Vintage photography, circa 1860-1900. Photographer unknown.

Introduction

 
Some of the most popular posts at Kung Fu Tea have examined vintage images of traditional martial artists.  These are also among my favorites to research.  Yet it seems that I have neglected this subject with all of the other projects that have come up this summer.  Hopefully this post will go some distance towards rectifying that oversight.

The internet is both a blessing and curse to those doing research.  It allows us to regularly discover new treasures.  Yet such finds are often presented in a decontextualized way that makes interpreting them challenging.

This post adds two new vintage images to our discussion.  Unfortunately both are “orphaned,” meaning that I have yet to locate the exact place and date of their creation.  Nor do they share a single medium.  Nevertheless, these images are thematically linked in ways that suggest an interesting moment in the evolution of Western views of Chinese boxing.

Two Images, One Theme

Our first image is a late 19^th century albumen print showing four martial artists.  I have not been able to locate any information about the photographer who produced it.  The dress and hair styles of the athletes suggest that it cannot have been taken later than 1911.  The fact that this is almost certainly an albumen photo (note the sepia tones and the ease with which the corner of the thin photographic paper bent off its backing) suggest a date prior to 1900, at the latest.  Thus this photograph dates to somewhere from 1860 to 1900.

Perhaps, if we allow ourselves to indulge in a little speculation, it might be possible to shave a few decades of this interval.  The fact that this was shot in a photography studio against a backdrop suggests the need for a longer exposure time. Consider also the subject matter and composition of this image.

The mirrored symmetry in the shot is remarkable.  Three of the individuals are shirtless, revealing highly muscled bodies.  The two boxers in white stand at ease, meanwhile the inner pair appear to be wrestling.

At first it appears that the theme of the photograph might be something like “physical strength through struggle.”  No one would doubt the athletic ability of these individuals.

This point is further emphasized by the heavy stone weights (commonly used by wrestlers, boxers and soldiers) that define the physical space on which the camera focuses. Given the faded nature of the photo it is hard to make out any details of the ball in the foreground, but I suspect that upon closer inspection we would discover that it is carved from stone as well.

But brute strength is not the only idea that this shot is meant to evoke.  While the inner pair is involved in combat, the boxers on the outside stand at ease.  The photographer also chose a painted backdrop meant to evoke the bucolic Chinese countryside of rivers, mountains and quaint cottages.  Given the importance of Willow Ware in creating the romanticized early 19^th century Western mental image of Chinese life, such an artistic choice is unlikely to have been unintentional.

The symbolic nature of the composition is further confirmed by two seemingly out of place artifacts in the foreground.  Here the viewer finds a tea pot and cup.  Of course China was famous for its tea exports.  Interestingly both tea and China serving ware were among the few export items that could be found in pretty much any middle class house in the West.  They were both ubiquitous and evocative of material comfort and success.  China provided the indispensable goods that for many people symbolized a “civilized” life.

At first glance we might assume that the intended subject of this image is the traditional martial arts.  Yet upon further meditation I suspect that this is not really the case.  Instead the photographer has taken China writ large as his subject.  It is in the juxtaposition of the heavy training weights and the delicate teapots, or the violent wrestlers and the peaceful countryside, that the true intent of the image appears.

What at first appeared to be a simple symmetry is really a sort of visual dialectic.  This is not so much “China” as any visitor would visually see it on the street.  Rather, the composition of the various elements suggests that this may have been an attempt to communicate the nature of China as the photographer had experienced it.  Or perhaps it might be more accurate to say as the viewer wished to understand it.  In its mix and juxtaposition of symbols the image resembles the still life paintings of a previous era.

Given the wonderfully evocative nature of this photograph it’s a shame that I have not been able to figure out who produced it.  Yet rest assured, the search continues.

While thinking about my frustration in researching the first image, I was reminded of another piece of hand combat related art that has also been on my mind.  A few years ago I first encountered an engraving by the French artist Felix Elie Regamey titled “La Preparation Aux Examens Militaires, A Canton.”

It’s a great image, and at the time I had very much wanted to add it to my collection.  Yet as I researched it I quickly discovered that compared to his better known Japanese subjects, Regamey’s Chinese works do not seem to have received very much attention.  In fact, it is hard to know exactly when this piece of art was first done (engravings, by their very nature, lend themselves to reproduction and subsequent republication throughout an artist’s career.)

Later in his life Regamey adopted a more relaxed style which, to my untrained eye, looks as though it may have been influenced by Japanese or Chinese brush paintings and wood block prints.  He does seem to have produced other Chinese subjects in the more structured and formal style seen above between roughly the middle of the 1860s and the middle of the 1880s.  It seems likely that this particular study also dates to the same basic time period.

Again, the dominant theme of the image is physical strength.  Here we see two martial artists preparing for the military service exam by lifting the sorts of heavy stone weights used in the testing of candidates.  Around them are the other implements used in the exam.

On the left wall we see a rack of the heavy knives, or halberds, that one was expected to wield.  On the other side of the image hangs archery equipment, perhaps the most critical aspect of the exam.  All that is missing is a horse, as candidates were also expected to know how to ride.  The two martial artists are at the same time highly muscled yet relaxed.

Once again, it is impossible to miss the unique mirrored symmetry of this scene.  The only item that is out of place is the stone block that is currently being used.  The natural result of this composition is to focus the viewer’s attention on the only singular item in the image, the religious altar placed in the center of the composition.  Here we see the expected lamps, incense and offering table.  Yet as the eye expands outward we quickly encounter something else, calligraphy.

By this the viewer learns that these exam candidates are not mere day laborers or common soldiers.  Rather they are educated individuals, masters of both the body and the mind.  Of course basic literacy skills were necessary to complete the military exam, yet one did not have to be a trained scholar to do well.

The important thing in this case is not how accurately this image captured the actual level of literacy possessed by the average examination candidate.  More critical is what it communicated to its Western viewers about the nature of Chinese life and society.

A dialectic logic again emerges from the composition.  The overriding impression is of a balance between physical strength and cultural attainment.  The “mysterious orient” is shown as existing in that liminal joining of the body and the mind.  Of course such suggestions would have resonated with the romantic turn in late 19^th century European thought.

Yet in some respects this engraving is more complicated than the photograph.  Boxing and wrestling were popular 19^th century pastimes in both the East and West.  Athletics never really needed any justification for a Western consumer.  A fast paced wrestling match was a good in and of itself.  The virtue bestowed by success in such a realm was self-evident to all.

In contrast, the individuals in the second image are not really “athletes.”  They are aspiring military officers.  And Western viewers surely would have noted that they were training with the bow well into the age of the rifle and revolver.  While a generally positive image, and one that noted the physical strength and dedication of the Chinese people (e.g., it is an image of daily physical training, and not the exam itself), this picture also would have underlined China’s militarily backwardness.

If the audience is meant to approach this piece from a more “romantic” perspective, an emphasis on physical effort rather than mass produced industrial goods is not necessarily a bad thing.  Yet while the overall aesthetic of the first photograph is rather “modern,” (wrestling was just as popular in 1900 as it had been in 1800) there can be no doubt that the second image plays into widespread notions of the “timeless and inscrutable orient.”

Chinese Boxers before the “Sick Man of Asia”

A number of Chinese and Western commentators in the early 20th century went out of their way to paint Chinese individuals as physically weak, often unhealthy, individuals.  Many of China’s economic, social and political struggles were laid unfairly at the feet of its citizens.  This tendency reached its zenith in the early 20^th century when long running debates about the effects of opium use and a string of military defeats coalesced in a (mostly domestic) debate as to whether, and why, China was the “Sick Man of East Asia.”

I have discussed these developments in other posts. One should not underestimate how important these debates were in shaping the TCMA in the modern era.  After the humiliating setback suffered during the Boxer Rebellion (when the martial arts were very nearly driven out of the social discourse), these discussions opened a space in which martial artists could claim to advance the national good through a return to traditional values.

The impact of these discussions can still be felt today.  The mythology of the Jingwu Association, as well as Bruce Lee’s films, ensures that these images (and insecurities) live on.

What interests me about both of these images is that they predate this entire social discourse.  I suspect (admittedly with insufficient evidence) that both the engraving and the photo date to roughly the early 1880s.  But even if that estimate is off by a decade in either direction, they are clearly a product of the period of China’s “Self-Strengthening Movement.”

The enthusiasm and self-confidence in these images is palpable.  They neither doubt the physical capabilities of the Chinese people, nor do they seek to turn away from core cultural values in the quest for athletic excellence (as recommended by the May 4^th reformers).  Nor are they shy about communicating this self-confidence to the world.

In terms of geo-political events, the 1880s came a generation after China’s defeats by the British in the South, and 15 years before its diplomatically devastating loss to the Japanese.  While China clashed with France in the middle of the 1880s, it managed to win a number of battles and avoided the same sense of military humiliation.  The production of such images even suggests some sort of market for visions of a stable and strengthening China in the West.  Meanwhile, the Self-Strengthening Movement was giving rise to diverse efforts, some of which contributed to the rise of modern Taijiquan as well as other martial arts. Yet all of this would be abandoned following the national defeats suffered in 1895 and 1900.

Eventually the fierce public debate over China’s status as the “Sick Man of East Asia” would subside, and a growing sense of cultural confidence would again characterize the traditional martial arts.  Still, images from an earlier era force us to ask how the evolution of these fighting systems would have unfolded in the absence of the Sino-Japanese War and the waves of revolution, political chaos and cultural self-doubt that followed in its wake.  Both images offer us a glimpse into this realm of alternate possibilities.

oOo

If you enjoyed this discussion you might also want to read: Two Encounters with Bruce Lee: Finding Reality in the Life of the Little Dragon

oOo

Weapons seized by the NYPD and photographed for a 1922 report on violence in Chinatown. Source: NYPD Public Records/Vice.com.

The Yin and the Yang of the Hudiedao

Earlier this year I had the opportunity to participate in a day-long seminar on the Wing Chun swords taught by Sifu John Crescione. This was a great experience that provided many students with an introduction to this iconic weapon. Such events, by necessity, tend to be packed with information, activity and new faces. It is always a challenge to select a single high-point. Yet I think that for some of the students such a moment might have come just before we broke for lunch.

One of the themes that Sifu Crescione emphasized was the importance of knowing your weapon. At this point in time there doesn’t seem to be any single standard pattern for the construction of the double swords used within Wing Chun, let alone across all of the southern Chinese martial arts. While these weapons all have enough points of resemblance to be identifiable, elements such as blade length, shape and handling characteristics vary immensely. Some swords are optimized for chopping and slashing while others seem to be better suited to stabbing. The form used within Wing Chun contains a wide range of techniques, but it is up to the practitioner to select the most appropriate ones for any given situation and set of blades.

Nor does this concern apply only to recently produced weapons. As I noted in my previous history of the butterfly swords, a huge amount of variation can be seen in the size and shapes of swords that were produced in 19th and early 20th century in Southern China. To demonstrate this Sifu Crescione had brought a set of late Qing era blades to the seminar. I also brought a pair of knives from my collection which date to approximately the same era. Both sets of knives were longer (and heavier) than most modern examples and possessed distinct tips.

It was fascinating to watch the other students crowd around, eager to get a glimpse, and then handle, these antique blades. Such relics are not frequently encountered by students today. There was a feeling of reverence in the room. The Butterfly Swords have taken on a near legendary status within the practice of our art. Instruction in this weapon is often reserved for only the most advanced students.

The knives have become a symbol of martial attainment. Mastery of these blades is seen as the culmination of years of dedicated practice. This may help to explain why so many organizations have included these swords in their school’s logo.

Nor am I immune to the romance of the blade. After some discussion with the publisher it was decided that the butterfly swords should grace the cover of our book on the history of Wing Chun and Southern Chinese Martial Arts. I must admit that I was elated when I received the news.

Still, it is not clear that any of the meanings that modern martial artists attribute to these weapons have much intrinsic value. Many of these students might be surprised, if not a bit scandalized, to see how these same weapons were perceived at various points in the past.

Far from being the epitome of martial excellence, in the 1840s the hudiedao were a standard issue weapon stocked for use by the quickly trained (and poorly equipped) militia companies of the Pearl River Delta. These weapons were produced by the tens of thousands and issued to troops who tended to carry them as side-arms (their main weapons being the musket, spear or pole). While never issued to the “official” Green Standard Army troops, local gentry seem to have appreciated the fact that these blades could be made cheaply and new recruits (more used to village boxing than formal military drill) could be trained in their use.

Ships crews and private security guards were also issued these weapons for the same basic reasons. That probably helps to explain their association with pirates, traveling opera companies and other elements of southern China’s rich nautical lore. During the 1840s and 1850s these short, guarded, double swords seem to have carried a different, more plebeian, set of symbolic associations.

Nor was southern China the only place where the public encountered such swords. For better or worse butterfly swords also appeared in publications, museum displays and public demonstration in the West throughout the 19th century. Once again, they carried with them a set of connotations quite distinct from those admired by modern Kung Fu students.

Rather than being a marker of self-discipline and martial excellence, these swords were most often associated with the periodic breakouts of violence that rocked both the East and West Coast Chinatowns. Whereas British military observers in the 1840s had found the Chinese use of these swords to be paradoxical and quaint, American audiences viewed them as symbols of everything that was untrustworthy and dangerous about the nation’s steadily growing Chinese population. In many ways the spread of the image of the butterfly sword went hand in hand with the spread of the Yellow Panic and the news coverage that supported it.

Butterfly Swords in the Roaring 1920s

This point was driven home for me as I read some of the publicity releases for a new book titled Tong Wars: The Untold Story of Vice, Money and Murder in New York’s Chinatown by Scott D. Seligman (Penguin 2016). Given this volume’s discussion of community violence in the Chinese diaspora community during the 19th and early 20th centuries it has earned a spot on my “to read” pile. Even more interesting were some of the publicity photos that were distributed to the press and other media outlets.

Perhaps the most exciting of these can be seen at the top of this post. Taken from the archives of the New York City Police Department this image was apparently included in a 1922 report detailing the ongoing problem of violence in Chinatown. It shows a large group of weapons (and other contraband material) that had been captured by police.

Some of this material is what one would expect to see being carried by any well-outfitted gangster during the 1920s. I counted 16 revolvers in this picture and at least one automatic handgun in addition to holsters and ammunition. Yet more traditional weapons were also well represented. Within the haul there were two (quite nice) sets of butterfly swords as well as other daggers. These particular Tong members also seem to have had an affinity for brass knuckles, having accumulated at least five sets.

I have yet to read Seligman’s book, so I can’t say if his narrative contains a more detailed backstory for this particular photograph. But I did notice the following quote in a publicity interview that he did for Vice.

“Vice: How did the violence evolve from meat cleavers to pistols to bombs?

Segliman: It was a slow process, but it escalated as weapons got more sophisticated and capable of taking out more people at a time. In the late 1800s, they were mostly using cleavers and knives; by 1900, Chinatown saw a large influx of revolvers. Explosives were only used once or twice later in the game—about 1912—and they fortunately did more damage to property than to people.” (Read More Here)

What struck me about this quote was the sense of nostalgia for a previous period of violence. Needless to say, we hear a lot of this in traditional martial arts circles.

On a purely philosophical level I am not sure that being beaten to death or stabbed is preferable to being shot. Nor, historically speaking does there seem to have been a golden, pre-gun, era in modern Chinese violence. As I pointed out in a previous post looking at violence in the San Francisco Chinese community of the 1870s, the police seem to have been confiscating firearms from that neighborhood’s criminals at about the same rate as they were being taken off the streets in the rest of the city. While it is undoubtedly true that violence in NY escalated after 1900, I doubt that the primary factors behind that were exclusively technological in nature.

The other thing that struck me about the 1922 photograph was how similar it was to other images that police and government officials had been producing across the country for at least 50 years. Indeed, given the qualitative change in the level of violence, what is surprising is that the weapons look so similar.

Chinese Highbinders and Weapons in San Francisco. Harper’s Weekly, Feb. 13th, 1886.

Readers might recall that in 1886 Harper’s Weekly ran a lengthy piece profiling the “Highbinders” of the Bay Area. This included engravings showing the various types of arms that had been confiscated from these groups including knives, handguns and butterfly swords. The author of the piece went on to include a chilling description of their use:

“The weapons of the Highbinder are all brought from China, with the exception of the hatchet and the pistol. The illustration shows a collection of Chinese knives and swords taken from criminals, and now in the possession of the San Francisco police. The murderous weapon is what is called the double sword. Two swords, each about two feet long, are worn in a single scabbard. A Chinese draws these, one in each hand, and chops his way through a crowd of enemies. Only one side is sharpened, but the blade, like that of all the Chinese knives, is ground to a razor edge. An effective weapon at close quarters is the two-edged knife, usually worn in a leather sheath. The handle is of brass, generally richly ornamented, while the blade is of the finest steel. Most of the assassinations in Chinatown have been committed with this weapon, one blow being sufficient to ensure a mortal wound. The cleaver used by the Highbinders is smaller and lighter than the ordinary butcher’s cleaver. The iron club, about a foot and a half long, is enclosed in a sheath, and worn at the side like a sword. Another weapon is a curious sword with a large guard for the hand. The hatchet is usually of American make, but ground as sharp as a razor.”

(Feb 13, 1886. Harper’s Weekly. P. 103).

While never the deadliest weapon in the Tong arsenal, the American press certainly seems to have considered the Butterfly Sword to be the most distinctive. Some accounts seem to have gone beyond the purely tactical value of this weapon and to have associated it with obscure, esoteric and threatening aspects of the Chinese American Experience. Of course the Tongs themselves often stood in for all of these qualities in late 19th century “Yellow Peril” literature.

The San Francisco Call, 1898.

Consider the cover of an 1898 edition of the The San Francisco Call. The paper ran an expose on the initiations conducted by the area’s Chinese secret societies. The main illustration showed a number of tong members, butterfly swords in hand, swearing to destroy the Qing and restore the Ming.

Another evidence photo, produced around 1900 and included in a government report, also shows a typical assortment of weapons carried by Chinese criminals and Tong members. Among the various knives (one of which is clearly Japanese) we also find a pair of bar maces, a revolver and set of hudiedao. It appears to be almost identical in size and shape to the examples that the New York police department would confiscate one generation latter.

Chinese Highbinder weapons collected by H. H. North, U. S. Commission of Immigration, forwarded to Bureau of Immigration, Washington D. C., about 1900.
Courtesy the digital collection of the Bancroft Library, UC Berkley.

An Evolving Symbol of Chinese Identity in the West

The 1922 NYPD photograph is interesting precisely because it suggests that while levels of violence may have escalated and fallen off in rhythmic patterns, firearms and more traditional weapons continued to co-existing for a surprising length of time. The number of handguns in the community escalated but butterfly swords did not disappear. And if this photo is a representative sample, knuckledusters seem to have grown in popularity. That would be a good sign that someone was still expecting hand-to-hand encounters.

The one thing that is absent from any of these photos or discussions, however, is the martial arts. While elements of the American public were certainly aware of these swords, they were not imagined as the training tools of skilled practitioners of martial arts, or even as an element of Chinese cultural heritage. Of course this was exactly how Samurai swords came to be seen in the first few decades of the 20th century. Instead these weapons were imagined as the cutting edge of a violent and subversive force in American life.

I suspect that the popular discourse linking obscure Chinese fighting methods to criminal groups was a powerful force in impeding the transnational transmission of these arts in the first half of the 20th century. It was not until Chinese-Americans came to be reimagined as a “model minority” in the post WWII era that immigration policies would be relaxed and the stage set for Bruce Lee to unleash a Kung Fu Fever in the 1970s.

The hudiedao are a fascinating topic of study precisely because they have seen it all. First associated in the western mind with humble militia troops and later with criminal groups, for many people butterfly swords represented the backwards and dangerous elements of Chinese society. In the current era this same object has been reinterpreted as a relic of a “more civilized” time in which persistent effort led to martial mastery and self-transformation. It is hard to say that one of these visions is more intrinsically “true” than the others, but this unfolding discourse may hold important keys to the meaning and spread of the Chinese martial arts in the West.  As a result we must be careful not to inappropriately project our reading of these symbols onto the past.

oOo

If you enjoyed this you might also want to read:  Tools of the Trade: The Use of Firearms and Traditional Weapons among the Tongs of San Francisco, 1877-1878.

oOo

Vintage postcard showing a “Young Boxer” with sword. Early 20th century. Source: Authors personal collection.

Meeting the Boxer

I recently had the good fortune to meet one of my favorite Chinese Boxers.  I had been stalking him for years.

This early 20^th century postcard was probably purchased in Beijing and then mailed to Tianjin on February 5^th, 1909.  The card itself was published by J.H. Schaefer’s Kunstchromo, Amsterdam.  While this firm used a number of Chinese images, I have never seen any others dealing with the same model or subject.  Given that this postcard was printed in the Netherlands (or possibly Germany) it seems safe to assume that it was sold all over Europe.

This particular example also seems to have been fairly popular.  Only a small proportion of the postcards printed in the early 20^th century have survived.  As a result, many of the images that circulated during that period are probably lost to history.  Yet I have seen at least three different copies of this postcard come up for sale in on-line auctions over the last two years.  As such, I suspect that it must have circulated in some quantity.  From a social scientific standpoint this document is doubly interesting, not just because of the early 20^th century image of the Chinese martial arts that it preserves, but also for what it suggests about the intended audience of such products.

Postmarks indicating that this card was sent from Beijing to Tianjin on the 5th of February, 1909. Source: Author’s Personal collection.

The front of the postcard presents readers with a supposed image of a “young boxer” (named “Joung Ping Fou”) hard at work on his exercises.  The card’s model appears to be a child and the sword that dominates the upper part of the frame seems to be both intimidating and comically large.  The boy himself is dressed in what appears to be a military uniform of some type.  The darker colored turban on his head and belt at his waist were almost certainly red.  The boxer appears to be well fed and well clothed.  Further, his stance is both stylized and vaguely “operatic.”

These are the facts that we can be certain of.  Yet what meaning did this image convey to those who produced, mailed and received this piece of ephemera?  And what subsequent impact may it have had on the Western understanding of the Chinese martial arts?

As we have seen throughout this series, such images always present complex interpretive problems.  To deal with some of these issues I would like to briefly consider this postcard from three different perspectives.

While talking with Paul Bowman recently I noted that he used a metaphor which I thought readers of Kung Fu Tea might find helpful.  He casually mentioned that rather than sticking too closely to any one intellectual tradition, he preferred to “use his theories like lenses.”  When presented with a difficult interpretive problem he would move from one theory to another for much the same reason that an astronomer might switch eye pieces on a telescope.  The different concerns and assumptions of each theory sometimes revealed something new that the others had missed.
I have certainly done the same thing in parts of my own writing (including the discussion of globalization in the Epilogue of my book on the social history of the southern Chinese martial arts).  Yet to more succinctly illustrate the possibilities of this approach I would try it here.  If we were to examine this image through the lens of social history, religious studies and critical theory, what would we see?  Given the brevity of this post what follows will be quick suggestions rather than fully formed theoretical arguments.  Still, the exercise reveals some interesting possibilities for future consideration.

A Historical Reading

Any social historian worth their salt would probably begin by establishing both the setting and the players involved in the actual production of this document.  While many similar images were staged in studios, this image appears to have been taken outdoors, probably in some sort of marketplace.  We must also consider the question of timing. Given that the Boxer Uprising ended only in 1901, and the postcard itself must have been printed prior to 1909, that violent outburst becomes the major social event that frames and gives meaning to this postcard.

Still, it goes without saying that this image was not produced during the conflict itself.  This is not an example of “war photography.”  Esherick, in his landmark study of the event, noted that many of the Spirit Boxers were quite young, just as we see here.  Yet the level of photographic technology at the time strongly suggests that this image was not casually snapped on a street corner.  Rather, it must have been carefully (and patiently) composed.

Given his willingness to work with a Western photographer we can be fairly certain that the boy in question was not a violent anti-Christian radical.  In fact, we know that in the aftermath of the conflict both local models and foreign photographers produced images exactly like this one to sell to a western public who wanted to see what the much feared “Boxers” had looked like.  Other photographs produced in this genre featured scenes of battlefield destruction, or the execution of captured Boxers.

In short, while the image evokes the memory of anti-Western violence, the actual production and marketing of this postcard is an example of the degree to which both Chinese and western individuals were being drawn into the same global productive and commercial networks.  Further, the selection of this model suggests an attempt to diminish the actual dangers of the recent uprising, as well as the military and cultural strength of the Chinese themselves, by mapping all of that onto the body of a single child.  In the image of the young Boxer we see a country that is, paradoxically, both too “old” (superstitious, backwards) and too “young” (just undertaking the process of serious reforms) to stand on its own in the international system.

By reducing the Boxer Uprising to an item for commercial consumption, the reader is reassured of the legitimacy of the foreign presence in China, as well as the inevitability of that country’s defeat.

Why Red?

While not disagreeing with these basic conclusions, a student of Chinese religious history might note that this discussion of globalization and exploitation is not really capable of answering some of the more interesting questions about this image.  Specifically, globalization might account for the existence of such an item, but can it explain the image’s content?  If not, is the model in this image really complicit in nation’s exploitation?  Or might he be using this exercise to appropriate certain symbols as aspects of his own identity?

On a technical level it seems certain that a professional photographer composed this shot.  Just getting the lighting right in an outdoor environment must have been tricky.  Yet one suspects that there are layers of meaning in this image that its Western recorder may not have been fully aware of.  Why, when asked to portray a Boxer in training did the young model (probably a marketplace performer) choose this operatic pose?  And what was the meaning of the costume that he wore?

Western observers noted at various points during the 19^th century that Chinese rebels had a propensity to adapt red “turbans” and belts as their defacto uniform.  Indeed, this same basic tendency was seen during the Boxer Uprising.

While discussing rebellions and secret society uprisings in Southern China Barend J. ter Haar notes:

 

“The use of a piece of cloth wrapped around the head or waist is also common amongst religious officiants, such as Daoist priests (especially those performing the vernacular rituals), shamans and mediums, and lay people engaged in religious activities.  Strips of red paper are also attached to holy trees and rocks.  It has been a common practice throughout Chinese history for rebels to wear a piece of red cloth around the head to indicate vital power.  Red cloth or paper is a general indicator of divine power, undoubtedly derived from the reddish color of blood and the fact that blood was perceived to be a concentrated life force.” (Ritual & Mythology of the Chinese Triads, p. 116)

Thus the costume seen in this postcard is highly significant.  The Boxer Uprising was fought, in large part, by young peasants who believed themselves to be shamanistically possessed by the gods and heroes of vernacular opera and ritual.  All of this is captured in the image at hand.

Indeed, the large sword which seems to dominate the image may hold another clue to help us more fully interpret this scene.  One of the more common gods encountered during the Boxer Uprising was Nezha, a hero discussed in the popular novel Canonization of the Gods.  A dangerous child warrior, Nezha was said to be the protector of Beijing and was the chief of the eight thunder gods who guarded the city’s gates.  Scott Phillips has noted that Nezha’s imagery seems to have had some impact on Baguazhang.  This is particularly evident in its eclectic weapons (including the two headed spear, the hoop and very large ox-tail dao), all of which are associated with the iconography of the capital city’s mythic and popular protective deity (p. 49-50).

In short, the image used on this postcard evokes a rich complex of cultural symbols that were central to the popular culture of Beijing in the final years of the Qing dynasty.  Some of these found expression in the violence of the Boxer uprising, and others lived on in the area’s operatic and martial traditions.  Focusing only on the technical production of the image may cause us to miss much of what such a scene would have conveyed to a local audience in a city like Tianjin or Beijing.

The Boxers and the Oriental Obscene

Yet what marketplace was really driving the production of this image?  And what other discourses and texts did these early images of the Boxer Uprising go on to influence?  Did they set the stage for the development of Western images of the “dangerous Orient” throughout the 20^th century?

A critical theorist interested in both the media and Western portrayals of the martial arts might look at this this (or other images) produced in the aftermath of the Boxer Uprising and think immediately of Sylvia Chong’s The Oriental Obscene: Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era (Duke University Press 2012).  Paul Bowman (in Martial Arts Studies: Disrupting Disciplinary Boundaries, 2015) has already argued at length that her treatment of film in the wake of the Vietnam War is of general relevance to the field of martial arts studies.

I think that this and other postcards might be used to argue for an even broader relevance for her work.  Chong is primarily interested in how the violence of the Vietnam War found its way onto the screen and into American popular culture during the 1970s and 1980s.  Yet this was not the West’s first imperial misadventure in Asia.  More specifically, one must wonder whether some of the cultural patterns and discourses that Chong notes were actually pioneered over the course of earlier conflicts (such as the American occupation of the Philippines, the “island hopping campaigns” of WWII or the Korean War).

Further, it is not clear that the basic logic of Chong’s psycho-analytical arguments must be limited to the realm of film.  In particular, her treatment of three famous photographs, Eddie Adams’ Saigon Execution (1968), Ronald Haeberle’s My Lai Masssacre (1968) and Huynh Cong Ut’s Napalm Girl (1972) suggest possibilities for understanding how previous generations might have reacted to visual images of violence.  The Boxer Rebellion is culturally significant in part because it was the first of imperialist campaign in Asia to leave behind a rich visual record as well as media accounts that both traumatized and titillated the Western reading public with their graphic descriptions of anti-Christian violence.

Consider again the age of the sword wielding martial artist in this postcard.  Western newspaper readers surely would have noted the paradox that it was youth like this who were responsible for the murders of so many Christian women and children.  And of course the vast majority of these victims were themselves Chinese.

The fact that the Western public understood the Boxer intervention as an easy (one might say inevitable) victory makes this case quite different from the post-Vietnam era.  Many aspects of Chong’s discussion will not be applicable here.  Still, the publication of images of violence inflicted on Chinese bodies for “the continuation of a larger tradition of racial sentimentalism or melodrama, in which the spectacle of the suffering racial other is staged for the moral uplift of a middle-class, white and often female audience” seems to suggest the existence of deeper discourse that did not begin with Vietnam. (p. 77)

The fear of a class of “Oriental others” who are, on the one hand, the victims of unspeakable violence, and yet threaten to bring that same destruction to the imperial center, is precisely the specter that haunted Sax Rohmer’s popular Fu Manchu novels.   It is interesting to note that the “East-West” violence of the Boxer Uprising is invoked in those stories.  Indeed, one wonders to what degree these images linking the Chinese people to racial prejudice and bizarre forms of violence, influenced the development of later cultural discourses during the 1970s and beyond.

Conclusion

Examined from three different theoretical perspectives, a single image can yield a wealth of meaning.  Each of these approaches begins with its own basic assumptions.  Further, each directed our attention towards a different set of issues.

I should caution that it would be a mistake to assume that all of these theories naturally coexist or that focus only on a single aspect of any problem.  Indeed, the instability of meaning and identity that makes so many “critical theories” possible might cut directly against the basic methodological assumptions employed by an economist in her formal model of global trade and violence.  When we employ a variety of theories, understanding where (and why) they clash is a vital part of the exercise.

And yet the exercise is often worthwhile.  The present case reminds us that these fighting systems have always existed within, and contributed to, a media rich environment.  Some of what we think of as quintessentially “modern” may be more “traditional” than we ever suspected.

oOo

If you enjoyed this post card you might also want to see: War Junks, Pirates and the Commercialization of Chinese Martial Culture

oOo

Vintage postcard showing a “Young Boxer” with sword. Early 20th century. Source: Authors personal collection.

Another Look at a “Young Boxer” – Martial Arts and National Humiliation in Early 20th Century China

By Benjamin Judkins and Doug Wile

Introduction

Earlier this year I published an image of a “Young Boxer” found on a vintage postcard, mailed between Tianjin and Beijing in 1909.  This was used as a jumping off point for a short essay that attempted to illustrate how various theoretical approaches (in this case social history, religious studies and critical theory) could create contrasting and complimentary views of the same subject.  Because these theories have different underlying assumptions and associated methodological tool kits, each is capable of generating a different set of conclusions about the same image.  When faced with any question of sufficient complexity, students of martial arts studies might find it worthwhile to apply a series of lenses, rather than a single approach.  Of course this is only one possible way of conceptualizing “interdisciplinary work.”

Yet the benefits of such an exercise go beyond the ability to acquire additional theories.  Interdisciplinary work can be exciting because of the conversations that it stimulates.  These sometimes lead one in new and fruitful directions.

It is thus interesting to note that my previous post on the “Young Boxer” generated as much email correspondence between students of martial arts studies as any other post that I have published here at Kung Fu Tea.  Interestingly most of these messages did not attempt to weigh in on the three views (social history, critical theory and religious studies) presented before.  Led by Prof. Douglas Wile (author of the Lost Tai Chi Classics, among other important contributions to Chinese Martial Studies), they instead sought to open a conversation on linguistic based approaches to this image.

As we will see, the Chinese language inscriptions on this postcard may well generate more questions than answers.  Yet the issues that they raise are fascinating.  While I am not clear that we have totally resolved all of the puzzles surrounding this image, it opens a valuable window onto the public discussion of the traditional Chinese martial arts in the early 20^th century, prior to their rehabilitation by various reformers and modernizers (including the Jingwu Association) in the 1910s.

What is this a case of?

In order to understand how this postcard managed to generate so much interest it might be helpful to compare it to a few other images that I have previously posted here at Kung Fu Tea.

A Vintage Postcard showing a Shanghai Sword Juggler. Source: Author’s Personal Collection.

“Well Known Sword Juggler n Shanghai City” Vintage postcard, 1907-1914. Source: This particular scan from the digital collection of the NY Public library. They managed to get a better reproduction that I could.

Detail of postcard showing traditional practitioners performing in a marketplace. Japanese postcard circa 1920.  The image dates to the final years of the Qing Dynasty.

 
In comparing these images readers will immediately note multiple similarities.  All of these photographs were taken prior to the 1911 revolution.  They all feature men with swords.  Indeed, an individual holding a sword (or less commonly a spear) was probably the dominant image of Chinese martial artists available to Western consumers prior to the 1960s.  Thus “Chinese Boxers” tended to be imagined quite differently from their Japanese counterparts (usually seen in their identical white Judo uniforms) during the first half of the 20th century.

Given the great variety of actual practices found within the Chinese martial arts, one might wonder how such a uniform set of images emerged.  Why do we have so few postcards featuring wrestling competitions, or middle class archery practice on university campuses?  The historical record informs us that these other sorts of things happened as well.

The nature of the medium itself may be partially to blame to this homogenizing effect.  Most postcards were shot in one of the few larger treaty ports or cities with a substantial Western presence.  Further, readers must remember that practically all of these images were produced for sale to Western (rather than Chinese) consumers.

Additionally, while huge numbers of unique images were marketed through early postcards, Thiriez notes that almost all of them (following the conventions of early photography) can be thought of as falling into one of only four genres.  The most popular category was “topography” in which prominent features of the landscape (including city walls, ancient monuments and tourist attractions) were documented.

Also important were “portrait” cards.  These tended to feature composed scenes of individuals (often women, occasionally prostitutes) or families.  It is interesting to note that with the exceptions of high officials and other important individuals, these images were almost always marketed in general terms (such as “Chinese family” of “Chinese beauty”).  This stripping of individual identity is also seen on most martial arts related postcards.

The remaining two genres of postcards seemed to work at cross purposes with each other.  The first warned its readers of the imminent disappearance of “old China,” while the second served to reassure them that such a thing could never happen.  As such, the first class of postcards focused on images of Western innovation and modernization within China.  Popular subjects seem to have included Christian Churches, industrial factories and newly paved streets lined with European style architecture.  Modern military units and naval vessels also make regular appearances.

This frank acknowledgement of the process of rapid change and urbanization in China was counteracted by the final, and probably most popular, genre of postcards.  These were images of “authentic” Chinese life and customs.  Of course how one understands “authenticity” is always something of an issue.  Almost all of these photos were taken in public spaces.  It appears that neither western photographers nor Chinese models had much interest in actually entering the domestic sphere of Chinese homes.  That would have violated an unspoken sense of propriety for both groups.

While early 19^th century photographers often went to some lengths to capture detailed, almost ethnographically accurate, images, their later followers tended to be more sensational in taste.  Photographs were also reused for decades after their first production.  This can make dating postcards difficult and it certainly contributed to the West’s allochronistic view of China.  For better or worse, the Western public seemed to have an unending appetite for images of “traditional” Chinese barbers, dentists, grocers, farmers, beggars, soldiers, criminals, merchants and fortune tellers, all plying their trade (Thiriez 2004).

Almost all of the early postcards featuring Chinese martial artists fall into this last category.  There are some exceptions.  Hand painted images of martial artists often touched on different themes.  But they are a subject for a future post.  The images of Chinese Boxing that were produced for Western consumers tended to place these activities almost exclusively in the public arena and to focus on the sorts of activities and performances that were either deeply romanticized or an aspect of everyday market life.

When viewed in these terms, there is much about our image of the Young Boxer that is already well understood.  It clearly sits within a tradition of imagining Chinese martial artists (or more likely “sword dancers”) that early 20^th century consumers would have readily understood.

Yet when compared to the images above (or the many additional examples posted previously at Kung Fu Tea), a few differences are also evident.  Whereas many postcards alluded to some aspect of China’s ancient and “unchanging” nature (either in terms of its landscape or the supposedly entrenched customs of its people), this card was specifically referencing the Boxer Rebellion.  At the time it was sent (1909) this was still a recent (and feared) event, rather than a matter of “timeless imagination.”  Indeed the, the Boxer Rebellion spawned its own cottage photography industry seeking to satisfy the appetites of curious western consumers.

Yet such postcards, printed in Europe and intended for Western audiences, were not labeled in Chinese.  Nor did they generally feature much Chinese linguistic content of any kind.  This image is an exception as it bears both a Chinese language label (along the left hand side) and an inscription (on the boy’s chest badge).  Almost none of the postcard’s intended consumers would have been able to read these lines.  And yet they may have a critical impact on how we understand the intentions of the individuals involved with the initial production of this photographic image.

Another image of the chest badge.

A Foolish Farmer

As I mentioned in my previous post, this particular postcard comes up at auction frequently enough that one suspects that it must have been fairly popular when it was first published in the early 20^th century.  As such the vertical inscription on the left hand side of the image has been previously addressed.  Scott Rodell and Peter Dekker noted that it reads “Stupid Farmer Practicing Boxing.”  Douglas Wile concurred and read the same phrase as “Ignorant Peasant Practices Martial Arts.”

Given the financial ruin and national humiliation that the Boxer Rebellion unleashed on the state, the hostility of this title is not surprising.  As I have mentioned elsewhere, the Chinese martial arts probably came closer to actual extinction during the period that this card was produced than at any time since.  It would be another decade before the hard work of a group of nationally minded reformers would launch these fighting systems back into the national consciousness.

Yet for much of the first decade of the 20^th century the rapidly urbanizing Chinese population took an increasingly hostile view towards anything related to the martial arts.  These fighting systems had traditionally been associated with poor youth from the countryside.  Rapidly unfolding processes of modernization shifted the center of social power decisively into the urban sphere.

Thus it seems likely that there is a double mockery embedded in this title.  In addition to taking a swipe at the despised legacy of the Boxer Rebellion, this postcard also appears to take aim that the ignorant, “backwards youth” of the countryside who have not yet been swept up in the unfolding process of urbanization and modernization.

More interesting is the inscription on the boy’s chest badge.  When first thinking about this postcard I simply ignored this inscription.  I had assumed that it would be uninteresting because of the way that most of these images were produced.

Rather than capturing subjects in their natural state, it was common for photographers (either in the street or working in their studios), to provide a variety of props to the individuals that they were photographing.  This might include stock weapons, costumes and furniture.

Further, when examining the boy’s ill-fitting uniform more closely it looked like it was made up of random bits of other cobbled together military uniforms.  As such it was unlikely to be of any significance to its intended audience.  Doug Wile, however, pointed out that there seemed to be something interesting about the boy’s badge.  Rather than simply being recycled costuming, of the sort often found in early studios, the photographer appears to have been attempting to broadcast a more pointed message.  But to who?

After blowing up and enhancing the photo to make it more legible, it was determined that the bottom most vertical line read “Yi He” (義合).   Wile noted that while this particular set of characters was not common, it was an early, previously attested, variant of name “Yi Hi Boxers” (or the Righteous and Harmonious Fist) typically written as 義和.  See for example the 1899 edition of the Wanguo gongbao and A. Henry Savage-Landor’s 1901 China and the Allies.

Of course this is the proper name of the spirit boxing movement that swept across northern China between 1899-1900.  Wile further speculates that a third character (團 or 拳) is hidden under the boy’s sash, completing the typical formulation of the movement’s name.

A Banner from the Boxer Uprising using the more commonly seen characters. Source: Prof. Douglas Wile.

The top two lines are almost certainly meant to be read as place names, noting where the boy’s “Boxer unit” originated.  Oddly it seems that neither of these places actually exist.

Prof. T. J. Hinrichs read the top line as “Ling” (or numinous) township.  Another friend at Cornell thought that it might be rendered “Saint township/county.”  In this case Wile was more circumspect noting that the first character of the name doesn’t appear in any of the standard dictionaries at his disposal.  But all readers seem to agree that this is meant to denote a fictitious place name.

The second line poses similar challenges.  It is not possible to make out all of the characters with the naked eye.  But with some magnification it appears to say “迷谷莊” (Maze Valley Village).  Wile notes that while the name “Maze Valley” is well attested in a number of places, none of them end with the “莊” character (Wile, personal correspondence).  Once again, this is a name that meant to seem real, but is almost certainly fictitious.  As my friend Xiao Rong put it, “such a place cannot exist.”

While looking at the magnified image I realized something else.  The script in question was entirely too legible.  If the boy were really wearing the badge one would expect that it would twist and turn in a natural fashion.  Instead it appears that photographer “whited out” the area and used a brush to paint these cryptic locations directly onto the badge.  One might guess that this was done at the same time that the inscription on the left hand side was added.  The trouble that was gone through to add this detail begs the question of motive.  Who modified this image?  Who was the intended audience?  And what messages were they expected to receive?

Conclusion

Or perhaps a different question might be a better place to start.  Given that Shandong and Zhili were full of villages that actually contributed “Boxer Bandits” (as the official reports of the day often referred to them), why were they not named?  After all, the one thing that seems certain about this image is that the individual who produced it was hostile to both the martial arts and rural life more generally.

On this point Wile notes:

“At the end of the day, the only explanation I can come up with for the two unattested place names is that they were deliberately invented “to protect the innocent,” so to speak, or in this case possibly to protect the guilty, or at least not point fingers or expose any real people…..” (Personal Correspondence)

One suspects that this photograph was not originally produced for a Western postcard at all.  If a western audience could read it, perhaps the message that they might have received was that despite the Boxer’s turn of the century setbacks, the Chinese Tiger still had its teeth.  Indeed, in a mere two years from the time this card was mailed the country would once again be swept up in the tide of revolution.

Nevertheless, the more likely intended audience of the image was Chinese.  In such case meeting the demands of an increasingly urbanized market, while avoiding the attention of the censors, was probably the original publisher’s key aim.

Clearly some questions still surround this image of a “Young Boxer.”  Yet the linguistic approach has made a unique contribution to revealing the origins and semiotic value of this photograph.  It has also provided us with a vivid reminder of the precarious existence of the traditional Chinese martial arts during the long decade between the close of the Boxer Rebellion and the Republic era revival and reinvention of their practice.  The association of these practices with nationalism and pride during the 1920s and 1930s was an accomplishment rather than a given.

A Note of Thanks

I must extend my sincere thanks to a number of individuals who contributed to the discussion of this image.  They include Douglas Wile, whose comments sparked this conversation, T. J. Hinrichs of Cornell University, William Brown of the University of Maryland, Xiao Rong of the University of Shenzhen, Scott Rodell and Peter Dekker.

 
oOo

If you enjoyed this post you might also want to see: Reforming the Chinese Martial Arts in the 1920s-1930s: The Role of Rapid Urbanization.

oOo

Two senior students outside Sage Hall at Yenching University, March 1928. Source: http://findit.library.yale.edu

Introduction

At the end of the last class at the “Central Martial Arts Academy” (the location where I am conducing my current research on lightsaber combat and the “hyper-real martial arts”) we all gathered for an impromptu class photo.  Digital technology makes this a quick and easy process, especially compared to what was involved in producing such images a century ago.  As such we do these group photos about once a month.  Students enjoy posting these shots to their social media accounts, and I have found them to be a handy tool in visually tracking the schools progress over time.  Every new class photo (as well as a number of other more candid images) is dutifully recorded in my field notes.

I am not the first such researcher to find such images helpful, and I am sure that I will not be the last. But thinking about the meaning of these photos and their place in the research process reminded me of some great photos that a very generous reader pointed me towards back in November. They will be the focus of today’s post

The history of the Asian martial arts is a fascinating subject.  Yet one of the wrinkles that must be kept always in mind is that in many cases these fighting systems are acutely self-conscious about their identity as “traditional” practices and their place in history.  I have long suspected that beyond the question of immediate goals (improved health, self-defense skills, etc…), many individuals have taken up the martial arts precisely because they want to commune with history.  This has always been the allure of identifying with something larger than the self.  They find meaning in their lives by placing themselves within (what Mircea Eliade might have identified as) “sacred time.”

The Chinese martial arts often rely on “lineage” not just as a means of ensuring the legitimacy of transmission (perhaps the context in which the concept is most frequently invoked in the West) but also the structure and good order of the current community (the nuances of which are more frequently observed in Chinese schools). Thus when individuals take photos with their teachers, or pose for class shots, they are not just recording history.  They are creating and shaping it.

Yet contrary to universalism often found in Eliade’s work, not everyone seeks to live in the same imagined past.  Photos can be helpful precisely because an analysis of their creation or content suggests the many competing visions of both the past and future that the Chinese martial arts have existed simultaneously.

Consider the date and setting of these pictures.  All of them (and a number of others that I did not include here) currently reside in the digital collections of Yale’s Divinity School.  The very first image records two senior female students at the martial arts club of Yenching University (in Beijing).  This photo was taken in March of 1928, and is the only photo in this post that we can establish a definite date for.

The other two images record scenes from a similar student organization at Fukien Christian University (which was subsequently absorbed into Fujian Normal University).  Unfortunately Yale’s archives do not include exact dates for either of these other photographs.  But judging from the style of the clothing (Jingwu inspired uniforms and women in bloomers), one suspects that all of these photos were a product of the late 1920s.

That date should not be particularly surprising.  The Chinese martial arts enjoyed something of a renaissance starting in the middle years of the 1920s.  As a result many middle class high schools and universities rushed to offer martial arts instruction to their students.

The Chinese Boxing Club of Fukien Christian University. Source: http://findit.library.yale.edu

The class photo is interesting on a number of counts.  I assume that the three individuals on the far left of the back row are not students.  They may be instructors or advisers for the club.  That would leave 20 students in the club, three of whom are female.  Interestingly, only the males have any type of official uniform.

Of course we do know that female participation in such programs was fairly common during the 1920s.  The Jingwu Association campaigned hard to promote female involvement in the martial arts and they achieved a fair degree of success.  Many of the newspaper accounts of public martial arts demonstrations during this decade note the typical inclusion of female athletes and performers. [link]

The archival note with this photo reads as follows: “F. C. U. student activities “F. C. U. Girl athletes Chinese boxing” Four students in blouses and bloomers, holding sticks in their right hands, perform a move on a dirt field surrounded by walls. A crowd of spectators watches. Hills visible in background.” Source: http://findit.library.yale.edu

We have already reviewed a number of such accounts, and we will be hearing more about them in the coming months.  As such the final picture in this set is particularly helpful.  In an era when most newspaper articles did not include photographs, it shows four young women (at Fukien Christian University) performing a Jian routine as part of a public martial arts demonstration hosted at the university.  I think that this image is particularly helpful as it gives us a good sense of the crowd that came to these events, and the general atmosphere of the day.  Here we see society’s better elements turned out for a boxing demonstration.

Conclusion

In an earlier post I discussed the “dangers of telling only a single story” about a year in Chinese martial arts history.  Ironically the year that I selected for that essay was 1928, the same year that at least one of the photos presented.

There is a tendency to discuss the Chinese martial arts in monolithic terms, to imagine it as a single entity reflecting a unified set of identities and values.  Yet these photographs remind us of how distorting such simplifications can be.  In reality there was no single accepted vision of what the Chinese were, or what they had been.  Rather than discussing Chinese martial culture (in the singular), we really should begin to discuss Chinese martial cultures (in the plural).

Not only was there disagreement as to where the martial arts had come from, what their relationship with the state should be, and what lay in their future, these questions were publicly contested in the press.  While much of the current academic discussion of the martial arts focuses on marginal individuals (Red spears militia men in the countryside, or struggling industrial workers in the cities), here we see yet another view of what the Chinese martial arts might have become.

This realization becomes particularly important when we begin to think about the early history of the Chinese martial arts in North America.  Many accounts of the martial arts look at developments in the nation’s Chinatowns, typically New York or San Francisco.  The economic and socially marginal nature of these communities is often stressed and the supposed secrecy of China’s martial artists is always part of the mix.  Individuals like Bruce Lee (a later immigrant from China) and James Yimm Lee (an American by birth who moved his family to Oakland) are seen as the pioneers of change.  Charlie Russo’s recent book (discussed here) does an excellent job of telling this aspect of the story.

Yet what these accounts forget is that there was an entire other world of Chinese martial arts in America, located within its Universities as colleges.  While there may have been no legal immigration to the US during the 1920s, a great many university students came to the United States to study at some of the country’s most important institutions.  And given the growing popularity of the martial arts among students in China, we should not be overly surprised to discover that some of these individuals were accomplished boxers by the time that they arrived.

Nor were they in any way restricted by the supposed codes of secrecy that ruled the early Chinatown schools.  These elite university students were instead the product of the modern and expansive vision promoted by the reform movements such as the Jingwu Association or the Guoshu Association.  At the same time that certain teachers were supposedly shunning contact with “foreign students”, reformers like Chu Minyi were working frantically to promote these practices on the Olympic stage before a global audience.  Other reformers went out of their way to make sure that foreign reporters would always be invited to their events to ensure that English language articles on developments in the Chinese martial arts would appear in the next day’s newspapers.

In the future I hope to explore some of the ways that Chinese university students in the West attempted to use their mastery of the martial arts to shape and correct America’s vision of their home.  Far from being hidden and secretive, these individuals went out of their way to organize public demonstrations, sometimes in consultation with Chinese diplomats.  Kung Fu demonstrations were used to raise money for food and famine relief.  At other points in time they were seen as a means of generating support for the Nationalist Party.  Some of these individuals even wrote about the Chinese martial arts, often as a counterpoint to growing public interest in Japanese Judo.  This was public and cultural diplomacy in the truest sense of the term.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about China’s university educated martial artists is the degree to which their efforts have been forgotten, both in China and the West.  Indeed, one occasionally gets the impression that the Chinese martial arts were never publicly demonstrated in the West until the arrival of Bruce Lee or the public emergence of Lau Bun.  This is a false historical narrative based on a narrow vision of the Chinese experience in America.

On a personal level I suspect that it also reflected the 1960s counter culture’s deep desire to discover something “new” and “exotic” as they attempted to look to the East to re-enchant their world. When married to the economy’s need to advertise new and exciting products, the combined result was a powerful incentive to erase even the recent past. Yet every new creation rests on a foundation inherited from the past.  This small collection of photos helps us to peel back a few of these layers.

Special Thanks:  I would like to thank Scott Harrington for first bringing this collection of photographs to my attention.

oOo

If you enjoyed this you might also want to read: Lives of Chinese Martial Artists (4): Sun Lutang and the Invention of the “Traditional” Chinese Martial Arts (Part 1 of 3).

oOo

“Back to Weapons of Forefathers in War with Japanese.” Vintage newspaper photograph. June 1937. Source: Author’s private collection.

Wonder Woman with a Dadao

In China the realm of social violence, and the martial arts in particular, has been male dominated.  That does not mean that women never became a part of such activities.  After all, they played an increasingly high profile role in the martial realm from the early 1920s onward.  By the time that hostilities erupted between China and Japan in 1937, female martial artists and soldiers were often at the forefront of Western reporting on the conflict, if not the actual fighting.

Nevertheless, locating accounts of these individuals can be difficult.  It seems that within the resolutely patriarchal lineage societies of the martial arts the contributions (and even presence) of daughters, sisters and female students was less likely to be remembered.  Just as serious  an issue is our (in)ability to search through the mountains of historical data that remain.  While many stories have been forgotten, others are hidden in plain sight.

As is so often the case, finding the proper search terms (in both Chinese and English) is half the battle.  To investigate the past, even in one’s native language, is to engage in an act of “cultural translation.”  Ideas, associations, idioms and identities that made perfect sense 60 or 70 years ago might never occur to us today.  Worse yet, they can seem off-putting.

Here is a quick pro-tip.  If you are interested in unearthing accounts of female Chinese martial artists and soldiers during the 1930s-1940s, try searching for “amazons.”  One suspects that the release of the new Wonder Woman film (set during WWI) might refresh some of these linguistic associations within our modern popular consciousness.  Yet as the newspapers of the period will be quick to remind you, the Chinese also had a wide variety of “amazons.”

Students of cultural history and gender studies may find it interesting to note what sorts of activities and identities fell within this category.  I have seen female bandits, soldiers, rioters, politicians and suffragettes all referred to as “Chinese Amazons” by various newspaper reporters.  While at the first cut this may seem like an overly broad label, it is actually a very helpful way of understanding the connotations, connections and inflections that were associated with the idea of female martial artists during the Republic period.

Still, for our purposes, female martial artists and soldiers are the most interesting cases.  The image at the top of this essay is a scan of a eight by ten inch press photo dated June, 1937.  The photograph itself, marked with a wax pencil to increase the level of contrast and detail, is fascinating.  It shows a woman holding either a long handled dadao or a shorter pudao.  The weapon has a tightly braided cord handle with a ring at the bottom.  It is also possible to make out two holes in the spine.  Best of all, the back of the image retains its caption bearing a wealth of information.

BACK TO WEAPONS OF FOREFATHERS IN WAR WITH JAPAN

HONG KONG, CHINA—Famous among the modern amazon warriors of the Chungshan district near Macao—where Chinese women guerillas are engaging in combat with the Japanese—is Miss Tam Tai-men, who has achieved fame through her skills with the famous Chinese broad sword against the Japanese invaders.  6-7-39

Readers may recall that a few years ago I interviewed Prof. Stephen Chan about his grandmother who was also a swordswoman and militia leader at this point in time (though her village was just outside of Guangzhou).  It is fascinating to find a picture of another female martial artist following a similar career path.  Yet from the perspective of my current research, what is most remarkable is not simply the existence of such women, but that their presence was being actively promoted in the Western press.

In the coming decades western martial artists would show a great deal of interest in the idea of Chinese “warrior women.”  Historically inclined discussions often debunk this as a simple misunderstanding (or naive acceptance) of Republic era folklore. But I think that we should also consider the possibility that this fascination was partially a result of fact that such “amazons” had been the public face of the Chinese war effort for the better part of two decades.

That observation suggests many other questions.  There is something about this photograph that feels not just heroic, but mythic.  I think that images like this resonated with the public because they tapped into fundamental symbolic structures (“myths” in the anthropological sense) which made cross-cultural communication (or at least empathy) possible.  Yet one suspects that they also promoted a entire range of political ideas and ideologies as well (or “myths” as the term is often encountered in cultural studies).

Indeed, everything about this photo, from the reference to taking up the “weapons of the forefathers”, to the almost stark image of a lone female warrior standing against an empty sky, seems calculated to raise awareness of, and interest in, China’s plight at the start of WWII.  Wartime reporting is never without an ideological slant. Indeed, that is a feature of this genre rather than a  bug.

Readers may also recall that Wonder Woman, perhaps the most successful “amazon warrior” of all time, first emerged to fight the Axis Powers on the pages of American comic books in 1941. One cannot help but suspect that the two streams of mythology that would have guided the audiences interpretation of this press photo probably shaped her creation and acceptance as well.

We can delve more deeply into what exactly these streams contained by reading the many articles that accompanied such photos.  I have transcribed a later example of one such piece that explores a slightly different aspect of the Chinese “amazon phenomenon.”  Rather than focusing on the lone warrior (or the improbable leader of a rebel band), this piece tracks the creation of a much larger, all female, fighting force organized as part of a regular military structure.

The story of how the unit came together, and what inspired individual women to enlist, is fascinating.  Yet once again, its hard not to see in these verbal images the creation of a very politically useful set of myths.  The first task facing the Chinese and their friends in the West in 1937 was to convince the American public that the Chinese people were both capable and willing to stand up to Japanese aggression.  The next task was to generate monetary contributions for the war effort.  Readers should note the various ways in which this article accomplishes both goals.

To a large extent these tasks are carried out by manipulating the image of “Chinese amazons.”  Women’s bodies are shown as the sites of both victimization and resistance.  In an effort to generate broad based public sympathy these female soldiers are notably de-sexualized.  Indeed, that task takes up a surprising amount of the author’s overall effort.  Clearly the idea of fighting amazons was somewhat threatening. As a result, great efforts were made to argue that contributions to the war effort would not be supporting anything “unsavory.”  And yet these women had to be seen as at least somewhat attractive to generate sympathy.  This article makes it clear that more than one battle was being fought with/over these women’s bodies.

By the end of the Second World War combat journalism and political propaganda had familiarized American audiences with the image of the Chinese amazon.  The public seems to have been fascinated by her ability to disrupt certain hierarchies in the pursuit of “universal values.”  Yet what exactly those values were, whether the Chinese martial arts were deeply conservative in character, or an aspect of the burgeoning post-war counter-culture movement, would be negotiated for decades to come.  Unsurprisingly many of these conversations continued to revolve around the feminine and the female in these fighting systems.

AMAZON FORCES AID RESISTANCE

About three thousand of Kwangsi’s hardy womenfolk have laid aside the sickle and hoe for the big sword and Mauser rifle and joined their men in resisting the  Japanese penetration in the Southwest.

For 22 months of the war, China’s New Life Movement has carried extensive propagation of the significance of China’s unity to the rural districts.  China’s womanhood has been mobilized under Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s banner in all phases of war work-but in Kwangsai, a province famed for its fighting spirit, it has been the peasant women who have taken the initiative in rallying for the salvation of their country.

Not content with performing the mere domestic services connected with Kwangsi’s armies, they have formed a Women’s Regiment which has been drilled and disciplined under the leadership of Madame Pai Chung-his, wife of Kwangsi’s No. 2 General.

Recent reports from the Southwestern front state that the Women’s Regiment is participating in the defense of the Lingyang Railway in an effort to prevent the Japanese drive on Toishan, Yanping and Hoiping, rich towns in the West River delta and the native homes of many overseas Chinese in the United States and Canada.  Chinese overseas remittances contributed largely to the support of Kwangsi’s valiant army and its Women’s Regiment.

When their men first rallied to Kwangsi’s Commander-in-Chief, General Li Tsung-jen, and then followed him to Central and Northern China at the outbreak of hostilities, the more prominent among Kwangsi’s women, as in most other provinces, organized a Women’s Corp.  They were recruited for service behind the lines and for carrying on agriculture and industry at home.  In this respect, Kwangsi’s women earned the praise of Madam Chiang for their initiative and self-reliance.

But as the months rolled on, the war assumed a new significance for Kwangsi’s women.  The battles of Taierchwang and Hsuchow, in which General Li’s fifth group army won fame, swelled the number of widows and bereaved mothers and sisters in Kwangsi.  In increasing numbers, bands of sturdy women and workers presented themselves at the Group Army headquarters in Kweilin, demanding to be allowed to join their men in the ranks or to be allowed to fight the enemy to avenge the deaths of their male relatives.

It was in the latter part of 1937 that the first really militant sections of the Women’s Corp was formed.

At first it numbered about 700, composed mainly of land workers with muscles as hard as those of their menfolk through years of toil in their mountainous province; but as the spirit spread the ranks of the Women’s Regiment swelled with the recruitment of women from all walks of life-teachers, nurses, store assistants and even housewives.

Now the Women’s Regiment is reliably estimated to number 3,000.

“No stream lined beauties these,” said an executive of an American oil company when he recently returned from a tour of the Southwest, where he came into contact with the women soldiers.” “’amazons’ is rather a shop-soiled term, but it is the only one which describes them.

“Most of them are short and squat and of sturdy build…in appearance they are actually not unlike the Japanese soldiers.  They wear a uniform which is the exact counterpart of the men’s and throw a hand-grenade with the best of the men.

“In fact, I had no idea the detachment I saw was composed of women until I saw them at close quarters.”

“Their code of discipline is of a high order.  They live in the barracks when at their headquarters in Kweilin and are subject to the same military routine as the men.  As a rule they are detailed to rear positions, forming support and supply lines but vernacular reports received in Hong Kong tell of women fighters engaging in actual combat, side by side with the Kwangtung and Kwangsi troops in the West River sector.  They have suffered some casualties and a recent report from Shekki tells of some badly wounded being in hospital there.

Their moral discipline is also of the highest order.  Although they are not completely segregated from the men when at the front, maybe for long weeks of entrenchment, strict celibacy is maintained.

“There’ll be no call for a midwife in the Women’s Army.” Said the foreign oil man,  “The girls are loath to betray any sign of femininity.  I don’t suppose one of ‘em has known the taste of lipstick nor the feel of one of these slit gowns the slim Hong Kong girls wear.  But don’t get the idea that they are without attraction…they are bronzed and healthy, with perfect teeth and the merriest of smiles.

“They are paid about twenty Chinese dollars a month, but money doesn’t seem to trouble them much.  Given their ration of rice and vegetables and a place in the ranks, they are content…but what they hunger for most is a chance to take a smack at the enemy.”

“The vernacular papers in Hong Kong recently published a story of one of the wounded women soldiers. She was formerly a Kwangsi countrywoman.

“My husband has done me the greatest honor in my life by dying for China in the fight in the north.  I have his name and will continue his fight against the enemy till I die.” She said.

The China Critic (Shanghai; 1939-1946). Jun 8, 1939. P. 154

oOo

If you enjoyed this you might also want to read: Lives of Chinese Martial Artists (15): Fei Ching Po – Professional Gambler and Female Martial Artist in Early 19th Century Guangzhou

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Kendo at Ina Middle School, probably late 1930s. Vintage postcard. Authors personal collection.

Introduction

Today’s post is the result of a happy coincidence.  As regular readers will be aware, I occasionally collect and share vintage images of the Chinese martial arts.  Many of these come from the sorts of ephemera (postcards, advertisements, old newspaper clippings, newsreels) that contain interesting data on the social place of the martial arts, but are too easily lost to history.

From time to time I also run across images of other sorts of martial artists.  While not directly related to the TCMA, these are important as they remind us that all of these practices, images and ideas existed as part of a complex web of global interaction.  That is true even of some images with solidly nationalistic pedigrees.

These other postcards and photographs come from a variety of sources.  French Savate proved to be a popular subject for a time.  The American occupation of the Philippines resulted in a many images of knives and other traditional weapons that are of interest to martial artists today.  I recently ran across a couple of older images of traditional boxers in Thailand that I hope to share at some point.

Yet most of the imported early 20^th century martial arts imagery originated in Japan.  Pictures of Chinese sword dancers, or Thai boxers, were occasionally captured by Western photographers seeking to capitalize on an interest in “Oriental” places and practices.  The martial images that they produced, while recording some interesting ethnographic data, tended to be only a small percentage of their total catalog.  They also seem to suggest more about the state of Western, rather than Chinese, culture.  That is probably to be expected when we remember that individuals within early 20^th century China did not send postcards to each other, and were never the intended audience of such images.

The Japanese did use postcards, and they produced them in large numbers for domestic consumption.  And because a great many Japanese reformers were interested in promoting the martial arts (both domestically and internationally), these fighting systems tended to find their way into all sorts of contemporary media.  Martial postcards from the 1920s-1930s usually focused on Kendo or Sumo, probably the most popular pursuits at the time.  But occasionally images of other practices (including Judo, archery or more traditional forms of swordsmanship) also turn up.

Such postcards also served a social purpose.  Some might commemorate an important moment in the history of the local branch of the Butokukai (such as the completion of a new training center), while others turned their gaze towards the reconstruction of Samurai practices from a previous era.  All of them seem to have aided and reinforced the creation of a specific vision of community.  And (as Benedict Anderson might suggest), this community was often imagined along specifically nationalist lines.

Budo in the Ina Middle School

This brings us back to the happy coincidence that reunited the two postcards discussed in this essay.  I ran across the first image about a year ago and did not think very much of it at the time.  The scene showed students practicing Kendo in a typical Japanese middle school during the pre-WWII era.  While always interesting, such images are not terribly rare.

Then, a few months ago, I had the good fortune to come across another image.  This example caught my eye as pre-WWII Japanese postcards showing Judo (or any form of unarmed combat) are harder to come by.  While students in the West came to see Judo as the preeminent Japanese martial, in truth Kendo was vastly more popular in Japan itself.

As I was placing the new find in an album it just so happened that there was an empty spot in the sleeve that also held the preceding image of the kendo class.  I caught my breath as I looked at the two images side by side for the first time.  Both pictures had clearly been taken in the same classroom.  Note for instance the details of the chalk board and door.  Its also interesting to see how the hardwood flood of the kendo class has been covered with movable matting before the commencement of Judo training.  And judging from the shadows on the floor both images were taken at approximately the same time of day.  Yet to my (admittedly fallible) eye, the Judo and Kendo instructors appear to be two different individuals.   I had inadvertently run across two images that may have been part of a larger set of postcards.

At this point I contacted my friend Jared Miracle (be sure to check out his new book).  Jared was kind enough to translate the captions of both cards.  He noted that both were written in a traditional character set and said “Ina Junior High School Kendo Club Practice” and “Ina Junior High School Judo Practice.”  Given the rather short length of the training uniforms seen in both photos (much shorter than those favored in the post WWII period), and the American GI inspired haircuts, Jared tentatively concluded that both images may have been taken in the late 1930, just as Japan’s nationalist fervor hit its peak.

Other scholars (such as Alexander Bennett, Denis Gainty and G. Cameron Hurst) have noted that the pedagogy of the Japanese martial arts underwent rapid reforms in the immediate pre-war period.  As conflict loomed on the horizon martial arts such as Kendo were reworked to move them away from a sporting basis and to emphasize basic battlefield skills.  Training was increasingly conducted outside so that students would be accustomed to charging across “live terrain” when they found themselves in China or on the islands of the Pacific.

Judo at Ina Middle School. Vintage postcard circa late 1930s. Source: Author’s personal collection.

Imagining the Community

One does not see a direct allusion to these more militant reforms in these postcards.  Perhaps this is not a surprise as the intended consumers of images of Ina’s students were probably their own parents and grandparents.  Yet why do we have these specific photographs at all?  What work did such images do?

Ina is not a large place.  Located in the mountains of Nagano Prefecture, Wikipedia lists its current population at around sixty-eight thousand individuals.  One suspects that its pre-WWII population was probably smaller.  Looking at the small city (really a town) on google earth reveals a population center hemmed in by a mountain valley and agricultural fields.  Today Ina is mostly known for its beautiful mountain landscapes.  My area of study is not Japanese martial history, but I can find no indication of a previously glorious martial heritage in this small city.

One imagines that Ina in the early 20^th century might have felt somewhat remote.  While Tokyo may not be far off as the crow flies, the Japanese Alps and winter snows would certainly be enough to create a sense of isolation in a small, primarily agricultural, community.  Certainly, rapid governmental reforms (and military conscription) in the late 19^th and early 20^th century would have created more of a sense of belonging within “the nation.”  But so would the martial arts.

When examining postcards such as these, it is worth noting how many images were produced in middle and high schools, and even occasionally at universities.  Pictures taken at educational institutions, all run by the government, are common.  Those produced by politically well-contented cultural institutions, like the Butokukai, are not far behind.  But I don’t think I have a single postcard (in my admittedly small collection) produced at a private dojo.

Obviously, such places existed.  Some even gained great popularity.  Morihei Ueshiba could not have created Aikido without dealing with the problem of finding real estate.  Yet such private endeavors remain under represented in this segment of the visual record, especially during the 1930s.

The great story of the Asian martial arts, in both China and Japan, from probably the 1880s-1950s was the effort to take that which had been particular and local, and make it unifying and national.  How better to accomplish these aims than to make the martial arts a standard part of the compulsory education program?  It is this effort (which finally bore fruit in 1911) that is being reflected in the ephemera of the period.

In addressing the origins of the notion that the globe should naturally be understood as a series of discrete “nations,” Benedict Anderson noted that this process had more to do with imagination and historical contingency than any sort of shared “primal essence.”  What was important was not so much a thousand years of commerce uniting two locations in Europe, but whether, with the spread of the printing press and the rise of markets for mass produced books, they shared the same vernacular language.

If so, then the inhabitants of these two towns might read the same newspapers.  To oversimplify an important argument, by taking part in a common conversation in which certain stories and items of news were related to one another, they would come to imagine themselves as being members of the same “nation.”  They would also come to imagine all of those reading other newspapers in languages that they could not understand as being members of other nations.

The spread of shared print vernacular markets allowed individuals to imagine that they were part of a broader community in which everyone one else was caught up in the same collective dream.  Of course, Japanese social elites in the early 20^th century did not have the benefit of Anderson’s social theory.  But they had the martial arts, and an extensive nationalist discourse surrounding them.

How much more powerful would it be to not just imagine the existence of the nation on a cognitive level, but to gain an embodied feel for it?  What if the existence of the nation could be imprinted on one’s physical habits and movements? What if “the nation” could be a somatic experience?

By including martial arts training in the national curriculum, a junior high student knew that when he rushed forward, shinai held high, he moved with hundreds of thousands of identically armed classmates at his back.  It would be hard to think of a more powerful vector for the inculcation of nationalist identity than the combination of somatic experience and discursive indoctrination that would result from making martial arts training compulsory in government run institutions like schools and the military.

Dennis Gainty, in his book Martial Arts and the Body Politic in Meiji Japan (Routledge 2013), notes that such concerns both complicated and drove efforts to create a set of universal Kendo kata to be practiced throughout Japan a generation before these photographs were taken.  Discussing one such effort, he notes:

 

“As we recall from Chapter 2, the Kata used a tripartite division under the designation of man, earth, and heaven (jin, chi, ten). By practicing the kata, the practitioner literally embodied and enacted the fluid relationship between earth, heaven and human; through it, he experienced the cosmos.  In this sense, the frameworks suggested by the Butokuai’s meticulous definition of bodies did not call up the atomomized individual theorized by Foucault; instead, they are more readily understood as serving exactly the opposite purpose, offering the individual a physical means by which to express and experience embodied unity with the imperial line, with the Japanese nation, and with the universe.” (p. 130)

Of course, this was a view of the universe seen from a very unique perspective.

We should be clear that this process was never restricted to just Japan.  While the Japanese state may have been the first to capitalize on modernized and standardized martial arts training, others looked on with great interest.  Various public and private reformers in China, noting Japan’s success, worked hard to integrate their own hand combat traditions into the national curriculum.  Unfortunately, these efforts have not left the same visual record.  As I mentioned at the start of this essay, the Chinese never really adopted postcards to the same degree as the Japanese during the early 20^th century.  But we have enough newspaper accounts of local school demonstrations being staged (often by Jingwu or Guoshu affiliated classes) during the 1920s and 1930s to know that substantial inroads were made.

One suspects that individuals in Japan bought, mailed and collected postcards such as these to further extend this aspect of the “imagined national community” beyond the physical bounds that a shared martial practice allowed.  A postcard’s most interesting attribute is precisely the fact that it was designed to travel in search of an audience.  As Gainty might argue, in collecting and mailing these images individuals became active participants in crafting their own view of what a modern strong Japanese nation would look like.  Yet as these postcards continued to circulate, both in China and then the West, their underlying meaning evolved to meet the needs of new audiences.  When examining photographs such as these we can almost recapture the moment when a primarily nationalist discourse became something else on a global stage.

oOo

If you enjoyed this you might also want to read:  Do the martial arts unite or divide us? Kung Fu and the production of “social capital”

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A collage-type postcard made in China between 1901-1907. Source: Authors personal collection.

Romanticizing the Chinese Martial Arts

Vintage postcards or other ephemera may be interesting to students of martial arts studies for a variety of reasons.  When assessing this material, we are often drawn to photographic images that might reveal lost details of how things “were really done.”  I have come across a few truly useful ethnographic images in this series, but in most cases even the best of these antique photographs suggest more about the ideas and the intentions of the individuals who captured them than the actual lived experience of China’s many martial artists.

The current post attempts to tackle this question from the opposite point of view.  What sorts of fantasy images of the Chinese martial arts were being produced and consumed at the turn of the 20^th century?  What can these intentionally Orientalist images teach us about the public’s perception of the Chinese martial arts?

In practice photography, which always seems to be “realistic,” was often used to create mythological images of these fighting systems.  But this essay will focus on the commercial distribution of other sorts of images.  Specifically, we will briefly discuss the rich history of hand painted postcards as well as paper-cut and “macerated stamp” collages produced in China.  Freed from the constraints of realism these genres of commercial art gave both consumers and producers the freedom to imagine a starkly romanticized vision of the Chinese martial arts that stood in direct contrast to the often-bloody images of the Boxer Rebellion period and the Yellow Peril literature it inspired.  In some ways they even reflect the idyllic and vaguely spiritual values that current students still seek to find as they turn East.

Vintage postcard circa 1898-1901. Authors personal collection.

Painted Postcards

Many of the most striking late 19^th or early 20^th century images of the Chinese martial arts were circulated on delicately hand painted postcards.  Produced in handicraft shops such images could be purchased at hotels in cities like Shanghai or Hong Kong and mailed back to friends and family in the West.  In a few cases Western consumers simply added their own visual impressions to blank cards before mailing them off.

Hand painted cards are now a sought-after collectors’ item and their price tends to vary with the condition, quality and subject matter of the card.  As such it will come as no surprise that I have never managed to add one to my collection.  Prices for these cards are often in the hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars.

However, there is a related class of images that are more commonly encountered.  These are mass produced printed cards designed to look as though they are hand painted.  One of the best examples of this genre that I have encountered was distributed by the Soy Kee & Co. curio shop located at 7 and 9 Mott Street in New York City’s turn of the century Chinatown.

Soy Kee & Co. was one the neighborhood’s better-known establishments.  Located just beneath the landmark Port Arthur restaurant, they did a brisk business importing everything from porcelain to silks, and their wares were sought after by both tourists and designers decorating some of New York’s more luxurious homes.

Soy Kee & Co. advertised aggressively in many mediums.  Collectors sometimes encounter early cards distributed by the store that are almost a hybrid of the old Victorian tradition of collectible “trade cards” and new developments in the world of postcards.  When added to a collection such ephemera could function as a uniquely durable form of advertisement.

Most of their “painted” cards showed civil scenes, but this image is the exception.  In it we see a young man performing some sort of spear set.  He is dressed in red and green and wears a blue urban.  The shaft of his spear is painted red (which was common during the Qing) and has a red tassel.  The image itself contains an interesting sense of movement and flow.

We can date the production of this postcard with some confidence, even though it was never mailed and lacks a postmark.  On the reverse we read “Private Mailing Card: Authorized by Act of Congress 1899.”  This label was required by law on privately produced postcards between 1898 and 1901.

Half of this time frame overlaps with the Boxer Uprising, which was a major media event within the United States.  Perhaps this card was produced to capitalize on the sudden ubiquity of Chinese Boxers in the press?  Or maybe the image was produced on the cusp of the crisis as a stroke of good luck?  One must wonder how the Boxer Rebellion affected the market for Chinese art and porcelain in New York City.

Beyond the question of timing there is also one of artistic influence.  The posture of the spearman, his weapon and the stark background, are all highly reminiscent of other sorts of export painting produced in China during the middle of the 19^th century.  These watercolors were beautiful but very delicate. They were exactly the sort of item that a shop like Soy Kee might be expected to carry.  One wonders whether the store’s owner just commissioned a reproduction of an image that they already owned.  If so, this postcard represents an important image of the traditional martial arts, produced by Chinese artisans, on the cusp of the Boxer Uprisings that was then mass produced for American consumers.

Mixed Medium Master Pieces

Between the turn of the century and the 1940s collage-type postcards were also hand produced in workshops in China.  These mixed medium artifacts took many forms.  A background landscape was first applied with pencil, ink and watercolors.  These could be either lushly produced or relatively simple and tended to feature 3-6 colors.  These cards were both sold in China and produced for export.  Their backgrounds tended to feature exotic and idealized landscapes reminiscent of Willow Ware patterns.

A main figure was then applied to the card that was equally Orientalist in its appeal.  These collages might be constructed out of macerated stamps, carefully cut strips of money or layers of decorative paper.  Occasionally features like hands or faces would be painted directly on the card giving the image a greater sense of depth or texture.

The postcard at the top of this post is a collage constructed from various bits brightly painted and inked paper.  The warrior’s body, face and hands all seem to be made of separate applications.  The blade of his jian, however, is inked directly onto the card.  The white sections on the back of his armor and leg are areas where the bare card stock has been allowed to show through.

The back of the card is somewhat interesting.  Because it is an undivided back with no space for a message we can confidently date this image to sometime between 1901 and 1907.  However, postcards of similar construction continued to be produced through the 1940s.  They will have split backs, with a space for both a mailing address and a message.  This example was apparently used as a hand-delivered Christmas card.

Vintage postcard made in China of macerated stamps, 1901-1907. Source: Authors personal collection.

The next example is a mixed medium piece utilizing a hand colored background and a figure crafted from carefully trimmed postage stamps.  The swordsman’s face, and the feathers on his cap, have been hand painted.  The rest of the figure is constructed from overlapping layers of stamps.  The back of this card is undivided as well suggesting an early 20^th century date.

It is interesting to compare these two swordsmen.  The armor, helmet and face of the paper-cut figure seem to invoke the sturdy heroes of the Water Margin or some other classic martial novel.  Set against the rustic stone bridge viewers would probably guess that they are looking at a legendary or even mythic figure.

The landscape of the final card is more stylized, and the reclining flowering tree in the upper-right hand side of the card adds a touch of sophistication.  But I find the overall effect of this card to be quite different.  Or perhaps it would be better to say that it invokes a distinct set of Orientalizing myths.

In contrast to the rugged features of the first figure, the round face, spectacles and thin mustache (as well as the feathered hat) all suggest that this is an image of a very different sort of figure.  He appears to be a government official or military officer of the Qing regime rather than an ancient hero.  Whereas the paper-cut figure invokes the strength of China’s past, its counterpart creates a sense of unease as it emphasizes the degree to which the nation’s government, and even its military, are out to step with the modern world.

Dueling Mythologies

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about these three postcards is that they were all produced and consumed within a few years of the Boxer Uprising.  This crisis had a marked impact of the way that China was imagined in the West, and neither newspaper accounts or Yellow Peril novels cast Chinese martial artists in a positive light.  We have already reviewed several postcards produced in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion that focused on scenes of massacres, where individuals with swords butchered Christian converts. Other cards attempted to mock Chinese martial artists as backwards and delusional.

Those postcards were produced in the West for Western consumers.  While the three cards presented here also sought an occidental audience, they were produced in China.  And the involvement of Chinese artists seems to have made a substantial difference in their vision of the martial arts.

Rather than the bold nationalism that would come to dominate Republic era thinking during the 1920s-1930s, these images still painted the Chinese martial arts in quaint and antiquarian terms.  But gone are the overtones of sadism and ignorance that anchored so much of the popular art to emerge from the Boxer Rebellion.  In its place, we have the subtle reminder that China’s heritage can be a thing of both wonder and beauty.  At minimum, it is something that Western consumers might be interested in investing in.  That heritage is seen to live on in its martial artists, both the heroes of mythic stories and the more prosaic (and bespeckled) figures that one might encounter in the late Qing.

Andrew Morris, Brian Kennedy, Judkins and Nielson, Douglas Wile and Stanley Henning have all discussed the ways in which Republic era martial arts reformers sought to re-imagine these practices as repositories of national strength and identity.  Indeed, the Chinese government is still attempting to promote its soft-power agenda by cultivating an interest in these practices.

The existence of these postcards suggest that this basic strategy may have emerged earlier than one might suspect, almost directly from the ashes of the Boxer Rebellion itself.  Likewise, in the hands of Chinese publishers and artists the traditional fighting systems could be made attractive to Western consumers even while sensationalist images of horror and gore were still easy to come by. This suggest the early circulation of not just one mythology of the Chinese martial arts, but many.

Thai Boxing. Vintage postcard, circa 1910s. Source: Author’s Personal Collection.

As a researcher who focuses on the martial arts in modern China and North America, I do not claim any special expertise in the rich fighting traditions of South East Asia.  Still, one of the gratifying aspects of running a blog like this is being able to share the thrill of new discoveries. In this case they related to late 19^th and early 20^th century Thai kickboxing.

While searching for vintage photographs of Chinese martial artists, I happened to run across the following postcards.  After doing a bit of preliminary research I have not located too many other examples like them.  Still, it is impossible to say at this point whether such images were rare at the turn of the century, or if their survival rate was just not as high as photographs of Japanese and Chinese martial artists.

The first photograph is more the more interesting of the two as it is labeled.  These inscriptions appear to have been applied directly to the negative, and were not added to the postcard later.  This suggests that the item was manufactured in Thailand for domestic consumption.  This makes it quite different from many of the Chinese postcards that we have previously reviewed in this series as these were almost always printed in Europe and destined for a Western audience.

The inscriptions themselves are quite simple.  I do not read Thai, but a colleague at Cornell translated them as:

Mr. Bang Malikham         6^th Pair                  Mr. Tian Hemasidon
(Ubon)                                                                    (Phra Nakhon)
Blue                                                                         Red

Here we have each fighter’s name, their place of origin and their identifying color in the match.  It would also appear that the pair were the sixth fight on whatever “card” this series was meant to commemorate.

Careful observers will also note a few other items.  A crowd is just visible around the far edges of the postcard.  Further, neither fighter wears gloves.  One is bare handed while the other’s fists and forearms are wrapped in hemp rope.

The next postcard also features fighters with “rope gloves.”  These combatants appear in a roped off, elevated, boxing ring whose floor appears to be made of wide wooden planks covered with some type of a mat.  While there was only the suggestion of a crowd in the previous image, here the spectators are much more visible.  While the VIP seating in the front is empty, the fight appears to have drawn an enthusiastic audience.

There are a few other differences of note.  Both fighters in the second image appear to have adopted a more upright stance.  Both have also been outfitted with foreign style groin protectors.

This last observation gives us a few clues as to how to date these images.  The second postcard appears to be the younger of the two.  Both cards have a split back, and the photographs themselves lack any border.  While I am not an expert in Thai ephemera, this generally seems to indicate a postcard that was printed between 1915 and the early 1920s.

It is interesting that the second image features a mix of old and new features.  Here we see rope bound fists juxtaposed to something that looks like a modern boxing ring and modern groin protection.  This suggests to me that this photo was taken during the transitional period in the early 1920’s as modern safety gear was being phased in.

The first image not only appears to be more “traditional,” but the card stock it is printed on is also physically older.  My best guess as someone who is not an expert in the development of Muay Thai, but who deals with a fair amount of vintage ephemera, is that the first image would be from approximately 1915 and the second closer to 1923.  Of course, those initial guesses are subject to revision.

Thai Boxing, circa 1920s. Vintage Postcard. Source: Author’s Personal Collection.

Written Accounts

What might a traditional Thai boxing match have been like in the late 19^th or early 20^th century?  Luckily, we have some decent period sources that can help to bring these images to life.  Herbert Warington Smyth (1867-1943) was a British mining engineer (and later travel writer) who spent a great deal of time working in the region and was eventually employed by the Kingdom of Siam.  In 1895, he published the following account of a journey up the Mekong River as part of a travelogue (at the time, one of the best-selling genres of popular literature).  Following the death of an area’s governor he had the chance to observe multiple rounds of boxing that seem to have been part of the funeral ritual.

It is interesting to note that one of the fighters in the first postcard was from a neighboring region to where this account was collected.  Smyth also does a masterful job of describing the social milieu and atmosphere that surrounded the events that he observed.

“The Chow Muang here was lately dead, and just before we left the creation ceremonies began in the big square before the principal wat.  At night the place all around the funeral pyre was lighted with candles; three or four of the head monks were reading in a kind of chant from their Pali manuscripts from the tops of temporary bamboo pulpits, and among the booths standing round; the people squatted in their cloaks, listening to music or hearing descriptive songs and stories, which now and then produced roars of laughter.  In the day sports were going on, and there was some very good boxing between the champions of neighboring villages, who at the end each got three rupees, victor and vanquished alike.

The men strip, and their names and places they hail from are given out.  They then salute the master of the ceremonies in the ordinary Laos fashion, touching the ground with their foreheads on bended knees, raising the clasped hands to the head, and proceed to business.  For some moments they warily watch one another, stepping and dancing round with a good deal of attitudinizing of an alarming description, by the extravagance of which we can generally tell the best man.

The blows are rather round-armed, it is true, and kicking is allowed; but it is wonderfully quiet and masterful, and when they warm to it, very hard rounds are fought.  The umpires squat round ready to separate the men, call time, and generally see fair play, and at the end of each round the two men squat down, and are offered water out of silver bows, the bearer respectfully on his knee handing them the ladle.  The keenness of the onlookers is tremendous, especially when the men are well matched; but what produced most enthusiasm was a fight between boys of ten years old.  The little fellows showed, I must say, a great deal of pluck and more science than most of us did at that age at school; they kept their tempers well and at the end of each round their seconds, stalwart fathers and uncles, were besides themselves with delight, stroking their heads and dancing round them with tears of laughter running from their eyes.

There were some sword and sword-and-spear dances by two men in slow time to music, with silver-handled weapons, and accompanied by the gestures in which all these nations take such pleasure…

 

Herbert Warington Smyth. 1895. Notes of a Journey on the Upper Mekong, Siam.  London: The Royal Geographical Society. pp. 39-40

Looking over my posts from the last few months I realized that it has been too long since we discussed new (to us) images of the Chinese martial arts.  In this post our friend Sidney Gamble will help to rectify that oversight.  Regular readers may recall that Gamble was an American sociologist who documented daily life in Republican China’s major cities.  His observations were recorded in several academic books.  Yet Chinese martial artists are likely to be more familiar with his passion for photography and amateur film making.  Some of this material found its way into Gamble’s various publications.  But he left behind a much larger archive of images, most of which was only discovered after this death.  We have already discussed the importance of his recording of the “Five Tiger Stick Society” and the Miaofeng Shan pilgrimage.

While northern China’s martial artists were never a subject of sustained study, Gamble’s interests in urban sociology seems to have brought him into frequent contact with such individuals.  Both his professional and personal interests ensured that he would spend a great deal of time exploring, and photographing, China’s marketplaces and festivals.  These were also great places to find martial artists, opera performers, patent medicine salesman, soldiers and a wide variety of other colorful characters.  From time to time such figures would make it into his books.

The photographs discussed in this essay explore the nexus of his encounters with marketplaces and the martial arts.  As part of his effort to document China’s changing cityscapes, Gamble took many pictures of Beijing’s shops and storefronts.  Some of these buildings were quite humble.  Others featured elaborately carved wooden screens and bright tile work.  He was particularly taken by the almost universal habit of fashioning shop signs from the objects that one sold.

Its hard to think of a better way to advertise one’s wares, and such signs might appeal to customers with limited literacy.  Still, a number of these signs also featured written descriptions, and various trades seem to have had their own stylized approach to signage.  Nowhere was this more evident than in the shops selling swords and knives.

Gamble photographed at least three different sword shops during his survey of Beijing’s markets.  Each sign was constructed of seven to twelve wooden sword replicas suspended one above another.  Perhaps the shape of the sign was meant to remind patrons of blades of various sizes and shapes on a rack.  Most of these wooden replicas portrayed the single edge dao, but occasionally other weapons appeared including spears heads, daggers or short and sturdy dadao.

I was somewhat surprised when I first came across these images.  The commonly heard troupe is that the Qing dynasty outlawed the civilian ownership of weapons as well as the practice of the martial arts so such things could only be found in secret societies.  Still, period accounts of the final decades of the dynasty (when the countryside was littered with militias and awash in traditional arms) would strongly suggest that those regulations were often observed only in the breach.  While researching accounts of the Boxer Rebellion I ran across one ominous note recounting how all of the storefronts in Beijing put up signs advertising swords and knives as the displaced Yihi Boxers streamed into the city during the spring of 1900.

Period observes noted that the market for swords and other traditional weapons had been in serious decline from the final decade of the 1800s onward. I assumed that the industry would have basically collapsed by the 1930s.  Apparently that was not the case, and a variety of weapons continued to be created, collected and sold in the sorts of small shops that Gamble frequented.  Indeed, as the following quote indicates, they continued to be indicative of the types of handicraft manufacturing that dominated much of Beijing’s economy.

In the northeast corner of the district was a group of streets, Kung Chien Ta Yuan (Bow and Arrow Street, that was as interesting as any we found in the city.  There, away from the bustle and traffic of the highway, were grouped the shops of the bow and arrow makers, some making long bows and others feathered-tipped arrows, others making cross bows to shoot clay marbles.  And many a boy can be seen bringing home a string of small birds that he has shot with one of these cross bows.  Then there are gold and silver shops where men, sitting on benches like saw horses and working with simple tools, make dishes of elaborate pattern.  In one corner is a shop where the men are busy cutting out saddle trees and making material for boxes, while just next door they are making copper kettles, dishes and pans, starting with the sheet copper and gradually beating it out with hammer and anvil into the desired shape and thickness.  There are stores occupied by the curio dealers with their assortment of porcelain, bronze and other things, wonderfully interesting places to spend an hour and keen men with whom to make a bargain.  Besides these there are cloth and tea shops, pipe stores, shops where they make reed mats, another for paper clothes, silk thread stores, a sword shop and one that deals in pig bristles. (Sidney David Gamble, John Stewart Burgess. 1921. Peking: A Social Survey. New York: George H. Doran Co. P. 322)

After reading this excerpt from Gamble’s survey, the next question must be, who patronized these sorts of shops?  Unfortunately, his writing gives no indication of who was buying traditional recurved bows in the 1920s-1930s.  But the patrons of the various sword shops do make the occasional appearances in his work.  Most often they can be spotted on the more vibrant market streets closer to the highway or at local festivals.

Through his films we have already met the 13 martial arts societies that took part in the annual Miaofeng Shan pilgrimage, which was an important social event in the Beijing area during the 1920’s.   Clearly schools and temple societies such as these would have patronized the shops that Gamble recorded on Bow and Arrow street.  And we have already reviewed numerous accounts of the sorts of martial artists, strongmen and patent medicine sellers that one was likely to encounter in more ordinary marketplaces.  Luckily Gamble also recorded some important images of these individuals.

Yet ever the sociologist, he was more interested in the question of how martial arts groups related to society, rather than simply seeking out feats of arms.  That turns out to be an interesting question as a great many martial arts schools in the 1920s-1930s had committees to provide either basic services to their members, or to raise money for community causes.  When we look at the groups that these martial arts schools cooperated with in their charitable work, it’s a little easier to see where they fit in the broader social structure.

Some $300 is annually raised for the chou ch’ang by a three day benefit given on the grounds of the Peking Water Company, outside of the Tung Chih Men.  This consists of an entertainment of singing, acting and acrobatics given by some nine groups of men who not only come and give their services but often pay their own expenses as well.  These men usually belong to some club or secret society and come year after year to make their contributions to the poor of peking.  One of these clubs, the Cloud Wagon Society, sent 40 members for the three days and subscribed $35 for their expenses.  This group sang old Chinese folk songs.  The Old Large Drum Society, founded in 1747, sent a group of 60 dancers and musicians.  The Centipede Sacred Hell Society, with some thirty-five members, gave demonstrations in the use of the double-edged sword, chains, pikes and other implements of combat.  The Sacred Jug Society was a group of 15 men from the village of Tuen Van, who amused the crowd by juggling jugs.  A group of actors gave their plays walking and dancing on four-foot stilts.  The Old and Young Lions Sacred Society made sport for the people with five lions of the two man variety, and whenever the lions moved the drum and cymbal players were sure to call attention to the fact by beating on their instruments. (Sidney David Gamble, John Stewart Burgess. 1921. Peking: A Social Survey. New York: George H. Doran Co. P. 208).

For better or worse, Sidney Gamble never set out to document China’s Republic era martial artists.  Perhaps that is just as well.  It is all to easy to read only the discussions of a single topic that interests us and begin to assume that such practices were omnipresent.  The challenge facing students of Chinese martial studies is not only to reconstruct the history of these fighting systems, but to understand their place in a much broader society where most individuals had little interest in the subject.

Gamble’s work is interesting to me precisely because it never places the martial arts at the center of the discussion.  And yet, these topics and practices are never totally out of view.  Even Beijing’s foreign residents and newspapers followed (from a distance) the developments of the Jingwu or Guoshu associations, and everyone could relate stories of particularly impressive (or pathetic) marketplace performances.  Yet far from being the center of the social universe, these martial organizations and practices remained one social movement among many.  The key to winning influence was in the friends you made, and how the martial arts sought to rhetorically position themselves.

Historians are most familiar with the modernist (Jingwu) and statist (Guoshu) discourses seen in the major reform movements of the period.  Yet in Gamble’s various home movies, photos and written accounts we see smaller martial arts groups continuing to be involved in local events and making common cause with other guardians of China’s performance and folk cultures.  In recent years this pathway (mostly ignored by elites in the 1920s) has come to the fore as China’s “folk” martial artists have attempted to position themselves as the vanguard of attempts to promote the nation’s “intangible cultural heritage” both at home and abroad.  Gamble’s work suggests that perhaps we should also be looking to the fruitful 1920s to locate the origins of this movement as well.

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If you are interested this you might also want to read: Collecting Chinese Swords and other Weapons in late 19th Century Xiamen (Amoy)

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Introduction

Co-authorship of today’s post is shared with Joseph Svinth, the editor of the EJMAS and multiple other important works on martial arts studies.   He brought the following account and historic photographs to my attention, and we both agreed that they were worth sharing here.

It seemed as though the events of WWI had largely receded from the public consciousness over the last few decades.  Yet the Great War has been making a comeback in popular culture.  It served as the setting for the hit 2017 film “Wonder Woman,” as well as several other projects appearing on the small screen.  It is often forgotten that China was officially a combatant in WWI (having declared war on Germany and her allies in 1917).  While China never sent troops to fight on the Western front, it did provide the UK and France with a large labor corps to assist the war effort. The opening scenes of Donnie Yen’s 2010 film “Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen” helped to renew popular appreciation of that fact in China and the West.

Yet what was the Chinese Labor Corps? Following the horrific (and largely unexpected) losses of the first two years of the war, the allied governments found themselves facing an acute manpower crisis on the Western front.  To alleviate this pressure the French (and later British) governments began negotiations with China to provide a large body of non-combatant laborers.  These individuals were typically drawn from poor families in Shandong and other provinces of northern and central China.  The provision of about 140,000 workers freed up allied soldiers allowing them (for better or worse) to return to the trenches.

The members of the Chinese Labor Corps performed a wide variety of tasks.  The simplest included digging trenches, filling sandbags and setting up camps.  More specialized assignments included working in weapons factories, unloading ships at various ports, and cleaning and maintaining heavy weapons such as tanks.  Between ten and twenty thousand members of the Labor Corps died during WWI, and their graves can be found in war cemeteries across Western Europe.  Most returned home in 1919 or 1920, yet at least 5,000 individuals remained in France and helped to create that country’s Chinese community.

The experiences of members of the Labor Corp were highly variable.  Many individuals were forced to work for extremely poor wages, and some were even deprived of basic food and supplies.  Others seem to have weathered the conflict better and a few were trained as semi-skilled workers.  These units were led by British and French officers and were accompanied by Chinese students who acted as translators.

At least one of the officers who worked with the Chinese Labor Corps should be well known to students of martial arts history.  Ernest John Harrison made a name for himself as both an intrepid journalist and an early student of Judo.  While living in Japan Harrison became the first Westerner to receive a blackbelt from the Kodokan.  He went on to write many books and articles.  Early in his career he tended to tackle more political questions, but after WWII the public knew him best for his many volumes on various aspects of Judo.  Anyone interested in learning more about him should check out this “autobiography”, based on Harrison’s private correspondence with the American martial arts pioneer R. W. Smith.

Harrison was already an avid wrestler and judo practitioner by the time that he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in British military and assigned to the Chinese Labor Corp.  As such he was in a good position to observe the Lunar New Year celebrations that his troops staged in 1918. He noted with interest the performance of “katas” (his term) and weapons demonstrations.  At one point, Harrison even found himself facing off against a Chinese martial artist in both jacketed and stripped wrestling.  He also reported on a brick breaking demonstration.

Harrison’s account notes that his fellow officers and countrymen also observed and photographed these demonstrations.  Luckily for us, many of these historic photographs still survive, so we can visualize with ease the scenes that he describes.  The existence of these photos also raises two additional points that are worth considering.

Joseph Svinth notes that it is clear that these celebrations had been planned by the Chinese workers themselves and quite a bit of preparation went into them.  It is not really a surprise to see the martial arts being demonstrated in a setting like this.  Yet it is important to note that even in an explicitly militarized context, the Chinese martial arts never appeared in a “pure” form.  Practical wrestling was always juxtaposed with amateur opera, actors on stilts, iron palm demonstrations and sword dancing.  It is sometimes assumed that there was once a pure “military” art that was debased by the world of the seasonal festival or marketplace street fair.  Indeed, that was the operating theory of many early 20th century reform organizations, including the Jingwu Association (whose very name means something like “pure martial.”)  While not denying that the martial arts have had a “serious” and a “military” aspect, the experience of the Chinese Labor Corps seems to suggest that these things could never be fully extracted from the other cultural factors that traditionally surrounded these fighting systems, even in an environment as grim as the battlefields of WWI.

Second, these scenes of the Chinese martial arts were not enjoyed in isolation.  Soldiers from many nations saw these displays.  And on other holidays (Christmas and New Year) they tended to enjoy their own forms of boxing, wrestling, theater and pantomime.  The 1910s and 1920s were a period of intense globalization and cultural exchange.  While WWI demolished important aspects of the global trade system, the meeting of so many soldiers and cultures on the Western front encouraged other types of exchange and cultural learning.  If nothing else, the sad shared experiences of trench raids led all sorts of individuals to wonder about better and more appropriate forms of martial art and hand to hand combat training.

The presence of the Chinese Labor Corps in Europe ensured that they too would be part of this conversation. Chinese travelers brought their experience with Western boxing back to their homeland, while individuals like Harrison got to see iron palm demonstrations and try their hand against China’s martial artists.  During the 1920s and 1930s many individuals in China would begin to actively promote their martial arts on the global stage precisely because the martial arts had become the subject of a truly global conversation.  The Lunar New Year celebration of the Chinese Labor Corps was an important harbinger of things to come, and who better to announce its arrival than E. J. Harrison?

Description of Source Material

“Transcription of a thick notebook (some 132 pages and nearly 38,000 words) in which Ernest John Harrison records his life as an officer in the Chinese Labour Corps, starting on 14 December 1917 and ending on 25 July 1918, going from Japan to China to Canada to England to France.  The original is in the possession of his daughter, Mrs Aldona Collins…  The account is in his handwriting.  Where there is doubt about the spelling of a word, mainly names, this is signified with (?).  R.  Bowen. November MM.” [Note: I have added additional paragraph breaks to make the document easier to read in a digital format.]

11:          Probably the most enjoyable and satisfactory day yet spent in camp.  Companies were roll-called and then given the rest of the day to themselves.  When I arrive on parade company was drawn up with lance-corporals facing right flank, in which position the entire company solemnly saluted me.  NCOs and p’ai t’ous came up to the mess soon after nine am.  They made a gallant showing .  Lowder and all the rest admitted that they carried off the palm for smartness, as exemplified in marching, turning, etc.  My English-speaking corporal tendered me the NCO’s cards with names transliterated and also two crimson paper scrolls bearing names of members of company and also communicating some special New Year sentiment.  Burman, as at one time assistant officer, also received cards.

I acknowledged greetings to the best of my poor ability, the while my messmates on the verandah above made ribald remarks at my expense.  The men went off as smartly as they came.  Afterwards I visited bunk-house and told them how pleased I was with their performance.  It is undoubtedly gratifying to see that, after all, one’s efforts have borne fruit.  Hennigan, Thompson, Spence and I went for a walk before tiffin.  We did perhaps four miles across country to a Japanese settlement, where we drank some beer at a tea-house.  Rising Sun flags were displayed everywhere in honour of the Japanese New Year.  Here too we met one of Hennigar’s sergeants, a fine-looking fellow, who is a local resident. He took us to his home and introduced us to his brother and nieces.  For such a man the surroundings were really surprisingly decent; showing how good a type often enlists in the coolie corps.  Returned in good time for tea.

While enjoying my post-tiffin nap the head boy called me saying that Van Ess wanted me to come out to see some coolie stunts.  I went down and found two fellows stripped to the waist going through kata-like movements.  One man had a knife with which he made mimic attacks upon the other.  The display was quite good and thrilling in its way.  Then nothing would satisfy Van Ess but that I should try conclusions with the bigger man of the two.  He being stripped it was not easy to obtain a grip, and during the first encounter, as I twisted his arm, he caught my foot and managed to bring me on all-fours to the ground – of course no fall at all in wrestling, but none the less a source of great delight to the mess onlookers.  Then we repaired to softer soil on the East side of the mess.  The coolie donned his tunic and in quick succession I twice put him on his back without trouble.  He declined to have any further truck with me.

The two fellows then continued their stunts.  The culmination was one in which the smaller man lay with his head resting cheek downwards on a stool; the other placed seven bricks upon the other side of the head, and then seizing a single brick dealt the pile a violent blow which shattered them in fragments over the head of the recumbent coolie who at once sprang up none the worse for his experience.  The taller coolie also broke several bricks over his own head. Several snaps were taken by Van Ess, Lowder, Cormack, etc, of these interesting scenes.

Shortly before four pm a procession headed by the camp “band” paid us a state visit.  There were the mandarin and daughter (or wife), the mandarin astride a pole and the girl in a sedan chair carried on bearers’ shoulders, an escort comprised of several men on stilts, including our sergeant-major also made up as a mandarin who staggered perilously as though under the influence of liquor.  One of the stilt-walkers was made up as a girl carrying a fan, he was simply immense, his imitation of the mincing steps of the conventional belle, the craning forward of the neck, the handling of the fan and the simper being ludicrous beyond words.  A squad of “soldiers” clad in our jail-birds’ uniforms, armed with wooden guns marched behind the band, and deliberately marched out of step.  They were priceless.  Unfortunately, the sergeant-major became so intoxicated with his success that he outdid himself and fell rather heavily.  I then left the scene and returned to the mess for tea.  Sayer told me at tiffin time that he had had a yarn with my men during the forenoon.  He said they referred to me as the “No.1″ officer in camp!   They praised my good temper and declared I hardly ever struck them like other officers.  Sayer assured them I had a very bad temper of which they had better be beware.  One man said he knew coolies were not beaten in France.  Sayer told him he was wrong and that if he objected to corporal punishments for his misdeeds he had better not go to France.  The man, however, concluded he would go in any case and risk it.

A Quick Update

My other writing projects are continuing well, though weekends are never quite as productive as one might hope.  But my loss may be your gain in the shape of some fresh material here on the blog.

It seems that among martial artists there has been renewed interest in “stone locks” and other types of traditional Chinese strength training equipment in the last few years.  I have already covered this topic once before.  Nevertheless, I now feel compelled to share a recent find with the readers of Kung Fu Tea (see above).  This photograph ran on the UPI news wire service in 1961 and I was lucky enough to snag an original copy of the image in an auction.  Its caption reads:

Exercise is the order of the day-every day-for most of the 670 million people of communist China, and the Red regime stresses psychical fitness to produce better workers and tougher soldiers.  Upper: An elderly peasant on an agricultural co-operative in Liaoning province lifted two heavy blocks in one of the two daily calisthenic sessions which are required of all communist workers.

Its a very nicely composed image, though upon closer inspection one suspects that we are actually seeing a scene from a public demonstration rather than a typical daily exercise session.  There are certainly more people standing around applauding than one might otherwise be able to account for.  And if you look carefully at the lower right hand corner of the image it appears that there is another strongman lifting a set of stone wheels that are obscured by the individual in the center of the frame.

The Cold War rhetoric in the caption is quite interesting and it reminds us of what was once a common context in which the Chinese martial arts were discussed.  Of course, all of this has long since vanished from our collective memory and been replaced with more recent images of figures like Bruce Lee, Ip Man and the ubiquitous Shaolin monk.  At some point in the future I hope to delve further into the Cold War inflected images of the martial arts in “Red China” that frequented the pages of Western newspapers between the 1960’s and the 1980’s.  Hopefully this photograph will serve as down payment on that conversation.

Still, it is always fascinating to see a vintage image of stone locks in use.  Those interested is seeing more great images (or reading about their use) may want to check out a short interview that I recently did for the Red Pagoda gallery.  Its a quick read, and the blog’s photography and design is really excellent.   Click here to read more:

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If you enjoyed this you might also want to see: Through a Lens Darkly (25): A Sawback Dadao in Hangzhou

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