Chinese martial arts has a written history and is part of the society in which it developed.
One of the greatest myths about Chinese martial arts is that it has no written record. Many people assume or assert that the only source of knowledge about its origins and development is the tradition orally transmitted from martial arts teachers. Adding to the misunderstanding of the past, this imagined oral tradition seldom places martial arts in the broader context of Chinese history or, when it does, uses a simplistic, static and inaccurate description of that past. In fact, the amount of available written material on martial arts history in Chinese History is enormous. As a first step in confronting such a vast body of information, this book will describe the origins and development of the Chinese martial arts across Chinese history. I will argue that these arts are the developed physical practices of armed and unarmed combat, which must be understood primarily as military skills, not methods of self-cultivation or religious activity.
That said although the martial arts stemmed from military requirements and related activities like hunting, these skills took on added meaning as markers of status and of certain mental or spiritual qualities. Warfare and hunting were important in the identity of early Chinese aristocrats, for example and their class was closely associated with chariot-borne archery. Aristocrats not only fought with certain weapons but they also fought uner specific rules of combat the reinforced their shared sense of class.
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The modern understanding of martial arts as only unarmed fighting skills for self-defense, abstracted movements for self-cultivation, or the wielding of archaic weapons for aesthetics or improved helath is a modern perspective inconsistent with most earlier practice. By contrast, the performance of martial arts for entertainment and even ritual is fundamental and original to their practice. Nevertheless, the modern understanding of Chinese martial arts is not wrong because it differs from its earlier place in Chinese society; it is simply an example of how things change. And indeed it is hard to fix martial arts into a single meaning in the modern era since Chinese society is itself currently in flux