Introduction: Addressing a Difficult Subject No topic is more difficult to approach than the varied roles that traditional Asian fighting systems have played in defining and strengthening nationalism during the 20th century. Governments in Japan, China and later Korea all... Continue Reading →
***Recently I was having a discussion about the state of Kung Fu in China with a friend. (You can see his detailed post on the topic here). He was lamenting the general decline of interest in the arts and... Continue Reading →
Accepting the“traditional” Chinese martial arts as a product of the modern world. If I were to conduct a pole and ask the average student of the Chinese martial arts when the “Golden Age” of Kung Fu was, what sort of... Continue Reading →
***Recently I was having a discussion about the state of Kung Fu in China with a friend. (You can see his detailed post on the topic here). He was lamenting the general decline of interest in the arts and... Continue Reading →
***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... Continue Reading →
Introduction Given the current growth of interest in all types of archery, it is not hard to understand the explosion of interest in Late Imperial Chinese bows and techniques. During both the Ming and Qing periods China was renowned for... Continue Reading →
Introduction: Informants and the Problem of Reliability The study of the traditional martial arts has tended to rely rather heavily on interviews with “participant informants.” Cultivating relationships with informants and learning about their worldview consumes much of a... Continue Reading →
Introduction One of the most important, though often overlooked, events of the late 18th and early 19th centuries was the creation and growth of the "Canton Trade System." This highly regulated trade, carried out between Chinese and European merchants in... Continue Reading →
Introduction The old adage states that a picture is worth a thousand words. After having reviewed hundreds of potential images for this series of posts, and writing over a dozen entries, I can now state with some certainty that this... Continue Reading →
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