New Book Review

[alextse4]

Since Robert's post more information has been made available.
For example you find that Liang Xuexiang called his form Bing Bu. Maybe in a local dialect Bing was pronounced Beng, there are certainly many instances of Yantai dialect differing greatly from the standardized chinese language, but the character he uses, 掤 is not found in modern dictionaries. It can mean a 'quiver' where one would store arrows.
I don't think that was his intended meaning though, instead I think he followed a custom of that era to use the characters in a phonetic context and in fact you can find many instances of this in his, as well as a lot of other non-scholarly work from the Qing Dynasty era.

This type of phonetic application of Chinese characters is now rare owing to the modified and improved education system since those days.

I someone is performing Huang Hanxun's Beng Bu I think they should call it that, and not call it Yantai Beng Bu. At least in general terms when relating one Beng Bu to another.

In the case of the book you reviewed I think the author used as a template a now very rare book published in the 60's by Su Kunming, whom we now know as Su Yuzhang, which is almost an exact reproduction of Huang Hanxun's Beng Bu book published (I believe) in the late 40's, I forget the exact publication date.

What has always bothered my about that book, and in turn this book, is that Su Yuzhang lists several of his teachers, but never says which one of them taught him this Beng Bu form. So, the reader of the book is left wondering where the Beng Bu form came from.

Later I tried to find which of those teachers taught that Beng Bu form and found that none of them did, nor did they teach any Beng Bu and the only versions of Beng Bu that I could track down to a specific teacher don't look anything at all like the Beng Bu listed in the book that you reviewed.

Here was the notice by WHF regarding he complained Su Kunming copied his mantis book.