***What follows in the second installment in our short guest series considering the history and development of the Vietnamese martial arts. Enjoy**** Lessons from the South By Trần Khải Hoài In the previous section, we looked at... Continue Reading →
Giáng long thôi sơn (“Descending dragon presses the mountain”)—Vietnamese martial artists training amidst Cham ruins in Bình Định of southcentral Vietnam. Source: ZingNews. ***Greetings! What follows is the first installment in a short series discussing the martial arts and martial culture of Vietnam.Trần Khải... Continue Reading →
Chan Wah Shun and his Place in the Modern Wing Chun Community One of the biggest problems in researching the history of the martial arts is the martial artists themselves. They love their styles (or the businesses that they support)... Continue Reading →
***Greetings! This was my first entry in the long running "Lives of Chinese Martial Artists" series. Rather than just profiling the most famous martial artists I attempted to look at the actual life experiences of a wide range of... Continue Reading →
***This was one of the more popular posts I wrote during the first year of KFT (2012). I still love talking about, and training with, wooden dummies. What better training companion can you have in the middle of cold weather... Continue Reading →
***Here is one of the first substantive posts that I ever wrote on Wing Chun for the blog back in 2012, about three years before my book (with Jon Nielson) came out. Wing Chun mythology is always a hot topic.... Continue Reading →
Today’s post comes courtesy of Joseph Svinth who shared an intriguing, if brief, find with me a few weeks ago. Kung Fu legends revel in accounts of high stakes challenge matches. In a typical story a young martial arts... Continue Reading →
The Problem with Being “First” I am distrustful of attempts to locate the “first” instance of anything popular or famous. Generally speaking, these quests misunderstand the way that the social world works. We all stand on the shoulders of... Continue Reading →
On Legends and their Grains Not all legends contain a grain a truth. Such an assertion is wishful thinking and sells short the remarkable faculty that is the human imagination. Still, grains manifest frequently enough that they keep historians... Continue Reading →
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