Introduction: The Symbolic Language of Weapons Victor Turner, the cultural anthropologist, famously argued that all symbols are "multivocal," meaning a single symbol can take on a multiplicity of meanings. Humans have a way of looking at complexes of symbols, perhaps... Continue Reading →
IntroductionThis article was first posted on August 3rd, 2012, making it one of the very first things I ever wrote for Kung Fu Tea. It was also my first review of an academic article, and my first attempt to deal... Continue Reading →
Introduction Here is a second post from the Kung Fu Tea archives. This post was originally published on September 5th, 2012. That was still in the first few months of the blog, well before I had started to establish any... Continue Reading →
Catching Qigong Fever. I have read my fair share of books on religion in late imperial and modern China. Unfortunately I had been neglecting a classic. In 2007 David Palmer released a volume titled Qigong Fever: Body, Science and... Continue Reading →
Introduction: What is a Qilin and why do they dance? Let me start off by wishing everyone a happy New Year! The Lunar New Year is the longest and most important festival in the traditional Chinese calendar. Individuals celebrate it... Continue Reading →
Sun Lutang and the Field of Chinese Martial Studies This post is the third and final installment of our three part review of the life and contributions of Sun Lutang. Sun was a master of Xingyi, Bagua and Taiji boxing... Continue Reading →
This is Part One of a three part biographical sketch of Sun Lutang. Also see Part Two and Part Three. Introduction: Why Sun Lutang? One of the persistent problems that I see in amateur discussions of “Chinese martial studies” is... Continue Reading →
Introduction This is the third and final installment of our in-depth review of Meir Shahar’s groundbreaking work, the Shaolin Temple. Today we will be looking at the evolution of unarmed boxing in late Ming and Qing era China. I... Continue Reading →
Introduction Welcome back to the second installment of the Book Club. In this series of posts we will be taking a more detailed look at some of the most important works in the field of Chinese martial studies. Our first... Continue Reading →
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