weapon in the west today.   In reality most troops in the various ROC armies were not organized into “Big Sword Teams” and we are still talking about the “Marco Polo Bridge Incident” because such events are so rare.  In fact, the story of this supposed triumph is really a very sad tale.  If the Chinese troops had been better armed, reinforced and had more ammunition they would not have been forced to close with the Japanese and engage them with swords and bayonets in the first place.  It is hard to imagine that there were really any commanders in the war hardened Chinese army of the 1930s or 1940s that actually wanted to engage the enemy with a sword charge.

Militia and paramilitary groups were in a different situation.  These were basically local support troops.  Their job was usually to secure rear areas and maintain order in the countryside.  They were not expected to act as front-line troops.  As we have already seen, the Dadao had a long and respected relationship with “law and order.”  While the modern collectors like to focus on the “Marco Polo Bridge Incident,” the actual truth is that these swords were much more likely to be used in the commission of “police actions” or (war crimes, depending on one’s perspective) than anything else.  For that purpose they proved quite effective.

They were also favored by militias for a number of other reasons.  While Mauser rifles were cheap enough that warlord armies and criminal gangs could buy them by the crate, the same could not be said of local militia.  These small groups were often comprised of struggling farmers just trying to get enough to eat and feed their families.  Modern rifles and large stocks of ammunition were often not an option for militia groups.

Members of a local militia outside of Guangzhou assembling in the summer of 1938. Note the mix of modern and traditional weapons.  The Dadao can be seen leaning against the tree. Photo by Robert Cappa.

As a result, both spears and Dadaos tended to be frequently seen in peasant groups and revolutionary societies.  These weapons could be quickly produced by any local smith, and they often helped to augment the few modern rifles that were laying around the village.  In this sort of landscape the Dadao was still a very effective weapon.  The Dadao also had a certain cache in peasant circles as it harkened back to the “Big-Sword” militias of the 19th century and the vast body of folklore that surrounds them.

A local militia armed with spears outside of Guangzhou, 1938.  Photo by Robert Cappa.

Swords were also favored by the martial arts teachers who often served as instructors of militia groups or other civilian paramilitary organizations.  Most Chinese martial arts had sword forms in their repertoire and these could be simplified to fit the Dadao.  Further, as a two handed chopping weapon it was not totally unfamiliar to the peasant troops who were asked to use it.

In southern China Cheung Lai Chuen, the founder of Pakmei (White Eyebrow) gained local fame by training a civilian “Big Sword Team” at the local Guoshu Institute in Guangdong during the 1930s.  Of course Cheung was closely allied with the GMD.  The leaders of the Foshan Hung Sing Association (formally closed by the Nationalists in 1927) returned to the area from Hong Kong in the late 1930s to train a Communist militia force.

If anything the Dadao was even more popular with martial artists in the north.  In 1933 Yin Yu Zhan (an important Bagua teacher, his name is also rendered Jin En-Zhong) published a manual titled Slashing Saber Practice (Shi yong Da Dao Shu).  This work is interesting because it not only discusses practical techniques for using the Dadao that may date to the late 19^th century, but because the author takes the time to briefly discuss the role of the Dadao in recent Chinese military history.  He notes a number of battles in the first Sino-Japanese war (1894-1895)  in which this weapon was used effectively, and claims that when properly understood it still had a place on China’s modern battlefield.

Yin Yu Zhan. Illustration from Slashing Saber Practice, 1933. Kennedy and Guo provide a detailed discussion of his publications in their volume, Chinese Martial Arts Training Manuals, 2005.  According to Yin Yu Zhan the ideal Dadao is 35 inches long and 3.5 pounds.

In the hands of teachers like Cheung Lai Chuen and Yin Yu Zhan the image of the Dadao was transformed once again.  More specifically, it was democratized.  What had once been a sign of state authority was devolved to the individual citizen who, through training and hard work, could now “defend the nation.”

For martial artists the Dadao and the bayonet became very visible symbols of the place of traditional hand combat in the modern world.  They were concrete reminders that could be pointed to every time the “May 4^th Reformers” began to complain about how there was no place for an activity as “backwards” and “superstitious” as boxing in modern China.  Not only could the martial arts still exist, they were desperately needed by both the state and local government as they attempted to raise militias and paramilitary groups.

William Acevedo was kind enough to send me a copy of this picture where the banner being held in the foreground is now legible. Thanks so much! “Guangdong Province Women Teachers sends the 29th Army relief goods.” Thanks goes to my brother Sam in HK for a quick translation.

Members of an all-female militia armed with Dadaos.  I am currently looking for any information about the date or origin of this photo.  Please contact me if you know where the original was published.

This democratization of violence extended beyond just weaponry.  During the 1920s women started to make great strides towards equality in modern Chinese life.  Nowhere was this more evident than in the Jingwu Society, a national martial arts organization from Shanghai that accepted female members on equal terms.  The later state sponsored Guoshu movement also promoted female martial artists, though more grudgingly.

In the 1930s all female militia groups and paramilitary auxiliaries were created.  These women often received some rudimentary training and were occasionally armed with the venerable Dadao.  It was not practical to arm them with rifles, and machine pistols were often too valuable.   For auxiliary organizations serving in rear areas, the Dadao once again proved to be the perfect weapon.

It is also interesting to note how seriously many of these women took their training and arms.  Many decades after the end of hostilities, civilian descendants of some of these original militia groups still practice with the Dadao in Taiwan.  This is a fascinating artifact of the weapon’s rich association with Chinese life in the mid-20^th century.

Women holding Dadaos.  William Acevedo has informed me that they may have raised the money to pay for a shipment of weapons are are posing with some of the swords in the above picture prior to their donation.  If anyone else has more information of this photo (or a better copy of it) I would like to hear from you.

Here are the same four women with officers from the 29th army. Note the soldier in the left side of the picture holding a Dadao at attention. Source: William Acevedo. This photo is part of the memorial at Xifengkou, ca. 1933.

Collecting Antique and Vintage Dadaos

The last section of this article addresses the Dadao as a physical object.  As a general rule antique Chinese swords are difficult to collect.  Authentic examples are rarely exported from China (which strictly controls the trade in antiques) and the few that are for sale in the west often sell for thousands of dollars.  Many of the swords that are for sale out of China are either partial or complete fakes.  While other countries may have a “cottage industry” in the production of doctored weaponry, the Chinese antique market mass produces fakes on an almost mind-boggling scale.  If you go to eBay and type in “antique Chinese sword” almost everything you see from China (maybe 98%) will be a fake.

As a result, most students of Chinese martial studies and the Chinese martial arts have never actually held a genuine example of the weapons that they write about or train to use.  This is a less than satisfactory situation.  I strongly believe that a familiarity with actual historic weapons is a needed antidote to many of the myths that are commonly circulated in both historic and practical circles.

Dadaos are interesting in this regard as they occasionally appear on the antique market at reasonable prices.  They are not antiques and can be exported from China.  Hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of these weapons were made during the 20^th century, making them quite a bit more common than Qing-era regulation sabers.

Fakes, often of poor quality, are still a problem.  This is ironic as occasionally one can buy an authentic Dadao for less than a fake copy.  If you are thinking about buying a Dadao do your research.  Visit electronic forums with a community of experienced collectors and familiarize yourself with vendors who sell legitimate artifacts.  And remember, everyone in the collecting world gets burned at least once.

Two mid-20th century Dadaos from the author’s personal collection. Photo Credit: Tara Judkins.

Pictured above are two examples of Military Big-Sabers from my own collection.  One of these swords was bought from an antique dealer in the US and the other from a trusted source in China.  It is evident from the degree of corrosion on the blades that both date back to at least the mid-20^th century, but it is impossible to say too much more.  So many different swords were made by so many different shops that it is nearly impossible to guess at the origin of a blade from its style.

While almost identical in length this pair of swords nicely illustrates the immense variability that one sees in the military Dadao.

Top

• Total Length:              79 cm
• Blade Length:             53 cm
• Handle:                       20 cm
• Blade Depth:               7 cm
• Width at Spine:           7 mm
• Weight:                       1210 grams
• Point of Balance:        20 cm ahead of the base of the blade.

Bottom

• Total Length:              79 cm
• Blade Length:             56 cm
• Handle:                       16 cm
• Blade Depth:               6 cm
• Width at Spine:           7 mm
• Weight:                       938 grams
• Point of Balance:        14 cm ahead of the base of the blade.

Both blades are identical in length, but the similarities end there.  The top Dadao is a heavy chopper.  The blade has a thick spine that does not taper as it approaches the tip.  The blade also has a simple straight ground v-shaped profile.  As a result the weapon feels heavy in the hands and it wants to fall forward when swung.  It takes two hands to wield this Dadao, which feels as much like an ax as anything else.

At one point in time the weapon probably had a simple sheet-metal guard which has since been damaged and removed.  Likewise it would have been issued with a wood handle held in place with two rivets.  The handle slabs have subsequently rotted away, which is common on vintage Dadaos (examples with good condition handles are rare and command a premium).  When new the hilt was likely wrapped with a cotton cord to improve the grip.

The bottom sword is a much more refined weapon.  While the same length it weighs less and is better balanced.  The blade is longer than the preceding example, but the width of the spine tapers dramatically after the first half of the blade.  This is a standard sword forging technique and it greatly improves the feel of the blade.  The blade is also slightly narrower and can easily be used with a single hand.  In fact, that is what any skilled swordsman would prefer to do.  However, the handle is still long enough to get a second hand on it for difficult cuts.

Some modern sources go to great lengths to disparage the quality of the Dadao.  The Nationalist Party did have trouble producing quality weapons, and the Communists gorillas forces were basically forced to use whatever they could get.  It would appear that this general reputation for shoddy construction has worn off on the Dadao as well.

Kennedy and Guo, in an otherwise good article on the Dadao in the Republic of China Army, characterize the physical construction of the Dadao as being too short, too light and too shoddy to strike fear into the heart of an enemy (“Bridges and Big Knives.” In Classical Fighting Arts Vol. 2 No. 14. pp. 55-60).  I have studied the Dadao for a number of years now and have handled dozens of examples, and I must say that I respectfully disagree with their overall assessment of this weapon.

“Chinese armies and railway men tore up their railways to prevent the Japanese from using them. Then the railway men carried away the steel rails and girders and welded them into big swords for soldiers and guerrillas to fight the enemy. This is a Chinese railway worker, member of a group of 60 railway workers who banded together to form a cooperative. They use blacksmith forges and bellows to melt and weld the steel rails, then hammer them into swords for use against the enemy.”
Late 1930s
Photographer: Agnes Smedley
Agnes Smedley Collection
Volume 38, MSS 122

While nowhere near the quality of a fine Katana, the average Dadao is very study.  Most of them appear to have been made to same standard as a robust piece of farming equipment.  That is not much of a surprise when you think about where most of these things were actually made or who used them.

Like any other tool, the Dadao was expected to be used in the field, day after day, and not break.  If that is your measure of “quality,” then the Dadao does quite well.  Especially when we remember that the Katana is a delicate weapon that requires a finely trained hand.  During WWII they did fail under battle field conditions, rather frequently.  While not elegant, the Dadao is clearly the more robust weapon.  When supplying a peasant army that toughness counts for a lot.

It is certainly true that some non heat-treated Dadaos, cut directly from thin sheet steel, exist.  Some have even ended up in museums (one of which was photographed by Kennedy and Guo).  In my experience these are the exception rather than the rule.  In fact, I suspect that many of these lighter weapons were actually produced for martial artists in the 1950s and 1960s when there was a general move towards more flexible, low quality blades.

The average Dadao from the 1920s-1940s had a heavy blade with a V-shaped profile that descends from a thick spine.  The body of the blade is usually mono-steel, though finely laminated examples do turn up.  I suspect that they are not more common only because no one bothers to polish and etch these swords.

Almost all period Dadaos that I have encountered have a high carbon steel edge inserted into the blade during the forging process and are differentially heat treated.   This may seem like an unexpected luxury on such a utilitarian object, but it was actually the standard way that all knives, and even scissors, were being produced in China by the 1930s.  That same very basic technology seems to have applied to the Dadao as well.

Clearly not everyone who produced Dadao’s was a trained blade-smith.  I rather suspect that most of these weapons were made by blacksmiths or in local machine shops.  As a result, some examples (like the one on top) lack details that you would expect to see on a sword blade.  Still, for a two handed chopper what they produced was more than sufficient.  If anything the top blade in the photo above is over-built.  It appears to embody the same construction ethos as an armored tank.  The weapon on the bottom is much more refined and it was probably made by someone who understood the art of sword construction.

Genuine Dadao’s are rarely elegant weapons.  Their proportions are never perfect, and many look as though they were carved from a block of steel with a dull chisel.  They came in many shapes and sizes.  Some had wood handles, others were bound only in cloth.  Most were issued without scabbards and were slung across the back with a length of cord.  A few others had nicely constructed leather coverings.  Many were issued in dull colors, but some sported eye-catching red handle wraps and flowing scarves.  All of this reflects the wide assortment of regular and paramilitary forces that employed these weapons for almost half a century.  This variety is one of the things that makes the Dadao such an interesting subject of study.

Modern martial artists may be more interested in the high quality reproductions of these weapons that are currently for sale.  Hanwei, Cold Steel and Kris Cutlery (among others) all offer their own versions of the Dadao that no doubt surpass the originals in terms of quality control and steel strength.  These blades, rather than vintage examples, should be the first choice for anyone interested in doing cutting or forms practice with a realistically weight weapon.  Obviously caution, common sense and formal training are the key to doing either activity safely.

Lastly, if you are interested in learning more about historical Dadao techniques, Yin Yu Zhan’s 1933 manual has been translated and republished by a group of historical fighting enthusiasts in Singapore.  You can find it here.

While only one example of the sorts of techniques that were popular in the 1930s, I think that this project serves as a model for future research.  Hopefully students of other styles will investigate and revive their own 20^thcentury Dadao fighting styles.  This weapon still has much to teach us about the modern history of the Chinese martial arts.

Undated photograph of a Chinese soldier and his Dadao.

Conclusion: The Dadao and the Creation of Citizen Soldiers in 20th Century China

The Dadao is one of the most iconic images to emerge from China during the first half of the 20th century.  It is strongly associated with the ideas of both “resistance” and “social order.”  It became a favorite weapon of martial artists, elite troops and local paramilitary organizations.  Far from being an anachronism, it actually seems to have embodied the spirit of the age.  Artists, poets and propagandists all found meaning in this simple weapon.

A public monument dedicated to Chinese soldiers who resisted the Japanese advance.

That meaning was not static.  It changed and evolved.  Civilian martial artists played a critical role in this process.  At the end of the Qing dynasty, the Dadao was a somewhat obscure infantry weapon in a rapidly modernizing army.  In the hands of law enforcement officers it became an instrument of “official terror” and a reminder of where authority and legitimacy in China’s rapidly changing landscape actually resided.  In this setting the Dadao represented the claims of centralized authority.  As a constantly displayed reminder of the vagaries of “official justice” it was feared as much as it was respected.
These claims did not go uncontested.  Warlord armies and bandit groups also made use of the Dadao.  However, it was the creation of numerous paramilitary groups and militias in the 1930s and 1940s that cemented the Dadao’s relationship with the modern Chinese martial arts and its place in the public imagination.

Martial arts instructors across China found that there was once again a practical demand for their services.  The Dadao could be produced locally and was easily adopted by a large number of different fighting styles.  In the hands of China’s martial artists this sword was transformed from an instrument of “official terror” to a symbol of community and personal empowerment.  The public image of this weapon was democratized in ways that are hard to imagine.  In fact, the images that these individuals created in the 1930s and the 1940s still effect how we think about the Chinese martial arts today.  While this has only been a brief introduction to the social history of the Dadao, I hope that it will inspire some of you to go out and research the subject more thoroughly.

Japanese soldiers carrying a trophy sword in Manchuria, 1932.

A studio image of two Chinese soldiers (local braves) produced probably in Hong Kong during the 1850s. Note the hudiedao (butterfly swords) carried by both individuals.  The individual on the right seems to be carrying a single sword crafted in the style of a hudiedao, while the one on the left a true set of double swords. Unknown Photographer.

Introduction:  The Butterfly Swords and Southern Martial Arts Defend the Nation

I recently ran across two photographs that I think students of the southern Chinese martial arts may find very enlightening.  They speak to interesting tactical and cultural questions.  On the one hand they provide a record of how individuals fought and the specific weapons that they used.  But on a deeper level they reveal subtle cultural trends that were effecting the martial arts of Guangdong during the 1920s and 1930s, a key period in their evolution and development.

The martial arts have long been associated with military training and local defense.  These links, however, are more complex than they first appear.  From at least the time of the Song dynasty officials were able to make an increasingly clear distinction between the martial arts as a social practice (predominantly carried out by civilians) and actual military skills (as practiced by soldiers).  The two areas were seen as clearly distinct, if still related, fields of studies.  One might lead to a career in the other, or it could lead to a number of other things.

And that was the problem.  Many of the activities of martial artists tended to be less than savory.  During the Ming and Qing dynasty opera and other street performers were often associated with the martial arts.  These rootless individuals were looked down on by most elements of society.  Other martial artists got jobs as military escorts or guards for local businessmen or property owners.  The state was not always enthusiastic about the creation of independent pockets of military power controlled by these sorts of free agents.  Finally, a disproportionate number of martial artists seem to have run afoul of the law and ended up as bandits or pirates.

Surely some of the accounts of the associations between martial arts schools and criminal organizations are exaggerations, but there is a disturbing grain of truth behind many of these stories that needs to be acknowledged if one really wants to understand the place of the martial arts in Chinese society.  This reputation for links to the criminal underground was one of the main sources of tension between martial artists and mainstream society in Hong Kong during the 1970s and 1980s.  I have recently heard some disturbing reports that the same sort of reputation is starting to reemerge in the current era as more Chinese parents are actively discouraging their children from taking up the traditional arts.

Robert J. Anotony discusses one of the common strategies employed to deal with the problem of wayward tough kids (often with some training in boxing and weapons) in his monograph Like Froth Floating on the Sea: the World of Pirates and Seafarers in Late Imperial South China.  When the piracy or banditry problems flared up in Guangdong one of the first things that the local government often did was to start hiring “braves” (basically independent mercenaries) to stiffen the local regiments and to organizing village, clan and gentry led militia units.

This was not an entirely new strategy, though the south did tend to embrace it with a particular enthusiasm.  During the 1510 Rebellion a Confucian statesman named Yang Yiqing (1454-1530) proposed a strategy for containing the spread of the violence by actively absorbing into the state as many under-employed young men with military training as was financially possible.  He petitioned the throne to authorize the Minister of War to hire civilian volunteers for limited terms of service (most of the Ming army was hereditary at that point) and to institute a special set of military exams that would select civilians who possessed great strength, archery skills, the ability to ride, and martial artists who specialized in the pole, spear, sword, chain or unarmed boxing as well as those who had studied military texts.  These individuals were to be recruited on generous terms, payed and equipped well, and given low-level leadership posts, such as being named a “military trainer.”  The suggestion of Yang and others were accepted and this strategy became a common practice for dealing with security concerns during both the Ming and Qing (David Robinson, Bandits, Eunuchs and the Son of Heaven, pp. 84-85).

Both Robinson and Antony point out that there is one critical element of Yang’s plan at is often missed by modern readers.  Rather than just bolstering local defense, Yang was really attempting to engage in direct economic competition with local bandits chieftains, rebels leaders or invaders who might also wish to employ the services of these same young men.  Creating extensive militias in times of crisis not only gave the state a valuable source of reserve troops, but it also made the situation less volatile by controlling a large and unpredictable set of actors.

It is critical to understand this so that we can really grasp the full relationship between martial arts training and militia service in southern China during the Qing dynasty.  From at least the Ming period on both the state and society were making increasingly clear distinctions between the martial arts as a civilian social institution (which was sometimes implicated in low level violence) and the actual business of warfare (which involved rifles, cannons, fortifications and massed cavalry charges).

Yes knowing some boxing could be an asset to military training.  Knowing pole or spear fighting would be even better.  But martial artists were intentionally sought out for recruitment into militias in large part because of their social marginality.  This was a crowd that was overwhelming young, it worked cheap and local leaders were worried about what they might do if left to their own devices.  Putting them to work for the duration of the crisis seemed to be a good idea.

This brings us to our first picture.  This photograph probably dates from the 1850s.  The photographer or circumstances of its creation are unknown.  It was probably taken in Hong Kong some time after the First Opium War (and likely after the Red Turban Revolt), but prior to the Second Opium War.

The two “soldiers” in the photograph look to be teenagers.  I suspect a disproportionate percentage of local militia recruits during both the Ming and Qing were likely very young adults.  There certainly seems to be some demographic issues at play here that need to be more fully explored in a future post.

Obviously this photograph was taken in a staged studio setting.  Still, the uniforms, helmets and weapons are very real.  The models look to be quite real as well.  While a recreation, this is probably the most accurate and detailed representation of mid 19^th century Cantonese militia members that I have ever seen.

Both boys are wearing a rough uniform that includes a dark tunic, shoes, a helmet and a label which reads “zhuàng yǒng.”  Translated literally these characters mean “strong and courageous,” but a more colloquial reading might be “valiant” or “brave.”  The uniforms, standardized weapons and the labels suggest that these individuals are mercenary martial artists, usually referred to in the historical literature simply as “braves,” who were so common in this period.  Its interesting to note that both of these individuals have been issued hudiedao as part of their “official” gear.  One individual carries this weapon as a sidearm accompanying his rifle, while in the other case they are the primary arms.  This matches quite closely the written descriptions of civilian troops from the period which we previously reviewed here.

We can now compare this photograph with another image of a militia unit.  This image clearly shows a local village militia group somewhere outside of Guangzhou.  Maybe it would be better thought of as a martial arts class that has been dressed and used as a militia.  These “soldiers” appear to be shockingly young.

A local village militia group outside of Guangzhou, probably in the mid. 1850s. Source http:\\www.swordsantiqueweapons.com.

This village militia does not seem to have the same level of economic support as the “braves” hired in the major urban areas.  Most of the soldiers are without shoes, they have no semblance of uniforms, and their weapons vary greatly.  However, it is interesting to note that the leader of this group is clearly carrying a set of hudiedao (butterfly swords), and other photographs in this series suggest that the individuals with the shields are as well.

These two photographs represent two different elements of the late Qing militia strategy.  The first set of soldiers are likely youths from a city (sometimes referred to as “urban toughs” by local officials) who were likely involved in boxing and were recruited into military service directly by officers of the state.  The second photo shows a much more organic group.  These youths were likely part of a crop-watching society or martial arts class in a small village.  There is a very good chance that most of these kids are related to each other (either as siblings or cousins).  During a time of crisis a local landlord or degree holder would recruit multiple groups such as this, and organize them into a fighting unit.  This force would be supplied and coordinated through the gentry led militia system.  The standardized helmets and shields (as well as the presence of some rudimentary firearms and hudiedao) would seem to indicate that this organization had already happened, but there is no sign of the larger military or social structure that this unit is supposed to be embedded in.

Guangdong Militias of the 1930s and 1940s.

The martial arts continued to be associated with the formation of militias and the defense of local communities in the 1930s.  While hand combat was quickly disappearing from the battlefield, these skills remained an important part of the repertoire of local militia men.

In fact, there is a notable change on this front from the pattern that we just reviewed 100 years previously.  In that case the government was free to recruit martial artists in large numbers.  They did so both to bolster the number of fighting troops at their disposal, but also as a means of temporarily strengthening their control over local society at a potentially sensitive and volatile time.

During the 1930s and 1940s most residents of urban areas had no martial arts training.  It appears that many of these individuals were first introduced to the martial arts when they joined a local militia group, or “Big Sword” (Dadao) training class to help to defend the nation.  The Nationalist Party consciously used the martial arts (regulated though their Guoshu program) as a means of strengthening the people, both physically and psychologically.

In the countryside these steps were less necessary.  Farmers still had to form crop-watching societies, bandits still plagued the roads and the martial arts were a popular pastime in a number of agricultural communities.  In short, the situation for many of the province’s rural martial artists was not markedly different in 1940 than it had been in 1840.  The greatest difference between the time periods would be the sudden increase in urban middle class martial artists that started to be seen in the 1920s.  Yet most people still lived in the countryside, and there life went on pretty much the same as always.

As such you might guess that the sorts of militias, technologies and weapons used would be pretty similar.  This turns out to be only partially true.  It is still the case that most peasants could not afford to buy a rifle, but the rifles that were seen in the 1940s were overwhelmingly bolt action designs.  While their state of repair might be variable, they were actually broadly comparable to what the average Japanese infantryman might carry.

Those members of the militia and rebel groups that could not be armed with guns still carried traditional weapons.  The following two photographs are very instructive in this regard.  The first of these was part of a series of images of a rural militia group organizing outside of Guangzhou in 1938 taken by Robert Cappa.  Other images in the same series can be seen here.

Member of a local militia outside of Guangzhou, 1938. Source: Vintage war photography by Robert Capa.

I quite like this image for a variety of reasons.  First and foremost it is simply an excellent photo that humanizes its subject.  That is something that many early western photographers of China utterly failed to do.  It seems that they took their task to be the illustration of “difference” rather than an exploration of our shared humanity.

On a more mundane level this photograph also offers one of the most detailed studies of actual spears from the 1940s that one is likely to ever see.  The nature and construction of the spearhead is clearly visible.  Again, some individuals in this unit are armed with rifles, and the others carried spears.

For all of their actual practicality, spears are not the weapon that most people associate with the patriotic martial artists of WWII.  That honor would go to the “Dadao” or the “Military Big-Saber.”  These large two handed swords are the most iconic weapon to emerge from China during the early 20^th century.  I discussed the origins and social history of these blades here.

While a few regular units were issued this weapon and organized into “Big Sword Teams,” its important to remember that the vast majority of the regular KMT army was armed just like any other modern military of the time.  They were issued bolt action rifles, semi-automatic handguns, grenades and sub-machine guns.  I have spent quite a bit of time searching old books and photo archives for good images of soldiers with dadaos in the field (as opposed to in a photography studio or on a parade ground), and I can tell you that such images are rarer than one might think.  They certainly exist, but finding good shots is a challenge.

Most of the individuals who were issued these weapons were in fact second line troops such as militias, rural guerrilla groups, military police units and railway guards.  Issuing traditional arms to these groups freed up more advanced weapons for those soldiers actually fighting the Japanese.  Further, these groups actually spent the majority of their time securing villages, protecting fixed assets and dealing with Chinese civilians.  In those settings a dadao was both very intimidating and very effective.

Again, this is not to say that there were not a few important battlefield clashes where dadao were used, but those instances are remembered precisely because they were the exception rather than the rule.  For the regular army the dadao seems to have functioned as a moral boosting weapon.  Those individuals who actually used it in anger tended to be concentrated in guerrilla and militia units.

A Chinese guerrilla team armed with rifles and dadaos near Guangzhou in 1941. Source: Vintage War photograph, Everett Collection.

The preceding photograph was taken of a group of Chinese guerrillas who were actively resisting the Japanese outside of Guangzhou in 1941.  I have not been able to figure out who the original photographer was (though I have a couple of guesses).  The individuals in the image are dressed in the almost universal garb of insurgents in Asia and are armed with a variety of weapons including modern and older firearms, and dadaos.

A number of interesting features of these blades are visible.  To begin with both of the blades in the foreground have holes in the back of the spine near the tip of the blade.  On civilian swords these often contain a brass or metal ring.  In the current case I suspect the hole is meant to hold a cord or a sling so that the sword can be worn across the back.  Note that neither sword appears to have come with a scabbard.

The sword on the right also shows an intricately wrapped handle.  This contrasts markedly with the sword on the left.  While the blades appear to be absolutely identical, its handle has a plain cord wrap.  Given the humid wet conditions of southern China, period handle wraps in good condition are rare.  This photo yields some interesting evidence as to what these swords looked like and how they were used in the early 1940s.

On a deeper level it is interesting to ask why these troops are armed with dadaos at all.  At first glance this seems to be a very “traditional” weapon inherited from the ancient past.  Yet that is mostly an illusion.  While militia forces from the area traditionally did use a variety of different types of swords, the dadao was not one of them.  There are no accounts of troops using these sorts of swords against the British in Guangzhou in the 1840s.  At that time chopping weapons were common but they were always mounted on longer poles (pu dao) giving the wielder the advantage of leverage, speed and reach.

Instead the hudiedao seems to have been the favored sidearm of martial artists and militia members in the region for much of the 19^th century.  During the 1840s and 1850s the government purchased huge numbers of these arms and trained thousands of people in their use.  Double swords really were an “official” weapon of local government backed paramilitary groups.

That may seem odd from a modern perspective.  We tend to treat butterfly swords as a highly exotic “Kung Fu” weapon.  They are regarded with an aura of supernal mystery.  But the truth is that if you already know how to box, its not that hard to give someone the rudimentary training they might need to use this weapon effectively.  Additionally the hudiedao were small enough to be treated as a sidearm that would not get in the way of a bow, rifle or spear (the primary arms of most local troops).  Given that the militias of the 19^th century were actively recruiting martial artists and boxers, issuing hudiedao made a lot of sense.

By the 1930s this weapon had vanished from the battlefield.  Southern martial artists still practiced with it, and criminals occasionally employed it on the streets for their own nefarious reasons.  However I have never seen any indication that militia groups in Guangdong continued to use this familiar local weapon.  Instead most of them seem to have issued the dadao, a fundamentally different two handed saber from the north, as the predominant sidearm.

It would not be too difficult to teach most peasants to use a dadao as they all used two-handed tools in their daily lives.  Then again, many of these same peasants were already martial artists, swords were common, and very few individuals in southern China used double handed blades.  Introducing a totally new type of bladed weapon seems to be a needless complication.

Nor am I really convinced that the dadao was adopted simply because it could be made “cheaply and easily by anyone.”  Cheaply perhaps.  But given how heavy and clunky some of the dadao are that I have handled, their production must not have been all that “easy” for some facilities.  If the provincial government could produce somewhere between 3,000 and 10,000 hudiedao in the year 1838-1839, I am not sure why the much more efficient and industrial government of 1937 would not have been able to do the same thing.

Far from being a “traditional weapon,” the dadao is really better thought of as a new invention in the 1920s and 1930s.  While swords of this type had existed in the past they had never been issued on such a massive, near universal, scale.  Nor had they ever been asked to do so much.  The dadao succeeded not only because of its low price, but also because it reminded individuals of a mythic time in the past when the country was unified and strong.  Specifically, it reminded them of the Ming dynasty, when China had defeated the Japanese twice.

The dadao became a successful national icon only after it was imbued with these meanings.  It was adopted into the universalizing and modernizing vision of the Central Guoshu Institute and from there it was exported to southern China precisely because it spread these norms and identities.  Any sword could do what the dadao did in purely physical terms.  Many probably could have done it better.  Yet the image of the guerrilla savagely resisting the Japanese with his trusty dadao became a touchstone in the national discussion of resistance and identity.  And that is precisely what the martial arts were supposed to do under the guidance of the Central Guoshu Institute.  They were supposed to strengthen and unify the people.

Conclusion: A Complicating Twist

Can we then conclude that the dadao is an example of the export of a northern martial art and set of concepts into the southern hand combat marketplace?  Does its presence, popularity and wide scale adoption in Guangdong indicate a broader acceptance of, and standardization on, the northern martial arts in the 1930s?  Did this indicate that the traditional southern arts were seriously damaged by the various northern led reform movements that swept through the nation’s martial arts in the 1920s and 1930s?

Not necessarily.  It is true that the residents of southern China signed up for “Big Sword” classes with as much enthusiasm as anyone else.  But the entrepreneurial martial arts teachers of the south treated this new weapon as a way of drumming up interest in the martial arts more generally.  I have never seen anything to indicate that they viewed it as a threat or resisted its importation.  In fact, southern hand combat teachers were some of biggest material beneficiaries of the creation of Big Sword units and militias throughout the region.

Various police and military academies had to hire local martial arts instructors to teach dadao classes.  Very often these same schools had full time martial artists from the north, but these individuals were already quite busy teaching the “official” military, police or Guoshu curriculum.  The inclusion of additional material was thus an economic windfall for well connected local martial artists who competed for these side-jobs.  Not only did they come with a government backed paycheck, but they were an important way of networking and connecting with students from other parts of society.  One could even use these sorts of appointments to forge connections with various police and military officials, as was demonstrated by Cheung Lai Chuen, the creator of modern White Eyebrow, during his stint as a “Big Sword” instructor.

These teachers turned to their own stores of local knowledge to develop their own curriculum and style for “Big Sword” instruction.  Just as the physical details of these swords tend to differ from specimen to specimen, so to did the techniques and forms developed by different local matters.  For instance, in the south instructors from Choy Li Fut, Hung Gar and White Eyebrow all developed their own dadao techniques and trained their own students.  Presumably each of these styles drew on the martial insight of their respective styles.

The move from the hudiedao to the dadao in the Guangdong militia is interesting as it demonstrates the limits of what the Central Guoshu Institute could really accomplish in terms of promoting a modern universal standard of practice based on the northern martial arts.  Even in areas of the country where they were represented and could openly operate (mostly the coastal urban zone), their actual presence on the ground was pretty thin.  While they were able to craft a discourse and create the demand for certain types of knowledge and services, as often as not it was local martial artists who provided the actual training.  This was especially true when it came to the vital task of drilling militia and paramilitary groups.  On the surface it appears that the adoption of the dadao by China’s martial artists in the 1930s was a universal phenomenon.  But if you scratch beneath the surface it becomes apparent that even this trend was really reinforcing the local and the particular.

Kung Fu Tea was recently interviewed on the Hiyaa Martial Arts Podcast.

A Guest Appearance for Kung Fu Tea

I recently had an opportunity to sit down and talk with Craig Kiessling and Dave Jones.  These two gentlemen are the hosts of the “Hiyaa Martial Arts Podcast.”  They graciously invited me to do an interview for their show discussing “Kung Fu Tea” and the current state of Chinese martial studies.  It looks like the post-production work is finished and the final product is ready for your listening pleasure.  Head on over and check it out!

The interview turned out to be quite far reaching.  We touched on a number of topics including (but not limited to) origin myths, the dadao, my recent post looking at hand combat styles as “brands,” the importance of researching Republic era boxing history and the current state of the academic study of the Chinese martial arts.  We also spent quite a bit of time discussing how this academic body of knowledge intersects with the more traditional training hall experience.

Craig and Dave were both great to work with.  I thought they asked some good, very thoughtful, questions.  You will want to check out a number of their other programs as well.  They produce a great product and have interviewed many interesting and important people.  Their catalog of past shows contains a lot of information that students of the Chinese martial arts will like.  I know that since discovering them I have spent more than one afternoon listening to my headphones when I should have been typing.  I suspect that some of my readers will as well.

oOo

The Hiyaa Podcast team in their Atlanta, GA studio location. This is where the magic happens!

Two individuals with dadao posing for a photograph in the 1940s. Source: Original image. Photographer Unknown. Author’s Private Collection.

Introduction

It is dangerous to make sweeping statements about the development of the traditional Chinese martial arts during the early 20^th century.  This was an important period for the hand combat community.  Between 1900 and 1949 the complex of behaviors and beliefs that we current think of as the “Chinese martial arts” were reshaped and repackaged in fundamental ways.

Much of this had to do with efforts to make the traditional fighting styles more attractive as a leisure activity for the growing urban middle class.  Period discussions and even government propaganda usually casts these efforts as an attempt to improve the physical and spiritual “health of the nation.”  These reforms are often seen as an attempt to recast the Chinese people in a mold similar to what the Japanese had created with Budo.

Still, one must be careful not to take this rhetoric too seriously.  Most of the major martial reform efforts (including both Jingwu and later Guoshu) were never even accessible to the vast majority of Chinese citizens living outside the key coastal cities.  There were other, much more basic, reasons behind this attempt to attract a new body of students.

Following the abolition of the old Imperial Military Service Exams in 1905 a very large percentage of the nation’s hand combat teachers found themselves unemployed.  These individuals had made a living preparing students to take this test.  At the same time the expansion of the railroads, which increased the ease and safety of overland travel, was a critical blow to the armed escort companies.  They had been one of the largest employers of traditional martial artists following the military.  Opera was also declining in popularity as new forms of entertainment became available.

Why did so many martial reformers turn to the rapidly growing middle class?  Because that was where the money was.  The transformation of China’s economy in the early 20th century created a systematic pattern of winners and losers.  Skilled workers and middle class professionals who could engage in trade or profit from modernization were the winners.  Hand combat instructors, as well as a wide variety of traditional craftsmen, peasants and unskilled workers, were among the losers.

It is no surprise that so many teachers decided that the key to their survival was to reposition the martial arts within society.  They needed to somehow move it from the old “unproductive” sector of the economy, and direct it towards the more prosperous economic frontiers. This necessitated some changes.

Most office workers were not worried about being hijacked on the way to work.  Simplifying the systems and presenting them to a new audience as a form of exercise and self-cultivation was an obvious strategy.  This potential had been in the traditional fighting styles all along, but now it was brought to the fore, and other concerns were allowed to recede into the shadows.

We have gone through different elements of this narrative in greater or lesser detail in a number of previous posts.  However, not every hand combat teacher agreed with this basic strategy.  While comparatively wealthy, the newly risen middle class was still a small fraction of China’s overall population.  And given China’s late industrial development and its various attempts at “rapid modernization,” it was never really clear that civil society and the economy would be allowed to develop on their own terms.

Rather than turning to the market, a large number of martial reformers looked back to the state, the former sponsor of so many hand combat instructors, and searched for way to reenter the government’s good graces.  Again, we probably should not be surprised by this.  Given the percentage of the national economy that the state dominated, it is only logical that martial artists would seek to break back into that sector.

These efforts proceeded along multiple lines.  Some institutions, such as the Jingwu Association, actively lobbied for the inclusion of traditional martial arts training in the physical education curriculum of all primary and secondary schools.  Other martial artists turned their attention to attempts to reform and modernize China’s many municipal law enforcement agencies.  The very nature of police work insured that these groups would be interested in close quarters hand combat training.  Lastly, other martial artists attempted to promote a return to martial arts training within China’s military.  An appointment teaching martial arts classes at a local police or military academy was a prestigious honor that could launch a career.

The end result is that the Chinese martial arts of the early 20^th century did not evolve along a single linear track.  Instead a complex patchworks emerged in which some themes are more dominant than others, but the entire situation is one of dynamic tension.  Some martial artists were adapting spear fighting forms to bayonet drills in an attempt to woo the military.  Meanwhile others were simplifying the same forms and focusing on “Qi” and “health cultivation.”  These seemingly very different trends were simply two economic strategies for survival in a vastly changed marketplace.

I have reviewed this material precisely because we have a tendency to only remember those aspects of martial arts history that are most successful today.  Wushu, Taijiquan and Qigong have been the most popular elements of the traditional Chinese martial arts to emerge in the post Cultural Revolution period.  Yet there were other historical pathways that could have been taken.

A number of Chinese martial artists believed that Japanese reforms to saber and bayonet training should be integrated into Chinese martial culture. This demonstration was photographed by the Jingwu Association in Shanghai.

A selected page from a mid 20th century Chinese language manual on Pici. This particular movement sought for greater realism as it adapted traditional fighting techniques to the needs of the modern military. Usually these drills focused on the Bayonet and saber, and they were promoted by the GMD’s Central Guoshu Institute. Source: Special thanks to Brian Kennedy for posting these images on-line. Originally from a reprint of a period manual sold by Lion Books in Taiwan.

In the remainder of this post we will examine a number of pictures of individuals posing with Dadaos (military big sabers) during the Second Sino-Japanese War (World War II) in an attempt to explore the recursive relationship between the Chinese military and the traditional martial arts.  After a period of aggressive westernization and modernization, the Chinese army of the 1930s once again began to appropriate elements from the traditional martial artists in an attempt to build esprit de corps and to find costs effective solutions to tactical problems.  At the same time many schools of hand combat started to undergo a subtle, or not so subtle, process of militarization through prolonged exposure to their new customer.  Some of these influences can still be felt in the Chinese martial arts to this day.

Two Soldiers and a Puzzle

The bulk of our discussion revolves around the first image, introduced at the top of this essay.  In it we see two individuals, apparently soldiers, in relatively new uniforms, standing in a doorway.  The most interesting thing about this pair is their arms.  Each carries a large (even by the standards of the weapon) shiny new Dadao.  We have discussed this saber in a few other places and this picture makes a nice addition to our catalog of historic images.  It is also interesting to note that the lintel of the doorway is both inscribed and labeled.

This is critical as it provides us one with two of our only clues for analyzing and dating this photograph.  The image itself is from a vintage photograph that I bought at an auction.  It is not a postcard.  Nor does it appear to be a commercial image reproduced for sale (the verso carries no advertisement or stamp for a photography studio, which is often a sign).  Instead this appears to be an actual snapshot taken by someone in the area for their own purposes.

It is always exciting to come across a new image of traditional weapons in their proper historical context.  I have never seen this photograph reproduced or published anywhere else, and it is both clear and detailed.  Still, the problem with artifacts like this is that we have no idea when, or under what circumstances, they were produced.

Luckily we have two clues to guide our guesses.  First, the back of this image was labeled “Peking” in faded pencil.  Secondly, after scanning and cleaning the image it became possible to read (most) of the inscriptions along the door.  The carved stone along the top is the less helpful of the two.  It indicates that the men are standing in the exterior entrance to a fire deity temple.  The vertical inscription is more interesting.  It reads something like: “”Nationalist revolution soldiers from the 34^th army group command post.”  I hasten to note that this is only an approximate translation as there was one character that was just too blurry to resolve.

Still, we now have enough information to start thinking critically about our new image.  And as soon as we do, we run into trouble.  There is a fire god temple in Beijing whose architecture vaguely matches the image in the photo, though I have not been able to local enough pictures of it to find the exact door that the soldiers are standing in (which presumes that the exterior wall still exists and has not been rebuilt).  Further, the large shiny Dadao seems typical of the type that became popular in the middle of the 1930s.  So possibly what we have is an image of two soldiers from the 34^th Army Group posing at a field HQ in Beijing in the late 1930s.

Unfortunately that is historically impossible.  The 34^th Army Group referenced in the image was not created until 1939 and it spent most of the war in the interior.  Beijing was overrun in 1937, so there is no way that this picture could have been taken in the capital prior to the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War.  Of course there are many other fire god shrines in China and it is always possible that the photo was simply mislabeled by whoever initially collected it.  So that is one possibility.  We are looking at a couple of nationalist soldiers in the 1940s standing in front of an unknown 34^th Army Group headquarters.

Yet there are some other odd things about this photograph.  The uniforms are not quite right for the period.  The hats bear the Nationalist Military symbol but they are not regulation issue.  By the 1940s most nationalist soldiers were wearing a German style cloth hat with their summer uniforms (and something much warmer in the winter.)  The hats worn by these two soldiers seem to be an attempt to copy the crisp peaked cap of the 1920s.  However, that style had been replaced in most places by the start of WWII.

Of course it is pretty common to encounter images of Nationalist soldiers in mismatched uniforms.  What is much odder is that neither of these individuals wears any indication of rank on their uniforms, either on their collars or arms.  Further, the Nationalist army patch is missing from above their breast pockets.  And the style of tunic that they are wearing more closely resembles what was being issued in the 1920s, or possibly in a warlord army, than what most individuals in the army were wearing in the 1940s.

Lastly, if these individuals are soldier it is very odd that they are not carrying any modern weapons with them.  Most soldiers who were issued a Dadao were also a given a rifle and bayonet.  Even individuals in the so called “Big Sword Units” carried at least one handgun (often more) and a number of grenades.  These two even lack the basic belts and webbing that would be needed to carry any sort of real equipment.   They don’t even have canteens.  All they have is their Dadao.

A Chinese soldier in the Nationalist Army. Manchuria, 1937. Source: Photographer Unknown.

The previous image is also of a Nationalist soldier carrying a Dadao.  One suspects that he may even be on guard duty given how he is standing.  It is much more typical of what we would expect to see.  His hat not only carries the correct pin, but it is typical period issue.  You can tell by the strap over his shoulder that he is either wearing a pistol belt or carrying a sleeping roll.  Further, the has a patch identifying him as a Nationalist soldier over his left breast.

I am pretty confident that the gentleman at the guard post is actually a Nationalist soldier.  I am less sure about the two individuals in our main image.  Of course there are a number of other possibilities.  They may simply be posing in newly issued uniforms (that are 10 years out of date) before any rank or insignia has been added.

Alternatively, they may not be regular soldiers at all.  Given their second-line uniforms (and weapons), one suspects that they might be members of some sort of paramilitary force.  In fact, most of the individuals who actually used the dadao were members of local militias, railway guards, watchmen, military police or members of resistance groups.  Such individuals were often armed with dadao and equipped with obsolete uniforms and gear (if any at all) precisely because the state could afford to give them little else.

If these individuals were members of a paramilitary group they are suddenly of much more interest to us.  It was not uncommon for the military to hire local martial artists to train such individuals.  Indeed, both Cheung Lai Chuen and Li Pei Xian (who we have already studied in some depth) were responsible for doing exactly this kind of work.  Other well-known master, such as Yin Yu Zhan also taught paramilitary groups and even developed their own special Dadao routines and training programs.

It is not unusual in Chinese history to find martial artists leading local militias.  What is interesting is that this was still going on in the mid 20^th century.  As these individuals adapted their training routines to fit the dadao (a relatively modern weapon) and the current tactical situation, they were opening a door whereby certain strains of the traditional Chinese martial arts were coming to reflect modern military, rather than civilian, influences.

Troops from the Ma Clique train with Dadao, probably in north western China. Photographer unknown. Notice that most of the individuals in this formation are very young and also lack any form of rank or insignia on their uniforms. I suspect that these are raw recruits or members of a paramilitary group.  I am looking for information on this photograph, especially where and when it was first published.

Conclusion

There is one last thread of our mystery that needs to be teased out.  Perhaps the individual who labeled the photograph actually knew exactly what he was talking about.  Maybe the image was taken at a fire god shrine in Beijing.  That might be possible if the image was produced between 1945 and 1948.  I do not know where the various field headquarters of the 34th Army group were in the post-WWII period, but it should be remembered that martial artists continued to be involved in the training of paramilitary groups.  Increasingly they were used as a check against the Communist Party during the Chinese Civil war.

This is a long-shot, but I wonder if these two martial artists may have had another reason for posing in front of that particular door.  Geng Jishan (1860-1928) was one of the foremost Xingyi Quan teachers of his day, as well as a founding member of the Jingwu Association.  He was also one of the first individuals to open a public martial arts school in Beijing.

He named his group the Shiming Wushu Academy.  His school was inherited by his successor Deng Yunfeng.  Deng was very well connected and sociable.  Under him the school became renown as a sort of salon where other martial artists came to talk, relax and discuss the issues of the day.  His friends and acquaintances included such luminaries as Sun Lutang, Li Cunyi and Chen Tinghua.

Rose Li studied with Deng for a number of years before immigrating to the United States and then the United Kingdom, where she became an important teacher of the internal martial arts.  When discussing her training in the 1930s Li always specified that the Shiming Wushu Academy was located on the grounds of a fire god shrine in Beijing.  In fact, that is what she called the institution in English, the “Fire God Temple School.”

One wonders if by chance the 34^th Army Group temporarily made their headquarters at the same temple, and then began to host classes for local militias and paramilitary recruits. If so our two swordsmen might be standing on the threshold of some of China’s most interesting modern martial arts history.  In truth we may never know where and when the picture was taken, but I think the speculation is a fun and educational exercise.

By Brian L. Kennedy and Elizabeth Guo

Brian L. Kennedy has been kind enough to kick off our “2013 Web Symposium on Chinese Martial Studies” with the following guest post.  In this article he revisits some of his previous research on the Dadao or “Big Knife” in the Chinese Republican Army.  I am particularly happy to host this piece here at Kung Fu Tea as it was one of the things that first helped to convince me that the academic study of the Chinese martial arts might be both possible and helpful.

Brian Kennedy himself needs little introduction.  He is the coauthor of two important books Chinese Martial Arts Training Manuals (2005) and Jingwu: The School that Transformed Kung Fu (2010).  He attended San Diego State University as an undergraduate and latter earned a J.D. from the University of San Diego Law School.  He has extensive first hand expertise and lived in Taiwan from 1991-2008.  In the gym he currently practices Brazilian Jiujitsu with Prof. Alfredo Barum.  Nor, as the following statement indicates, is he a new comer to the field of martial arts history.  We are very happy to have him as a contributor here at Kung Fu Tea.

“I first grew interested in martial arts history back in the ‘Bruce Lee-Kwai Chang Caine days’.  My parents got me a copy of Robert Smith’s Asian Martial Arts and one of my high school history teachers let me do a semester of independent study on Chinese martial arts history. That independent study project, back in 1975, got me started on a lifelong interest in Chinese martial arts history.  The field of Chinese martial arts history has progressed so much in those 40 years—but, many of the same challenges remain. “

Marco Polo Bridge. Source: Wikimedia.

“Over this river there is a very fine stone bridge, so fine indeed, that it has very few equals in the world.”

The Diary of Marco Polo

            It was an interesting vignette; the bridge had been praised by the western explorer Marco Polo in his diary and now several centuries later Chinese soldiers of the Republican Army, with their traditional “big knife” sabers and their modern rifles, stared across the bridge at Japanese forces amassed on the far side. The Japanese forces were a mix of the old and the new too; enlisted soldiers hunched down in mechanized tanks being lead by officers with katana in hand mounted on horses. It was July of 1937 and unbeknownst to the soldiers on both sides of the bridge, they were about to enter the history books.

            The bridge they stood on opposite ends of was the Lugouqiao, 盧溝橋 and the battle they were about to be involved in is known in the west as the “the Marco Polo Bridge Incident”. In China and Taiwan the battle is better known as the7-7 Lugou Bridge Incident (七七盧溝橋事變) because it occurred on the 7^th day of the 7^th month. Historians (fn.1) view it as the first shooting battle of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) (fn2).

What makes this battle noteworthy for martial artists is the fact that the battle at Lugouqiao marks the last famous battle fought where traditional Chinese martial arts weapons were used, albeit alongside such modern weapons as the pistol and grenade. The weapon we refer to is the “big knife” sabers, “big knife” being the actual name for that weapon, not just a description of the weapon. The “big knife” type sabers would be used elsewhere in various battles in the northwest and far northeast of China during other parts of the war but the Lugou Bridge battle was the last battle that used the “big knife” sabers, at least the last that made the history books.

                        The battle unfolded over a three day period, July 7^th through the 9^th. The short version (fn.3) was that the Japanese military claimed that they had been fired on and that one of their soldiers was missing and reputed to be on the Republican Chinese (ROC) side of the bridge. The Japanese commander asked/demanded permission to cross the bridge to search for the missing Japanese soldier. The ROC forces refused and on the early morning of the 8^th, the Japanese crossed the bridge. In the early morning of the 9^th, covered in part by mist and fog that had settled over the bridge, ROC Regiment Chief, Colonel Ji Xingwen (吉星文) (fn.4 ) led his forces in a commando style raid to clear the Japanese from both ends of the bridge. The ROC soldiers relied on pistols, hand grenades and their “big knife sabers”. The bridge was retaken and the Second Sino-Japanese War had started (fn.5).

The Big Knife was normally carried slung across a soldier’s back. The rig was not designed for any type of fast draw-movie scenes to the contrary. Source: Property of Brian Kennedy.

Big Knife Saber

            The weapon that went into the history books that early morning was known in Chinese by the somewhat prosaic name of “big knife” sabers Dadao (大刀). They are short but broad bladed sabers meant to be used with two hands. The standard specifications, the “mil-spec”, of these “big knife” sabers were 3.5 pounds in weight and 35.5 inches in length but the reality is the size and the weight varied greatly.

            They are characterized by having some sort of ring pommel and having tips that curve to a sharp point. They could be used to stab as well as slice or slash along the single sharpened edge. They were normally carried slung across the soldiers’ backs. The name “big knife” and the propaganda put out by the Republican era government would lead one to think they were awe inspiring blades (fn.6), works of art along the lines of the exquisitely crafted Japanese katana. And modern reproductions of these big knife sabers often reinforce that image by being handsome, thick bladed weapons made of the finest material (fn. 7).

            The reality is far different. Most of the examples we have seen that were actually used in the Sino-Japanese War can best be described as “complete junk”. This naturally follows from the fact they were normally made from scrap iron that had been stolen or salvaged from somewhere, melted down or simply ground and cold hammered into form. The construction of these military big knife sabers was usually done “on the move” by whatever blacksmith was available, with whatever tools and raw materials were available. A favored raw material was leaf springs from trucks or cars or railroad rails that had been pulled up.

            The end products were often quite short, quite thin, quite crude. But that is largely in keeping with how almost all Republican era military supplies and equipment were; handmade, crude, too short, too thin, junk (fn.8).

Men, metal and mettle

            The reputation of the Big Knife Saber Units reflects an interesting truism about marital arts. The reality is, the Japanese military units did “fear” the Big Knife Units of the Chinese Republican Army but not because of the weapon itself. What cast fear into the souls of the Japanese was the mettle of the men using the “big knife” sabers. The pieces of scrape metal that made up the “big knife” sabers were nothing special, nor were the size (as mentioned, usually light and thin) or design (a basic chopping machete design) anything terrifying. But rather it was the morale of the men using the “big knives” that made the difference. We mention this at length because the credit belongs to the men, the soldiers, not to some unique character of the “big knives” although the myth of the “big knife” sabers usually attributes the magic to the weapon. This highlights the truism that military effectiveness is often more a matter of having well motivated men, than having the some magical weapon.

Yin Yu Zhan’s “Slashing Saber Practice”

            There were two Republican era martial arts training manuals that were specifically written for the use of double handed sabers. One was written by Yin Yu Zhan, the other by Huang Bo Nien. Turning first to Yin Yu Zhan (尹玉璋) who lived from 1890 to 1950; he authored two books: “A Brief Book of Baguazhang” (八卦掌簡編) and more relevantly for this article, “Slashing Saber Practice”(砍刀術練習法). What we have been calling “the big knife” he refers to as the “slashing saber”. They are the same weapon.

            Yin Yu Zhan was born the son of Yin Fu, one of China’s most famous Bagua masters. Such a birth may be viewed either as a great blessing or a heavy burden. In the case of Yin Yu Zhan—Yin Fu’s fourth son—it lead to a lifetime of involvement with Bagua.

            Because of his father’s high position, Yin Yu Zhang was brought into the Qing imperial court at a very young age. His father Yin Fu was connected with the imperial bodyguards, both by virtue of being their instructor and having been appointed during the Boxer Rebellion to personally escort the Empress Dowager and the imperial heir Guang Xu when they were forced to flee Beijing’s Forbidden City. His position in the royal court made him a wealthy man. It also allowed him to bring his children into the Forbidden City as what might be called adjuncts of the imperial family.

After Yin Yu Zhang had been brought into the Forbidden City he began his martial arts education by learning “secret court martial arts” from Chua Yu Xie. What exactly this consisted of is unknown. Later, Yin started learning his father’s Yin style Bagua. As an adult, he made a living teaching martial arts, including acting as an instructor at the Guoshu Academy in Tsingdao City.

Yin Yu Zhang’s second book, “Slashing Saber Practice,” was published in June 1933 by the Guoshu Academy of Tsingdao City. Yin posed for the photographs. The book features two training routines, each with 20 movements.

The book is interesting from a historical standpoint in that Yin discusses at length the actual military use of the slashing saber. He writes, “The slashing saber was called ‘the big saber of infantry battle’ in the Qing Dynasty. It has been long and widely practiced in the military. In the recent Chinese and Japanese war [presumably referring to the First Sino-Japanese war of 1894-1895] our military used these techniques and this weapon to inflict damage on the enemy. ‘Big saber team units’ became well known. Slashing saber is easy to do and easy to learn. It is clear and practical, without ‘flowery embellishments.’ It emphasizes slashing and chopping.”

In his preface, Yin discusses the battlefield effectiveness of the slashing saber at length. He includes discussions of both ancient and modern battles where sabers were involved. Yin also makes a point of the deadliness of double-handed sabers at close range, as opposed to single-handed swords. He quotes a maxim, “long-range stabbing with sword, closer range slashing with saber.” He gives the standard specifications of a slashing saber at 3.5 pounds in weight, 35.5 inches in length.

As mentioned, his book has two short training routines. The training routines include a variety of simple but effective double handed sword techniques. The descriptions include a photo, discussion of how to perform the move and the application of the move against an enemy. The descriptions include a wide range of verbs describing different sword actions. The variety of verbs reflects the fact that Yin’s book was the product of a lifetime spent in martial arts and reflect a nuanced approach to the use of the saber. Admittedly “nuanced approach” and “quick and simple military training” are two concepts that are at odds with each other. Nonetheless Yin’s book does use a variety of technical terms for saber actions. By way of example in the second routine, movement six is described thus:

Dotting (點) Saber

Practice: Turn the body to the right rear, make your two legs into sitting cross leg and at the same time move the saber from the front to the right rear to “dot” forcefully and the edge of the saber is facing outward. Keep your eyes on the tip of the saber.

            Application: Suppose the enemy chops at the top of my head from behind, I should squat/lower my body and at the same time forcefully dot the saber at the enemy’s wrist.

What is referred to as “dotting” is actually a kind of quick jab with the tip of the saber, basically trying to get the opponent to drop their sword or get their hands cut off.

            By way of a second example, and these two examples are typical of how Yin’s book is laid out, there is nothing special about the two moves we mention. Again in the second routine:

Movement Four

Chopping (斬) Saber posture

Practice : Move the right leg to the left one step forward, it becomes a horse riding stance, at the same time forcefully chopping the saber from back to the front.

Application : Suppose the enemy uses a spear or lance to stab at my left side. I should move my right leg to the left one step forward. The left foot will move back half a step while the waist moves and at the same time chop the saber at the enemy’s waist.

It is not clear exactly what the source is for Yin’s big knife techniques. His family’s system, Yin style bagua, is well known for its use of a very large, long bladed saber and it is quite possible he simply picked techniques from that and modified and simplified them for military use. Alternatively he may have known techniques from some other system of double handed swordsmanship. There are a number of Chinese martial arts systems, dating back to the Ming dynasty, that use a thin bladed double handed saber. Yin may have known various training routines from that and modified them for the broader blade of the “big knife saber”.

One of the Big Knives from the ROC Museum Display. Source: Property of Brian Kennedy.

Huang Bo Nien’s “Xingyi Fist and Weapons Instruction”

            The second major Republican era training manual to cover the use of double handed saber was Huang Bo Nien”s (黃柏年) (1880-1954) book “Xingyi Fist and Weapons Instruction”.

            Born in 1880 in Hubei, Huang Bo Nien started to learn Shaolin boxing as a child because his health was so frail. In 1896, he became a student of Li Cun Yi, from whom he learned the two internal arts of Xingyi and Bagua. Huang began teaching alongside his longtime master in 1912 at the Zhong Hua Martial Arts Association. He was hired as the supervisor of the educational section of the Advocating Martial Arts and Improving Morality Association in 1928. It was here that he wrote “Xingyi Fist and Weapons Instruction.” the Nanjing Central Guoshu Academy hired him in 1931 to teach the system of Xingyi, saber and bayonet training that he had outlined in his book to Republican soldiers. Following that post, he became a martial arts teacher at the Zhong Ching Military Academy in 1937. He retired from government service the following year.

“Xingyi Fist and Weapons Instruction” was the first Xingyi book written specifically for use by the military. Published in 1928, the book featured Jiang Rong Qiao posing for the photos. The two men worked together at the Advocating Martial Arts and Improving Morality Association. The government underwrote publication of this volume as part of its program to support martial arts, both within the military as well as among the general populace.

During the early years of the Republican government, a number of prominent martial artists were recruited by various armies to teach their soldiers including Huang Bo Nien. An important part of this training was morale building. The arts that were taught to Republican-era soldiers had to meet two criteria: Be simple and be Chinese. In reference to the last point, the policy of the Nationalist government was that Chinese martial arts should be encouraged as a kind of countermeasure to Japanese martial arts and the principles of Bushido. The Nationalist government’s assumption, correct or not, was that the Chinese public, and by extension the Chinese army, had developed an inferiority complex regarding Japanese martial arts. The Chinese public and the Chinese army had learned to accept the idea that Chinese were the weak men of Asia. Promoting Chinese martial arts was seen as a way to counter that and give the general public and the military a sense of racial pride. Of course, this had to be done within the practical limits of military training, so the first criterion—simplicity—was equally important.

Hwang Bo Nien’s book attempted to meet both criteria. It covers the basics of Xingyi’s Five Element Fists and a version of Linking Fist along with the basic training ideas of Xingyi. In these areas the book follows the format of several other Republican-era Xingyi manuals, but two things set this book apart as being a military Xingyi training manual.

The first is its devotion of entire sections to the use of the bayonet and saber based on Xingyi principles and forms. The bayonet techniques presumably are derived from Xingyi spear techniques. According to legend, Xingyi was founded by General Yue Fei based on his skill with the spear. Xingyi was known for its simple but combat-worthy spear training, which provides a natural carryover to bayonet training.

The book also includes a section on the “dao,” or saber. The five techniques shown are built on the five-formed fist of Xingyi and are executed with both hands gripping the saber. All five involve an initial defensive block or deflection followed up with a strike.

As is de rigueur in modern military CQC manuals, Huang’s book has a chart of vital points on the human body and the anatomical weapons used to strike them.

The book is also different in that it is clearly designed to be used as a military training manual. For example, in discussing the five-element fist, the book breaks each movement down into individual commands that a drill instructor might use to coach a large group of soldiers; e.g. “attention, drilling fist, move.” The same pattern follows for each of the techniques shown in the book.

            Huang’s training manual is a fascinating and outstanding example of a Republican-era military training manual. It discusses in clear, understandable terms a number of basic techniques that could be taught to soldiers in a relatively short period of time. Huang’s book has been translated into english by Dennis Rovere and Chow Hon Huen.

A scene from the ROC movie Heroic Martyrs Remembered for a Thousand Years showing the Chinese Big Knife winning over the Japanese Katana. Source: Brian Kennedy.

Big Knife Saber Units

            The fame of the “big knives” comes largely from their use by the Northwest Armies of the Chinese Republican Army. The Northwest Army included the 29^th Battalion, which was a specialized unit that focused on close order combat and the use of the “big sabers”. Although the 29^th Battalion is the best known of the “Big Saber Units” there were others both in the Northwest and Northeast Armies.

            The soldiers of the Northwest Army are viewed by Chinese military historians as being the toughest fighters in the Republican Army (fn. 9). For all intents and purposes these soldiers were brigands and outlaws, who happened to have been conscripted into a large “gang” known as the Northwest Army. As a people they were from the hardscrabble north and when not working as brigands or soldiers they eked out a hand to mouth existence in the frozen areas bordering the Great Wall of China. They fully expected their life to be, as Hobbes puts it, “short, nasty and brutish” and they fought accordingly

            The “Big Saber Units” of the Northwest Army were best known for their defense of the Great Wall as well as being involved in the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. The Defense of the Great Wall (長城抗戰) was a series of battles taking place between January to May of 1933. The Japanese were attempting to move their forces south, past the Great Wall and into China. The Chinese armies were for both symbolic and practical reasons attempting to keep the Japanese “outside the wall”. On the symbolic side the Great Wall had for centuries been viewed by the Chinese as the dividing line between the civilized Han Chinese and the people outside the wall, i.e. uncivilized, non-Chinese peoples (fn.10). On the practical side, it was thought that if the Japanese could get south of the Great Wall that their presence “inside the wall” would place major northern Chinese cities in peril. That belief was confirmed by later events.

            Although in the end the Japanese were successful in pushing past the Great Wall and into China, the “Big Saber Units” became famous for their tenacity and furiousness in close quarters combat against the Japanese during the defense of the Great Wall. The fact that many of the battles took place in narrow passes or actually on the ramparts and in the gates of the Great Wall, provided a natural “close quarters” setting for a weapon such as the Big Knife and it can be said that although in the end, the modern heavy weaponry of the Japanese won out, the “big knife” sabers of the Chinese went out in a blaze of glory.

oOo

Footnotes:

1. Some Chinese historians place the start of the “shooting war” at various earlier points when there had been other skirmishes between the Japanese forces and the Republic of China army. For western historians the start is the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. In any event, for many wars the “first battle” is a historians’ convention as wars often start with a sliding scale of escalation starting from relatively minor incidents, which may or may not involve gunfire, into more serious armed encounters between the future opponents.

2. The Second Sino-Japanese War is basically the part of World War Two fought on Chinese soil.

3. Given the incident’s fame as the opening battle of the Second Sino-Japanese War and given the sometimes intense hatred between the Japanese and Chinese; it will come as no surprise that historians differ on the details of the battle. Even to this day events in the Second Sino-Japanese War are hotly and violently disputed, the “Rape of Nanjing” being the premier example of such debates. The version of the battle that we give is kind of the received Republic of China version. The reality is, it is largely based on a series of articles written by Regiment Chief Ji Xingwen. Some Japanese historians dispute his account of the “brave dash across the bridge in the cold mist and rain” as nonsense and point to various facts to dispute it.

4. Colonel Ji Xingwen (吉星文) survived the war and moved with the Republic of China government to Taiwan. In 1958 he became a two star general and was assigned to the defense of Kinmen Island. His military career and his life came to a soldierly end. On August 23^rd 1958 the Chinese Communist began their bombardment of Kinmen Island. The very first shell the Communist fired, about 6:30 in the evening, was a direct hit on the officers mess hall where General Ji and two other two star generals were having dinner. All three were killed instantly. Taiwanese military historians are sure that the direct hit was the result of communist spies who had measured off the exact distances and knew the habitual patterns of the generals. That opening bombardment was the start of 44 days of continuous artillery shelling. The Communist troops fired 474,910 rounds of ammunition into the Kinmen area.

5. In the end, three days later to be precise, the battle for the bridge was lost and by August the Japanese were in Beijing.

6. There was a famous movie, which most Taiwanese have seen, that was made by the Kuomintang government called Heroic Martyrs Remembered for a Thousand Years. The movie is a kind of Chinese “John Wayne” movie that glorified the Big Saber Units in Sino-Japanese war.

7. The example we are thinking of is made by the Cold Steel company and marketed as the “Chinese War Sword”. That modern reproduction faithfully reproduces the model image of a “big knife saber” but its quality (and price!) far exceeds anything that any Republican era soldier ever held in his hands.

8. Corruption and contempt were kind of the bywords for many, not all, but many, military commanders of the various Republican era armies. Corruption in the sense of pocketing the lion’s share of whatever funds were available and contempt in the sense of having an utter disregard for the welfare of their troops. Soldiers were viewed as basically chattels; semi-domesticated work beasts. As mentioned there were exceptions to this and we do not mean to tar with a wide brush; but the norm was corruption and contempt.

9. The second toughest group of fighters, and almost all Chinese military historians of the World War Two era agree on this, were the soldiers from Guangdong, a southern Chinese province. Many of the Guangdong fighters had backgrounds in the southern Shaolin system known as Hung Gar Quan (Hung Family Boxing) and many had been trained by the famous Hung Gar Quan master Lum Sai Wing.

10. Of course the last imperial dynasty, the Qing (the Manchu) had breeched the Great Wall and conquered China and many of the Republican era generals were ethnic Manchus, but nonetheless, the idea held that “beyond the wall people” were “savages” and the Great Wall was important from a symbolic and psychological standpoint.

Photography: The Republic of China Armed Forces Museum Exhibit

The photos which accompany this article were taken at the Republic of China Armed Forces Museum located in Taipei, Taiwan. Several years ago the museum hosted a special exhibit commemorating the courage and resourcefulness shown by the ROC soldiers in the Lugou Bridge Incident. The exhibit included a display of original “big knife sabers”.

If you enjoyed this article you might also want to check out: A Social and Visual History of the Dadao: The Chinese “Military Big-Saber.”

An image of a Japanese soldier holding a Gunto in China during WWII. This image was in the photo album along with the record of confiscated weapons below. Source: Author’s personal collection.

Introduction

It is clear that weapons training is enjoying a renaissance within the modern martial arts community.  Recently some of this attention has come to focus on the blades of the Second World War.  It is interesting to speculate on why these weapons were surging in popularity in the Asian theater at exactly the time that one would have expected them to disappear.  Yet whether it is the Nepalese kukri, the Japanese katana or the Chinese dadao, both collectors and practicing martial artists are increasingly drawn to these vintage bladed weapons.

Students of the Chinese martial arts have a particularly fascinating object of study in the Dadao and its adoption by certain troops during the 1930s and 1940s.  We have already addressed the dadao in a number of places.  You can find an overview of these swords here and Brian Kennedy has been kind enough to share some of his own research on their role in the Republic of China military.

It is important to remember that in most historic images from the 1930s and 1940s Chinese soldiers do not carry swords.  Indeed the vast majority of troops within China’s regular army were armed with the same basic weapons used by everyone else during WWII.  These were Mauser-type bolt action rifles, automatic handguns and grenades.  But when swords do appear it tends to be the broad gleaming dadao that dominates both the photographic record of the period, as well as our collective imagination.

Dadaos held by two soldiers in front of a temple in Beijing. Source: Author’s personal collection.

I have already shared and discussed a photograph from my own collection showing Chinese soldiers or auxiliary troops holding their newly issued dadao.  Still, there are some problems with this type of image of the past.  I think that such pictures tend to suggest that the bladed weapons carried by soldiers were all standardized, recently made, pieces.

This was not actually the case.  Chinese military and militia units occasionally employed a broad range of weapons.  I suspect that at times they simply issued whatever they could get their hands on.  As such it is not all that unusual to come across images of small auxiliary units carrying a wide variety of bladed weapons.  Occasionally spears were even issued to second line guards and militias.

A yard in which captured Chinese weapons and material is being sorted by Japanese soldiers. Source: Author’s personal collection.

Japanese Sword Confiscation in China during WWII

The following set of photographs helps to illustrate the actual variety of weapons that were used by various groups in Chinese society during the 1930s.  Recently a group of photos were auctioned on ebay.  These were original photographs taken from an album collected by a Japanese soldier during the occupation of China and subsequently transported to Japan.

Such “foreign language” resources can be a real boon to students of Chinese martial studies.  It does not appear that martial artists or their weapons were ever a really popular subject for most photographers in China.  Even worse, the pictures that did exist were often destroyed (sometimes intentionally) during WWII, the Chinese Civil War and the later Cultural Revolution.

Fortunately a number of foreign observers were interested in the martial arts (or Chinese military technology) and moved copies of these images to their home countries.  Of course it was not uncommon to find Japanese soldiers who had studied the martial arts themselves and were curious about China’s hand combat traditions.   As such interesting material occasionally appears in Japanese language collections.

Unfortunately we do not know much about the original circumstances in which these images were taken, and little information was available after the auction.  Japanese artillery pieces are a prominent feature of a number of these photographs, so it seems possible that the photographer was assigned to one of these units.  None of these photographs show people in heavy clothing, so it possible that these pictures came from the south.  Alternatively they may simply have been taken in the summer months.

Two images in particular are of special interest to us.  Apparently the photographers unit captured a fair amount of Chinese military equipment.  The first photo shows a stockyard where various types of confiscated weapons and gear are being sorted.  When looking over the yard it quickly becomes apparent that the vast majority of the material captured was actually pretty modern.  We see large piles of rifles, helmets and other equipment that would have been standard for the period.

The second image is a more detailed study of one specific section of the stockyard.  It shows a number of different swords laid out and roughly sorted by type.  In totally only a few dozen swords have been confiscated, but it is fascinating to note the variety of blades that are present.

Chinese swords captured by Japanese during WWII. Source: Author’s personal collection.

Most interesting to us is a set of four “niuweidao” or ox-tailed sabers placed prominently in the front of the frame.  These swords have long handles (probably about 30 cm) which terminate in peened pommels.  Each blade has an identical handle wrap (which shows use), scabbard and a heavy iron hand-guard.  The uniform appearance of these swords suggests that they may have been issued to a “Big Saber” unit of some sort, but I don’t think I have ever seen historical images of soldiers carrying this exact sword in the field before.

Moving to the left we next encounter a lone guan doa.  One wonders if this weapon actually came from a martial artists or local temple.  Next are half a dozen or so modern military swords of the sort that the KMT issued to its soldiers and officers.

Following this things get more interested for students of martial arts history.  There is another small pile of ox-tailed sabers of exactly the sort that civilian martial artists and marketplace performers preferred during this period.  Two of these blades have scabbards, but the rest do not (which was more typical for this class of weapon).

As we continue further to the left side of the picture we see a small group (probably 2-3 examples) of long elegant jians.  These swords had been favored by “gentlemen” during the imperial period but were not typically thought of as military weapons.  Nevertheless, they remained popular with civilian martial artists.

It is difficult to make out exactly what is going on in the last pile of swords.  A number of blades can be seen in profile, but it is hard to say too much about them.  Easier to identify are the scabbards of additional ox-tailed sabers.

Conclusion

Of course the most revealing thing about this image is what we do not see.  There is a not a single identifiable example of a 1930s style ring-tailed dadao in the entire collection.  In fact, all of the weapons (with the exception of the western-style military sabers) were types that were favored by Chinese civilian martial artists.

It is certainly possible that the long handled daos were issued to a paramilitary group.  Their matching furniture suggests as much.  But most of the rest of the weapons could just as easily have come from a marketplace martial arts demonstration or a boxing school.  It is actually important to remember that we don’t really know where these weapons were confiscated from, just where they ended up.

Alternatively, it is possible that this picture was taken early in the war before the production of dadao’s had reached its peak.  If that was the case than it is a valuable remainder that Chinese troops and auxiliary units employed a wide variety of bladed weapons when performing their missions.  Often these weapons were identical to those favored by civilian martial arts masters.  Such individuals were often recruited to teach hand-to-hand combat skills to second-line troops in the 1930s and 1940s, so perhaps the appearance of their favored weapons should not be a surprise.

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Japanese soldiers carrying a trophy sword in Manchuria, 1932.

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For more images of vintage Chinese weapons see: Through a Lens Darkly (9): Swords, Knives and other Traditional Weapons Encountered by the Shanghai Police Department, 1925.

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A Japanese private holding a captured Dadao sometime between 1931 and 1936. Source: Author’s Personal Collection.

Introduction

No topic within the study of the modern martial arts is more burdened with nationalist myths and legends than military fencing. By the middle of the 20th century blades were supposed to have become obsolete on the battlefield. Yet the Second World War (WWII) saw a resurgence of interest in the sword and knife.

The Japanese Imperial Military came to be defined by its symbolic and practical use of the katana. The Chinese state issued a variety of swords to its regular troops and many paramilitary auxiliary units. These were so evocative of the terrible conflict in the region that they became regular features in western magazines, news accounts and even children’s bubblegum cards. The British insisted on issuing large, combat worthy kukris to their Nepalese and even Indian troops. Meanwhile western armies, while no longer carrying swords, continued to place a lot of emphasis of bayonet training and the development of various styles of combat knives.

Given that much of this activity took place in Asia, it is no surprise that students of martial studies are continually rediscovering the details of this process. In thinking about these trends it might not be possible to find a single explanation for all aspects of the various these cases. Certainly many of these military officers were very practical people, and they often perceived some sort of need that only a blade could answer.

The kukri is a general purpose camp tool and weapon that has long been essential to the Nepalese infantry.  Likewise the dadao could be cheaply mass produced. It was probably a cost effective away of arming Chinese militia groups who were more often than not expected to hold rear areas or harass the Japanese. And if the bloody memory of WWI had taught these officers anything, it was that close quarters combat remained a possibility on the modern (often urban) battlefield.

Still, it is impossible to ignore the role of nationalist myth-making when looking at the symbolic form that was imposed upon these tools. The Katana was deeply linked to Japan’s feudal past. It was the “soul of the Samurai.” There are few jobs that a kukri does that a hatchet cannot do just as well and more cheaply. Likewise the modern Chinese dadao bears an uncanny resemblance to the blades of mythic heroes illustrated in popular texts about the Ming dynasty, as well as the various “Big Sword Societies” that stood up to western imperialists and the corrupt Qing in the 19th century.

The Katana and the Dadao in Manchuria

Symbols communicate, but their message is always multi-vocal and complex. It can be difficult to predict all of the ways in which they reverberate off of and harmonize with each other. I suspect that it is unavoidable that weapons will take on symbolic meaning to the individuals who wield them. Given that this will happen in even the most utilitarian circumstances, perhaps it is wise for military planners to attempt to shape this process.

Originally the audience for each of these symbolic messages was internal. By giving newly commissioned officers in the 1920s and 1930s a katana the Japanese general staff was really trying to make an argument to them (and the nation at large) about the type of loyalty to the army and the emperor that was expected. This argument drew very heavily on essentialist or “primordialist” beliefs about national identity.

Unfortunately for the Imperial Army, while the sword may have been the soul of the Samurai, simply being Japanese did not automatically make one a swordsman. Despite their love for this iconic weapon, the modern Japanese army actually suffered multiple setbacks on this front as they attempted to modernize and westernize small arms training.

Soldiers armed with newly purchased western sabers (which they had not been sufficiently trained to use) found themselves at a distinct disadvantage when facing traditional martial artist in the Satsuma Rebellion. And while they ultimately acquitted themselves quite will in the Russo-Japanese War, Japanese soldiers once again found themselves outmatched when facing sword wielding Cossack Calvary in close quarters combat.

Increasing nationalist sentiments in the 1920s ultimately insured the wide-scale reissuing of the katana within the Imperial military. Yet by this point very few soldiers actually had any experience with these weapons. Training programs had to be instituted to provide soldiers with a rudimentary familiarity with the sword that supposedly defined their national soul. Of course of the most important of these was the Toyama Ryu school established in 1925 by Nakamura Taisaburo.

This school provided soldier with the basic information that they needed to draw and cut with their weapons under modern conditions. Unfortunately by Nakamura’s own admission the original curriculum did not prove to be entirely effective.

An American trading card from the 1938 “Horrors of War” series. This image was labeled “Chinese ‘Big Sword’ Corps Resist the Japanese.” Authors personal collection.

The Japanese deployment of the katana also communicated all sorts of symbolic messages to those that they came in contact with. Chinese intellectuals and military leaders were very much aware of their attempts to cultivate Budo as part of their overall program of increasing nationalism and militarization among the Japanese population. In fact, there is some evidence that member of the KMT run Central Guoshu Institute wished to employ China’s own martial heritage in a somewhat similar manner.

Still, the use of the katana creates some unexpected resonances when viewed within a Chinese cultural context. If one were to simply look at material factors, the Japanese military would seem to have had all of the advantages. Yes it was numerically smaller, but it was more modern, better equipped and had tighter lines of command and control. It was also well led, less internally divided and more professional.

Yet the katana is an unavoidably medieval symbol. It evokes a variety of feelings. One the one hand there is the awe that many traditional Chinese martial artists and gentry ranked sword collectors felt for these weapons from roughly the 16th century onward. But on the other, it also suggests the “wokou” or Japanese pirates who were ultimately defeated by General Yu Dayou, Qi Jiguang and the Shaolin monks in the 1500s. This was perhaps one of the proudest moments in China’s late imperial history and it proved to be a turning point in the development of the civilian martial arts.

This weapon also suggests memories of Japan’s costly invasion of Korea which ultimately ended in defeat and retrenchment. Far from being demoralizing, the very presence of the katana was a suggestion that the Japanese could once again be defeated through Chinese ingenuity, endurance and intestinal fortitude.

Likewise the dadao itself was a weapon that was developed and popularized for domestic reasons. While not a regular sword in the Qing army (which had employed a few other types of chopping weapons) by the late 19th and early 20th century a number of civilian martial artists in northern China had taken a distinct liking to these sorts of blades. Later they were issued to law enforcement, militia and railroad guards. Certain warlord armies even adopted them in mass in the 1920s. By the 1930s a handful of regular units within the Chinese army were armed these sword. As tensions with the Japanese mounted, “Big Sword Training” classes became common in most of China’s larger cities.

It might be useful to stop and consider why in the run-up to the Japanese invasion in 1937 training civilians to use an arcane, and in many cases unwieldy, two handed sword would be a popular idea. After all, WWII was a conflict in which most deaths were caused by artillery shelling and bombs?

I suspect that at least some of the enthusiasm for the dadao stemmed from the success of small resistance groups in Manchuria after the Japanese invasion of the area in 1931. While the Japanese effected a more or less bloodless takeover of the local government their advances were resisted by a number of groups within Chinese society including large-scale bandit parties (who had always been disturbingly common in the area), the militant Red Spear Society (who I hope to examine in a future post), and a number of local “Big Sword Societies” who had been created with the express purpose of dealing with the area’s banditry problem.

These groups surprised the Japanese with their resistance and resilience. Unsurprisingly the bandits turned out to be some of the best fighters. Unfortunately they were also unreliable allies as they did not see a foreign occupation as any reason to give up their piratical ways. Still, they tended to be well armed and versed in hit and run tactics.

Modern students of martial studies will probably be most interested by the Big Sword and Red Spear societies. In some ways these groups were reminiscent of the Big Sword societies that were seen in Shandong province just prior to the Boxer Uprising in 1900. They relied on a combination of traditional martial training and spirit magic designed to insure their invulnerability. Some groups were organized communally while others were led by heterodox religious leaders. While the arms and tactics of all of these groups were eclectic (including everything from rifles, to 19th century cannons to improvised bombs), as their names suggest, dadaos and spears were seen in abundance.

Insurrections do not necessarily have to be victorious to be effective. While these small groups did not succeed in driving the Japanese out of Manchuria, they did effectively tie up tens of thousands of troops for years at a time in a perpetual pacification campaign. This led to a certain level of violence against local residents which contributed to the radicalization of the next generation of guerilla recruits.

It is also interesting to note that the hand-to-hand combat tactics of some of these groups gave the Japanese military pause. Nakamura Taizaburo, one of the fathers of modern Japanese military swordsmanship, served in the area after its 1931 takeover and saw actual sword combat. His assessment of the effectiveness of the Toyama Ryu’s methods was harsh. He concluded that to the extent that most Japanese soldiers had any familiarity with the sword it was through either kendo or the 1925 training program. The results of the engagements that he saw convinced him that neither was a satisfactory basis for effective swordsmanship. His Katana wielding countrymen were effectively outmatched. This then led to a reform of the Toyama Ryu curriculum in 1939 and the creation of a more brutal but effective training program.

Images of the Dadao and Katana in Occupied China

Both of the photos for today’s post come from my own collection. Each is an original snapshot taken of a specific individual to be saved in an album or sent back home. Unfortunately neither image is labeled. Even sadder, both of these images were separated from the original albums by wholesalers before being sold to individual antique stores in Japan. This is an unfortunate but common practice that deprives scholars of much needed contextual clues.

The first image shows a Japanese private standing before a heavy stone arch. In his hands he holds a large Chinese Dadao, probably captured from one of the various groups that we discussed above. The style of his uniform suggests that this picture was taken sometime between 1931 and 1936. Given that he is wearing his cold weather gear it seems likely that he is in northern China. There is decent chance that this individual was involved with the post-1931 occupation of Manchuria which we have been discussing.

The Dadao that he holds is also interesting. The blade looks heavy and healthy, though it appears to have substantial discoloration or rust. This reminds us that most dadao were issued and carried without scabbards, so these blades were continually exposed to the elements. The handle of this sword is wrapped in a simple heavy cord, and the S-shaped hand guard is still in perfect shape. I have noticed that this style guard, more than the other common variants, tends to get damaged and detached from surviving examples. I suspect that this is because they were made out of a comparatively soft and easily worked metal.

It is also interesting to consider how the sword is being held with its point resting on the ground. As a collector this makes me want to scream. Dadaos were generally manufactured with a sharp leading point. Nevertheless, the tips on many surviving examples are often rounded. Often this is the result of the weapons being repeatedly sharpened in a careless way. That can certainly change the profile of a blade in a number of ways. Of course resting the tip of the sword on the ground is also a great way to chip or deform it. Nor is there anything unique about this aspect of the image. I have a couple of photos of Chinese soldiers doing exactly the same the thing.

I like this image as it situates the Dadao at a critical time and place in Chinese history. This photograph conveys in a single image the impact that Chinese swords were having on the Japanese imagination during the 1930s. Yet at the same time, the widespread deployment of these weapons and their adoption as an ersatz national symbol seems to have been at least in a part a response to images like the one below.

The Japanese and Chinese rediscovery of the sword during WWII is a fascinating phenomenon. Even more interesting to me is that neither nation was content to employ these weapons only for their symbolic value. They managed to find their way into the conflict in surprising, and often grizzly, ways. Yet on a certain level it is impossible to understand the evolution of either tradition in isolation. Indeed the evolution of these two traditions is a good example of how symbols within the martial arts echo and harmonize in unpredictable ways.

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An image of a Japanese soldier holding a Gunto in China during WWII. Source: Author’s personal collection.

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If you liked this post you might also want to read: “Fighting Styles” or “Martial Brands”? An economic approach to understanding “lost lineages” in the Chinese Martial Arts.

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Two individuals with dadao posing for a photograph in the 1940s. Source: Original image. Photographer Unknown. Author’s Private Collection.

***One of the questions that I have been attempting to tackle in my more recent writing is the degree to which we should be thinking about the “traditional” Chinese martial arts as a quintessentially modern activity.  From the perspective of the average practitioner that might not make a lot of sense.  Yet if you look at the question from a historian’s point of view is clear that the systems we practice today were greatly influenced by the events of the 1920s-1950s.  This was an era in which everything in Chinese society, including its physical culture, was under pressure to adapt and evolve.  There are a lot of stories that you can tell about this, but the current one looks at the role of the military in shaping the evolution of one small part of China’s modern martial arts.  This post inspired some conversation when I first put it up in June of last year.  If you are interested in seeing the original draft and its comments click here.***

Introduction

It is dangerous to make sweeping statements about the development of the traditional Chinese martial arts during the early 20^th century.  This was an important period for the hand combat community.  Between 1900 and 1949 the complex of behaviors and beliefs that we current think of as the “Chinese martial arts” were reshaped and repackaged in fundamental ways.

Much of this had to do with efforts to make the traditional fighting styles more attractive as a leisure activity for the growing urban middle class.  Period discussions and even government propaganda usually casts these efforts as an attempt to improve the physical and spiritual “health of the nation.”  These reforms are often seen as an attempt to recast the Chinese people in a mold similar to what the Japanese had created with Budo.

Still, one must be careful not to take this rhetoric too seriously.  Most of the major martial reform efforts (including both Jingwu and later Guoshu) were never even accessible to the vast majority of Chinese citizens living outside the key coastal cities.  There were other, much more basic, reasons behind this attempt to attract a new body of students.

Following the abolition of the old Imperial Military Service Exams in 1905 a very large percentage of the nation’s hand combat teachers found themselves unemployed.  These individuals had made a living preparing students to take this test.  At the same time the expansion of the railroads, which increased the ease and safety of overland travel, was a critical blow to the armed escort companies.  They had been one of the largest employers of traditional martial artists following the military.  Opera was also declining in popularity as new forms of entertainment became available.

Why did so many martial reformers turn to the rapidly growing middle class?  Because that was where the money was.  The transformation of China’s economy in the early 20th century created a systematic pattern of winners and losers.  Skilled workers and middle class professionals who could engage in trade or profit from modernization were the winners.  Hand combat instructors, as well as a wide variety of traditional craftsmen, peasants and unskilled workers, were among the losers.

It is no surprise that so many teachers decided that the key to their survival was to reposition the martial arts within society.  They needed to somehow move it from the old “unproductive” sector of the economy, and direct it towards the more prosperous economic frontiers. This necessitated some changes.

Most office workers were not worried about being hijacked on the way to work.  Simplifying the systems and presenting them to a new audience as a form of exercise and self-cultivation was an obvious strategy.  This potential had been in the traditional fighting styles all along, but now it was brought to the fore, and other concerns were allowed to recede into the shadows.

We have gone through different elements of this narrative in greater or lesser detail in a number of previous posts.  However, not every hand combat teacher agreed with this basic strategy.  While comparatively wealthy, the newly risen middle class was still a small fraction of China’s overall population.  And given China’s late industrial development and its various attempts at “rapid modernization,” it was never really clear that civil society and the economy would be allowed to develop on their own terms.

Rather than turning to the market, a large number of martial reformers looked back to the state, the former sponsor of so many hand combat instructors, and searched for way to reenter the government’s good graces.  Again, we probably should not be surprised by this.  Given the percentage of the national economy that the state dominated, it is only logical that martial artists would seek to break back into that sector.

These efforts proceeded along multiple lines.  Some institutions, such as the Jingwu Association, actively lobbied for the inclusion of traditional martial arts training in the physical education curriculum of all primary and secondary schools.  Other martial artists turned their attention to attempts to reform and modernize China’s many municipal law enforcement agencies.  The very nature of police work insured that these groups would be interested in close quarters hand combat training.  Lastly, other martial artists attempted to promote a return to martial arts training within China’s military.  An appointment teaching martial arts classes at a local police or military academy was a prestigious honor that could launch a career.

The end result is that the Chinese martial arts of the early 20^th century did not evolve along a single linear track.  Instead a complex patchworks emerged in which some themes are more dominant than others, but the entire situation is one of dynamic tension.  Some martial artists were adapting spear fighting forms to bayonet drills in an attempt to woo the military.  Meanwhile others were simplifying the same forms and focusing on “Qi” and “health cultivation.”  These seemingly very different trends were simply two economic strategies for survival in a vastly changed marketplace.

I have reviewed this material precisely because we have a tendency to only remember those aspects of martial arts history that are most successful today.  Wushu, Taijiquan and Qigong have been the most popular elements of the traditional Chinese martial arts to emerge in the post Cultural Revolution period.  Yet there were other historical pathways that could have been taken.

A number of Chinese martial artists believed that Japanese reforms to saber and bayonet training should be integrated into Chinese martial culture. This demonstration was photographed by the Jingwu Association in Shanghai.

A selected page from a mid 20th century Chinese language manual on Pici. This particular movement sought for greater realism as it adapted traditional fighting techniques to the needs of the modern military. Usually these drills focused on the Bayonet and saber, and they were promoted by the GMD’s Central Guoshu Institute.

A number of Chinese martial artists believed that Japanese reforms to saber and bayonet training should be integrated into Chinese martial culture. This demonstration was photographed by the Jingwu Association in Shanghai.

A selected page from a mid 20th century Chinese language manual on Pici. This particular movement sought for greater realism as it adapted traditional fighting techniques to the needs of the modern military. Usually these drills focused on the Bayonet and saber, and they were promoted by the GMD’s Central Guoshu Institute. Source: Thanks to Brian Kennedy for posting these images on line. Originally from a reprint of a period manual sold by Lion Books in Taiwan.

In the remainder of this post we will examine a number of pictures of individuals posing with Dadaos (military big sabers) during the Second Sino-Japanese War (World War II) in an attempt to explore the recursive relationship between the Chinese military and the traditional martial arts.  After a period of aggressive westernization and modernization, the Chinese army of the 1930s once again began to appropriate elements from the traditional martial artists in an attempt to build esprit de corps and to find costs effective solutions to tactical problems.  At the same time many schools of hand combat started to undergo a subtle, or not so subtle, process of militarization through prolonged exposure to their new customer.  Some of these influences can still be felt in the Chinese martial arts to this day.

Two Soldiers and a Puzzle

The bulk of our discussion revolves around the first image, introduced at the top of this essay.  In it we see two individuals, apparently soldiers, in relatively new uniforms, standing in a doorway.  The most interesting thing about this pair is their arms.  Each carries a large (even by the standards of the weapon) shiny new Dadao.  We have discussed this saber in a few other places and this picture makes a nice addition to our catalog of historic images.  It is also interesting to note that the lintel of the doorway is both inscribed and labeled.

This is critical as it provides us one with two of our only clues for analyzing and dating this photograph.  The image itself is from a vintage photograph that I bought at an auction.  It is not a postcard.  Nor does it appear to be a commercial image reproduced for sale (the verso carries no advertisement or stamp for a photography studio, which is often a sign).  Instead this appears to be an actual snapshot taken by someone in the area for their own purposes.

It is always exciting to come across a new image of traditional weapons in their proper historical context.  I have never seen this photograph reproduced or published anywhere else, and it is both clear and detailed.  Still, the problem with artifacts like this is that we have no idea when, or under what circumstances, they were produced.

Luckily we have two clues to guide our guesses.  First, the back of this image was labeled “Peking” in faded pencil.  Secondly, after scanning and cleaning the image it became possible to read (most) of the inscriptions along the door.  The carved stone along the top is the less helpful of the two.  It indicates that the men are standing in the exterior entrance to a fire deity temple.  The vertical inscription is more interesting.  It reads something like: “”Nationalist revolution soldiers from the 34^th army group command post.”  I hasten to note that this is only an approximate translation as there was one character that was just too blurry to resolve.

Still, we now have enough information to start thinking critically about our new image.  And as soon as we do, we run into trouble.  There is a fire god temple in Beijing whose architecture vaguely matches the image in the photo, though I have not been able to local enough pictures of it to find the exact door that the soldiers are standing in (which presumes that the exterior wall still exists and has not been rebuilt).  Further, the large shiny Dadao seems typical of the type that became popular in the middle of the 1930s.  So possibly what we have is an image of two soldiers from the 34^th Army Group posing at a field HQ in Beijing in the late 1930s.

Unfortunately that is historically impossible.  The 34^th Army Group referenced in the image was not created until 1939 and it spent most of the war in the interior.  Beijing was overrun in 1937, so there is no way that this picture could have been taken in the capital prior to the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War.  Of course there are many other fire god shrines in China and it is always possible that the photo was simply mislabeled by whoever initially collected it.  So that is one possibility.  We are looking at a couple of nationalist soldiers in the 1940s standing in front of an unknown 34^th Army Group headquarters.

Yet there are some other odd things about this photograph.  The uniforms are not quite right for the period.  The hats bear the Nationalist Military symbol but they are not regulation issue.  By the 1940s most nationalist soldiers were wearing a German style cloth hat with their summer uniforms (and something much warmer in the winter.)  The hats worn by these two soldiers seem to be an attempt to copy the crisp peaked cap of the 1920s.  However, that style had been replaced in most places by the start of WWII.

Of course it is pretty common to encounter images of Nationalist soldiers in mismatched uniforms.  What is much odder is that neither of these individuals wears any indication of rank on their uniforms, either on their collars or arms.  Further, the Nationalist army patch is missing from above their breast pockets.  And the style of tunic that they are wearing more closely resembles what was being issued in the 1920s, or possibly in a warlord army, than what most individuals in the army were wearing in the 1940s.

Lastly, if these individuals are soldier it is very odd that they are not carrying any modern weapons with them.  Most soldiers who were issued a Dadao were also a given a rifle and bayonet.  Even individuals in the so called “Big Sword Units” carried at least one handgun (often more) and a number of grenades.  These two even lack the basic belts and webbing that would be needed to carry any sort of real equipment.   They don’t even have canteens.  All they have is their Dadao.

A Chinese soldier in the Nationalist Army. Manchuria, 1937. Source: Photographer Unknown.

The previous image is also of a Nationalist soldier carrying a Dadao.  One suspects that he may even be on guard duty given how he is standing.  It is much more typical of what we would expect to see.  His hat not only carries the correct pin, but it is typical period issue.  You can tell by the strap over his shoulder that he is either wearing a pistol belt or carrying a sleeping roll.  Further, the has a patch identifying him as a Nationalist soldier over his left breast.

I am pretty confident that the gentleman at the guard post is actually a Nationalist soldier.  I am less sure about the two individuals in our main image.  Of course there are a number of other possibilities.  They may simply be posing in newly issued uniforms (that are 10 years out of date) before any rank or insignia has been added.

Alternatively, they may not be regular soldiers at all.  Given their second-line uniforms (and weapons), one suspects that they might be members of some sort of paramilitary force.  In fact, most of the individuals who actually used the dadao were members of local militias, railway guards, watchmen, military police or members of resistance groups.  Such individuals were often armed with dadao and equipped with obsolete uniforms and gear (if any at all) precisely because the state could afford to give them little else.

If these individuals were members of a paramilitary group they are suddenly of much more interest to us.  It was not uncommon for the military to hire local martial artists to train such individuals.  Indeed, both Cheung Lai Chuen and Li Pei Xian (who we have already studied in some depth) were responsible for doing exactly this kind of work.  Other well-known master, such as Yin Yu Zhan also taught paramilitary groups and even developed their own special Dadao routines and training programs.

It is not unusual in Chinese history to find martial artists leading local militias.  What is interesting is that this was still going on in the mid 20^th century.  As these individuals adapted their training routines to fit the dadao (a relatively modern weapon) and the current tactical situation, they were opening a door whereby certain strains of the traditional Chinese martial arts were coming to reflect modern military, rather than civilian, influences.

Troops from the Ma Clique train with Dadao, probably in north western China. Photographer unknown. Notice that most of the individuals in this formation are very young and also lack any form of rank or insignia on their uniforms. I suspect that these are raw recruits or members of a paramilitary group.  I am looking for information on this photograph, especially where and when it was first published.

Conclusion

There is one last thread of our mystery that needs to be teased out.  Perhaps the individual who labeled the photograph actually knew exactly what he was talking about.  Maybe the image was taken at a fire god shrine in Beijing.  That might be possible if the image was produced between 1945 and 1948.  I do not know where the various field headquarters of the 34th Army group were in the post-WWII period, but it should be remembered that martial artists continued to be involved in the training of paramilitary groups.  Increasingly they were used as a check against the Communist Party during the Chinese Civil war.

This is a long-shot, but I wonder if these two martial artists may have had another reason for posing in front of that particular door.  Geng Jishan (1860-1928) was one of the foremost Xingyi Quan teachers of his day, as well as a founding member of the Jingwu Association.  He was also one of the first individuals to open a public martial arts school in Beijing.

He named his group the Shiming Wushu Academy.  His school was inherited by his successor Deng Yunfeng.  Deng was very well connected and sociable.  Under him the school became renown as a sort of salon where other martial artists came to talk, relax and discuss the issues of the day.  His friends and acquaintances included such luminaries as Sun Lutang, Li Cunyi and Chen Tinghua.

Rose Li studied with Deng for a number of years before immigrating to the United States and then the United Kingdom, where she became an important teacher of the internal martial arts.  When discussing her training in the 1930s Li always specified that the Shiming Wushu Academy was located on the grounds of a fire god shrine in Beijing.  In fact, that is what she called the institution in English, the “Fire God Temple School.”

One wonders if by chance the 34^th Army Group temporarily made their headquarters at the same temple, and then began to host classes for local militias and paramilitary recruits. If so our two swordsmen might be standing on the threshold of some of China’s most interesting modern martial arts history.  In truth we may never know where and when the picture was taken, but I think the speculation is a fun and educational exercise.

oOo

If you enjoyed this post you might also want to see: Through a Lens Darkly (7): Selling Swords and Printed Martial Arts Training Manuals in a 19th century Guangzhou Market.

oOo

A postcard showing Chinese weapons captured by the Japanese in Manchuria during WWII.

Introduction

Conflict seems to inspire trophy hunting. In the west this often takes the form of fading photographs of someone’s grandfather holding a vintage Luger. A large number of katanas also made their way back to the United States in the hands of returning servicemen. These became the seeds that gave rise to an increasingly sophisticated culture of Japanese sword appreciation on this side of the pacific. Nor does it appear that this impulse is the exclusive domain of the western cultures. As one combs through the historical artifacts of the great conflicts of the 20th century it is not hard to find evidence of similar practices in both China and Japan. Some of these remembrances can even be helpful to later students of martial arts history.

The decreasing cost of photographic reproduction ensured that by the middle of the 20th century images, rather than artifacts, would become some of the most frequently collected items to return home with soldiers. During the WWII period we can think of these as falling into three different categories based on their methods of production and distribution.

First, there are a very small number of personally produced photographic images that were taken by individuals who were actually located on the scene. These items are relatively rare as most soldiers who were actively campaigning did not have access to cameras and a darkroom. Many of these pictures were taken by journalists.  Nevertheless, when located these images can be important historical documents.

Much more common are images produced by professional photographers that were then reproduced for sale to servicemen and officers who were stationed in the local area. Often these images will feature stereotypical local scenes such as “The Great Wall of China,” or images of “The Shanghai Bund.” It is not uncommon for these reproductions to be labeled within the photograph itself, or to have been sold in collected albums, where each page featured a different theme. Such images could be sent home to loved ones and are fairly commonly encountered. In fact, if you spend some time on eBay it is not hard to start spotting duplicates of the more common themes. Execution scenes appear to have been big sellers.

Lastly there are images that were reproduced on an even wider commercial scale. Of course the most common of these are postcards. Whereas actual photographs derive their value from their specificity, being tied to a known place and time, postcards draw on the emotional appeal of the generic. Rather than a specific data point they promise a look at “all Chinese women” through a single portrait, or a sense of the totality of “Manchurian Daily Life” in a single street scene.

Working with these images can be rewarding, but it is not without its challenges. Occasionally some important piece of historical data can be gleaned from these postcards, but in general their value stems from what they betray about the subconscious attitudes and expectation of both those who sent and received them. Because their images are treated as generic and universal they are often reused in anachronistic or geographically puzzling ways. It is not uncommon to find postcards of “Chinese life” mailed in the 1940s that show images of China from before the 1911 revolution. The persistent yearning for an “oriental” and eternal China is portrayed in many of these images.

The inexpensive and widespread nature of the medium also made postcards a useful tool of public diplomacy and educational propaganda. The Japanese, in particular, produced large numbers of postcards that featured scenes of daily military training and camp life to be sent back to the families of soldiers in the mainland.

Other “educational” images seem to have been produced with the soldiers themselves in mind. These might carry useful bits of information, or show something about the forces that they were engaged with. The two postcards that we will be examining today, both taken from longer series, seem to fall into this category.

Weapons of the Enemy

Recently I had the good fortune of running across two postcards on eBay (both located in Japanese collections) that contained images of Chinese swords and other traditional weapons captured by Japanese troops in Manchuria during World War II. The first of these (featured at the head of this essay) was a black and white image of two swords, a Mauser pattern bayonet, a helmet and a gasmask. All of the items in this image are notable for their quality. The broader of the two swords is a dadao.  Note that the scabbard is present and that the blade lacks the distinctive “ring pommel” construction seen on so many surviving examples. Instead this sample appears to have a more traditional peened hilt.

While the dadao was likely produced during the late 1930s, the other sword is of a slightly older vintage. It is a well preserved example of a civilian jian. It is difficult to say much about the quality of the fittings or blade given the poor resolution of this photograph, but it is interesting to compare the length of this sword to the dadao besides it. Such weapons were favored by more extensively trained civilian martial artists. The helmet and gasmask, while core elements of this period’s military technology, feel slightly out of place in this image. We will return to that visual tension shortly.

A Japanese postcard showing swords captured in WWII. Source: Author’s Personal Collection.

The second image features an even more diverse array of traditional arms. Readers should begin by noting that this postcard is labeled in Japanese, English and Chinese. Most Japanese postcards from the WWII period are labeled only in Japanese (at least on the front), so this may be a reprinted image that was put back into circulation in the post WWII period. Again, it is hard to say with certainty as these images tended to get passed around and reprinted somewhat randomly.

The first two swords on the left are both patterns of dadao that are still encountered by collectors today. In fact, the first sword with the distinctive ring pommel and broken (probably brass) handguard was the most commonly produced type of dadao. The handle was generally wrapped with cord (sometimes with wooden inserts) to make it usable. The next sword to the left is notable for its wider blade. It appears to have lost its guard altogether (or perhaps it never received one).

The next three blades show a great deal of variety in both size and construction type. Readers should also notice the slender (probably Qing) era dao placed between the various bayonets. Along the bottom the image we see some archaic black powder firearms that were still in circulation and even a socketed spear head. A submachine gun rounds off this collection of weapons, once again adding an anachronistic flair.

One of the most interesting aspects of this image is the generally poor condition of these weapons. They look remarkably like many of random dadaos and lower quality swords that one might encounter at an auction house today. I must admit that I had always assumed that the missing handles and generally poor upkeep of these weapons had something to do with their age. But looking at this image (probably originally taken in the late 1930s or early 1940s), one wonders if perhaps a large percentage of the dadaos issued simply went into the field in an unfinished condition?

Selection Bias: A Double Trap

It might be tempting to look at this selection of images and to immediately draw some conclusions about how the Japanese individuals who bought and consumed them viewed the Chinese. Does this emphasis on traditional weapons betray a certain Orientalizing or infantilizing attitude? Does it constitute an implicit argument as to why Japanese Imperialism is not only necessary but ultimately beneficial?

I have heard a number of similar arguments made as scholars attempt to read similar images as historical texts. Some care is necessary in these exercises. To begin with, how much of the picture are we actually seeing?

I suspect that postcards like these are actually overrepresented in existing collections precisely because they are visually interesting. But how common were they in the 1940s? Recently I had a chance to see a number of other postcards produced in the same series as the first black and white example which we discussed above. All of these images were attempting to “educate” Japanese troops and other individuals as to the weapons that were encountered in Manchuria. But none of them (with the exception of the example given here) contained any traditional weapons at all. Instead they focused their attention on multiple patterns of modern rifles, submachine guns, handguns and poison gas gear. At least 80% of the series focused on modern weapons, yet I can’t find a single high quality image of these once more common postcards to share here.

Ultimately I would not discourage scholars from theoretically informed attempts to interpret or “read” the social meaning of these images. I believe that the exercise is quite fruitful. But some caution is in order. We must consider quite carefully whose discourse we are actually coming into contact with. Certainly we are not seeing the full totality of life under the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in these photographs. Only a tiny fraction of all of the available images was selected for distribution as postcards.

Yet over half a century later we rarely see more than a few of those. Instead we tend to encounter the elements of that discourse that found favor with more recent Japanese and Western collectors. These images survived and were reproduced precisely because they were congruent with the newly emerging discourse about China, WWII and the martial arts that arose in the current era. The Japanese soldiers being exposed to these postcards during WWII seem to have been (understandably) mostly concerned with the modern and deadly weapons in China’s arsenal. Yet the various patterns of bolt action rifles and sub-machine guns that characterized that conflict have faded in the popular imagination while the sword and bayonet have grown.

Nor is this challenge restricted to the realm of ephemera and postcards. Anyone looking at the history of popular culture needs to remember that these discourses usually come to us through multiple stages of evolution, each of which limits and colors what we see.

A rare period snap shot showing Chinese swords captured by Japanese during WWII. Source: Author’s personal collection.

oOo

If you enjoyed this post you might also want to see: Through a Lens Darkly (22): Heavy Knives and Stone Locks – Strength Training in the Traditional Chinese Martial Arts

oOo

A captured Chinese dadao being held by a Japanese soldier. Note the unique sawback blade. Source: Author’s Personal Collection.

The Album

Recently I had the good fortune to come across a photograph of a Chinese dadao (big knife) that dates to the late 1930s. Images such as these were sometimes collected by Japanese soldiers in occupied China and subsequently ended up back in Japan. Obviously photos of Chinese martial artists and traditional weapons are not nearly as common as snapshots of friends or famous places, but they do show up from time to time. Given how rare Chinese photographs of these same subjects are, such images are an important additional source of data. They are particularly helpful in suggesting exactly what sorts of bladed weapons were still being used and encountered by various forces in the 1930s and 1940s.

Images such as these fall into a couple of categories. On the one hand are snapshots that were taken by individuals who were actually on the scene. These tend to be rather rare. More common are photographs that look like they have been taken by local photographers and then sold to various soldiers.  Many of the images of scenic landscapes and monuments which are often seen in these sorts of collection fall into this latter category.

While these sorts of photos are not really all that rare, their usefulness to scholars is limited by the fact that various ephemera dealers in Japan have tended to break up the original albums so that these images can be auctioned off one by one. While this practice increases their profit margins (mostly because a small number of subjects are highly sought after by certain collectors), it destroys the original historical and sociological context of the photographs. Unless these images are labeled (which does happen from time to time) we cannot usually identify their setting or participants.

Today’s image is interesting in that it was part of a large lot of photos all taken from the same album. While the owner of the album is not known, by looking at the photos that he collected we can make some guesses about who he was and where he was stationed. I strongly suspect that this image was originally collected by an enlisted soldier in Japanese army who was stationed in Hangzhou (Zhejiang Province) in the early years of the Japanese occupation of that city.

Most of the pictures in this particular collection did not feature military scenes. Rather this soldier collected a number of very well composed images of famous attractions in the Hangzhou area. Many of these places (including the Six Harmonies Pagoda and the Moon Mirroring Pool) are still tourist destinations today. A couple of less identifiable landscapes pictures were also present, including one very nice image of garden walkway through the middle of a highly manicured bamboo grove.

The only other “military” image in this small collection also focused on the presence of swords on the modern battlefield. That particular photograph featured four or five Japanese soldiers sitting around in various states undress cleaning and inspecting their Gunto (katanas). It was actually one of the more remarkable images that I have ever come across in a soldier’s album.

These particular individuals were going out of their way to look unpleasant. Some of them were actually leering at the camera as they fingered their blades. The entire scene looked as though someone had ordered a group of “Japanese villains” from central casting for a bad Kung Fu film. Needless to say that image went to a collector with deeper pockets than me.

I was a bit disappointed not to have won any of the landscape photos that made up the bulk of this particular album. Often such images are ignored, but for some reason these actually attracted a fair amount of attention. Still, I did manage to take home the one photograph that was really interesting from the perspective of Chinese martial studies.

A detail of the sawback dadao. Source: Author’s personal collection.

The Dadao

This particular image shows a Japanese soldier holding a captured Chinese dadao. The print itself is fairly small, being no larger than a passport photo. The image is quite clear, but unfortunately it has been scratched over the years. Maybe I will try to clean this one up at some point. Readers should also note the sandbag position in the background of the image.

The dadao in this image is fairly unique. In my years of collecting both vintage blades and photographs I have never run across a specimen quite like this one. This is a good sized weapon. While many of these swords had surprising short blades, that is not the case with the current example. The handle is also generous in length and appears to be covered in wood.

Give the angle of the blade it is hard to tell what the pommel looks like, but the sword has a heavy “cup shaped” hand guard. I suspect that this is made from brass or bronze given its lighter color. Note that it appears to be slightly clover shaped and is less deep along the sides of the blade.

The blade of this particular sword is its most remarkable feature. I have never seen a period dadao with a “sawback” design before. The teeth of the saw are pronounced and clearly visible running along the spine of the blade.

Similar features were included on swords and bayonets issued to “pioneer” or engineering units in Europe from about the middle of the 19th century onward.  By 1900-1920 such weapons had fallen distinctly out of favor. I suspect that while originally intended as a multipurpose tool for cutting wood and building wooden structures, the saws on most of these weapons were probably not very effective.

This dadao might have been a different story. The length of the blade would have given this saw a much more useful draw, and the curve of the spine (as well as the weight) might have made for some good cutting ergonomics. If nothing else those teeth look like they might have had real bit. A lot of this would come down to what sort of steel was actually used and how it was hardened, all of which is impossible to tell from a photograph. Still, this looks to be a substantial and well-made weapon, at least by the standards of the dadao. Now that we know that these were out there, I will have to keep my eyes open for other examples.

Over the last few years I have focused a lot of my collecting on Nepalese military kukri. These traditional knives are still issued to Gurkha soldiers today and there are many accounts of their use on the modern battlefield. Still, what has always interested me the most about the kukri is its utility as a general purpose survival tool. Yes, it can be a weapon, but it can also chop wood, build shelters, start fires and butcher animals. I suspect that it is this genuine versatility (as well as a degree of romanticism) that has allowed the kukri to survive as a battlefield tool for this long.

The dadao presents us with a contrasting case. These swords were much bigger and heavier than a kukri. Nor are they particularly useful. While some of them are so poorly weighted that they feel more like an ax than an actual sword, their blades were never intended for chopping wood. They were much more a single purpose weapon.

I have often wondered whether anyone attempted to make the dadao into a more versatile tool. This picture would seem to indicate that at least a few manufactures were thinking along these lines. Still, we will need to inspect some period examples (if any have survived) before we can judge the extent to which they succeeded.

oOo

If you enjoyed this you might also want to see: Through a Lens Darkly (14): Archery Practice in Late Imperial China

oOo

Kendo and Judo as part of life in the Japanese Navy. Source: Vintage Postcard. Author’s personal collection.

Introduction

The martial arts can speak to a number of important questions, but perhaps to none as directly as popular attitudes towards violence. Much of my recent research has looked at what the organization of martial arts groups in China reveals about the nature of social conflict. Yet for those who share my interest in the modern martial arts and conflict, it is hard to imagine a case study quite as rich as the Pacific theater of the Second World War (WWII).

During the years prior to the outbreak of this conflict martial arts played many roles within the domestic political discourses of both Japan and China. Hand combat reformers argued that they were an inexpensive means by which the state could reform physical education in schools, promote physical fitness among the general population and improve public health. Yet they were also turned to as vehicles for promoting nationalism, strengthening state control of civil society and structuring the ways that civilian populations would perceive other peoples in the coming conflict.

The idea that these fighting systems somehow revealed essential truths about the Japanese (and later Chinese) people even aided the explosion in popularity which these same systems enjoyed in the West after the close of hostilities. Still, as many scholars have previously argued, the seemingly immutable links between the Asian martial arts and specific ethnolinguistic identities were ultimately a byproduct of specific political discourses, the efforts of individual reformers and the power of “invented traditions.”

In today’s post I would like to take a look at a couple of period artifacts that help to illustrate the process by which these discourses were created and spread throughout society. Both of the postcards that we will be discussing were printed in Japan during WWII and were intended to illustrate and humanize scenes of daily military life. Presumably these sorts of images were created for the benefit of both the soldiers who might have bought them as well as their families back home.

These seem to have been fairly popular and it is not hard to find them in auctions and specialized collections. They exist in multiple series, some of which focus on the army, while others tackle the challenges of naval life. I have always suspected that some of them were actually reprinted after the end of the war, but because postcards are usually not dated I have yet to definitively confirm this.

As one might expect the vast majority of images presented on these cards have nothing to do with the martial arts. Topics such as “swabbing the decks”, eating lunch in the field and feeding the horses dominate these series. Yet a few cards in each series seem to be dedicated explicitly to the practice of hand combat.

This is not surprising as martial arts training had become a mandatory part of most primary and secondary educational programs in Japan during the late Meiji period. The military itself also made use of various martial disciplines in its training. Sumo wrestling, judo and kendo are all well represented in these series and soldiers are seen both participating in these events as well as watching them as spectators. Yet this does not exhaust the limits of the artist’s martial imagination. From time to time we even catch glimpses of the Chinese martial arts as well, always seen from the perspective of victorious Japanese soldiers.

Before going on I should make a couple of final notes. First, I would like to thank Dr. Jared Miracle for providing me with a rough translation of the contents of these postcards on very short notice. He was also kind enough to share some of his thoughts on these images. Any errors of omission or commission in the discussion below are mine alone.

Another vintage Japanese postcard showing kendo practice on a battleship. Source: Author’s personal collection.

 
Kendo in the Navy Life

Our first postcard focuses on traditional fencing and judo. Of all of the martial themes that appear on these postcards, swords and the practice of kendo are by far the most common. While we in the West tend only to imagine karate or judo when discussing the Japanese martial arts, this emphasis on sword-play accurately represents the importance of kendo in the development of Japan’s martial arts culture during the pre-war period. While it is nice to see a portrayal of ship-board kendo training on this postcard, the brief mention of judo is what makes it really standout in my opinion.

When reading a Japanese cartoon, proceed from right to left, and top to bottom. A rough translation of dialog runs as follows:

Banner: “Gekiken”

Fencing Sailor 1: “He enjoys taking that posture/stance he learned.”

Officer: “Like some kind of ‘Sword Barbarian,’ eh?”

Fencing Sailor 2: “Here I come!”

Judo Guy: “We really prefer judo over gekiken.”

At first glance this postcard would seem to accurately capture a fairly mundane moment in the life of many sailors. Ample photographic evidence exists to demonstrate that shipboard kendo practice and competition was common in the Japanese navy. In fact, I have other photographic postcards that show scenes that are almost identical to the one portrayed in the postcard above. In one sense this image is interesting precisely because it replicates such a mundane moment in time.

Nevertheless, the cartoon is more interesting than its photographic brethren in that they do not attempt to tell us anything about what the various participants in these activities are thinking. Or at least what those who were employing these images to create a certain discourse linking martial arts practice and military service wanted us to believe that they were thinking.

For instance, given that practically all Japanese high school students practiced kendo at one time or another, it may be significant that the side banner on this postcard identifies the scene as one of “gekiken” (or old style fencing) rather than kendo. While I am not an expert in Japanese martial arts history (most of my own research being focused on China), one suspects that this reflects the debate that emerged in the 1930s where certain military officers and martial artists began to worry that “modernized” kendo (which had developed more as a means of self-cultivation and competition) was no longer preparing officers with practical battlefield skills. In fact, Japanese swordsmen faced a number of setbacks when they first entered the Chinese field.

Hence the “older” approach to fencing went into revival during the WWII period in an attempt to update the skills of Japanese soldiers for the modern battlefield. In that sense it may be interesting to observe that the second swordsman appears to be using unorthodox “barbarian” techniques that the first is being forced to adjust to.

This card also appears to intentionally juxtapose such “rough and tumble” combat training techniques with the more structured, fraternal and even “gentle” nature of judo training. While many soldiers practiced judo, the art itself never seems to have undergone the same transformation that gripped the kendo world. This juxtaposition of two different approaches to the martial arts seems to provide the narrative thread that runs through this card.

Glorious Deeds of Arms

Banner: “Glorious Deeds of Arms: Prisoners of War and Spoils of War”

Japanese Officer: “This is banned dum-dum ammunition.”

Japanese Soldier: “Yeah, we also captured the enemy’s tank(s)!”

Captured Chinese Soldier: “POWs certainly enjoy the Japanese Army’s kindness.”

Japanese Soldier: “I’d really like (or it would be nice) to take this Green Dragon Blade home as a souvenir, eh?”

Our second image turns its attention to the infantry in occupied China. There is no indication within the picture to indicate where or when this scene is supposed to have taken place. But photographs of such “victory scenes,” where Japanese soldiers are shown posing with confiscated weapons (or occasionally at important landmarks) are commonly found in soldiers’ photo albums from the period. Again, one of the most interesting aspects of this image is its intentionally generic nature. Images of such scenes were frequently recorded and then reproduced on a massive scale for consumption by viewers on the home front.

The great advantage of the illustrated format of this particular image is that it provides the artist with a way to tell us what is (or should be) going on in the heads of individual soldiers. The first individuals who speaks is probably meant to be an officer (note the mustache, katana, and high leather boots). His interest is focused on the more modern and deadly aspects of the Chinese military. In this case it has just been discovered that the Chinese soldiers in question were armed with “dum-dum” rounds.

This is a slang term for any bullet that is designed to mushroom or expand on impact to inflict more damage on its victim. The name itself is a historical reference to the Dum Dum arsenal in India where the British experimented with such ammunition in the late 19th century before it was banned by the Geneva Convention. While it is not uncommon to come across references to “dum-dum rounds” in English language discussions, I was previously unaware that the term had entered conversational Japanese in the 1930s.

Notice also that the next speaker emphasizes the mechanized nature of the Chinese army by pointing to the captured tank on the far right of the image. The viewer is not meant to feel pity for a “poorly equipped” Chinese army. Obviously this is a fine line to walk given what is going on at the left-hand side of the card. But the “testimony” of the captured Chinese soldiers themselves notes that we need not be concerned for their welfare. Of course this is one place where the images presented by the official propaganda and actual historical events are different in profound ways.

On the left side of the card a very different conversation appears to be happening at exactly the same moment. Here two soldiers pick through a pile of traditional weapons that have been confiscated. One holds a classic dadao aloft, while the other hefts a guandao. He refers to this weapon as a “Green Dragon Blade.”

In so doing he explicitly identifies the weapon as that wielded by the hero Guan Yu in the classic novel The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The same story was very popular in Japan (where it often went by the title Sangokushi). In fact, this one work has spawned literally countless derivative novels, stories, plays, woodblock prints, poems, manga and movies between the late Tokugawa period and today. It has occupied an important place within Japanese popular culture for literally centuries.

A captured Chinese dadao being held by a Japanese soldier. Note the unique saw back blade. Source: Author’s Personal Collection.

Conclusion: The Martial Arts and Modernity

Both of our postcards have built stories around the physical trappings of the martial arts. In the first image we see sailors, faces obscured by kendo masks, training on a ship with bamboo swords. In the second image we instead find real swords, won in an actual fight, while their former owners look on passively. And in both cases the martial arts are shown to be an aspect of the modern battlefield rather than a purely cultural exercise.

Still, it is interesting to consider this relationship with modernity in a slightly more detailed way. The subtle comparison between Japanese gekiken and judo suggests an acute awareness that martial practices in Japan were evolving and changing in response to things happening in their environment. Interestingly, the various martial artists within the image seem to have mixed opinions on the value of these trends. While the two swordsmen throw themselves into the newly revived “old style” fencing practice, the judo players behind them look on with some degree of incredulity. All of this indicates a high level of social literacy regarding the sorts of political debates that were happening within the world of the Japanese martial arts.

In contrast the Japanese vision of the Chinese martial arts seems to be frozen in time. More specifically, it is frozen in a vision of an “Orientalized” past defined by the immensely popular Sangokushi which dominated much of Japanese popular culture throughout the 20th century. This is fascinating as the widespread adoption of the dadao by Chinese troops was in some ways just as recent a trend as the innovations in Japanese military fencing that the first postcard seemed to be commenting on.

Nor did these cards show the Chinese as having only obsolete equipment. Theirs was a mechanized force complete with artillery. How “glorious” could “deeds of arms” be when unleashed against a vastly inferior enemy? Still, while the Japanese fighting arts were viewed as an evolving part of a modern military structure, their Chinese counterparts are reduced to essentialist markers of ethnolinguistic identity. Further, this identity is made accessible to Japanese consumers and readers through the popular novels and media of their day.

There are a number of interesting points to take away from this brief discussion. While forces within Japanese society sought to use their traditional martial arts to promote certain ideological and nationalist positions, readers appear to have been aware of recent changes in how these arts were practiced and political debates within the martial community. This is the opposite of the sort of allochronism that one might expect to see. Secondly, Japanese readers are expected to have some interest in (and familiarity with) the practice of Chinese boxing. If nothing else traditional Chinese weapons are shown as desirable war souvenirs.

Yet these practices are understood only through political discourses and media representations that have the effect of stripping them of their actual history. This misperception of the true nature of the Chinese martial arts becomes one step in the process of reducing them markers of an inferior ethnolinguistic identity that must be overcome or controlled. This would seem to suggest that the misunderstanding of someone else’s martial arts history is at least as dangerous as accepting a false narrative of one’s own practices.

Guan Yu as shown by Utagawa Kuniyoshi in his collection of prints from the Sangokushi.

If you enjoyed these images you might also want to see:  Through a Lens Darkly (31): Red Spears, Big Swords and Civil Resistance in Northern China

Chinese Officer and Soldier with Ring Hilted Sabers

Today’s post is an early Christmas gift.  When I first decided that it would be wise (for research purposes) to collect and catalog images of period martial artists, I was faced with a couple of dilemmas.  Perhaps the most pressing was to determine what constituted a photo of a “martial artist.”  The realm of hand combat instruction in China was filled with all sorts of figures, from opera singers to private security guards and even bandits, who depended on the martial arts to make a living.  Yet they do not all fit into a modern understanding of “proper” kung fu students and schools.

Soldiers also fall into this category.  For many individuals the martial arts were a very practical educational choice to prepare for a career in the military.  So under what circumstances is a photo of a late 19th century soldier also a potentially important image of a martial artist?

My answer to this question has shifted over the years.  At the moment I have decided that a soldier is also a martial artist if he is acting as such (for instance, practicing archery) or displaying either objects of values associated with Chinese martial culture (e.g., one occasionally finds photos of soldiers participating in lion or dragon dancing at festivals).  I will be the first to admit that this is more of a rule of thumb than a comprehensive typology for classifying images.  Unfortunately I had yet to work even this out when I first began collecting period postcards and photographs.

You can see a scan of one of the very first postcards that I puzzled over at the top of this article.  For reasons that I have not entirely worked out, some of the best photos of early Chinese martial artists appear on Russian postcards.  Soldier and martial artists were also plentiful in the British, American, Japanese, German and French spheres of influence.  And over the course of this series we have seen interesting images emerge from all of these geographic areas.  But for some reason, whether it was local culture or consumer demand back in Europe, martial images seem to have made up a larger percentage of the Russian catalog.

The image at the top, which probably dates to the very end of the 19th century or the early 20th, shows a Chinese military officer flanked with four soldier who appear to be armed as his personal guard (recall that regular troops in China in the early 20th century generally carried rifles). When I first saw this postcard I was fascinated by the image.  Not being able to read Russian I am not exactly sure where the photo was taken, but one can clearly see the crenelations of a fortress or city wall behind them.  These were quite common in northern and central China at the end of the Qing dynasty.  Even more interesting are the long, ring hilted, sabres carried by each of the soldiers.  The central officer is armed with what appears to be a European style blade.

Unfortunately I decided that these particular soldier were not a “priority” and I passed on the image.  I immediately regretted that decision and spent the next three years looking for another copy of this postcard.  Earlier this month two examples hit the market at exactly the same time.  Luckily I managed to snag one and am now sharing my good fortune with you.

One might assume that such a long search indicates that the image in question was very rare and had little impact on anyone’s perception of Chinese culture or the martial arts.  That is probably not the case.  I suspect that this image was actually quite popular.  Each of the three examples that I have come across in the last few years is slightly different from the others.  This indicates that each of these examples (see below) comes from a different printing of the card.  It must have been commercially successful to warrant this degree of sustained attention.  The scarcity of this image today is probably a better indicator of the incredibly low survival rates for all sorts of ephemera rather than its circulation figures at the time.

Taking a Closer Look at the “Tai Chi Saber”

From a martial arts perspective, the most interesting thing about this image is the swords (or more properly dao) carried by the soldiers.  Pay special attention to the “S” shaped guards, cord wrapped handles (probably over wood scales) and ring pommels seen on each weapon.  Occasionally one sees modern interpretations of this basic blade shape marketed as the “Tai Chi Saber.” The weapon even seems to have achieved a degree of popularity among practitioners of certain forms.  Needless to say this is not an “official” name for these sorts of swords.  Chinese martial artists, in general, seem to have employed the weapons that were at hand rather than commissioning specific designs for their local styles. Instead this was a style of dao that was popular in northern and central China from roughly the middle of the 19th century to the 1930s.  It was carried by a wide range of local militia members, bandit forces, security guards, martial artists and apparently even some more regular soldiers.

One of the reasons why this image has always fascinated me is that I have owned a couple of these swords over the years.  I would have loved to provide detailed photos of one of these blades as it is a pretty close match to the examples in the postcard.  Unfortunately that weapon is currently on loan to my Sifu on the other side of the country.  Instead I found a couple of examples that were posted over at Swords and Antique Weapons for study purposes that may help to shed some light on what these blades are like for anyone who has not had a chance to handle one.

http://www.swordsantiqueweapons.com/s205_full.html

http://www.swordsantiqueweapons.com/s205_full.html

The first of these is the sort of blade that may have been used as a presentation sword or carried by more elite guards whose employer was looking to make an ostentatious statement.  This particular sword is 111 cm long (about 44 inches).  Its blade is decorated with both piercings and fullers, and the spine has been incised with a bamboo pattern.  That last flourish actually seems to have been somewhat common on these swords and can even be seen on my own, much more plebeian, example.

In general these swords are lighter and faster in the hand than you might expect given their length and width.  This is possible as the profile of the blade is rather thin and flat coming to a sharp edge optimized for slicing rather than bashing armored targets.  As you move towards the tip this tendency becomes even more pronounced, much as you might expect with an ox-tailed dao of the same period.  Of course one has to be careful making generalizations about blades of this era as they have often been polished more than once and this can change both their weight and geometry.  If you see one of these swords with a oddly rounded tip and fullers that lack definition or depth, this is an indication that you are dealing with a “tired blade” that has seen too many polishings.  Given the lengths and weight of the handle, it seems that many of these swords could have been used with either one or two hands.

http://www.swordsantiqueweapons.com/s109_full.html

The second example of a blade of this type is more typical of what one might encounter today.  Because these swords appear to have been popular with civilian martial artists and militia members, they show up on the antique market with some frequency.  Unfortunately a lot of these swords are in “relic” or “dug” condition.  Still, it is possible to get a real sense of how they would have handled, and many of them are sturdy enough for forms practice.  Needless to say, all of the normal disclaimers about the proper inspection and careful use of antique weapons apply here.

This more typical sword is about 93 cm in length, 69 of which is blade.  Aside from that, the basic profile of the blade appears to be similar.  It was also a nicely decorated weapon in its day.

Over the years I have seen some discussion of these swords and whether they could be considered true “military” weapons or if they were the exclusive domain of civilian martial artists.  In a sense these sorts of questions are impossible to answer because of the ever shifting boundaries between the “official” military, sanctioned and unsanctioned local militias, bandit groups and warlord armies.  Soldiers and even important commanders moved back and forth across these lines and when they did they took their weapons with them.  Thus what one might encounter at any given garrison in the final years of the Qing dynasty might deviate substantially from the official regulations for the Green Standard Army. Still, the postcards discussed here provide a suggestion that at least some of these swords ended up in military hands.

oOo

If you enjoyed this post you might also want to read:  Through a Lens Darkly (18): Chinese Martial Arts and Early 20th Century Cigarette Cards: Building the Global Image of Kung Fu.

oOo

Lee Fung, “Director of Chinese Lion Dance.” January 23rd, 1941. Source: Vintage newspaper photo. Author’s personal collection.

Introduction

Happy Lunar New Year!  In honor of the holiday I decided to publish a couple of posts that focused on the important role that the traditional martial arts, and martial values more generally, have played in the celebration of this holiday.  On Friday we looked at a reconstruction of a specific Dragon Dance festival in Tu village and asked what that could teach us about the place of martial values in building up social capital and shared identity within a community.  This topic is an important one as it helps to explain what benefits martial arts groups might bring to communities outside of the realm of pure defense.  You can read more about this topic here.

In today’s post we will focus on how martial displays in “Chinese New Year” festivals helped to spread the image of the Asian martial arts in North America during the 1940s and 1950s.  These decades are particularly important as many accounts of the global emergence of the Chinese martial arts do not begin until the late 1960s.  While it is certainly true that there was an explosion of popular interest in these fighting forms during the 1960s-1970s, it is not the case that no one was doing (or publicly exhibiting) Kung Fu in earlier periods.

While still relatively rare, the Spring Festival was one of the few times of the year in which martial values and practices were put on public display.  And because various Chinatown businesses and restaurants promoted Lion and Dragon Dancing, as well as the occasional boxing demonstration, as a way of attracting tourists to their neighborhood, these displays were more widely observed and reported on by the press than one might suspect.  In some important ways these events are the pre-history which shaped and conditioned the later explosion of interest in the Chinese martial arts.  Thus it may be fruitful to critically examine a few images of Lion Dance teams and martial artists that were produced and distributed in this period.  In this case we are interested in both the images themselves as well as how they framed these practices within the boundaries of mid 20th century consumer culture.

Who was Lee Fung?

That is not a rhetorical question.  If you have any information on this individual I would really like to learn more about him.

I have been looking for information about Lee Fung (so far with little luck) since I had the good fortune to acquire a somewhat faded photograph of him.  The picture was taken for a newspaper article and it came out of a press archive.  The nice thing about old press photos is that they often carry descriptive notes on the back.  This usually includes the name of the photographer, the subject, the date that it was used, the newspaper that ran the image and its caption (if any).  If you are particularly lucky it is sometimes possible to even find the original article that ran with an image.

This is what makes newspaper photos so valuable.  Like other forms of ephemera they capture a moment in time.  Yet the nature of the commercial and journalistic projects tie these images to important themes in popular culture while providing some additional clues about their subjects.

Verso of the Lee Fung Picture. Source: Author’s personal collection.

Unfortunately one does not always get so lucky.  In this case the back of the photo included a date indicating that the article ran four days before the Lunar New Year in 1941 (which was the year of the snake).  It also had the name of the subject and the picture’s caption.  Unfortunately the name of the newspaper was missing and I have not been able to locate the article that it accompanied.  Nor have I been able to find any additional information about Mr. Fung.

The photo itself is interesting and I quite like the detailed images on Fung’s shin guards and his old school shoes.  Yet what period readers would have noticed first was the large Dadao that he held in both hands.  The sword has a small guard (similar in size and type to those that were popular on the Vietnamese version of this weapon) and a pronounced sweep to the blade.

While the Dadao is not commonly encountered in Lion Dance performances today (at least not in any of the ones I have seen), it would have been an immediately recognizable and meaningful weapon to readers in 1941.  At the time the country was embroiled in WWII and discussions of the situation in China were commonly encountered on the front page of newspapers of the era.  A large number of articles had reported the existence of “Big Sword” troops within the Chinese army and their success in facing down the Japanese (armed with their own near-mythical swords) in close quarters combat.

Indeed, the Dadao had become an image of China’s anti-imperialist resistance in the face of Japanese aggression.  This discussion in the press helped to modify the common belief that the Chinese lacked the strength (either individually or collectively) to resist occupation. It was also one of the first images of the more modern (Republic era) Chinese martial arts to really find a firm place in the Western imagination.

The sight of a Chinese-American martial artist wielding a Dadao during the Spring Festival probably registered with American audiences on a number of levels that are not as obvious to us today.  To take up this weapon in 1941 was to make a political and cultural statement about the complex relationship between America, China, Japan and the Chinese-American community.

A vintage postcard showing Lion Dancers in Los Angeles. This particular card was used as an advertisement to attract visitors to Chinatown’s various markets and restaurants. While the photo has a copyright date of 1952 the picture could have been taken years earlier. Note the similarities in dress and costume to Lee Fung in the early 1940s. Source: Vintage Postcard. Author’s personal collection.

The next photo comes from a widely distributed vintage postcard.  It was part of a very popular series of images of L.A.’s Chinatown produced by the S. I. Co.  We know from the postmarks and inscriptions on some of these cards that they were in fact being sold within Chinatown’s various shops to the tourists who visited the district in the early 1950s.

While this postcard bears a copyright date of 1952, it seems likely that the photograph of the Lion Dance team is somewhat older, possibly dating back to the 1940s.  Note for instance the similarities in dress and foot-ware to Lee Fung’s more detailed photograph above.  One almost wonders whether he might be hiding somewhere in this group shot.  And while the Dadao is missing from this later image, the paired American and Republic of China flags (only a few years after the mainland fell to the Communists in 1949) would have invoked a similar set of political and psychological reactions in the viewer.

This is not to say that martial weaponry is missing from the photograph.  In this case the Lions themselves seem to blend into the background while the various pole arms wielded by the troupe are brought to the fore.  Again, the display of Chinese culture in this image is closely tied to the articulation of martial values.

All of this is given a strongly “Orientalist” gloss when we turn the card over.  It appears that all of the postcards in this series carried an identical secondary message, meant to advertise the allures of the city’s Chinatown to potential tourists.  In that sense these postcards are actually similar to Victorian “trade cards” which businesses of that era used for advertisement.   Here we read:

In a setting of Old China, with shrines, lily pools, and courts, the Chinese have gathered art treasures of the Orient.  Here is offered silks, antiques, jewelry, and thousands of beautiful souvenirs.  The delicacies prepared in the fine Chinese restaurants are fit for a Mandarin, and delight the palate as well as the eye.

Thus the complex political subtexts of the actual image vanish in a hazy vision of “old Cathay.”  Two themes dominate this short paragraph.  The first is the promise of all types of consumption.  The other is a powerful sense of nostalgia for China as the exotic “other.”  After all, by the 1950s China had been free of “Imperial courts” for some time. This card rectified that situation by provided a vision of China as a living antique rather than a rapidly modernizing nation.

When one turns the card back around a new message seems to emerge.  It is not simply the food and silks of China that are now available for Western consumption.  It is also cultural traditions and martial values.  All of this is being offered to the intrepid traveler who would set aside a day for patronizing the stores and businesses of Chinatown.  While a national political and diplomatic debate raged as to “who lost China,” American consumers were discovering a new realm of nostalgia and imagination.  It was more stable and immediate than the complex reality of events on the global stage.  In this vision one could experience the “essence” of Chinese culture through the consumption of its goods, values and practices.  All of this could be done without leaving home.

Conclusion

When did the Chinese martial arts finally make their presence felt in the Western marketplace?  Mass public awareness of these systems would have to wait for the dawning of the 1970s.  Yet the global journey of these systems began well before that.  Concepts, identities and institutions from these earlier eras had an important shaping effect on events to come.

We cannot really understand some of the details of the later Kung Fu Craze without first coming to grips with the slow accumulation of ideas and symbols that preceded it.  As the photographs in this post suggest, the martial values associated with the Spring Festival, and the way that they were marketed to mid 20th century tourists, helped to reinforce a specific cultural discourse that would later carry the Chinese martial arts to practically every corner of western popular culture.

Another photo auctioned on ebay. This one showed a Lion and Kung Fu performer in Honolulu in 1957. Source: ebay.

oOo

If you enjoyed this post you might also want to see: Lives of Chinese Martial Artists (6): Ng Chung So – Looking Beyond the “Three Heroes of Wing Chun”

oOo

“Chinese Reoccupy Great Wall Area.” 1933. Still taken from Vintage Newsreel.

“In the west, Asian martial arts are everywhere.  They are part of the texture of popular consciousness.  Nonetheless I want to argue that they remain marginal.  That is to say, although Westerners may see them often, and all over the place, they are not simply the norm.”

-Paul Bowman, “the Marginal Movement of the Martial Arts: From the Kung Fu Craze to Master Ken.” 2015.

Introduction

Students of martial arts studies stand at a perpetual crossroads.  It springs from the very nature of our subject.  A great many of us are current or former martial artists.  We have an intimate understanding of the embodied physicality of these practices.  As much as I like talking about the history of Wing Chun, I will be the very first person to say that if you want to understand what the art actually is, don’t start by reading a book or blog post about it.  Not even one written by me.  Go and do it.  Experience the actual system.  Examine how it makes you feel.

At the same time I have to wonder why you are asking me about Wing Chun in the first place?  As a historian I can tell you that it was a pretty obscure art back in 1949.  Chances are good that you first encountered this style through the media, either on TV or film.  That is just fine as the martial arts, while a sensuous experience, have always existed as an aspect of popular culture.  That was also the case in historic Japan and China.  In those countries commercial visual art (woodblock prints), professional storytellers, printed novels and traveling opera performers, spread the stories of various heroes just as effectively as film or videogames do today.

This is why martial arts studies needs to remain an interdisciplinary research area.  It is unlikely that any single methodological toolbox can reveal all that this body of practices has to offer.  On the one hand no less an authority than Douglas Wile has argued that Universities have an unprecedented opportunity to become involved in teaching, preservation and analysis of actual martial arts systems and traditions.

Still, we would be foolish to assume that the physical practice of the martial arts is a self-interpreting process.  The popular literature is littered with experts, spiritual gurus and ethno-nationalist propagandists all of whom would like assist us in discovering the “true” meaning of our practice.  How could it be otherwise?  The martial arts exist as social institutions, and social power is always somewhat fungible in nature.  That makes it a valuable and contested resource.

This realization should also spark a moment of self-reflection.  Images of these practices were introduced to us through an (often media driven) social discourse long before we started to practice them.  And while our understanding of their nature no doubt grew exponentially as we engaged with them, how do these “first impressions” continue to color our understanding of our practice?  How do they help to explain why some sorts of individuals, and not others, tend to be drawn to the martial arts in the first place?

We probably cannot understand our personal experiences within the martial arts, let alone their broader social impact, if we ignore the discourses which bring new students to the school door.  This is not simply a theoretical question.  For anyone interested in the health and future survival of the traditional martial arts it is a vital topic.

Readers interested in exploring this subject more deeply would be well advised to carefully consider Paul Bowman’s recent conference paper from which the introductory quote was drawn.  I suspect that as we look back on the development of martial arts studies it will be remembered as one of the more important papers given this year, particularly for those interested in the global spread and appropriation of the martial arts.

This paper is also a fun read.  It diverges from the (ever serious) mainstream discussion of history and film, and instead takes a look at the evolution of martial arts humor in the West.  As Bowman reminds us, humor is a powerful tool of analysis because it points to deeply held, and widely shared, cultural frameworks.  If you want to know what the public at large thinks about the martial arts, start by considering what they find funny.  This often reveals more nuanced views than a simple opinion survey might be able to uncover.

Unfortunately Bowman notes that the public spends a lot of time laughing at martial artists, rather than with them.  While these systems have successfully spread themselves throughout Western society, with terms like “Kung Fu” and “Ninja” now being part of popular culture, they always seem to lose out in the realm of respectability politics.

Consider the following.  No parent needs to explain or rationalize their decision to send a child to a summer sports camp, or to push them to excel in gymnastics or basketball.  But parents supporting their children in a Judo class or Kickboxing tournament generally come well-armed with a litany of justifications for their recreational choices.  It keeps my kids active, it teaches them to fend for themselves, it prepares them for the ‘real world,’ and (my personal favorite) it ‘builds character.’  Basketball probably does a lot of the same things.  But no one feels the need to concoct elaborate justifications for allowing their kid to try out for the school team.  It is just a normal and expected part of childhood.  And it is fun.

This is where the martial arts run into trouble.  For all of their name recognition, Bowman notes that they remain separated from the norms and hegemonic discourses that define mainstream western society.  Ergo the constant need to justify them as vehicles for other values that society has deemed to be acceptable.  In that sense our justifications of our practices are very revealing.  They speak to the sorts of questions and concerns that our neighbors might have when they learn that we have just signed a child up for a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu class.

The distance between the perceived cultural place of the martial arts and society’s dominant value systems creates a space of puzzlement, tension, and sometimes fear among non-martial artists.  Humor is important as it can be used to either subtly disarm these emotions, or to further marginalize the “deviant” behavior.

“London Sees Thrill of Japanese Sports.”
A Judo match between a British and German competitors. Taken from a vintage newsreel. 1932.

Towards a Media Archeology of Martial Arts Studies: Judo, Kendo and the Dadao on Film     

While I agree with the main thrust of Bowman’s argument I would like to push its application in a more historical direction.  His investigation of the evolution of martial arts humor seems to begin in 1974 with the release of the now iconic disco hit ‘Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting.’  Bowman points out that the meteoric rise of this song through the charts marked, in many ways, the high-water mark of the ‘Kung Fu Craze’ of the early 1970s.

Touched off by grind house Kung Fu films (especially those by Bruce Lee), this interest in the Chinese martial arts had been seen as edgy, counter-cultural and somewhat dark.  This same view was even shared by some in the mainstream martial arts world where Bruce Lee’s movies did not always make a good impression on the more conservative practitioners of the Budo arts.  Yet by the middle of the 1970s the Chinese styles seem to have accomplished what it took the Japanese arts decades to do.  They too became fixtures in the pop culture landscape, and ‘Kung Fu’ quickly joined ‘Karate’ and ‘Judo’ as household words.  Krug places an acceleration in the cultural appropriation of the Asian martial arts as happening in this same time period.

Still, high-water marks foretell an inexorable retreat.  As the Chinese martial arts became famous they quickly lost their aura of danger.  What had been “dark” and mysterious became just another consumer good.

On Main Streets across America, Kung Fu schools opened their doors to throngs of students looking to recapture Bruce Lee’s magic.  The humorous disco hit of 1974 both illustrated and advanced this process.  As Bowman puts it “…the song ‘Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting’ participated in the domestication, sanitization, depoliticizing and, ultimately, ridiculing Kung Fu.”

Nor were the Chinese martial arts alone in this.  As Bowman points out in the rest of the article, what pop culture humorists tended to latch onto after the 1970s was the exotic “Oriental” nature of the martial arts.  The specific culture that gave rise to a given movement tradition (Japan, China, or the Philippines) was less important to western audiences than their essentially “Eastern” nature.  While it often irks aficionados that popular songs or TV shows seemed to confuse Chinese and Japanese traditions Bowman notes that this is simply how these things were perceived by audiences in the West.

Yet what sort of pre-history exists behind all of this.  Is it really the case that the Kung Fu Craze of the 1970s was a totally unique event?  Was this actually the first time that audiences were exposed to the Chinese (or Japanese) martial arts on a massive scale?  And can we trace the often uncomfortable humor that surrounds the martial arts to earlier periods, facing very different political and social challenges?

It seems that one of the hurdles facing students of martial arts studies is a periodic amnesia that grips public discussions of many of these topics.  It is certainly true that Bruce Lee was a unique figure on the western cultural landscape.  Yet he was not actually the first individual to put the Chinese martial arts on film and expose them to national audiences.  Likewise, the Japanese martial arts had gained wide exposure on the silver screen long before Samurai films became favorites of the post-WWII art house theater scene.

While I am still mulling over the specific mechanisms behind this unique form of cultural forgetting, I expect that at least some of it has to do with very basic factors dealing with the advertising and marketing of popular culture products.  The first step in selling the public something “exciting and totally new” is to never remind them that they have actually been exposed to similar things before.  Likewise audiences, in their excitement to be part of a cultural moment, seem inclined to see novelty in places that leave historians and archeologists of popular culture scratching their heads.  Ernest Renan famously remarked that a nation is a product of both collective remembering and forgetting.  It seems that this same sort of forgetting also plays a part in the construction of “new” social and media discourses.

For many research questions the historical antecedents of a phenomenon may not matter.  But in some cases I think they can be quite illuminating.  While the past may be consciously forgotten, its path-dependent structure leaves patterns that shape future events in interesting ways.  This is certainly the case when we examine media representations of Chinese and Japanese hand combat systems.  Consider, for instance, the question of exactly when these things became “humorous” and what that implies about the cultural appropriation of these systems in the west.

“London Sees the Thrill of Japanese Sports.” A still taken from from a vintage newsreel showing a Kendo exhibition match. 1932.

Newsreels: The Japanese and Chinese Martial Arts on Films

Bruce Lee’s iconic ‘Enter the Dragon’ was probably the first Chinese martial art film seen by an entire generation of Americans.  Samurai films had been present in the West for a while, yet they generally reached a smaller audience.  Kyle Barrowman has reminded us that Western audiences were also exposed to the martial arts in a variety of Hollywood films. Yet it is critical to remember that feature films were not the only places where individuals might be exposed to gripping and informative images of the Asian martial arts.

As I have argued elsewhere, the public display and discussion of the Japanese martial arts goes all the way back to the heyday of the magic lantern display.  Heavy glass slides, often delicately painted, along with standardized scripts, provided many late 19^th century and early 20^th century entertainment seekers with their first glimpse of Jujitsu, Kendo, reformed Judo, Sumo Wrestling and the historic Samurai.  Such images and discussions were actually quite popular and widespread almost 70 years before the explosion of the Kung Fu Craze.  More importantly for students of the history of popular media, they also helped to establish basic patterns and audience expectations that shaped the developing film industry.

As such we should not be surprised to discover that the Asian martial arts also made early appearances on film.  Yet they probably had their greatest impact in the now, mostly forgotten, newsreels that ran before or between the feature films that audiences had come to see.

A few words of orientation may be helpful before proceeding.  In an era before television, newsreels were a profoundly important instrument in displaying the sorts of images that would shape public opinion on critical issues.  Prior to the fragmentation of the media market they also had the ability to directly speak to large audiences.  While old newsreel footage may strike us as quaint, we should not underestimate the effect that it had on shaping people’s views of the world.  In fact, newsreels were popular with audiences precisely because (like the magic lantern shows of old) they allowed for a quick glimpse into foreign lands.  For students of popular culture and social discourse they are critical, and substantively important, historical documents.

A full survey of all of the martial arts related newsreels put together in the first half of the 20^th century is well beyond the bounds of what can be done in a single blog post.  But for the purposes of exploring Bowman’s article I would like to ask viewers to consider four specific clips from the late 1920s and early 1930s (an era that is particularly important to my own research).  While I briefly describe each of these scenes I cannot directly host them on this on blog.  Readers are encouraged to take a few moments to view each of these segments as they are discussed.

“London Sees Thrills Of Japanese Sport.” A Vintage Newsreel. 1932.

We begin with two clips that deal specifically with the Japanese martial arts.  These are important because they illustrate many of the trends that Bowman introduced in his paper.  Already in the early 1930s the public discussion of the Japanese martial arts was characterized by humor.  And much of this bears more than a passing resemblance to the sorts of word-play focusing on cultural discomfort that will once again rise to the surface two generations later.

Perhaps my favorite of these clips is titled “London Sees Thrills of Japanese Sports.”  It ran in 1932 and recorded a martial arts exhibition and Judo tournament that pitted competitors from Germany and the UK against each other.  While the German fighters managed to score an upset by winning the tournament, most of the footage focused on the exhibition performances.

The footage is historically quite interesting.  It includes some Kendo Kata work, and a very spirited exhibition match.  Next a member of the audience was selected to try and score a hit against one of the Kendo masters with a Shinai.  Perhaps the highlight of the event was a self-defense demonstration in which a woman defended herself against repeated (somewhat bafoonish) attacks.  While a trained martial artist, the woman in question was an even better actor.  She showed a great ability to play to the audience and give them what they wanted.  And that was humor.  Note the gales of laughter that can heard as she deals damage to her unfortunate attacker, only to end by powdering her nose while standing over the body of her fallen foe.

“London Sees Thrills Of Japanese Sport.” A self-defense demonstration by a female martial artist, choreographed to as to be humorous for the audience. Vintage Newsreel. 1932.

In this case the narrator of the film did not make many jokes himself.  It seemed to be understood by the audience that what they were seeing was intrinsically funny.  And as Bowman suggested, much of that had to do with the western appropriation of Japanese practices and attitudes mixed with questions of gender performance.

In subsequent years the producers of these newsreels would not be so circumspect.  As the 1930s progress (see here, here and here) the humor becomes more pronounced and sharper in its focus.  Increasingly the narrator takes the lead in articulating and directing the humor.  Thus we can almost track the evolution of this particular discourse.  Yet by 1932 it seems to have been already firmly established

Schoolboys “Kendo” at Tokyo. Vintage Newsreel. 1934.

These newsreels are also informative in that they did not confine themselves to domestic subjects.  Like the magic lantern shows that preceded them they functioned as a form of virtual tourism for a public that was hungry for travel and worldly knowledge yet firmly grounded in their own lives.

Schoolboys “Kendo” at Tokyo. Vintage Newsreel. 1934.

Particularly important is this very short segment titled “Schoolboys ‘Kendo’ at Tokyo.” Distributed in 1934 this film offers an important view of the evolving role of the martial arts in the Japanese educational system during a critical decade.  Note that the class has been moved out of the Kendo hall into a training field where the “future soldiers” could acclimate to fighting on bumpy and uneven ground.  The mass engagement between the two groups of sword wielding students rushing towards each other at the end of the film is a great illustration of the sorts of reforms (and militarization) of the Kendo curriculum during the 1930s and 1940s discussed by authors like Hurst and Bennett in their respective histories of Japanese swordsmanship.  In that respect this is another important historical document.

Note that the overall tone of this discussion is once again one of humor.  Even though the practice of the Japanese martial arts by Japanese students should raise no questions of cultural discomfort, humor is still evoked as the dominant paradigm by which a (somewhat disturbing) scene is discussed.  One wonders to what degree imperialist attitudes, or possibly fear in the face of rising militarism, contributed to the establishment of this discourse.

Schoolboys “Kendo” at Tokyo. Vintage Newsreel. 1934.

This makes a fascinating contrast to the next two newsreels.  They show scenes of Chinese hand combat training.  In some ways their historical and ethnographic value is even greater than the preceding films.  Yet how would their Western audiences have described what they were seeing on screen?

An exotic form of military training?  Certainly.  A “martial art”?  Possibly, though that term was not yet as popular in the public discourse as it became after WWII.  A type of self-defense system that they could learn and study for their own betterment and enjoyment (such as Judo, or possibly even Kendo)?  Certainly not.

“Russo/Chinese War Scenes.” Chinese soldiers drill with Pudao. Vintage Newsreel. 1929.

The first of these films is the longest newsreel in the post, yet it is worth watching in full.  The final sequence shows a small formation of soldiers drilling with pudao (horse knives).  The form that they are doing is relatively short, clearly illustrated, and I suspect that someone could even teach it to themselves simply by watching this footage.  It’s a very nice demonstration.

“Russo/Chinese War Scenes.” Chinese soldiers drill with Pudao. Vintage Newsreel. 1929.

“Russo/Chinese War Scenes.” Chinese soldiers drill with Pudao. Vintage Newsreel. 1929.

Yet this is not simply an attempt by the imperial West to show the Chinese as militarily weak or backwards.  This “training exercise” was introduced only after the audience was shown footage of a warlord and his officers, iconic images of modern troops marching along the Great Wall, and ranks of modern machine-guns being deployed in field exercises.  The Chinese military is shown as efficient and well disciplined.  One suspects that a Westerner watching this footage would likely equate the sword drill at the end to the Kendo of the Japanese military.  Which is probably what both the newsreels producer and the Chinese officers who agreed to be filmed both intended.

“Chinese Re-Occupy Great Wall Area.” Vintage Newsreel, 1933.

A similar pattern is seen in our next film, “Chinese Re-Occupy Great Wall Area.”  Dating to 1933 readers of Kung Fu Tea will be pleased to note that the soldiers in this film are drilling with the classic dadao.  Whoever produced this footage went to great lengths to try and make a strong impression on the audience.  The clip juxtaposes images of a vast field of smartly dressed soldiers with close-ups of individual martial artists shot against the sky.  The effect is striking and serves to emphasize the acrobatic elegance of their practice.

“Chinese Re-Occupy Great Wall Area.” Vintage Newsreel, 1933.

The starkness of an individual soldier, engaged in dynamic movement, silhouetted against the sky reminds me of some of John Ford’s iconic WWII footage.  Like his more famous counterpart, this director also had an argument that he was trying to bring to the masses.  It sought to answer once and for all the persistent questions about the willingness and ability of Chinese soldiers to stand and fight.  As if to drive that point home the last sequence is framed by a pair of crossed dadao, inviting the audience to grab one if they dared.

I am interested in these two films because they seem to represent a point of departure in the discussion of the Chinese martial arts in the West.  In one sense what audiences are being exposed to remains remote, especially in comparison to Judo and Kendo.  It is not hard to find newsreel footage of both Western and Japanese practitioners of those arts in the 1930s.  Already they were moving into the realm of cultural appropriation, yet they remain outside of the hegemonic norms and identities.  The result is the emergence of exactly the sort of humor in the 1930s that Bowman predicts and explains in the post-1974 era.

In comparison there is nothing funny about the Chinese sword routines.  They are introduced not as sporting events or community interest stories.  Rather they exist in a grimmer world, one of international conflict, cities falling under martial law and modern armies on the march in Northern Asia.  There are no western practitioners of these arts, and so there is not the same sort of cultural discomfort that Bowman describes.  Those blades instead represent a forbidding reminder of the challenges facing the Chinese people during the 1930s and 1940s.  As such they may make audiences somewhat uncomfortable.  Yet there is nothing humorous about what they represent.

“Russo/Chinese War Scenes.” Chinese soldiers drill with Pudao. Vintage Newsreel. 1929.

Conclusion

Bowman is correct in noting that there is an important relationship between humor and the media driven global spread of the martial arts.  However, this post suggests that this basic pattern may have been established much earlier than the 1970s.  The newsreel footage demonstrates that these discourses were already in place (and even began to accelerate and evolve) by the 1930s.  If you are willing to go back and look at the writing in sports pages many of the same sorts of jokes and subtle concerns about identity masculinity and race can be found in the early years of the 20^th century, just as Jujitsu begins to establish its presence in the West.

The Chinese martial arts, on the other hand, do not seem to come into their comedic own until much later.  This should not be taken as an indication that they were totally unknown, or that Bruce Lee was the very first Chinese martial artist to do something amazing on film before Western audiences.  The newsreel footage that we have reviewed here probably had a striking impact on the audiences that saw it during the early 1930s.  Yet it did not generate the uncomfortable humor that Bowman is interested in as it posed no threat to the West’s identity or dominant values.  Nor was it remembered decades later.

This provides additional support to Bowman’s central argument that (with some notable exceptions) the comedic discourse around the martial arts does not seem to be driven by pure racism.  More important is a critique of how certain types of westerners (often individuals already considered to be marginal by their own societies) seek to live out their fantasies by appropriating alternate models of masculinity or mastery.

What is left unresolved by all of this is the question “why?”  Why is there less public engagement with the Chinese arts than the Japanese one from the 1920s-1940s?  The immediate danger is that students of martial arts studies will fall back on the old trope that prior to the 1970s the world of Kung Fu was insular because the Chinese themselves were racist.  Their arts were not spread because they refused to teach outsiders.

This narrative conveniently ignores the truth that it was the Chinese-American community itself that was being victimized by systemic racism during the 19^th and 20^th century.  It also seems to neglect the fact that while a great many westerners were interested in learning about the Japanese martial arts, very few people seem to have had any interest in the Chinese systems, even when they were advertised to the public through newsreels such as these, performed at the 1936 Olympics, demonstrated by Ivy-League Chinese students as part of popular flood and famine relief programs, or widely seen during Chinese New Year displays in major urban areas.

Ultimately these things were not hidden from the public so much as they were studiously ignored.  Bruce Lee turned out to be a pivotal figure not because he was first to teach the arts, but because he managed to change what an entire generation of people wanted.

Yet his was not the first invitation.  These newsreels are important as they record early attempts to shape a more favorable public opinion of China in the West by showcasing its traditional martial arts.  Together the Dadao and Pudao disrupted the notion that the Chinese people were weak, the so called “sick man of East Asia,” and unwilling to stand and fight back against imperial aggression.  They attempted to showcase a highly disciplined army that had mastered both the modern technologies of the machine gun and mechanized transport, while staying connected to the cultured heritage of its past.  While America may have awoken to the beauty and potential of the Chinese martial arts only in the 1970s, these newsreels are a fascinating reminder that the hand of Kung Fu diplomacy had first been extended to the Western public at least 40 years earlier.

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If you enjoyed this post see you might also want to read: Zheng Manqing and the “Sick Man of Asia”: Strengthening Chinese Bodies and the Nation through the Martial Arts

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“Back to Weapons of Forefathers in War with Japanese.” Vintage newspaper photograph. June 1937. Source: Author’s private collection.

Wonder Woman with a Dadao

In China the realm of social violence, and the martial arts in particular, has been male dominated.  That does not mean that women never became a part of such activities.  After all, they played an increasingly high profile role in the martial realm from the early 1920s onward.  By the time that hostilities erupted between China and Japan in 1937, female martial artists and soldiers were often at the forefront of Western reporting on the conflict, if not the actual fighting.

Nevertheless, locating accounts of these individuals can be difficult.  It seems that within the resolutely patriarchal lineage societies of the martial arts the contributions (and even presence) of daughters, sisters and female students was less likely to be remembered.  Just as serious  an issue is our (in)ability to search through the mountains of historical data that remain.  While many stories have been forgotten, others are hidden in plain sight.

As is so often the case, finding the proper search terms (in both Chinese and English) is half the battle.  To investigate the past, even in one’s native language, is to engage in an act of “cultural translation.”  Ideas, associations, idioms and identities that made perfect sense 60 or 70 years ago might never occur to us today.  Worse yet, they can seem off-putting.

Here is a quick pro-tip.  If you are interested in unearthing accounts of female Chinese martial artists and soldiers during the 1930s-1940s, try searching for “amazons.”  One suspects that the release of the new Wonder Woman film (set during WWI) might refresh some of these linguistic associations within our modern popular consciousness.  Yet as the newspapers of the period will be quick to remind you, the Chinese also had a wide variety of “amazons.”

Students of cultural history and gender studies may find it interesting to note what sorts of activities and identities fell within this category.  I have seen female bandits, soldiers, rioters, politicians and suffragettes all referred to as “Chinese Amazons” by various newspaper reporters.  While at the first cut this may seem like an overly broad label, it is actually a very helpful way of understanding the connotations, connections and inflections that were associated with the idea of female martial artists during the Republic period.

Still, for our purposes, female martial artists and soldiers are the most interesting cases.  The image at the top of this essay is a scan of a eight by ten inch press photo dated June, 1937.  The photograph itself, marked with a wax pencil to increase the level of contrast and detail, is fascinating.  It shows a woman holding either a long handled dadao or a shorter pudao.  The weapon has a tightly braided cord handle with a ring at the bottom.  It is also possible to make out two holes in the spine.  Best of all, the back of the image retains its caption bearing a wealth of information.

BACK TO WEAPONS OF FOREFATHERS IN WAR WITH JAPAN

HONG KONG, CHINA—Famous among the modern amazon warriors of the Chungshan district near Macao—where Chinese women guerillas are engaging in combat with the Japanese—is Miss Tam Tai-men, who has achieved fame through her skills with the famous Chinese broad sword against the Japanese invaders.  6-7-39

Readers may recall that a few years ago I interviewed Prof. Stephen Chan about his grandmother who was also a swordswoman and militia leader at this point in time (though her village was just outside of Guangzhou).  It is fascinating to find a picture of another female martial artist following a similar career path.  Yet from the perspective of my current research, what is most remarkable is not simply the existence of such women, but that their presence was being actively promoted in the Western press.

In the coming decades western martial artists would show a great deal of interest in the idea of Chinese “warrior women.”  Historically inclined discussions often debunk this as a simple misunderstanding (or naive acceptance) of Republic era folklore. But I think that we should also consider the possibility that this fascination was partially a result of fact that such “amazons” had been the public face of the Chinese war effort for the better part of two decades.

That observation suggests many other questions.  There is something about this photograph that feels not just heroic, but mythic.  I think that images like this resonated with the public because they tapped into fundamental symbolic structures (“myths” in the anthropological sense) which made cross-cultural communication (or at least empathy) possible.  Yet one suspects that they also promoted a entire range of political ideas and ideologies as well (or “myths” as the term is often encountered in cultural studies).

Indeed, everything about this photo, from the reference to taking up the “weapons of the forefathers”, to the almost stark image of a lone female warrior standing against an empty sky, seems calculated to raise awareness of, and interest in, China’s plight at the start of WWII.  Wartime reporting is never without an ideological slant. Indeed, that is a feature of this genre rather than a  bug.

Readers may also recall that Wonder Woman, perhaps the most successful “amazon warrior” of all time, first emerged to fight the Axis Powers on the pages of American comic books in 1941. One cannot help but suspect that the two streams of mythology that would have guided the audiences interpretation of this press photo probably shaped her creation and acceptance as well.

We can delve more deeply into what exactly these streams contained by reading the many articles that accompanied such photos.  I have transcribed a later example of one such piece that explores a slightly different aspect of the Chinese “amazon phenomenon.”  Rather than focusing on the lone warrior (or the improbable leader of a rebel band), this piece tracks the creation of a much larger, all female, fighting force organized as part of a regular military structure.

The story of how the unit came together, and what inspired individual women to enlist, is fascinating.  Yet once again, its hard not to see in these verbal images the creation of a very politically useful set of myths.  The first task facing the Chinese and their friends in the West in 1937 was to convince the American public that the Chinese people were both capable and willing to stand up to Japanese aggression.  The next task was to generate monetary contributions for the war effort.  Readers should note the various ways in which this article accomplishes both goals.

To a large extent these tasks are carried out by manipulating the image of “Chinese amazons.”  Women’s bodies are shown as the sites of both victimization and resistance.  In an effort to generate broad based public sympathy these female soldiers are notably de-sexualized.  Indeed, that task takes up a surprising amount of the author’s overall effort.  Clearly the idea of fighting amazons was somewhat threatening. As a result, great efforts were made to argue that contributions to the war effort would not be supporting anything “unsavory.”  And yet these women had to be seen as at least somewhat attractive to generate sympathy.  This article makes it clear that more than one battle was being fought with/over these women’s bodies.

By the end of the Second World War combat journalism and political propaganda had familiarized American audiences with the image of the Chinese amazon.  The public seems to have been fascinated by her ability to disrupt certain hierarchies in the pursuit of “universal values.”  Yet what exactly those values were, whether the Chinese martial arts were deeply conservative in character, or an aspect of the burgeoning post-war counter-culture movement, would be negotiated for decades to come.  Unsurprisingly many of these conversations continued to revolve around the feminine and the female in these fighting systems.

AMAZON FORCES AID RESISTANCE

About three thousand of Kwangsi’s hardy womenfolk have laid aside the sickle and hoe for the big sword and Mauser rifle and joined their men in resisting the  Japanese penetration in the Southwest.

For 22 months of the war, China’s New Life Movement has carried extensive propagation of the significance of China’s unity to the rural districts.  China’s womanhood has been mobilized under Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s banner in all phases of war work-but in Kwangsai, a province famed for its fighting spirit, it has been the peasant women who have taken the initiative in rallying for the salvation of their country.

Not content with performing the mere domestic services connected with Kwangsi’s armies, they have formed a Women’s Regiment which has been drilled and disciplined under the leadership of Madame Pai Chung-his, wife of Kwangsi’s No. 2 General.

Recent reports from the Southwestern front state that the Women’s Regiment is participating in the defense of the Lingyang Railway in an effort to prevent the Japanese drive on Toishan, Yanping and Hoiping, rich towns in the West River delta and the native homes of many overseas Chinese in the United States and Canada.  Chinese overseas remittances contributed largely to the support of Kwangsi’s valiant army and its Women’s Regiment.

When their men first rallied to Kwangsi’s Commander-in-Chief, General Li Tsung-jen, and then followed him to Central and Northern China at the outbreak of hostilities, the more prominent among Kwangsi’s women, as in most other provinces, organized a Women’s Corp.  They were recruited for service behind the lines and for carrying on agriculture and industry at home.  In this respect, Kwangsi’s women earned the praise of Madam Chiang for their initiative and self-reliance.

But as the months rolled on, the war assumed a new significance for Kwangsi’s women.  The battles of Taierchwang and Hsuchow, in which General Li’s fifth group army won fame, swelled the number of widows and bereaved mothers and sisters in Kwangsi.  In increasing numbers, bands of sturdy women and workers presented themselves at the Group Army headquarters in Kweilin, demanding to be allowed to join their men in the ranks or to be allowed to fight the enemy to avenge the deaths of their male relatives.

It was in the latter part of 1937 that the first really militant sections of the Women’s Corp was formed.

At first it numbered about 700, composed mainly of land workers with muscles as hard as those of their menfolk through years of toil in their mountainous province; but as the spirit spread the ranks of the Women’s Regiment swelled with the recruitment of women from all walks of life-teachers, nurses, store assistants and even housewives.

Now the Women’s Regiment is reliably estimated to number 3,000.

“No stream lined beauties these,” said an executive of an American oil company when he recently returned from a tour of the Southwest, where he came into contact with the women soldiers.” “’amazons’ is rather a shop-soiled term, but it is the only one which describes them.

“Most of them are short and squat and of sturdy build…in appearance they are actually not unlike the Japanese soldiers.  They wear a uniform which is the exact counterpart of the men’s and throw a hand-grenade with the best of the men.

“In fact, I had no idea the detachment I saw was composed of women until I saw them at close quarters.”

“Their code of discipline is of a high order.  They live in the barracks when at their headquarters in Kweilin and are subject to the same military routine as the men.  As a rule they are detailed to rear positions, forming support and supply lines but vernacular reports received in Hong Kong tell of women fighters engaging in actual combat, side by side with the Kwangtung and Kwangsi troops in the West River sector.  They have suffered some casualties and a recent report from Shekki tells of some badly wounded being in hospital there.

Their moral discipline is also of the highest order.  Although they are not completely segregated from the men when at the front, maybe for long weeks of entrenchment, strict celibacy is maintained.

“There’ll be no call for a midwife in the Women’s Army.” Said the foreign oil man,  “The girls are loath to betray any sign of femininity.  I don’t suppose one of ‘em has known the taste of lipstick nor the feel of one of these slit gowns the slim Hong Kong girls wear.  But don’t get the idea that they are without attraction…they are bronzed and healthy, with perfect teeth and the merriest of smiles.

“They are paid about twenty Chinese dollars a month, but money doesn’t seem to trouble them much.  Given their ration of rice and vegetables and a place in the ranks, they are content…but what they hunger for most is a chance to take a smack at the enemy.”

“The vernacular papers in Hong Kong recently published a story of one of the wounded women soldiers. She was formerly a Kwangsi countrywoman.

“My husband has done me the greatest honor in my life by dying for China in the fight in the north.  I have his name and will continue his fight against the enemy till I die.” She said.

The China Critic (Shanghai; 1939-1946). Jun 8, 1939. P. 154

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If you enjoyed this you might also want to read: Lives of Chinese Martial Artists (15): Fei Ching Po – Professional Gambler and Female Martial Artist in Early 19th Century Guangzhou

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I love that it is the fans who are inside the ring, and the combatants who stand outside of it in this picture.

Introduction

Welcome to “Chinese Martial Arts in the News!”  Its great to be back at the blog.  I am happy to report that the conference in Utah went very well and I had a chance to talk with a number of political scientists about the work that we are doing in Martial Arts Studies and the contribution that we can make to other areas of the social sciences.  I now have about two months to prepare for my next trip, but right now its time to get caught up on current events.

As regular readers know, 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 there is a lot to be covered in today’s post.  Let’s get to the news!

And this is how it ended.

News From All Over

It was the pummeling seen around the world.  Unless you have been living under a rock you will already know how the fight between MMA trainer Xu Xiaodong and “thunder-style” taiji master Wei Lei ended, about 10 seconds after it began.  Yet, as is so often the case, the event itself proved to be just the starting point of a debate on the reality, nature and viability of the traditional Chinese martial arts that has raged for weeks.  The fact that I was contacted by a number of reporters asking me about the match in the last week suggests that the conversation is far from over.

As I mentioned in a brief post outlining my initial thoughts on the event, the fight itself does not seem all that unique or interesting.  Youtube is full of videos of traditional stylists getting overwhelmed by more “modern fighters.”  This is one of the stock tropes of Chinese martial arts culture going back to the days of Bruce Lee and others.  What seems to be unique about this case is the public attention that the fight has inspired, both in China and around the world.  Suddenly everyone has an opinion on the traditional Chinese martial arts.

For instance, no less an outlet than the NY Times ran an article titled “MMA Fighter’s Pummeling of Tai Chi Master Rattles China” discussing both the fight and its aftermath.  It notes that the state run Chinese Martial Arts Association posted a statement on its website saying that the fight “violates the morals of martial arts” and the Chinese boxing association followed suit.  These official denunciations seem to indicate the government’s position on the controversy.

The reporting in Forbes offers a little more detail on the pressure (both official and otherwise) that is being brought to bear on Xu in the wake of his efforts to capitalize on the initial victory.  And the BBC has covered the story as well.

In the wake of this event a number of similar videos have started to appear on-line, such as this match between another Chinese stylist and a Taekwondo student.  Given the importance of the traditional martial arts to China’s national image, and the fact that places like Chen Village and the Shaolin Temple are important sources of revenue for local governments and industries, its not a huge surprise that the Chinese government might want to put its thumb on the scales of this debate.  But one also wonders to what degree they will decide that they must crack down on these unsanctioned fights precisely because, from a law-enforcement standpoint, you don’t want a wave of street fights that could spin out of control.

The Chinese press is also reporting that other figures in the fledgling Chinese MMA scene have started to publicly criticize Xu.  Apparently a segment of the population has taken his attack on fraud in the martial arts as an attack on traditional Chinese culture itself.  Other competitors have denounced him for both disrespecting the traditional martial arts and, through his actions, provoking a widespread backlash that could damage the reputation of MMA at a time when it is still still attempting to find its footing in China’s crowded martial arts marketplace.

The much debated fight seems to have brought other insecurities about the Chinese martial arts to the fore.  I particularly liked this article which seemed to argue that the real problem plaguing traditional Kung Fu was the lack to a profitable business model.  I am not sure that having a better business plan would have helped Wei in this case, but it is true that many traditional school in China are struggling.  This piece, titled “Why China still lags behind its martial arts industry ambitions” picks up on similar themes.

Source: South China Morning Post.

The South China Morning Post, which generally does a good job covering the martial arts, has had a lot to say on this fight.  One of their think pieces even argued that “a kick in the teeth is good for Chinese Kung Fu.”  These events also seem to have inspired some articles not directly related to the fight, such as this one attempting to get readers up to speed on the evolution of the Chinese martial arts.  In another article the the Xu vs Wei fight is used to frame reporting on a experiment conducted by the Hong Kong Police that pitted Japanese bayonet fighting against Chinese Dadao techniques.

The legend continues to this day. Today, in Chinese war dramas, you often see Chinese soldiers charging towards Japanese invaders with their broadswords raised, killing enemies with ease.

But is the Chinese dadao really effective against Japanese jukendo?

The fact that this unrelated story could so easily be equated to the recent MMA vs. Taijiquan fight illustrates the degree to which the public has come to see the event not as a contest between two equally Chinese, but differently trained, martial artists.  Rather it has become a forum on Chinese versus foreign martial culture, and the anxieties that these debates have exacerbated within Chinese social history.

The Global Times also used the the fight as an opportunity to ask some “deeper” questions.  First, why will the “traditional Chinese Martial Arts always lose to brutal MMA?” Second (and more interestingly), “what do foreigners who study Chinese martial arts think of the recent viral combat video?”  Again, these discussions are interesting as they suggest that the fight is not being viewed within a strictly domestic context, but is impinging on question of how China is viewed on the international stage.

This is just a small sampling of the many articles that have come out on this fight.  And the fact that multiple journalists are still working on it leads me to suspect that the conversation is far from over.  I am starting to wonder whether we have witnessed a critical moment in the history of the modern Chinese martial arts, similar to the 1954 “Battle in Macau,” which pitted Wu Gongyi against Chen Kefu, or Bruce Lee’s now mythic fight with Wong Jack Man.

The social significance of these fights was immense.  In many respects it far outstripped the technical virtues of the contests.  As in the current case, those fights became famous because they were seen as critical discussions that transcended narrow questions of school or training regime.  Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that questions of style and practice became closely aligned with larger social questions that remained fundamentally contested. It is well worth noting that most of these people discussing the Xu/Wei encounter at this point have never trained in MMA or stepped foot in a Taijiquan class. Indeed, the martial arts are a fascinating subject of study precisely because of their ability to throw light on these broader social anxieties and conflicts.

African students at the Shaolin temple. Source: Council on Foreign Relations.

Kung Fu Diplomacy

There were also a couple of news stories in the last month that focused directly on China’s efforts to use the traditional martial arts to establish their global brand.  The first of these, titled “Traditional medicine, martial arts – two giants of Chinese culture” is unique in focusing on South America (even though the article starts off with a discussion of China’s efforts to build a global trade empire that runs through central Asia).  While we hear a lot about wushu in Africa, cultural diplomacy efforts in South America, while important, get less discussion.

Peru has embraced Chinese culture ever more as the two countries have developed their economic, trade and social ties in the last decade. Chinese traditions such as martial arts and acupuncture are popular with Peruvians and act as windows to a distant culture.

Master Juan Vasquez, 63, has traveled to China over 20 times, with each trip furthering his study of Tai Chi.

Vasquez has been training in diverse martial arts since he was 17 but Tai Chi has been his favorite, because he thinks it has “more complete and deeper” cultural and philosophical connotations than other kinds of martial arts.

For the more academically inclined, be sure to check out “China’s Big Bet on Soft Power” on the Council of Foreign Relations blog (full disclosure, I was an associate member of the CFR while finishing my doctorate at Columbia.)  This article doesn’t go into the details of the use the martial arts as a tool of soft power (though it mentions the efforts).  Anyone interested in that subject can read about it here on Kung Fu Tea.  But it does provide a great overview of China’s soft power strategy, and some initial conclusions as to why these efforts do not always succeed (despite the popularity of Chinese culture on the global market.)

China is believed to spend billions of dollars to boost its international image, but it has yet to see a marked return on its investment in soft power…..

What are the limitations of China’s soft power?

China’s soaring economy has elevated the country as a model to be emulated, but there are multiple strains that threaten to undermine its image. Environmental pollution and degradation, food safety issues, overcapacity of state-owned enterprises, and Xi’s exhaustive anticorruption campaign are likely to dissuade others from following China’s example.

Moreover, experts say, China’s soft power campaign is limited by the dissonance between the image that China aspires to project and the country’s actions.  Rising nationalism, assertiveness vis-à-vis territorial disputes, crackdowns on nongovernmental organizations, censorship of domestic and international media, limits to the entry of foreign ideals, and political repression constrain China’s soft power. “If China’s narratives don’t address the country’s shortcomings, it becomes very hard to sell the idea of China as a purveyor of attractive values,” says CFR Senior Fellow Elizabeth C. Economy. Chinese culture and ideas have the potential to appeal worldwide, but only when there is “honesty in the depiction,” Economy adds.

No where is the success of soft power more evident than in the accelerating flow of students headed to China to study various elements of the country’s traditional culture.  CCTV (a public television network) often highlights these stories and publicizes them through their various English language media outlets, creating a multiplier effect.  This month they released a photo essay looking at two Norwegian twins who are currently studying taijiquan on Wudang Mountain.

“The Norwegian twins are among a growing number of foreigners from various counties who have dedicated themselves to the mastery of Tai Chi on Wudang Mountain.

The twins say there is a growing interest in learning Tai Chi in Norway, but say there are very few instructors in the country. They hope they’ll be able to pass on the skills they’ve learned on Wudang to others in their home country.”

Wing Chun

There were a couple of big Wing Chun stories in the last month.  I suspect that these would have attracted a lot more attention if not for the viral fight footage which seems to be sucking up all of the oxygen at the moment.  These first of ran in the Straits Times.  Its a profile and interview with Dennis Lee, who is the current Chairman of the Hong Kong VTAA titled “Spreading Wing Chun culture.”  Anyone interested in the current state of Wing Chun will want to check this out.  Here is a quick excerpt:

Mr Lee, who is married with no children, says his goal is to promote wing chun culture, which goes beyond the martial art’s technicalities.

“We hope that by teaching people wing chun, they can learn about the culture behind it too, so the passion will not be so easily extinguished, ” adds the Hong Konger, who spoke to The Straits Times last month when he was visiting the Singapore branch of his school, the Dennis Lee Ving Tsun Martial Arts Association.

Sam Lau. Source: South China Morning Post.

The South China Morning Post also ran a major piece titled “How Ip Man helped turn a rebellious young Hongkonger into a wing chun master.” Sam Lau has always struck me as an interesting figure, and this article includes some great stories, including how he first met Ip Man:

“One day in the 1950s, as Sam Lau Kung-shing was getting a haircut at a barber shop in Mong Kok, a bald man wearing a traditional Chinese Tang suit and kung fu shoes showed up. Lau was told the man was Yip Man, the grandmaster of the Chinese martial art wing chun.”

The article offers a thumbnail biography of Ip Man and a number of accounts of the Wing Chun community in the 1950s-1960s.  As such, its definitely worth checking out.

Speaking of the Wing Chun community, the VTAA will be celebrating its 50th anniversary this October!  Festivities will include both a forms and sticky-hands competition, a gala dinner and a trip to Foshan (October 7th-10th). For More information click here: PDF.vtaa.50th.

No collection of Chinese martial arts stories would be complete without a nod to the ongoing legacy of Bruce Lee.  Fans will be happy to hear that there is a new “authorized” biopic in the works.  This film will apparently focus on Lee’s life in Hong Kong in the 1950s.  As such we might get some on-screen glimpses into the period’s Wing Chun community.

“The latest biopic, Little Dragon, will have Shannon’s seal of approval, since her company Bruce Lee Entertainment along with Convergence Entertainment will produce it….According to reports, Little Dragon will be set in 1950s Hong Kong, where Bruce Lee grew up. The story will reportedly focus on the socio-political events as well as people that contributed to the transformation of Lee into the world’s most famous kung fu star.

Ninjas Wanted

Finally….Japan is facing a Ninja shortage.  That is a group of words that one does not often see in the same sentence.  A confluence of factors, including increased visibility in popular culture and the upcoming Olympic Games are putting the spotlight on everyone’s favorite black clad spies and assassins.  Unfortunately, actually being a Ninja hasn’t been a viable career path for a while, so the numbers are lacking.

“As tourism to Japan has grown, there has been an increasing demand to see the iconic warriors perform “ninja shows” to crowds – but martial arts squads are struggling to find candidates who are up to scratch.

Takatsugu Aoki, the manager of a martial arts squad in the city of Nayoga in the south of the country, told the Asahi newspaper: “With the number of foreign tourists visiting Japan on the increase, the value of ninja as tourism content has increased.”

Luckily aspiring ninjas have some new study material.  The Japan Times recently ran an article reporting on Edo period textbooks that reveal the tricks of the espionage trade.

Of course such works are difficult to interpret without the help of specialists in the reconstruction of martial culture.  And given the nature of the work, one would probably need an interdisciplinary team to really grasp the world of the ninja….

Just such a project in now on the horizon.  Call it “Ninja Studies.”

In a first of its kind endeavour, Mie University has decided to set up the world’s first research centre devoted to ninja. Ninjas, who have for decades ruled the imagination of people around the world, were black clad assassins known for secrecy and stealth. While mostly confined to history books and fiction, the ninjas have been enjoying renewed interest in the wake of the 2020 Olympic games slated to happen in Tokyo. Mie University is situated in a region which is considered the home of the ninja masters. The university said that the Ninja Research Centre would be set up in July.

Yuji Yamada, a professor of Japanese history at the Mie University, said that the University plans to compile a database of ninja and encourage cooperation between scholars from different disciplines who study ninja. He said that the researchers at the centre would study ancient documents and collaborate with science researchers to develop ways to implement ninja wisdom to modern society.

Martial Arts Studies

It looks like its going to be a busy summer for students of Martial Arts Studies.  The Martial Arts Studies Research Network just wrapped up a fascinating conference in Bath that focused on the Japanese arts.  And there will be a number of additional meetings this summer and autumn as well.  We will cover these as they happen, but I would like to remind readers that I am always looking for conference or event reports to share with the readers of Kung Fu Tea.

Michael J. Ryan, who just released an ethnography on stick and machete fighting in Venezuela, recently posted one of his articles to academia.edu which is now free to download.  If you have been wondering whether to check out his book (see the photo above) this might be a good place to start.

“I Did Not Return a Master, But Well Cudgeled Was I: The Role of ‘‘Body Techniques’’ in the Transmission of Venezuelan Stick and Machete Fighting.”

This article looks at the way that bodily attributes are cultivated and disciplined in the process of being recognized as a member of a restricted social group. This study took place in northwestern Venezuela, and looks at the role of stick, machete, and knife fighting as it has been refined and transmitted by a group of men. Following a description of the different contexts where these local armed combative methods (known collectively as ‘‘Garrote de Lara’’) developed, this article suggests that stepping and seeing are not merely physical attributes, but ‘‘body techniques,’’ or technical and efficient ways of looking at, moving through and belonging to a world. Where contingent historical and ecological factors shape a community’s traditional habitual responses toward acts of interpersonal violence.

Also, anyone interested in the development of Martial Arts Studies may want to check out Paul Bowman’s working draft, the “Triviality of Martial Arts Studies.”  I found myself dealing with many of the issues while attempting to explain our project to individuals involved in more traditional, and disciplinary bounded, areas of the social sciences.

Given the recent conference in Bath, the following new book caught my attention.  It appears to be historically rather than theoretically oriented, but that just means that it might be a rich source of data for future studies.

The Oshu Kendo Renmei: A History of British and European Kendo (1885-1974) Paperback – April 21, 2017 by Paul Budden $28

The Ōshū Kendo Renmei documents kendo’s beginnings and establishment in the UK, its spread into Europe, and the formation of the Ōshū Kendo Renmei, forerunner to the European Kendo Federation. It explores the link with the UK’s judo clubs, namely the Budokwai and the Anglo Japanese Jujutsu and Martial Arts Association (later known as the Anglo Japanese Judo Club), that were instrumental in kendo’s introduction in the UK.

With extensive commentary by Roald Knutsen, one of the UK’s kendo pioneers, it also profiles the efforts of others such as Horie Etsuko, R.A. Lidstone, Ōsaki Shintarō and Okimitsu Fujii.

Outside of the UK, The Ōshū Kendo Renmei examines the contributions of such people as Hungarian Count Robert von Sandor, Jacques Dupont, Alain Floquet and Shiga Tadakatsu as they sought to establish kendo in Europe and aim for the foundation of a European governing body. The efforts of the All Japan Kendo Federation and prominent Japanese instructors in promoting kendo in the UK and Europe are also documented.

Capoeira. Photo by Turismo Bahia. Source: Wikimedia.

The already vibrant literature on Brazilian Capoeira appears to be exploding at the moment.  In addition to the new ethnographies just released by Lauren Miller Griffith and Sara Delamont (both of which were fascinating), we can look forward to a new study by Sergio González Varela.

Power in Practice: The Pragmatic Anthropology of Afro-Brazilian Capoeira by Sergio González Varela (expected release on September 30, 2017).

Considering the concept of power in capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian ritual art form, Varela describes ethnographically the importance that capoeira leaders (mestres) have in the social configuration of a style called Angola in Bahia, Brazil. He analyzes how individual power is essential for an understanding of the modern history of capoeira, and for the themes of embodiment, play, cosmology, and ritual action. The book also emphasizes the great significance that creativity and aesthetic expression have for capoeira’s practice and performance.

Sergio González Varela is Professor of Anthropology at Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí, Mexico. He is currently working on a book about the anthropologist Paul Stoller.

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 have talked about the “YMCA Consensus” in the Republic era martial arts, double sword and tradition vs. modernity. 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.

Given that it is a holiday weekend, I will be keeping this research note brief.  Still, the subject matter is quite interesting.  China’s Republic era dadao, or big knives, generate a good deal of interest among both historians and practical martial artists.  They also played a role in the development of General Ma Liang’s career as a martial arts reformer.

In some ways that is a bit surprising.  The general’s troops were often Muslim and hailed from impoverished areas of Northern China.  Of course these were exactly the sorts of individuals that would win fame as they faced down the Japanese army along the Great Wall in 1933, or slightly later in famous Marco Polo Bridge incident.  Stories of such exploits went a long way towards explaining the general enthusiasm for the dadao among China’s civilian martial artists during the early 1930s.

Yet the dadao itself was not really part of General Ma’s highly structured “New Wushu.”  One may skim his four textbooks (published in their final form in Shanghai in 1918) and not see any hint of his eventual big knife movement outlined below.  Ma was certainly interested in swords, and fencing was an integral part of his system.  For reasons which I have never completely understood his training method seems to have focused on the jian (traditional straight sword) rather than the more militarily accessible dao (saber).  Yet that did not stop the enterprising general from heavily promoting the dadao as he searched for a route back into the center of China’s martial arts community during the 1930s.

In our ongoing series, we have already reviewed a number of Ma’s accomplishments.  A basic overview of his life can be found here, as well as more specialized discussions of his role in promoting the martial arts as part of educational reform and the organization of the first national Wushu tournament.   Most of the General’s great successes came in the late 1910s and early 1920s when public enthusiasm for the martial arts was at its peak, and it appeared that there was a decent chance that his New Wushu program would begin to appear in school curriculums around the country.

However, international and domestic politic trends attenuated these early successes.  After the explosion of the New Culture Movement, martial artists of all stripes struggled to articulate how their practices might contribute to the development of a modern, strong China.  Yet the wheel of fate is always turning.  Other geopolitical developments would breath fresh life into China’s martial arts community and the General’s flagging career as a martial art reformer.

The 1931 Mukuden incident was the event that cast doubt on the New Culture Movement’s prior attacks on the martial arts and their role in educational reform.  This social shock was further compounded in 1932 when the Japanese installed a puppet regime in Manchuria, touching off a wave of nationalist fervor in China.  The latent associations that had been forged between the Chinese martial arts and notions of nationalism in the 1910’s were reawakened.  This led advocates of the “National Essence” approach to call for the promotion of modernized and militarized versions of the martial arts (both in schools and the general civilian population) as a counterweight to the fear of further Japanese aggression against China’s cities and economic centers.

General Ma, while still discussed in newspaper articles, found himself to be increasingly marginalized during the late 1920s.  This became clear with the formation of the KMT’s new Guoshu (National Boxing) Institute.  While Ma was eventually asked to join, he played a comparatively minor role as an “educational reform” expert.  The sudden swing in public opinion in the early 1930s presented him with an opportunity to restore a measure of public leadership.

The following articles illustrate two of his activities during this period.  First, Ma seems to have become more involved with the promotion of the KMT’s Guoshu program.  Secondly, Ma began to formulate his own plans for the creation of a civilian network (or militia) armed with dadao, capable of repelling the advance of Japanese infantry through cities (or at least making it costly).  It should be noted that Ma was far from the only martial arts reformers in the 1930’s to have this same “good idea.”  Many individuals, at both the local and national level, were spreading similar schemes.  During the 1930’s the dadao became something of a defacto symbol of the state and Chinese military strength, and the nation’s answer to the more famous Japanese katana.  Multiple specialized manuals were published, and a huge number of local martial arts instructors began to assemble their own systems to teach the weapon.

I have yet to discover the ultimate fate of Ma’s dadao network.  Maybe it never got off the ground.  Still, it is interesting to read a somewhat detailed outline of how one of these groups might have been organized.

It should also be noted that these efforts were well enough known that they began to attract the attention of the English language press.  Indeed, the stories that appeared in these newspapers during the early 1930s set the stage for China’s “Kung Fu Diplomacy” efforts after 1937 as the country appealed for military aid in the face of a much broader Japanese advance.

Art of Self Defense Urged by Ma Liang

Genera Ma Liang, Mohammedan leader in China, urged every Chinese citizen to learn and practice Chinese boxing and swordsmanship which he said is necessary for the building of a strong China in the future, during a lecture at a [illegible] party given in his honor by General Chang Chih-chiang, director of the National Boxing Training Institute at 24 Weihaiweai Road yesterday at noon.

Following the lecture, performances in Chinese boxing and swordsmanship were given by 20 students of the Mohammedan general which won applause from the audience.

“The Art of Self Defense Urged by Ma Liang.” The China Press, Feb. 18, 1933. P. 8

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Wide Training in Big Sword Use is Planned

Students to be enlisted from all nation for Nanking course

Many already applying to join movement

Nanking, March 23. –(special)—People from the whole country will be trained in the use of the “big sword” which has proved its usefulness as a weapon against the Japanese, according to a move just started by General Ma Liang, Mohammedan Leader of China.

The move aims at the organization of a “National Big Sword Army” to begin at Nanking.  The idea of the Mohammedan leader has met with enthusiastic response as scores of young Chinese have registered their names with the central Boxing and Swordsmanship Training Bureau asking to be members of the Big Sword Army under organization.

According to the scheme laid down by General Ma, Nanking will be divided into eight districts, each to have one company of the Big Sword Corps.  All who join the organization will be required to undergo boxing training in the Central Boxing and Swordsmanship Training Bureau before being taught the use of the big swords.

The organization of the Big Swords Corp will gradually spread to all cities and the countrysides throughout the nation until people of the whole country are equipped with and thoroughly trained in the use of the big sword as an effective weapon.

“Wide Training in Big Sword Use is Planned: Students to be Enlisted” The China Press. March 24, 1933.

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If you enjoyed this research note you might also want to read: Bridges and Big Knives: The Use of the “Big Knife” saber in the Chinese Republican Army by Brian Kennedy

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