Lai Tai Shan Military Kung Fu

Here is an episode of "Martial Arts Odyssey" by Mike Graceffo aka Brooklyn Monk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dg_R65F3mxw

Looks impressive. I hope you enjoy watching.

Seen this awhile ago Shan martial arts are interesting .

The Shan are known as Dai in China.
They speak a Tai language and are ethnically and linguistically related to the Thai and other Tai language speakers.
In China they are all grouped under the name Dai. In Burma and other areas south of China they are usually all grouped under the name Shan.
Each Dai/Shan ethnic group has it's own Autonym to describe their specific ethnic group, although these are generally only used by themselves.
As far as I know Lai Tai just means fighting or martial arts of the Tai/Dai people and is a general term for the various styles practiced by Dai people. In China the Han group these various styles under the name Dai Zu Quan which has the same meaning of Boxing of the Tai/Dai People.
The Shan State Army has a very interesting history which I would urge people to look into.
Anyways there are lots of Tai/Dai/Shan people on either side of the southern Chinese border and ****her into China as well. Each group has different styles of martial arts although they are all somewhat similar to what you see in most of the local ethnic minorities in Southwest China.
The martial arts in this film shouldn't really be called military kungfu. They are not practiced by the people in the military. He interviews the only two guys on that whole base who actually practice traditional Dai martial arts, both of whom learned them before entering the military and neither of whom teach them as part of military duties.

Here are a couple videos showing a small bit of martial arts from other Shan/Tai/ Dai groups.

Here is a video showing some boxing and saber from the Dai Na / Tai Nua of Dehong. The Daina people are one of the major Dai/Shan ethnic groups in Burma. Most of the groups in burma are found on both sides of the border.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFda1j-9U-0

Here is another clip showing some dancing and boxing from another group of Dai people in Dehong. I'm not sure which, there are a couple different Dai ethnic groups in Dehong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEBDGmOFIcM

Antonio Graceffo also has a bunch of other videos from the military base there. I have no idea which ethnic group they are from, a lot of people fled to the military bases for protection so they are not necessarily all from the same Dai/Shan ethnic group. There are probably also people there from other local mountain ethnic groups which speak languages outside the Tai family. The Burmese were pretty much trying to kill off everyone who wasn't Burmese and the Shan state areas offered protection, to some extent, at least there was less chance of mass slaughter by groups of Burmese soldiers, although probably a higher likely hood of bombing
(technically the Burmese military government claimed everyone in Burma was Burmese and always had been. I suppose it's good way of trying to deny genocide "they were never here in the first place so how could we kill them" sort of thing. Plus then anyone who isn't ethnically Burmese automatically magically becomes a foreign invader no matter how many hundreds or thousands of years their ancestors lived there. Although I think they chilled out on that to some extent after the government change in 2011 when they changed their name back to Myanmar).

Read Combat and Shan Kung Fu by Antonio Graceffo.

His writings for us are indexed here and here.