Happy New Year! New Years is a good time to sit back and reflect on recent accomplishments and events. 2015 has been a huge year for the field of martial arts studies. Things had been picking up for a while, but in the last year we saw a veritable explosion of new books, articles, … Continue reading
Introduction Welcome to “Chinese Martial Arts in the News.” 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 … Continue reading
Happy Holidays! Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of Kung Fu Tea’s readers. Thanks so much for your support and feedback over the last year. I think that Santa left one or two things under the tree for me. Hopefully he did the same for you. We will be … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
Introduction It is my distinct pleasure to introduce the first entry in a new series of guest posts titled “Doing Research.” Compared to other fields of scholarly inquiry, Martial Arts Studies has a distinctly democratic flavor. This stems from a number of sources. Mostly obviously, the martial arts are widely practiced in both the … Continue reading
Introduction Spirit possession is a fascinating but rarely discussed aspect of the traditional Chinese martial arts. Reformers in the field of physical culture spent much of the 20th century attempting to erase the national embarrassment of the Boxer Uprising in which young martial artists who practiced a type of “spirit boxing” were seen … Continue reading
Introduction History is difficult. It goes beyond gaining access to appropriate sources, records and languages. The challenges that we face are often more basic and conceptual. At the present moment there is a lot of interest, both in popular and scholarly discussions, in finding the “real origins” of various Asian martial arts. Perhaps … Continue reading
Religion, Violence and the Asian Martial Arts Tel Aviv University – Department of East Asian Studies Conference, November 23, 2015. Introduction Today’s post will introduce readers to some of the recent developments in the global field of Martial Arts Studies. This comes in the form of a conference report, submitted by Abi Moriya, on … Continue reading
“In business, be competent. In action, watch the timing. No fight: No blame.” Introduction I bet you didn’t know that the Dao De Jing was full of Christmas shopping advice. It turns out that it is, and this is the perfect time to start thinking hard about what you are going to … Continue reading
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