This article is written by Hing Chao and was first printed in the 2353 issue of Ming Pao Weekly, it continues on many of the themes first written in the article on Southern Boxing which I have also translated on my Blog. I am currently working with Hing on preparing a bilingual book that will compile the numerous articles published in this series of Hong Kong Wu Lin. Further updates to follow over the next few months.
A large proportion of the original inhabitants of Hong Kong were Hakka people, one of the 5 large clans of the New Territories was the Tang Clan, who were one of the Hakka immigrants groups into Hong Kong during the Song Dynasty. Most of the Hakka clans who had come to Hong Kong during the early Qing Dynasty were from Eastern Guangdong.
The Hakka have traditionally favored the martial arts, in the Walled Village of the Tang Clan there are many heirlooms which have to do with practicing the martial arts, like the stone lock, halberd, heavy bow, etc. Lung Yeuk Tau is also one of the few places in Hong Kong where an armed rebellion took place during the Qing Dynasty, and has retained the sign stating [Wu Kui] until the present day. In addition the design of the walled village is the best example of the Hakka people martial readiness, supporting the fact that there were often armed incidents that took place between villages of different families. Just after the Opium Wars, when the British had taken control of the New Territories, the Tang Clan recruited villagers from the surrounding villages to resist the British. These historical records tell us that the martial culture in these villages in the 19th century was very well developed, and this Martial Spirit lasted well into the twentieth century.
The Hakka tradition of martial arts and culture is based upon special historical, geographical and social causes. To deeper understand the Hakka martial arts, we need to expand our horizons, and examine Hakka martial arts during the transition from the Ming to the Qing Dynasty.
Fu Lao 福佬 and He Lao 鶴佬
When modern scholars study Southern China, they use "the Cultural and Economic Sphere of the South China coast" as a unifying concept. From a geographical perspective, this stretches from the two counties of Zhangzhou 漳州 and Quanzhou 泉州, west towards Longgang and Dongguan and although this area includes the different cultural groupings such as Minnan 閩南, Hakka and Chao-Shan 潮汕, it has a strong collective power, comprising a unique, multi-constituent cultural and economic system as well as a huge but unstructured market and network of human interaction. From a historical, social or cultural perspective, southern Fukien and Eastern Guangdong have tens of thousands of connections. The economic development of the mountainous and coastal areas of Eastern Guangdong can be attributable to the influx of Southern Fukienese during the Qing period, so the "Fu Lao" culture of Shantou and Hailingfeng can be considered an extension of Minnan culture, with the culture of the Hakka people being one that crosses provincial boundaries. "The Cultural and Economic Sphere of the East China Coast" is divided into mountainous and coastal areas, the former stretches westwards from the Yongchun and Pinghe counties to the hill areas of Huizhou. The latter from Zhangzhou and Quanzhou to Chaozhou and Shantou, and the coastal areas of Hailingfeng.
In this area, the main culture and language groups are those of the Fu Lao or He Lao culture. From the time of the Sung Dynasty, this was the area where the maritime economy was the most developed, and was the starting point of the Maritime Silk Road. The slaughter of the Semu caste 色目 (a caste of Uighurs who served under the Mongols during the Yuan Dynasty) by Zhu Yuan Zhang (the founding Emperor of the Ming Dynasty) and the Qing policy of banning maritime trade and forced relocation, had retarded the development of the region, but had been unable to control the strong desire of the peoples to traverse the Pacific. Similarly, the Ming policy of preventing the people from trading across the sea, was powerless to prevent the rise of large private business groupings, and during the end of the Ming Period men like Wang Zhi and Zheng Zhi Long (Koxinga's father) were able to control large areas using naval power and private armies. The culture of the Overseas Chinese could be said to have originated in the local development of a trans Pacific culture.
From the time of the Ming and the Qing, the movement of peoples from this area overseas, had fundamental societal causes behind it, of which one of the most important was population pressure.
The Expansion of the Population leads to Conflicts in Society
The population problem in South China had already arisen during the Early Ming. During the transition from the Song to the Ming, the threat of military peoples from the North led to the third mass movement of population from North to South in China's history. A portion of the Hakka peoples who had been forced to move to Jiangxi and Fujian during the Wei Jin and Five Dynasty Period and during the Yellow Turban uprising during the Tang Dynasty, moved to Southern Fujian, Northern Guangdong and Eastern Guangdong. According to research, many of these peoples were the subordinates of Wen Tian Xiang, having fought a war of resistance against the Yuan soldiers in the mountainous region between Guangdong and Fujian, eventually moved to northern and eastern Guangdong.
The large scale movement of the Hakka peoples during the Song-Yuan period undeniably brought an hidden disaster to the Qiuling area of Fujian. The flat irrigated land in Fujian province had already been scarce so the immigrant Hakka people were only able to build their homes in the rough mountainous areas. Towards the middle of the Ming, the population pressures started to evolve into a culture of crossing the Pacific ocean to seek a new life. Under the traditional directives of Confucian thought, households would uncontrollably increase their progeny 添丁, leading the ratio of arable land to people to decline from 5.3 mu 畝 (614.4 m² x 5.3) per person during the Song period to decline to 3.3 mu. As the country entered the 26th Year of the Emperor Hung Wu (1393), the population of the province had increased to 3.9 million people, which placed a heavy burden in terms of generating enough food. During the middle of the reign of the Qing Emperor Qianlong (1711-1799), the population broke through the 10 million barrier, and each person had only 1.7 mu under cultivation. Under this pressure, the underclass became marginalized, and were forced to leave their home towns, to look for a livelihood in new areas. A portion of these people, especially Hakka people, chose to move to the far mountainous regions of Southern Fujian, and Guangdong and slowly expanded to Huizhou 惠州 (central Guangdong), Heyuan 河源 (NE Guangdong) and Qingyuan 清遠 (NW Guangdong).
Also due to geography, a portion of these peoples chose to traverse the ocean to Taiwan, South East Asia, and or even further to build a new life. According to the data, the Han people only started to settle in Taiwan in large numbers during the end of the Ming period and a large number of these were Hakka peoples from Quanzhou and Zhangzhou. During the Qing period this expanded to include those from Chaozhou.
On the mainland, the population pressures had another cultural effect, which had two aspects: first the increase in population accelerated the already fierce competition for resources, eventually leading to the problem of a militarized society, where family groups would fight to gain control of land. This armed conflict could be traced to the end of the Ming Dynasty, and by the Qing had enveloped the whole of the Southern Chinese coastal region. The second arose when the agricultural economy could no longer support the increased population, this gave rise to "Non-traditional Societies" where new "Family Groups" arose due to oaths of brotherhood, or through religious beliefs that brought together people from different regions, cultures and bloodlines. In Southern Fujian these two trends combined together leading to the rise of Secret Societies deriving from oaths of brotherhood or religious beliefs or association with various temples. These two cultural trends gave impetus to development of the martial arts of Southern China - "Southern Boxing" systems and were the most important causes in their formation.
Armed conflict and the culture of local marital arts.
The area in Southern China that was first subject to populational pressures was Southern Fujian and hence it was in this area that armed conflicts arose. The first battles using weapons were between family groups who had organized and armed themselves, and could be described as the militarization of traditional society. During the beginning of the Qing period, the flames of war and the Emperor Kangxi's (1661-1722) policy of banning maritime travel and forced relocation of people from the coast, had to a certain extent delayed the effects of problems that had originated during the Ming period. But during the reign of Yongzheng (1722-1735), the southern economy and population had recovered, the problem of armed conflict arose once again, became very severe during the middle of his reign and by the Year of Qianjia became one of the most serious problems of his rule. In addition, the decline of the military capability of the Qing and the militarization of the people had a direct relationship. During the Year of Qianjia, the the people rose in rebellion in many regions, and the Taiping Kingdom, Xiaodao Association 小刀會 and Shandi Association 山地會 caused chaos, forcing the traditional Bannermen and footsoldiers (who had already started to show the signs of incipient decline) to fend for themselves and rendering them unable to venture out to other areas, and thus were unable to maintain the structure of society in the countryside. Under these conditions, the Qing government loosened its grip and allowed the rural gentry to form self defense associations, greatly expanding the "rule of the elders" 長老之治 in the countryside. They unconsciously stimulated the development of a local militarized society, and once started, there was no turning back.
On the other hand, frequent armed clashes provided a large space for the development of local martial arts. We are unable to assess the actual contents of martial arts in the Southern Chinese region during this time, but according to available sources, there was a direct connection between the martial arts of the Ming era garrison troops of the south and the people. First, the development of Ming martial arts was greatly influenced by southern martial arts, the famous General Qi Jiguang who fought the Japanese pirates, introduced the content of Jiangxi and Fujian bare handed and weapon arts into his training and military formations. For example, in his book "Ji Xiao Shin Shu" 紀效新書 has a detailed record of the Mandarin Duck Formation 鴛鴦陳, besides the large spear, most of the martial arts in the formation come from the local martial arts, including the famous Rattan Shield Knife 藤牌刀 from the mountainous people of the Jiangxi and Fujian regions and the large [spade] used by all the farmers of the time. At the same time General Qi once spend a great deal of time researching empty hand techniques and selected what he though to be the most useful 32 attacking forms and compiled it into the Boxing Manual of the 32 forms.
There are researchers who feel, that Fujianese martial arts was heavily influenced by General Qi, and they even took forms directly from the boxing manual. In recent years, the Japanese martial arts researcher, Ozeki [ ] Sensei wrote research comparing White Crane and the General Qi's boxing manual. He indicated that Fujianese White Crane contained many movements that were the same as the boxing manual, and many even had the same name. [As to the relationship between White Crane and the Boxing Manual, I have previously written about this in previous issues and the reader should consult the essay "Southern Boxing" and "Yong Chun White Crane: The Founder of Karate and Essense of Fujian Culture" ]
According to the Yong Chun White Crane's account of its origins, the Founder of White Crane - Fang Qilang's father Fang Zhong (Fang Zhang Guang) was a refugee, and during the year when the Ming Dynasty fell (1644), he moved from Lijiang County in Zhejiang to Fujian, to set up a base to resist the Qing hegemony. So the early White Crane practitioners would have included many who were familiar with the Boxing Manual. In my humble opinion, the fact that Minnan martial arts is a development of the Boxing Manual is not strange at all, although White Crane has its own set of principles and fighting system, especially the crane method. According to my research, the framework of principles and system of applications was already at a very mature stage during the middle of the Qing period - the empty hand techniques had the "Three Attacks" 三戰 as their foundation, and the weapons were mainly the cudgel staff and double knife. Furthermore the Boxing Manual is a form of "Long fist", whereas White Crane emphasizes close distance fighting, so the Fujianese martial arts do not all derive from the boxing manual and have their own local constituents.
The development of Hakka and East Guangdong martial arts has a direct relationship with Fujian martial arts, and can be said to share of the same history, society and cultural background. The armed conflicts in Fujian and Guangdong often took place between the local and Hakka peoples. Under the condition where population increase had put pressure on land and resources, the original misunderstandings between different groups was bound to rapidly escalate, and the wounds caused by armed conflicts would further develop into traditional vendettas between family groups and villages.
The Hakka Fighting Spirit
Without doubt, the Hakka have lived in foreign lands, and having had to fight to control land and resources to ensure their survival, and came continuously into conflict with locals, the gave rise to a tribal identity that emphasized the martial, and was conservative and xenophobic. Thus Hakka martial arts are one of the most outstanding, most practical amongst the Lingan Martial Arts 嶺南武術. As the Hakka people are very conservative there have been few accounts of Hakka martial arts until now, and we have never seen any Hakka manuals of any historical merit. This has led to many problems when researching Hakka martial arts, for apart from some modern oral accounts and techniques, there are no other cultural relics for us study. However from the level of martial applications we are able to make a few objective determinations.
First, Hakka martial arts have a strong southern, close fighting flavor: concave the chest, sink the shoulders, push out the back, and from the footwork the stance is rather narrow with a [straight] horse stance. Objectively speaking, Minnan, East Guangdong, and a few styles that have developed into the Pearl River delta, like Wing Chun, Yong Chun, Bak Mei, Dragon Style comprise one martial framework. Whether one talks about style, power emission, and application, these are very different from the Cantonese arts (especially those originally of the Pearl River Delta) such as Hung, Li, Choy, Mok style which have a comparatively wider area of movement and use the bow stance (side stance) and have the [wide] horse stance, which have a strong "Long Fist" flavor.
Hakka arts are traditionally called "teachings" such as Southern Mantis' "Zhu Family Teaching" 朱家教 and "Zhou Family Teaching." 周家教 Traditionally the countryside did not have a strong concept of martial arts schools, and most local martial arts were named after the teacher's surname. So calling it Zhu or Zhou family teaching has a stronger Hakka flavor than calling it Southern Mantis. According to Lee Tien Loy 李天來, the lineage holder of the Zhou (Chow) Family teaching, Mantis had its origins in the beginning to the middle of the 19th Century, where Chow Ah Nam incorporated the movements of the Mantis into Southern Shaolin.
Zhou Family Mantis, also called Southern Mantis, originated in Fujian Shaolin, the Founder Chow Ah Nam was a Hakka from Xingning county 興寧, and was [a worker at the Shaolin temple]. One day he was passing through a wood, he saw a mantis fighting with a [type of finch]相思雀, and thus was inspired to see that he could model a form of boxing on the mantis' movements. He caught the mantis and took it home and aggravated it with a blade of grass. Observing its fighting method, he thought up the Mantis Style. Subsequent to this, he received the teachings of the senior Shaolin Monk, Master Chan Yin and became a Grandmaster. He passed on his teachings to Wong Foo Goh, who then taught Lau Sui 劉瑞 , (1866-1942)... originally this was only taught to Hakka peoples and was only transmitted to sons and not daughters, but with the fall of the Qing Dynasty, Lau came as a refugee to Hong Kong in 1910 and it was only then that he began to teach this style to outsiders.
Hakka "Three Step Arrow" 三步箭 Versus White Crane "Three Attacks" 三戰
What is worth noticing is that Southern Mantis (and some other traditional Hakka styles) has a beginners' set called "Three Step Arrow" - whether one considers the structure or the way of emitting power, power training or applications, thy are all very similar to White Crane's "Three Attacks", one can almost say they came from the same source. I had previously discussed in the essay "The Mother Style of Southern Close Distance Boxing" the relationship between the relationship between the three attacks of Fujian kung fu and the "Three Developments" 三展 of Cantonese boxing, and theorized that the "Three Attacks" was the "Mother Style" of Southern Close Distance Boxing. Quoting from that Essay - "The Three Attacks is the core of Southern Close Distance Boxing, especially in Fujian province, all old styles have the "Three Attacks" as a basic form and training method and view the "Three Attacks" as the most central and introductory method.
Without doubt the Hakka "Three Step Arrow" has an uncommonly close relationship to the "Three Attacks". In the opinion of the author, the "Three Step Arrow" evolved out of the "Three attacks". Whether it is the training method, or the internal and external methods of emitting power, or concrete hand and kicking applications, it is even closer to the "Three Attacks" than the more common "Three Developments" set which is common in the Pearl River Delta, one can say that technically it is even closer. However in certain areas, it is quite different from the "Three Attacks". Simply put, when the Hakka people inherited and developed the Fujianese culture, they took an "emphasis on Hardness" developmental path and became one of the hardest and fiercest of the close fighting styles. Although Southern Mantis' internal principles are the same as Fujian's Taizu, White Crane, and Five Ancestor styles, but Southern mantis maintains a stronger emphasis on Gongfa, and to a certain extent has discarded the detailed applications with multiple variations.
Chao-Shan Choy Mok Styles and Southern Branch Systems
Apart from Southern Mantis, the other styles of East Guangdong contain the characteristics of Minnan styles, these include the martial arts of Chaozhou and Shantou (traditionally Swatow). Compared to Hakka styles the development of styles in the Chao-Shan area was relatively late, and a number of important styles were only named after they had been transmitted to Hong Kong, like the famous "Sea Land Tiger Boxing" 海虎龍拳 of Hailufeng later became "Choy Mok Boxing" However from the point of view of martial arts, as the Chao-Shan and Hailufeng regions were repositories of Fu-Lao culture whose original immigrants were from Fujian, compared to Hakka styles, evidence of their evolution from Fujianese styles is even stronger.
Several local Fujian styles, during the mass movement of peoples have also shifted their headquarters, moving from Southern Fujian to Eastern Guangdong, of which the "Southern Branch Boxing" 南枝拳 is representative of this trend. From the appearance and the style of attacks, this is very similar to Guangdong's Hung Kuen, only Southern Branch Boxing retains many of the characteristics of the "Old Hung Kuen" practiced in Zhangzhou in Fujian. The best example of this is the "Branch Hand" (Single Branch) of Southern Branch Boxing, is the same movement as the "Finger Hand" of Cantonese Hung Kuen, - the wrist is cocked back perpendicularly to the forearm, and the index finger and other fingers are curled into a "tiger's claw" shape. The difference lies in that this is only a training posture for Hung Kuen, and not used in applications, but this is a core hand form for Southern Branch Boxing, and used to attack the vulnerable points of the opponent. The writer supposes that Southern Branch boxing is one of the rare styles that retains the "death inducing" applications of traditional martial arts.
This hand posture is called "single blade of grass branch hand" and is used to attack the [scapula] where it is attacked to the upper back: if the attack is successful; and is not treated properly with the right medicine, if untreated for a long time the victim will die within half a year.
Due to the [pitiless] nature of the form - all who practice this form will see their hands deform. Although the hands can become deadly weapons through a long period of training, apart from martial arts the hands will not be good for much else. In recent years the large majority of schools have given up these "ultimate techniques." Branch hand retains the original reading of the characters and finger hand is a misreading and thus can be seen to have evolved from branch hand. This change in the name reflects the move from Fujian to Guangdong, and the transmission and exchange between different dialect groups. There are numerous such examples such as the three step arrow, three developments and three attacks as mentioned above. Apart from the martial arts themselves, the weapons popular in the Chao-Shan area are related to those in Southern Fujian, like Fujianese He Zhai Dao (double knife)合仔刀 is popular in the Chao-Shan area and it was only after it came to the Pearl River Delta that is evolved into the Butterfly knife.
If we treat the Fujian Southern Shaolin Temple as the birthplace of Southern Boxing, the oft-neglected area of Eastern Guangdong is the bridge between the Pearl River Delta and Southern Fujian. In order to further understand Southern martial arts, or to unravel the mystery of the interaction between Southern Fujian and Guangdong, the martial arts of Eastern Guangdong is the most important key.
The Eastern Guangdong Kungfu hidden in Hong Kong
We can still find Hakka martial arts in Hong Kong, most important of which is Southern Mantis, Dragon Style, Bak Mei, and Liu Min Pai. However their names also came late in their history, but this does not mean that they are new styles, this interesting phenomenon probably arose from the fact that the Hakka liked to name their martial arts after their teachers. For instance Zhu Style and Zhou Style came from the surnames of the respective teachers. The transmission of Cantonese arts came from the connections of the same family, transmitted from one Hakka village to another Hakka village, for instance Bak Mei was transmitted from a Hakka family member in Fanling in the New Territories who in the early twentieth century had gone to Canton to study under the Grandmaster Zhang Li Quan 張禮泉 and he later transmitted it to Sai Gong and Tsuen Wan villages in the territories.
When one looks at the recent history of Guangdong Kungfu, the influence of Fujianese and Hakka styles are deepest. During the early twentieth century, the styles of Canton and the Pearl River Delta such as Bak Mei, Dragon Style and Wing Chun became very popular, even outpacing the traditional styles of Hung Kuen and Yong Chun. These newly established schools not only took over the City of Canton, but spread to the villages of the Pearl River Delta in a very short time. At the beginning of the year when the author had gone to Wong Fei Hung's ancestral home to do field research, discovered that the Bak Mei school had already built a martial arts school in a village near Sai Chiao San, and its popularity in recent years has already surpassed Hung Kuen.
In addition these new styles had many points in common with the traditional close distance boxing styles, having sprung from the same source. The main difference being that the curricula of the new styles was greatly abbreviated, and system of applications was simpler and was much more focused towards combat, and discarded other constituent parts such as emission of power, the cultivation of health and the more complex philosophical underpinnings of the styles. I believe the rise of these new styles reflected the turbulent times at the end of the Qing Dynasty, and also reflected a change in the pace of life in society, forcing the martial arts to divorce themselves from the armed group conflicts of the past, de-emphasizing the weapons, and leading to the flourishing of empty handed styles. However sadly, this led to many important parts of traditional martial culture to disappear in the twentieth century, such as the double handed sword that had originated in the Ming Dynasty, or the southern staff that was famous at home and abroad. This movement from the focus on the minutiae towards simplification also reflected change in society, and the desire for practitioners to see quick results.
Having reached the twentieth first century, the ever conservative Minnan, Chao-Shan and Hakka martial arts face a singular life or death challenge. The Choy Mok Style which was once famous in Hong Kong for its practicality, only counts a handful of teachers who are still passing on the style, perhaps because as Master Li Gang states : "The training style of Choy Mok style is too hard!" In todays society which has been contaminated by culture of mass media, it is difficult for a number of masters who have the goods to compete with popular styles.
Komentar
Posting Komentar