Introduction

Gu Ruzhang is one of the best known martial artists of the Republic of China era.  He is remembered today as a pioneer who helped to bring Northern Shaolin to Southern China.  Most accounts of his illustrious career start with his appearance at the first National Guoshu Exam held in 1928. At the conclusion of this tournament he was awarded the title of “guoshi” (national warrior) and came to the attention of important military leaders in the Nationalist Party (GMD).  They would subsequently sponsor his teaching mission to the South.

Unfortunately these accounts omit some of the most interesting aspects of Gu Ruzhang’s life and career.  Perhaps the real question that we should be asking is what unique set of circumstances led him to Nanjing in the fall of 1928 in the first place?   We have already seen that a close examination of the careers of other martial artists can expand our understanding of both civil society and martial culture.  My own personal background is not in Northern Shaolin, nor am I really qualified to speak to the specific substance of Gu Ruzhang’s martial method or training system.  However, a brief outline of his career does open a valuable window onto the rapidly evolving realm of the civilian fighting systems in the Republic of China period.

Much of my own research focuses on the evolution and development of Southern China’s martial culture in the 19^th and 20^th century.  Gu Ruzhang is a central figure in many of these discussions precisely because he crossed cultural boundaries and helped to promote and popularize different approaches to the Chinese martial arts.  For those reasons alone his career might make an interesting case study.

Still, none of us are free to make our lives exactly as we wish.  Gu Ruzhang’s career was both constrained and enabled by powerful forces within Chinese society.  Some of these were the direct result of the political turmoil that China experienced in the first half of the 20^th century.  Others were a side-effect of the rapid modernization and urbanization of the state’s traditional economy.

Gu Ruzhang’s story is as much about political history as it is anything else.  By exploring these sometimes neglected aspects of his life and career I hope to shed a light on the basic forces that were shaping the development of the traditional Chinese martial arts more generally.  His career coincided with a period of immense change in the way the traditional fighting styles were imagined and taught.  I hope that a brief discussion may help to clarify why these changes began to emerge when they did.

Gu Ruzhang: Creating a Tiger

Gu Ruzhang’s life has become the subject of many legends and stories.  Some of them are basically true, others are vast exaggerations.  Nor did he leave a body of literature behind as did some of his contemporaries.  All of this makes documenting his life somewhat challenging.  The following account will try to stick to the “known facts” while placing them within the proper historical context.

Gu Ruzhang (“Ku Yu Cheung” in Cantonese) was born in 1894 in Jiangsu province in Funing County.  It doesn’t appear that his family was rich, but his father did run a successful armed escort company which employed a number of local martial artists.  These sorts of businesses thrived and prospered at the end of the Qing dynasty.  As the government’s grip on society weakened it became increasingly dangerous for either people or goods to travel on the roads.

Local highway men were a constant concern.  One of the most common solutions that merchants employed was to hire specialized armed escort companies to accompany their caravans.  In fact, by the final decades of the Qing dynasty such firms had become one of the leading employers of martial artists.

Gu’s father is said to have been an expert in Tan Tui (springing legs) as well as the art of throwing blades.  These skills were an important part of his professional reputation, though of course by this point in time most bandits (and the armed escorts that dealt with them) also carried modern and effective firearms.

Like many martial artists of the time, Gu’s father was basically illiterate.  This did not make running a business any easier and he appears to have wanted to provide his children with the benefits of at least a basic education.   In 1901 Gu was sent to complete a year of primary schooling.  It should be noted that Gu was the second son (he had one older brother and a younger sister), so we can probably assume that his schooling was less extensive than what his older brother might have received.

In 1906 his education changed from the literary to the strictly practical.  From the age of 11 Gu was instructed by his father.  He was first introduced to the form Shi Lu Tan Tui.  Unfortunately this course of study was also fated to be short lived.  Within two years his father was struck with a lingering illness that left him confined to his bed.

What happened next is a little unclear, but it appears that he advised his children on their future educations shortly before he died.  Gu reports that his father recommended that he seek out Yan Jiwen (a former college who had also been a player in the local escort industry) in Shandong to continue his martial training.

However the youth did not set off all at once.  Instead he stayed with his mother for an additional two years.  This was probably in observance of the traditional mourning period.  After that he left for Nanjing where he was enrolled in a middle school to continue his formal education.

Unfortunately that situation does not seem to have agreed with him.  One year later (in 1911) he and a classmate (who was also a cousin) named Ba Qingxiang set out for Shandong to find “Great Spear Yan.”  At the time Gu was likely 15-16 years old.

It is interesting to note the timing of this career change.  The Qing dynasty was overthrown in 1911-1912.  The nation was full of revolutionary sentiments and young men across the state felt a powerful “call to arms” in this period.  The martial arts (which had suffered badly in the wake of the Boxer Uprising) also began to become more popular in this period.  This was especially the case of anything that could claim to be tied to Shaolin or the secret societies that had resisted the now discredited Qing government.

Again, we don’t actually have any day to day accounts of what Gu was thinking or feeling.  Yet I find it to be suggestive that it was at this specific moment that he decided to dedicate himself to the study of the martial arts.

Gu and Ba apparently had little trouble locating Yan Jiwen or convincing him to teach them.  At the time he was actually running a small school and he seems to have been happy to take on the task of instructing the son of his friend and former colleague.  Ru began his training by relearning his Tan Tui sets to his new teacher’s satisfaction.  At that point he was introduced to the ten sets of Northern Shaolin, a variety of weapons forms, Iron Palm training and Small Golden Bell Qigong.

Gu stayed with his new teacher for quite some time.  He studied in residence in Shandong for at least eleven years.  In 1922 Gu received world of his mother’s death.  Decorum mandated that he return to his home village and observe the proper period of mourning.  At this point Yan proclaimed that Gu’s education was complete and he was ready to head out into the world.

The next two to three years were spent back in Jiangsu province.  During this time Gu lived with his cousin Ba and worked to hone his skills. Yet once again his career plans changed.

Rather than opening a school or joining a military academy, Gu reappears in the historical record in 1925, employed as a clerk in the office of the Finance Minister in Guangdong Province.  Many of the better known legend of Gu’s martial feats date to this period.  For instance, this was when he supposedly killed a Russian War Horse with a single blow from his iron palm.

Of course the really interesting question is not whether Gu actually killed the horse, but what he was doing in Guangdong at all?  After all, this job was pretty far from home?  Nor was it what he had spent the last 13 years training to do.  Why might a resident of Jiangsu (or northern China more generally) decide to move to a very different cultural and geographic climate in late 1924 or early 1925.

Gu did not leave us with a diary of his day to day thought, but one suspect that the very destructive Second Zhili–Fengtian War of 1924 may have had something to do with this decision.  This conflict pitted the more liberal (western backed) Zhili faction against the conservative (Japanese backed) Fengtian clique for control of Shanghai (including both its rich legal and illegal trade networks).  Things quickly escalated from there and the conflict became the bloodiest of Northern China’s many warlord conflicts.  Almost all major urban areas in northern China suffered some damage as a result of this war, and in some placed the destruction was extensive.

It is not a surprise to discover that a number of individuals (Gu among them) decided that Guangdong looked like a good bet in 1924-1925.  The Soviet backed clique of the KMT (headed by Chiang Kai Shek) was enjoying a moment of peace and security as its northern rivals ripped themselves apart.

It is likely that Gu (and others like him) believed that Guangdong was good place to start fresh.  While a smaller port than Shanghai, the area was still connected to international trade.  Even if the pace of social reform and economic growth was generally a little slower in Guangdong, by the 1920s it should have been possible to build a new life here.

Unfortunately Gu arrived just in time for another catastrophe, this one of an economic nature.  The Hong Kong Strike of 1925-1926 was one of the most economically disruptive periods in the entire history of the Republic of China.

Not surprisingly this event had an important impact on a number of regional martial arts organizations.  In fact, it affected pretty much everything in the local economy and society.  Yet it is seemingly never remembered in our discussions of the era’s martial arts?

The origins of this trade embargo can actually be found in Shanghai and the aftermath of the Second Zhili–Fengtian War.  Resentment of foreign interference was running high after this destructive conflict.  Shanghai, which had both a substantial foreign presence as well as a highly unionized workforce, became the epicenter of this growing resentment.

The Communist Party sensed an opening and moved quickly to educated workers, draw up lists of demands and organize student protests.  Initially much of this agitation focused on Japanese owned spinning mills.  A series of escalatory confrontations at one mill led to a Japanese manager shooting and killing a demonstrator.  At that point the city exploded like a powder keg.

Large groups began to protest in the international settlement.  Demands ranged anywhere from a release of protesters held by the police to the end of extraterritoriality and even foreign investment in China.  Eventually large numbers of protesters attempted to storm a British police station (they were intent of freeing some jailed comrades) which resulted in British, Chinese and Pakistani law enforcement officers opening fire on the crowd.  There were dozens of casualties.  Within days similar massacres played out in different cities around the country.

Very quickly the anger of the Chinese people shifted from the Japanese to the British.  Hong Kong remained a center of the UK’s commercial strength in the region and it was a highly identifiable target.  Both the KMT and the Communists initially supported plans to boycott foreign good and trade with Hong Kong.  Businesses that flaunted the boycott found themselves the target of often violent reprisals.

The social effect of all of this was devastating.  The economies of Guangzhou and Hong Kong were deeply linked and (truth be known) highly dependent on trade.  When that trade was severed the entire area suffered a massive and immediate drop in GDP.  This in turn led to a collapse in employment and government revenue.  Probably 50% of the region’s GDP evaporated in a few months.

In a future post I plan on talking about how these events affected the Choy Li Fut, Hung Gar and Wing Chun communities.  But for right now, let’s consider what this probably did to Gu Ruzhang.    The entire reason that he had moved to the south was probably to get away from exactly this sort of social disruption.  Further, he got a job as a low level clerk probably because he had the benefit a few years of formal education and there was not much else for a wandering martial artist to do.

After all, the military (traditionally the largest employer of martial artists) had long since been professionalized and the armed escort companies (the second largest employer of hand combat professionals) had been put out of business by cheap and reliable train travel about a decade years earlier.  In short, the martial arts world of his father and teacher had ceased to exist.  Gu was probably working as a filing clerk because he needed the job.

This was the basic situation before the local economy took a massive hit.  One wonders whether rumors of his Kung Fu prowess began to emerge during this period because he was forced to fall back on his martial skills and public demonstrations to support himself.  After all, the famous story of killing the horse with a single punch is, at the end of the day, a pretty typical example of a public performance where organizers are selling tickets and contestants are competing for money (all protests to contrary notwithstanding).

Fortunately Gu’s luck begins to improve at about this point in our story.  Once again it is a shift in national politics that opens a new set of possibilities.  With the major northern cliques left bloodied and exhausted from their recent confrontation, Chiang Kai Shek lost little time in exploiting his opening.  Following the end of the Hong Kong Strike in 1926 (which had lasted substantially longer than he planned) his forces began the now famous “Northern Expedition.”  This campaign allowed the general to consolidate large parts of China under his direct control.

Still, there is more to unifying a nation than seizing territory.  The KMT created multiple programs to promote a sense of nationalism and shared identity.  One of the more interesting of these (building off of the earlier success of the Jingwu Association) sought to use the traditional martial arts as a tool of state building.

Of course in the 1920s there was very little about the Chinese martial arts that was actually “unified” or “modern,” let alone supportive of the KMT.  The Japanese had demonstrated that the martial arts could be a critical part of the nation building process, but to do this the government must first assert regulatory and ideological control over this section of civil society.  In politics a message that cannot be scripted or guided is not a tool, it’s a liability.

The new organization meant to unify the martial arts community behind the aims of the state was the Central Guoshu Institute.  The group was founded as the dust was still settling from the Northern Expedition and its headquarters were located in Nanjing.

Gu Ruzhang appears to have been hired on as a drill instructor at the Central Guoshu Institute soon after its creation.  However, that is not where he would come to national prominence.  Members of the Guoshu Institute realized that they needed to convince martial artists around the country to participate in their program (one that most boxers had been doing perfectly well without) if they were going to succeed.  To spread their mission they organized the First National Guoshu Exam in October of 1928.

The novel undertaking was a three way combination of a Qing era military exam (minus the traditional emphasis on archery), a boxing tournament and a modern, spectator-centered, sporting event.  The relatively young Gu Ruzhang entered the tournament and on its final day was named a “guoshi” or national warrior.  At the time it was the highest honor that the KMT could award to a martial artist.

Gu Ruzhang: The South Bound Tiger.

The organization of the initial National Exam had been rushed.  There were the sorts of problems with the format and programing that one might expect from a new effort.  Still, many members of the audience found the entire thing enthralling.  One of the most enthusiastic converts to the new Guoshu program was General Li Jishen.  At the time he was the governor of Guangdong and Guanxi and the commander of the Eight Army.

Li decided that he would enthusiastically support the Guoshu initiative.  It seemed to be the ideal way to strengthen and unify the area under his command.  Of course the traditionally hierarchic structure of martial arts associations could also be converted into an inexpensive mechanism for spreading ones political influence throughout society.

He invited Gu Ruzhang and four other individuals to return with him to Guangdong where they would establish the Liangguang Guoshu Institute.  Collectively these individuals became known in the press as the “Five Southbound Tigers.”  Together they had an impressive background in the northern arts including Taiji, Bagua, Liuhe Quan, Cha Quan, a wide variety of weapons and of course Northern Shaolin.

This was not actually the first time that the northern arts were to be publicly taught in the south.  That honor is usually awarded to the Jingwu Institute which had opened multiple clubs in the area in 1920 and 1921.  It should also be remembered that, unlike most other areas of the country, the Jingwu Association in Guangdong remained strong until the Japanese invasion in 1938.

Unlike the Jingwu Association, the new institute was conscious of the need to recruit some southern stylists for the teaching staff.  This went a long way towards not alienating the local population.  It hired Zhang Liquan, a White Eyebrow expert, among a handful of others.  Gu Ruzhang himself was well known for cultivating a positive relationship with a local Choy Li Fut clan.  Still, the vast majority of the organization’s teaching efforts were to focus on the orthodox (e.g., northern) Guoshu curriculum.

General Li’s branch of the Guoshu Institute formally began accepting students in March of 1929.  It had an initial enrollment of a little under 150 students and its offered classes 5 times a day (three two hour session and two one hour slots).  Following the lead of the Jingwu Association, the new club made deals with local schools, government offices and companies to provide in house instructors for a set fee.  For the most part it seems to have been government agencies that took them up on this offer.  It appears that a very large percentage of their student base were workers from various KMT controlled offices.  Initially enrollment was limited to men, but special classes for women were eventually created.

While enrollments were good, they were not spectacular.  The fact that so many of the new students were employees of the KMT leads one to suspect that it was going to take the new organization a while to penetrate deeply into the already crowded local market  for martial arts instruction.

Despite these shortcomings, or maybe because of them, the governor and the Liangguang Martial Arts Institute announced a road map to radically reform the martial arts of Southern China.  The first stage of this process was the registration of all martial arts schools in Guangdong and Guangxi.  The next step was to be a total ban on the creation of any new schools or associations other than those created by the staff of the Guoshu Institute.  Lastly the organization would begin publication of a new martial arts magazine explicitly dedicated to advancing the nationalist “Guoshu philosophy.”

With the full power of the provincial government and the Eighth Army backing the orders, it seems at least possible that these policies could actually have been implemented.  Clearly General Li Jishen was quite sincere in his desire to turn the local martial arts community into a tool to be exploited by the state.  With perfect hindsight it is hard to see how the execution of such a plan could have been anything but disastrous for Guangdong’s flourishing indigenous martial arts community.

Political calamity intervened before implementation of the new policies could begin.  In May of 1929 General Li Jishen resigned as governor and traveled to Nanjing with the intention of mediating a dispute between Chiang Kai-shek and the “New Guangxi Clique.”  Negotiations between the groups went badly and Li Jishen was arrested and held until his eventual release in 1931.

General Chen Jitang was then appointed the new governor of Guangdong and Guanxi.  One of Chen first acts was to eliminate his predecessor’s cherished Guoshu program.  I suspect that this action was politically motivated.  Perhaps he saw the organization as a threat, or maybe he did not want to align himself with a wing of the GMD that was so much under the influence of Chiang Kai-shek’s vocal supporters.  Whatever the real reason, Chen claimed to be acting out of an urgent need for fiscal responsibility.

The total budget of the Institute was around 4,500 Yuan a month.  This was a substantial figure, but probably in line with the costs of a major social engineering project like that which Li had envisioned.  The Liangguang Guoshu Institute folded after a mere two months of operations, a victim of internal politics within the GMD.

The upshot of this rapid fall was that a number of prominent northern exponents were left unemployed and more or less stranded in Southern China.  This seeming setback created new opportunities that spread the northern arts more effectively than anything the Guoshu Institute had ever managed to do.

After all, most of the instruction that the school had offered was focused on a handful of civil servants.  This likely reflects the fact that it was government pressure and subsidization that supported the original Institute, not public demand.  Chen’s forced dissolution of the Institute allowed its instructors to enter the much broader marketplace for private instruction.  It was within these smaller commercial schools that northern styles, such as Bak Siu Lam and Taiji, really took hold and began to spread in the south.

Gu Ru Zang proved to be among the most influential of the remaining staff.  In June of 1929 he created the Guangzhou Guoshu Institute.  It seems likely that this new, smaller organization, had some level of official backing and that it clearly fell within the broader Guoshu movement led by the Central Academy in Nanjing.  The group was housed in the building of the National Athletic Association.  That said, the new institute did not continue the grandiose mission of its predecessor.  It did not attempt to regulate or lead the local martial arts marketplace.  It essentially became just one more martial arts school among many.  Ironically that appears to have been the key to its long term success.

Conclusion: Gu Ruzhang as a Wandering Tiger

One might assume that after his return to the South, and his subsequent establishment of a successful martial arts institute, Gu would settle down.  Unfortunately it was not to be.  He left the region following the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931.  I have not been able to locate precise information on what he did next.

In 1932 Ho Qian, a high official in Hebei Province, hired Gu to act as a head instructor at the Heibi Military Academy.  Such appointments were very prestigious and highly sought after.  This kind of government sponsorship was seen as legitimating the efforts of a martial artist.  Gu also opened a traditional medicine clinic in 1932.  Yet once again the Master showed no interest in putting down roots.

In 1934 he returned to the south, this time to receive an appointment as the Chief Guoshu Instructor for the Eight Army.  This would be the last major assignment of his career.  In 1938 the Japanese invasion reached Southern China.  Most martial arts schools closed their doors or went underground.  The Central Guoshu Institute retreated with the government to the far interior of the country.

In the early 1940s Gu Ruzhang announced his retirement from the world of the martial arts.  At that point he disappeared from public view.  I have not been able to find much information on the final years of his life.  He is known to have died in 1952 and a few of his students have asserted that heart problems were to blame.  He was only 58 years old at the time of his death. 

Still, his career spanned three decades in which the traditional martial arts were transformed, modernized and socially repositioned for even greater success in the future.  Gu taught literally thousands of students in his lifetime and played an important role in preserving and passing on China’s martial culture.

It is certainly interesting to watch how the Chinese martial arts evolved throughout his life.  As a child they were the essential skills of bandits and paramilitary guards.  Later they fell on hard times.  Then in the 1920s and 1930s the traditional combat systems were systematically re-imagined as an aid in building and promoting a new vision of Chinese nationalism.  Each of these shifts reflected larger changes in the China’s economic and political situation.  These in turn manifested themselves in very specific ways in Gu’s life and career.

Introduction

The “writing sabbatical” continues and I am happy to report that the book chapters and papers are progressing nicely.   This weekend’s post comes to us from the early days of Kung Fu Tea, and it covers a topic that has played a central role in the creation mythology of many of Southern China’s martial arts.  It was also part of a small series of posts on the Red Boats that I wrote at the time (you can find a follow-up essay here).  Anyone interested in checking out the original comments and conversations can click here.  Enjoy!

Exploring the Red Boats

No subject has been more romanticized among students of Guangdong’s martial arts (and Wing Chun practitioners in particular) than the “Red Boat” companies of the Cantonese regional opera tradition.  Late 19^th and early 20^th century martial arts folklore claimed that remnants of the Southern Shaolin Temple (including the Abbot Jee Shin) found refuge among these wandering performers following the destruction of their sanctuary by the hated Qing government.

Such stories make a lot of narrative sense.  Because of their low social status, and ability to travel from place to place without engendering too much suspicion, opera companies would seem to be the ideal cover for individuals fleeing government persecution.  They were even expected to house martial arts experts among their casts of performers.

Of course the acceptance of these stories as historical facts requires us to overlook other inconvenient details, starting with the likelihood that the Southern Shaolin Temple, imagined in so many Kung Fu legends, never existed.  Further, the anti-government activities of the various secret societies and triad organizations in southern China during the late 19^th century had much more to do with criminal scheming and social posturing than they did any organized plan for actual political reform.  Things become more complicated in the first decade of the 20^th century when Sun Yat Sen begins to organize genuinely revolutionary activity among some of these groups, but that is not what most Kung Fu legends are describing.

Most of the stories that see opera groups as dedicated political cells (rather than convenient covers for wandering criminals) seem to date to the mid 20^th century or later. Some of them were not first recorded until quite recently.  In a recent post I looked at the actual history of political and revolutionary activities of Cantonese Opera troops.  It is true that these groups were often quite vocal in making political demands, and in one memorable instance even went into open rebellion against the state (along with many other elements of Southern China’s underclass.)  Still, a detailed examination of these episodes does not validate the historical accuracy of the Wing Chun folklore.  Rather it strongly suggests that the Red Boat Opera companies were never involved in the sorts of activities that are generally ascribed to them.

This does not mean that individuals interested in Wing Chun’s history are free to ignore the opera connection.  I suspect that it is actually very significant that the orthodox Wing Chun genealogies claim that Leung Jan was influenced by the Cantonese opera tradition during the mid 19^th century (probably during the Opera Ban following the Red Turban Revolt for reasons which I have discussed elsewhere).  In fact, Cantonese opera had a particularly close relationship with the southern Chinese martial arts and likely had a substantive impact on both their development and public perception.

It is not my goal in these posts to dismiss any connection between the two.  Rather, it may be necessary draw the line between folklore, on the one hand, and social history, on the other, in order to open a space for new research.  I think that this is a rich topic that could potentially yield findings that would be important not just for our understanding of hand combat systems like Wing Chun and Choy Li Fut, but also southern Chinese popular culture as a whole.

Unfortunately this is not the sort of thing that is easily summarized in a single blog post.  In my last essay on the topic I restricted my focus to the somewhat complex relationship between Cantonese Opera and revolutionary politics in the late Qing and Republic Periods.  In the current post I want to introduce some basic historical and social description about what life was like on the Red Boats.  Southern China was a dangerous place during much of their period of operation.  What precautions did they take when plying the waters?  How did the opera companies fit into the local economy of violence along the Pearl River Estuary?  Just as importantly, how did they manage to train their own apprentices in Kung Fu while constantly on the move?

The historical investigation of these questions is complicated by our reliance on oral accounts.  Specifically, we wish to know more about the Red Boats to expand our understanding of the development of the southern Chinese martial arts.  Yet from the 1970s onward (and the process rapidly accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s) martial arts culture has been read back onto the accounts of the Red Boats themselves.  This created a seamless system of self-reinforcing folkloric accounts easily mistaken for history.

Nor is this challenge restricted to the realm of opera.  Traditionally most individuals within Chinese society held the martial arts in low esteem. They were not an integral part of how people remembered their own cultural past.

Yet after the Kung Fu Craze of the 1970s, where these traditional fighting systems came to be accepted as a legitimate marker of Chinese identity, this changed.   Increasingly they have come to be projected back onto the past, often in very creative (if totally anachronistic) ways.  In the final section of this post I hope to examine a few examples of this process as it relates to Cantonese opera and consider how we might attempt to control for it.

In a future installment of this series I will examine some 19^thcentury accounts of Cantonese opera performances, particularly as they related to “military plays.”  I will also take a closer look at what we think we know about how these groups learned their martial arts in the first place, as well as the realities of river violence and piracy during the late imperial period.  Hopefully this series of posts will lay the groundwork for future research on the relationship between the martial arts and opera as related strands in the region’s popular culture.

Lastly, I should say a few things about my sources.  There are really only a handful of books and articles in the scholarly literature that focus directly on the history and description of Cantonese opera as it relates to questions of interest to martial artists.  This blog post relies heavily on two sources.  The first is an article by the anthropologists Barbara E. Ward titled “The Red Boats of the Canton Delta: A Historical Chapter in the Sociology of Chinese Regional Drama” (Proceedings of the International Conference on Sinology. 1981. pp. 233-258.)  Her work is based on a very large number of interviews (conducted between approximately 1975-1980) with individuals who lived and performed on the Red Boats.  Ward also conducted extensive ethnographic research with Cantonese Opera companies in her home city of Hong Kong (where she was employed as a professor of Anthropology at Chinese University of Hong Kong.)

The other source that I have turned too in writing this is a Master thesis by Loretta Siuling Yeung titled “Red Boat Troupes and Cantonese Opera.”  This research was completed much more recently (2010) and was supervised at the University of Georgia.  Yeung also conducted a number of interviews, but seems to have relied much more on the historical and secondary literature.  This change in research strategy is certainly understandable given the lack of surviving veteran Red Boat performers in 2010 and the academic goals of a Master’s thesis.  In general the historical accounts of Yeung and Ward are quite consistent.  Still, the differences which occasionally appear are also quite suggestive.

Understanding the Red Boats as a Physical, Economic and Social System

The Red Boats present the student of popular culture with a number of paradoxes.  The era in which they plied the waters of the Pearl River was absolutely critical to our understanding of Cantonese opera.  In fact, this is when many of the traditions and customs that we now think of as “ancient” and “timeless” first emerged.

Barbara Ward has noted that echoes of life on the Red Boats can be seen in many aspects of modern, theater-bound, opera troops in Hong Kong.  Everything from the arrangement of dressing rooms to the details of incense burning rituals looks back to life on the boats.  Throughout the post-war period veterans performers who had actually lived on the boats were lionized and idealized by their younger peers.  Yet a number of very basic questions about these vessels remain unanswered.

During the 1970s Ward and others were able to locate a number of individuals who could give very detailed accounts of what the structure of these boats had been like.  Interestingly almost all of the actual Red Boats were internally identical.

The vessels were all made to the same basic specifications and were owned either by the opera guild or some other group of individuals (I have not yet been able to answer this question).  Individual opera companies generally rented these vessels for years at a time, and were responsible for hiring their own crew of sailors.  The high degree of standardization between boats allowed for companies to change ships with little disruption as the social structure of their company was designed to be compatible with any of the 60 or so specially built Red Boats which sailed the waters of southern China.

The era of the Red Boats was also much briefer than most martial artists realize.  When speaking of these opera companies I suspect that the vessels themselves were really only part of the entire equation, and possibly a small one at that.  For me the most interesting aspect of Ward’s extensive research was the discovery that each Cantonese Opera company had a shared social structure optimized for both performance and life on the boat.

These groups were not generalists or traveling troubadour/mercenaries.  Rather they were units composed of highly specialized performers supported by an elaborate physical and administrative infrastructure.  The real “technology” of these companies, the thing that accounted for their remarkable success, was actually organizational in nature.  It was their own internal structure and group cultural.  The physical layout of the boats both reflected this and helped it to gel.  In fact, Ward found that by the 1980s (more than 30 years after then last voyage of a Red Boat) it remained remarkably intact.

No historical account, either in Chinese or any other language, mentions Red Boats in southern China prior to the 1850s.  It is possible that they were introduced as a social and economic system for organizing opera performances just prior to the Red Turban Revolt of the 1850s, but if so they made very few voyages before the decade long opera ban that followed the end of that conflict.  The real start of the era of “Red Boat” activity was in the 1870s.  From that time forward these vessels became a conspicuous aspect of local popular culture.

The purpose of the Red Boats was to allow opera companies to travel from one temple festival to the next during the performance season.  Almost all of these voyages were actually carried out through southern China’s extensive river system.  These were not ocean going vessels and were not actually capable of moving along China’s coastline.  Occasionally a pair of boats (they always traveled two at a time) would be dispatched to fill a contract in Macao, but that was really as far into “open water” as any of these vessels ever ventured.  Even that journey was probably a harrowing experience for the cast and crew.

The Red Boats themselves appear to have been an artifact of one stage of the economic development within the Cantonese opera industry.  Clearly it took a lot of capital to build these ships, and individual companies had to earn a lot of money to pay the rent on them.  Prior to the 1850s most opera companies still traveled by water (with few roads in the region almost everyone in southern China did).  But there was nothing remarkable about their vessels and I have yet to see evidence indicating that the internal structure of these companies were standardized to the same extent that would later become common.

During this earlier period the region’s economy was generally smaller and it does not appear that traveling companies could make all that much money.  But as revenues grew in the middle of the century it became possible for the opera guild to invest in new technologies that would streamline the performance process.  In short, the Red Boat system that modern martial artists seem to be so interested in really appears to be an artifact of economic changes that were just starting in the middle of the 19^th century.

The Red Boat opera companies reached the peak of their popularity in the 1920s.  This was really their golden era.  After that they became a victim of their own success.  Traditionally Cantonese operas were only performed on makeshift temporary stages that were erected as part of a temple festival.  The temples offered these performances to the local gods, and were responsible for raising the funds that were used to pay the actors who stage the performance.  The entire community would then come out to watch the show.

In the middle of the 19^th century southern China had no (or very few) dedicated theaters.  It took a substantial investment of capital to build the Red Boats, but they were still a stop-gap solution for the opera guild.  The truth was that owning land and building theaters was incredibly expensive.  There simply wasn’t enough money in opera to make that viable in most places.

However, the rapid economic growth of the 1920s started to change all of this.  As opera companies grew rich, and more people flocked to cities, suddenly it became possible to build permanent theaters.  Access to these structures was still controlled by the guild, but the cost of staging a performance was vastly lowered if one did not have to travel to it.  And when it was necessary to travel to the countryside to fulfill lucrative festival contracts, a company could simply book passage on the new steam ships and trains.

Red Boat opera troops continued to travel through the 1930s but the institution was in decline even at that point.  The Japanese invasion in 1938 put a stop to much of this activity.  Rumor has it that they even bombed a pair of boats (possibly the last ones) moored in the harbor of Guangzhou.  Other accounts state that the last known sighting of a pair of Red Boats was in Macao circa 1950.

A number of people have asked me why the Red Boats were never really resurrected after WWII.  I think that the answer is basically financial.  The boats themselves represented a certain level of capital investment which made sense when the Cantonese opera companies were starting to enjoy a surplus (due to changes in the structure of the local economy) but could not yet afford speedier forms of travel and permanent theaters for off-season performances.  The Red Boats helped to give shape to the internal culture of the modern Cantonese opera company, but once they ceased to fill their basic economic function they were quickly discarded.

I doubt many performers were all that nostalgic about this change in 1940s and 1950s.  All of the accounts collected by Yeung and Ward indicate that life on these vessels was a challenge.  Generally speaking these vessels traveled in pairs (termed a “Heaven Boat” and an “Earth Boat.”)  Both Red Boats housed between them about a 140-160 people in spaces that were only 80 Chinese feet long by just 10 feet wide.  Ward states that a full Opera crew included 62 actors, 12 musicians, 11 full time administrators/managers, 9 “costume men”, 10 property handlers/stage hands, 2 barbers, 4 laundry men, 7 cooks, 12 boatmen, 4 professional guards, a ship’s doctor, captain and other officers.

As performances became more elaborate in the early 20th century a third vessel was often added to the armada.  Its job was to carry the increasingly complex scenery and props which were becoming a part of newer styles of stage performances.  It was simply termed the “Scenery boat” was not made to any special specifications.

Each of these vessels had a raised deck on the stern and rows of cabins running down the sides.  They also had a mast that could be raised or lowered.  About half of the individuals on the boat were the performers, apprentices, musicians, property managers and administrators who made up the opera company proper.  They monopolized the cabins and area below decks.

Again, the internal layout of each of these vessels was standardized and basically identical.  Both Yeung and Ward confirm that the names of the various cabins were even standardized from ship to ship.  The “cabins” (really more like double bunks which could have privacy screens installed) were on the port and starboard side of the ship and were separated by a “hall” that was only a few feet wide.  Some of these bunks had better circulation and views than others.  Cabins were assigned by lottery at the start of each season and no one wanted to draw cabins with such poetic names as “Trash Heap” and “Mosquito Den” (which Ward speculates may actually have been unfortunately literal).

Interestingly Ward points out that all members of the opera company actually had equal chances of drawing a good birth going into the lottery, meaning that potentially a raw apprentice would end up with the best assignment on the boat.  Of course he probably would not keep it, but according to both rules and tradition the more senior members of the company would have to bid to buy it from him.  This could be a valuable boon for a young individual with very little access to money, and it is a fascinating way in which resources were redistributed (albeit on a limited scale) from senior members of the company to junior ones at least once a year.

Given everything that one reads about the cruelty of opera training, not to mention impoverished parents selling their children to traveling groups of performers, I thought that this was an interesting bit of evidence as to the willingness of these groups to actually make some investment in their youngest members.  It should also be noted that even the most junior apprentice in the opera company was still “senior” to 50% of these individuals on the craft.

Of course they would have been the crew.  With the exception of the Captain and the ship’s doctor, the crew and officers did not have any place below decks.  They worked and lived on the surface of the vessel, rolling out blankets and sleeping on the decks at night.  The crew included a number of sailors, but also more specialized individuals such as cooks, barbers, members of armed escort companies tasked with providing security for the vessel and general officers.

None of these individuals were attached to either the opera company or the vessel itself.  Instead the company rented the vessel for the season and then was responsible for finding and hiring a crew.  Ward suspects that most of the individuals who signed on for such missions were from the caste of “Boat People” who were so common on the waterways of southern China at that time.

Generating enough revenue to sustain an operation of this size and complexity cannot have been easy.  The ability to manage this complexity, staying both booked and on schedule, was really the great innovation of the Red Boat system.  Again, their greatest assets appears to have been organizational in nature.  I find it particularly revealing that a company traveled with no fewer than 11 full time managers and many other individuals who roles essentially boiled down to “performance logistics.”

Martial artists often wonder to what degree we can think of the Red Boat opera companies as semi-specialized bands of who may have adopted the role of “pirate” or “mercenary,” if not outright “rebel.”  Obviously we have much less information about what earlier groups in the 18^th or early 19^th century were doing.  Yet by the time the Opera Ban is lifted it is pretty clear that this is not usually the case.  These companies were highly specialized economic units.  Their vessels are not well suited for either open water sailing or combat.  In fact, they actually turned to local specialists for their defense.

Violence on the Red Boats

Having laid out a description of the basic character of the Red Boat opera companies I would now like to return to a more focused discussion of their relationship with civil violence in the late Qing and Republic periods.  Again, this is a broad subject, and it is not the sort of thing that can be tackled in a single blog post.  The current discussion is by necessity limited though I intend to return to these same themes in my follow-up discussion.

The threat of violence was an actual concern for members of the Red Boat companies.  In some ways they may even have been uniquely cursed.  When thinking about social conflict in southern China we often draw a distinction between the sorts of banditry that was common in the countryside versus the criminality and secret societies that plagued the cities.  Due to their peripatetic nature these troops were practically guaranteed to be exposed to both of these forces at one time or another.

Members of these companies were likely also vulnerable for other reasons.  The low social status of performers may have made it difficult for them to seek redress through established official channels.  Also, by virtue of their appearance at temple festivals, opera performances were linked to gambling and other sorts of commerce that was often controlled by organized crime.

Of course piracy was another major issue on China’s waterways in the 19^th century.  Robert Antony (Like Froth Floating on the Sea, 2003) identifies the period from about 1790-1810 as being the peak of the region’s piracy crisis.  While this sort of activity dropped precipitously after 1810 it never totally vanished.  One can easily add it to the already long list of concerns that the officers and crew of the Red Boats would have had to contend with

So how did the Red Boat opera companies handle these threats?  Wing Chun mythology suggests that it was by maintaining a separate set of more practical and deadly martial skills than those that were exhibited on stage.  For instance, in a number of stories the exiled Shaolin Abbot who has been hiding as a cook on a Red Boat reveals himself to be a martial arts master only after various members of the company fail to defeat a gangster who has been harassing the group.

The reality of the situation is probably more nuanced than these sorts of accounts would indicate.  As security on China’s roads and waterways broke down towards the end of Qing dynasty most merchants turned to “Armed Escort Companies” to provide safety for both goods and people while traveling.  In fact, these companies became a major employer of both civilian trained martial artist and retired military officers.  It is actually impossible to tell the story of the development of the modern martial arts without exploring these groups.

These security specialists employed a wide range of skills beyond Kung Fu.  Their most critical asset was actually their deep local knowledge, established relationships with local strong-men and their carefully cultivated diplomatic skills.  If these should fail many of these companies were also armed with relatively modern rifles, carbines and in some cases even state of the art handguns.

It is absolutely true that members of these companies also carried traditional weapons such as swords and spears.  Man of them had extensive training in hand to hand combat.  But if actual fighting could not be avoided very few individuals wanted to leave any of their bases uncovered.

It seems that the Red Boat Opera companies dealt with the turmoil of the 19^th and early 20^th century in exactly the same way that most merchants did, by hiring professional guards and escort companies armed with a variety of modern weaponry.  Even after the heyday of the armed escort company passed in the early 20^thcentury, the Red Boats continued to turn to dedicated professionals for their immediate security needs.

Barbra Ward relates the following oral account in her paper which provides some additional information on this subject:

“Informant S, male aged 72, February 1975: When I was a boy my father used to take me to the theater whenever he could because he liked it very much.  So we used to see not only the plays in our own town at the festival times but also those in neighboring towns and villages.  Sometimes we walked and sometimes we went by boat.  I remember the Red Boats were really like special ferry boats.  And they had guns too.  In those days public order was not reliable, and the ferry boats always used to carry armed guards.  There were usually three of them.  They stood on the top of the ferry boat (i.e., on the cabin roof. B.E.W.) to keep a look out.  Quite often, too, a sort of platform was built at the bow on which a small gun was mounted.  The ferry boat often had iron sheets built along the cabin sides for protection against gunfire.  I know that the Red Boats had the same arrangements about armed guards, and I think that they often had iron sheeting too.  I used to like to see the guns.” (Ward, 234-235)

Clearly the Red Boats took security seriously, and that meant turning to professionals with modern weapons.  In that regard they were very similar to pretty much every other ferry and commercial vessel of any size on the Pearl River at that point in time.

Of course this does not mean that martial arts would have been a useless skill outside of the stage.  As useful as a small artillery piece is, it may not help in an altercation in an urban environment or when dealing with petty crime.  And we know from a variety of period accounts that these were things that many martial artists had to deal with.  There is no reason to suspect that the Opera companies would have been uniquely exempt on that front.  Still, it is clear that when dealing with major threats to the ship or crew they, like most other civilians, turned to professional specialists in violence.

Purported image of late 19th century performers with a large planted wooden dummy on a vessel.  This image is commonly passed around the internet, but I have yet to actually confirm the photographer, subjects or original place of publication.

Before concluding I would also like to review a few points about martial arts and operatic training on the Red Boats.  Again this is a topic that has generated a lot of speculation among Wing Chun students and other martial artists.  I have read numerous accounts that have claimed that Wing Chun owes it compact nature to the fact that it was developed on a boat (or alternatively to fight on boats).  Of course not everything about the Wing Chun system (such as its weapons, either the three meter pole or the expansive footwork of the swords form) is really all that “compact” or well adapted to tight spaces.

The informants that Barbara Ward interviewed were all unanimous in declaring that martial arts training did not happen on the boats themselves.  Rather these skills were taught almost exclusively when the boat was moored and the crew was on dry land.  Why?  A quick look at the Ward’s reconstruction of the typical Red Boat reveals the reason.  There was simply no room to do anything other than sleep on these vessels.

Hallways were only a few feet wide and often had trunks along their edges reducing their actual width even more.  Stair wells were so narrow that individuals actually had to turn sideways to move up and down them.  And while there was open space on the fore deck and roof of the cabin (if the mast was raised) that area was typically occupied by the crew of the vessel.  In fact, Ward’s informants indicate that even basic performance and musical training happened exclusively on land.

Still, when you recall that these boats were essentially river barges rather than ocean going vessels, this actually makes a lot of sense.  They were never all that far away from the bank, and most of the trips between venues (where they might be tied up for three day or more) were not all that long.

Conclusion: The evolving relationship between martial arts mythology and our understanding of Cantonese Opera.

While we know a number of details about the history and operation of the Red Boats, there are still some of things that we are less sure about.  One of the most surprising of these is why these vessels were actually called “Red Boats” at all.  Most causal readers would probably assume that they were so named because they were painted red.

Yet Professor Ward’s informants in the 1970s (all individuals who had seen or lived on these vessels) disputed that.  They claimed that in fact the boats looked much like any other river going ferry.  Some stated that the boats were so named because they displayed red banners and advertisements when coming into port.  Ward herself wonders whether this was an ironic or self-deprecating pun based on the fact that high status official vessels were also called “Red Boats.”  She also speculates on the various associations of the color red with different local secret societies but comes to no conclusions (see pages 249-250).

Unfortunately there is little agreement on the basic facts of the situation.  While early accounts claim that the boats were brown, later sources and even government museum replicas (dating from the 1990s and 2000s), state that the boats really were red.  For instance, the Opera Museum in Foshan is one of the few places where scholars can go for reliable information about the history and development of Cantonese regional opera.  Their scale model of an opera boat is quite clearly painted red and white.  In fact, when Yeung did her research in 2009-2010 it does not appear that any of the later sources she used indicated that the boats were not red.  Who should we believe?

One would think that this would be an easy point to resolve.  All we would need to do would be to find a photograph of a Red Boat in the 1920s or 1930s and look at it.  And one might suppose that given the enormous popularity of Cantonese opera that we would be easy.  Unfortunately this is not the case.

We have many pictures of the performers that these boats carried.  We even have photographs of costumes and musicians.  But we have yet to identify a single surviving photograph or painting of an actual pair of Red Boats.  I have tried to speak with as much confidence as my sources will allow, but this surprising ellipse is a useful reminder of just how spotty the historical record can be.  On a fundamental level we just don’t know how these boats were decorated, or if they were decorated at all.

In general the sources that Ward dealt with were more numerous and closer to the actual events than the ones that Yeung had access too.  As such I am inclined to believe that these vessels were “red” only in symbolic terms, and probably looked much like any other ferry to a casual observer.  Their genius lay in their social organization, not their advertising.  I must admit that I also like the idea of them displaying red banners when they arrived at their destination.  That seems very plausible.

Still, this is no longer the dominant image of these vessels in either operatic or martial arts circles.  It would appear that sometime between 1970 and 2000 the “Red Boats” literally became red in the public’s imagination.  So what changed?

I suspect that a big part of this shift had to do with who could claim to be an “expert” on this aspect of southern China’s cultural heritage.  Prior to 1970 if you wanted to know about the Red Boats one would simply go and interview someone who lived on them or frequented their shows.  Martial artists probably would not have been considered a very credible source of information, nor would many people be all that interested in catering to their tastes or vision of the past.

Of course this was prior to Bruce Lee, Jet Li and the “Kung Fu Craze” that swept Hong Kong and Mainland China in the late 1970s and 1980s.  Despite the best efforts of previous generations of reformers, the martial arts were always viewed as a marginal activity within Chinese society.  Ergo their close association with the opera and military, both of which were also seen as very marginal activities.  When most Chinese individuals imagined their past the martial arts did not play a huge role in it, and if they did it was not necessarily a glorious one.

In the 1980s all of this changed.  A much wider group of people were now willing to accept the martial arts as a legitimate tool for both enacting and understanding Chinese identity.  This had an immediate and profound effect on the contours of popular culture.  Suddenly things were interesting to consumers precisely because they had a connection to the martial arts.

Martial arts tourism also became a major industry which picked up steam throughout the 1980s and 1990s.  Municipalities and individual institutions found themselves competing in a new industry based on a rapidly evolving “memory” of what the past had been.  I suspect that as the cultural prestige of the southern Chinese martial arts rose, its teachers were increasingly seen as “experts” to be consulted on the history of area’s opera tradition.

After all, these performance traditions played a critical part in the lore of groups like Wing Chun.  Their stories were colorful and often full of solid nationalist themes.  And of course they were likely to be an economic boon to whatever geographic unit could lay claim to them.

All of which brings me back to the model of the literally “Red Boat” housed at the Foshan opera museum. Astute observers will notice that in addition to the red paint another addition has been made to the model that does not appear in any of Professor Ward’s accounts or her own reconstruction of the boats.  Relying on the museum replica Yeung (in 2010) reports that the bow of each Earth Boat featured a wooden dummy for the opera singers to practice their Kung Fu on.  Further, the training apparatus in question looks suspiciously like a modern Wing Chun dummy.

I have got to admit that I have some very mixed feelings about this.  As a Wing Chun practitioner I would actually love for this to be true.  Yet it is strange that in 1975 none of Ward’s sources remembered this detail.  However in our current decade (well after the rise of Bruce Lee and even Ip Man) suddenly local experts “remember” that the boats all had dummies on them.

Again, it is hard to know what to do with this.  We have one photograph that appears to show two individuals on a boat with a dummy, much like the one that Yeung reproduces.  But I have never been able to actually confirm in concrete terms the origins or provenance of that image.

Readers should also recall that there were other sorts of dummies that were used in southern China.  Should we really expect of a modern Wing Chun dummy in 1870?  Or even in 1920?  Why not a Choy Li Fut style training device?  During that period it was the most popular regional art.

Finally, looking at the measurements and recreation provided by Ward I actually have some doubts as to whether a dummy would actually have fit on the deck at all.  After all, she has a cannon mounted in the middle of the platform where the martial arts student would have to stand in order to use the dummy.

Ultimately I doubt that the Red Boats included training dummies of the sort imagined by the Foshan museum model.  I do not doubt that dummies were part of opera training.  They are an important part of a number of local martial arts systems and it is hard to think of a reason why opera students would not have used them.  Yet this training, like pretty much everything else, probably had to wait until the apprentices disembarked onto dry land.

I suspect that this may be a good example of how martial arts folklore has come to be projected back onto Chinese popular history in unexpected ways since the 1980s and 1990s.  Prior to this time there would be no reason to think of Wing Chun teachers as “experts” in the history of Cantonese opera.  But after that time their stories became critically important to the many tourists who descend on Foshan each year hoping to hear about Cantonese opera’s connection to Wing Chun.

Popular culture is not static.  It is a dynamic thing.  This means that our view of the past is always changing and evolving as well.  It is not hard to see this process unfurl in academic discussions of China’s history, but it is also happening in popular conversations about the past and its relationship with modern identity.

I do not want to dismiss this changing discourse about the nature of the Red Boats and their relationship with the martial arts.  I think that these two issues regarding the boats’ appearance are pretty informative in terms of understanding what many individuals are looking for in the Chinese martial arts today.  Still, it is necessary to bracket this process if you are instead interested in understanding the evolution of the martial arts in the Late Imperial or Republic periods.  If one is unaware of the influence of these modern stories on how the past imagined, then history quickly becomes tautology.

How do historical or cultural students guard against this tendency?  In general Yeung’s thesis is pretty good, but it is clear that she was not really all that well informed about the local martial arts (her emphasis is on the musical and performance side of opera).  This may have hampered her ability to judge the credibility of different sources.

At the end of the day relying on accounts and documents close to the source is our best strategy.  When there has been a discrepancy between Yeung and Ward I have tended to favor the later precisely because her sources are more numerous and credible.  The real danger that arises when speculating about the past in the absence of primary documents is that we cannot tell when our thinking starts to go offtrack.  When the historical record is silent it is just too easy to support almost any argument no matter how spurious.

I hope that this blog post will help to address some of these issues, at least with regards to the Red Boat Opera companies and their relationship to Wing Chun.  In recent years this motif has been used to advance a number of competing theories about where the system originated and why it evolved in the way that it did.

Most of these claims are probably spurious. The Red Boat period of the Cantonese opera is both later and shorter than most people recognize (really circa 1870-1938).  These companies appear to have been highly specialized economic units and unlikely to have been involved in the sorts of radical politics which later martial arts folklore seeks to link them too.  Lastly, while the Red Boats inhabited a dangerous world, they often relied on professional guards armed with modern weapons to protect their property and lives.  In that sense they were very much like any other travelers on the Pearl River at that point in time.

Nevertheless, I suspect that opera was linked to the development of a number of important styles in Southern China.  Competition between opera troops to showcase the newest and most exotic skills on stage helped to spread different styles throughout the region, and likely even acted as vector for new hand combat traditions to enter southern China in the first place.  In asking these questions about where exactly the “history” ends and modern “folklore” begins, I do not seek to discount the contribution of Cantonese opera.  Rather I would like to open a space where their actual accomplishments can be investigated and understood aside from their more recent reputation.

oOo

If you enjoyed this essay consider reading: The Red Boats and the Nautical Origins of the Wooden Dummy.

oOo

Introduction

I am happy to report that all of the conference papers and book chapters I have been working on for the last month are now finished.  Unfortunately, my blogging sabbatical must continue a little while longer. I am now preparing to hop on a plane for a few weeks of transoceanic travel and presentations.  In the mean time, I would like to leave you with a few of the keynotes and round-tables from this summers Martial Arts Studies at Cardiff University.  The organizers of the event have been kind enough to upload these to YouTube and its the next best thing to being there (though admittedly, being there in person is way much more fun).

The first “guest posts” in this series is a real treat.  Professor Meaghan Morris is an important pioneer in the fields of film and cultural studies.  Her writings on the Hong Kong film industry have helped to forge a strong intersection between these fields and martial arts studies.  Anyone who considers themselves to be a Kung Fu film fan will find many new ideas to ponder in her paper, and those who are newer to the genre may even pick up a few recommendations for films to see and themes to watch for.  Enjoy!

Disenchanting Jianghu: Historical Experience and the Kung Fu Refusenik in Cinema by Professor Meaghan Morris.

oOo

Looking for something to read?  Why not check out this essay:  Do the Chinese Martial Arts have One “Martial Culture” or Many?

oOo

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