Unit 8 · China Is Not One Kung Fu

In Mandarin Chinese, the common word for martial arts is wushu. It joins wu, meaning military or martial, with shu, meaning art or skill. The word is old. Today it is also the official name of a modern sport run by national and world federations.

The English word kung fu comes from gongfu. In Chinese, gongfu means skill gained through long effort and time. A cook or a calligrapher can have gongfu. The spelling kung fu follows an older way of writing Chinese sounds in Latin letters.

In the 1920s and 1930s, China’s Republican government used a third word, guoshu. It means national art. Leaders chose it to link martial arts with the nation and public health. Each word points to a different chapter of history.

China is a large country with many regions and languages. Martial arts grew up in many local places. An old Chinese saying groups them roughly: nanquan beitui. It means southern fists, northern legs.

Northern systems grew in provinces such as Hebei, Shandong and Henan. Names include Chaquan and Bajiquan. Southern systems grew in Guangdong and Fujian. Names include Hung Gar, Choy Li Fut and Wing Chun. Many southern names reached the world in Cantonese spelling, through Hong Kong and emigrants.

The saying is a rough label, not a rule. Teachers moved between provinces, and families traded ideas. Modern wushu keeps the old split in its events. It has a Changquan event, for long fist, and a Nanquan event, for southern fist.

Chenjiagou, or Chen Village, lies in Henan Province. The Chen family there kept a martial art for generations. Historians link the earliest records of taijiquan to this village in the 1600s and 1700s.

In the 1800s, Yang Luchan studied in Chen Village. He later taught in Beijing, where his students included people close to the imperial court. His teaching grew into Yang style. Other teachers founded Wu, Sun and Hao styles. Each style carries a family name.

Styles named for families show how arts spread: teacher to student, one line at a time. In 2020, UNESCO added taijiquan to its list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. The listing honored a living practice kept by communities, not one single school.

The Shaolin Monastery stands on Mount Song in Henan Province. Emperor Xiaowen of the Northern Wei dynasty had it built in 495 CE. It was made for an Indian monk named Batuo. It is a Buddhist temple first, a home for monks and their teaching.

A stone tablet, or stele, at the temple dates from 728 CE. It records that Shaolin monks helped Li Shimin in 621 CE. Li Shimin later became Emperor Taizong of the Tang dynasty. In return, the monastery received land.

Later records from the Ming dynasty, in the 1500s, describe Shaolin monks fighting coastal raiders with staffs. In 1928 a warlord’s army burned much of the temple. In 2010 UNESCO listed Shaolin within the Historic Monuments of Dengfeng as a World Heritage site.

Bodhidharma was a Buddhist monk from India or Central Asia. Chinese Buddhist writings say he came to China in the 400s or 500s. Chan Buddhism, called Zen in Japan, honors him as a founder. Early writings about him describe meditation, not fighting.

A popular legend says Bodhidharma taught the Shaolin monks exercises that became their martial art. The story is linked to a book called the Yijin Jing, or Sinew-Changing Classic. Its preface claims an ancient origin. Historians date the text to the early 1600s.

In the 1930s the Chinese historian Tang Hao studied these claims. He argued that the Bodhidharma story did not match the older records. Later scholars, such as Meir Shahar, agree. The legend is still told in many schools, so historians label it as a story.

The Wudang Mountains are in Hubei Province. They are home to many Daoist temples. Ming emperors paid for large buildings there in the 1400s. In 1994 UNESCO listed the Ancient Building Complex in the Wudang Mountains as a World Heritage site.

A legend says a Daoist named Zhang Sanfeng invented taijiquan at Wudang after watching animals. Records that tie him to taijiquan appear only centuries later. Historians such as Tang Hao found no early evidence for the claim.

Founding stories like this are common. They give a school an old and famous origin. Some writers set a Wudang family of arts against a Shaolin family, as if one were Daoist and one Buddhist. Historians treat that pairing as a later way of sorting, not an ancient fact.

In 1910 a group in Shanghai founded the Jingwu Athletic Association. It is also spelled Chin Woo. The martial artist Huo Yuanjia was linked to its start. He died in 1910, the year it opened.

Older teaching often happened inside a family or a small circle of students. Jingwu was different. It was a public association, a club with members, officers and a written purpose. It taught several northern and southern styles in one place, along with sports and music.

Jingwu opened branches in other Chinese cities. By the 1920s it also had branches in Southeast Asia, where many Chinese families had moved. Its model made martial arts look like a modern club activity, open to people outside one teacher’s family.

In 1928 China’s Nationalist government set up the Central Guoshu Institute in Nanjing, then the capital. Its leader was Zhang Zhijiang, a general. Its goal was to make martial arts a national program for health and defense.

The institute trained teachers and held national examinations, the first in 1928. Provinces and counties opened their own guoshu halls. Teachers from rival styles were asked to work under one national roof. This was a new idea after centuries of local teaching.

In 1936 China sent a team to show martial arts at the Berlin Olympic Games. It was a demonstration, not a medal event. The program was cut short when Japan’s full-scale invasion of China began in 1937 and war spread.

After the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, the state organized sport through national bodies. The Chinese Wushu Association was founded in 1958. Committees wrote standard routines drawn from many older styles, so every athlete could be judged on the same set.

A taolu is a set routine performed alone. It is judged a bit like gymnastics or figure skating. Under world federation rules, separate judges score the quality of movement, the overall performance and the degree of difficulty.

Taolu events carry old names. Changquan draws on northern styles, Nanquan on southern ones, and Taijiquan on the family styles. Weapon events include the broadsword, straight sword, staff and spear. A judged event rewards a clean performance, not a win over a partner.

Sanda, also called sanshou, means free fighting. China developed it as a modern contest sport in the late 1970s and 1980s, with national rules and national meets. It is part of wushu, but it follows its own rule book.

Sanda bouts take place on a raised square platform called a leitai. The name comes from older public challenge stages. Athletes wear gloves, headgear and body protectors, and they are sorted into weight classes. Referees and judges award points, and leaving the platform costs points.

Taolu and sanda share a governing body but not a rule book. One is judged like a performance. The other is scored like boxing or wrestling. Knowing which code is in use tells you what an athlete is trying to do.

The International Wushu Federation was founded in 1990. Wushu joined the Asian Games in Beijing that same year. The first World Wushu Championships were held in Beijing in 1991, with athletes from many countries.

At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, a wushu tournament was held with the organizers’ approval, but it was not an official Olympic medal sport. The IOC later chose wushu for the 2026 Youth Olympic Games in Dakar, Senegal.

In English, one word, kung fu, often covers all of this. It can mean a village art, a family style, a temple story, a sport routine or a movie scene. Using one word this way can flatten the map. Historians bring the map back by naming the place, the teaching line and the rule book.

Wong Fei-hung lived from 1847 to 1924 in Guangdong Province, in southern China. He learned the Hung Gar style from his father, Wong Kei-ying. He practiced traditional Chinese medicine and ran a clinic called Po Chi Lam in Foshan.

Starting in 1949, Hong Kong studios made a long series of films about him. The actor Kwan Tak-hing played him in dozens of them. In 1991 director Tsui Hark made Once Upon a Time in China, with Jet Li as Wong. Each film invented new adventures.

A biography is a true account of a person’s life, based on records. A folk hero is a real or imagined person whose story grows as people retell it. Wong Fei-hung is both. Historians separate the doctor in Foshan from the hero on the screen.

Huo Yuanjia was a martial artist from Tianjin, in northern China. He is linked to the founding of the Jingwu Athletic Association in Shanghai. He died in 1910. Stories about him say he took on foreign strongmen who issued public challenges.

In 1972 Fist of Fury, made by Golden Harvest in Hong Kong, told a story set after his death. Bruce Lee played Chen Zhen, a student who seeks justice. Chen Zhen is a fictional character, created for the film. The film shows Japanese characters mocking the Chinese as weak.

The film spoke to anger about foreign power in China in the early 1900s. It was made for audiences in Hong Kong, then a British colony, and across Asia. In 2006 Jet Li starred in Fearless, another film about Huo. It too mixed record and invention.

Ip Man was born in Foshan, Guangdong, in 1893. He learned Wing Chun there. After 1949 he moved to Hong Kong, where he began teaching Wing Chun in the early 1950s. He died in Hong Kong in 1972.

In Hong Kong, Ip Man taught in rented rooms and rooftops, and his students opened schools of their own. One of his students was a teenager named Bruce Lee. Through students who moved abroad, Ip Man’s lineage reached Europe, North America and Australia.

In 2008 the film Ip Man, starring Donnie Yen, made him famous to millions who had never heard of him. It added invented fights and events. Sequels followed. Many new students came to Wing Chun schools because of the films, and teachers had to explain what was history and what was screen story.

Bruce Lee was born in San Francisco in 1940 and grew up in Hong Kong. He studied Wing Chun with Ip Man. In 1959 he moved to the United States. In Seattle he opened a school and called his teaching Jun Fan Gung Fu. He later taught in Oakland and Los Angeles.

Lee taught students who were not Chinese, at a time when some teachers in Chinatowns taught only Chinese students. In 1967 he gave his own approach a name: Jeet Kune Do. The name means way of the intercepting fist in Cantonese. He called it a way of thinking about fighting rather than a fixed style.

His films The Big Boss (1971), Fist of Fury (1972) and Enter the Dragon (1973) made him a world star. He died in Hong Kong in July 1973, at age 32, just before Enter the Dragon opened. Enter the Dragon was made by Warner Bros. with Golden Harvest, a Hong Kong studio.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Hong Kong studios such as Shaw Brothers made many martial arts films. A genre is a type of film with familiar settings and stories. Shaolin became one of the genre’s favorite settings. The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, from Shaw Brothers in 1978, showed a hero training through many halls.

Those halls were a film set. The real temple’s records do not list thirty-six chambers. Films borrowed the temple’s name and its legends, then invented new ones. Audiences in Hong Kong, Southeast Asia and later the West came to picture Shaolin through these sets.

In 1982 the film Shaolin Temple, starring a young Jet Li, was shot partly at the real monastery in Henan. It was a huge hit in China. Visitors poured into Dengfeng, and new martial arts schools opened near the temple. A film changed a real place.

From 1972 to 1975, the ABC network aired a series called Kung Fu. Its hero was a Shaolin-trained monk of Chinese and white American parents. He wandered the American West in the 1800s. The show made the word kung fu familiar in millions of American homes.

The lead was played by David Carradine, a white actor. Many Asian American actors and viewers criticized the choice. They pointed out that Asian actors were rarely offered lead roles on American television. This practice of casting white actors in Asian roles is often called whitewashing.

The show was set in a real time: Chinese workers did help build the American West, including the Central Pacific Railroad in the 1860s. But its Shaolin scenes came from legend and the studio. It is evidence about 1970s television, not about Shaolin.

Chinese is written in characters, not letters. When a name is written in Latin letters, people must choose a spelling system. Romanization is the name for writing a language in the Latin alphabet. Cantonese and Mandarin also sound different.

One style can have many spellings. After Ip Man’s death, his students’ groups in Hong Kong and abroad used Wing Chun, Ving Tsun and Wing Tsun. The Ving Tsun Athletic Association was founded in Hong Kong in 1967 by Ip Man and his students. Some groups registered their spelling as a trademark.

A spelling can work like a family name. It can tell you which organization a school belongs to. So when a school sign uses a certain spelling, a historian asks which association uses it, and who gave that school’s teacher the right to teach.

Older Chinese arts did not use colored belts. A student’s place came from the teacher and the lineage. Belts and dan grades came from Japanese judo, where Kanō Jigorō began them in the 1880s.

In the late 1990s the Chinese Wushu Association launched the duan wei system. Duan means level and wei means rank. It has nine levels in three groups, marked on certificates. The goal was one national standard across many styles.

A certificate is a written record that an official body gives to a person. It names the holder, the rank and who awarded it. A historian can check a certificate against the body that issued it. A movie can give a hero a title, but it cannot issue a real rank.

A film is a primary source for the time it was made. Fist of Fury shows what Hong Kong filmmakers in 1972 wanted to say about foreign power in China. The Kung Fu series shows who American television cast in 1972.

Later films show later times. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, directed by Ang Lee, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2001. It was made by companies in Taiwan, Hong Kong, mainland China and the United States. Its partners show how the film business had become global.

Kung Fu Panda, an American animated film from DreamWorks in 2008, set a cartoon story in an imagined China. Each film tells us about its makers and audiences. None of them is a record of how a real school was founded or who taught whom.

From the 1800s, many Chinese people left southern China for Southeast Asia, the Americas and Australia. Many came from Guangdong. A community living far from its homeland is called a diaspora.

In many Chinatowns, martial arts schools were tied to family and district associations. These schools often trained lion dance troupes, which perform at Lunar New Year, weddings and store openings. The lion dance carries meanings of good fortune in many Chinese communities.

After 1965, the United States changed its immigration law. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 ended quotas based on national origin. More Chinese immigrants arrived, and more schools opened. Many of them taught southern styles and used Cantonese names.

A school’s name is a claim. It says where the art came from and who taught it. A historian checks a claim against records, the same way a detective checks a story against evidence.

Useful records include a charter or founding papers, certificates, photographs with dates, newspaper reports and letters. A charter is a document that creates an organization and states its purpose. Jingwu’s founding in 1910 and the Ving Tsun Athletic Association’s in 1967 are both on record.

Films, posters and legends are records too, but of something else. They show what people believed or enjoyed. When a film and a charter disagree about a school, the charter usually tells us more about the school, and the film tells us more about its audience.

Martial arts gyms around the world open class with a warm-up and a safety check. The habit protects students more than any piece of gear.

1. Tell a grown-up you are practicing, and practice where one can see you.

2. Clear a space about two big steps wide in every direction. Move pets, bags and furniture.

3. Warm up for five minutes: jog in place, arm circles, leg swings, and gentle knee lifts.

4. Watch the move in the Dojo, step by step. Then try each step slowly before you join them.

5. Use control: stop every strike and kick in the air at the point you choose.

What helps: count the steps out loud. Practice both sides. Rest and drink water between rounds.

Stay safe: practice alone, into the air, never at a person. Keep kicks at knee or belly height until your balance is steady. Falls only on a mat or soft grass. Stop if something hurts.

Northern and southern Chinese systems differ in many ways, but many of them train mabu (horse step), a wide, low stance held still. Okinawan karate later used a similar stance, kiba-dachi.

1. Step your feet about twice shoulder-width apart, toes pointing forward.

2. Bend your knees and lower your hips, keeping your back upright.

3. Press your knees gently outward so they stay over your toes.

4. Bring fists to your waist and hold for five slow breaths. Stand up and shake out your legs.

What helps: start higher than you think. Add a breath or two each day as your legs get stronger.

Stay safe: if a knee aches, rise higher or stop. Keep the floor dry and flat.

Karate calls it neko-ashi-dachi, cat-foot stance, and many Chinese systems use a similar empty stance. The front foot is light, like a cat ready to step. This is called a cat stance.

1. Stand with one foot a short step in front of the other.

2. Bend the back knee and sit most of your weight onto the back leg.

3. Lift the front heel so only the ball of the front foot touches the floor.

4. Keep your back upright and hands up in front. Hold, then switch sides.

What helps: you should be able to lift the front foot off the floor without falling. That shows your weight is on the back leg.

Stay safe: if the back knee feels strained, stand a little taller.

Many kung fu systems, and modern self-defense classes, teach the palm strike: an open hand that leads with its heel, the firm pad above the wrist.

1. Stand in a short stance with hands up in front of your chest.

2. Open one hand. Pull the fingers back and keep them together.

3. Push the hand straight forward into the air at chest height, leading with the heel of the palm.

4. Bring it back. Switch hands.

What helps: bend the wrist back so the heel of the palm faces forward. Keep your thumb tucked beside your hand.

Stay safe: into the air only. Stop just before your elbow locks.