Boy, have we ever come a long way!! I remember when these forms were just rummurs and we were not sure they even existed!!
Boy, have we ever come a long way!! I remember when these forms were just rummurs and we were not sure they even existed!!
Those that are the most sucessful are also the biggest failures. The difference between them and the rest of the failures is they keep getting up over and over again, until they finally succeed.
For the Women:
+ = & a
Well, it seems these arts are preserving the fighting methods and over all body of techniques that we know come from the Song army. Which is the same stuff from the Tang dynasty for the most part.
So the form choreography, whenever that was done, is basically a box of fighting that goes back to the Tang Dynasty at least.
This is really, really old, primordial stuff we are looking at...yet it is surprisingly advanced. That means the over all body of techniques, footwork and body methods has to be way older than Tang, for sure. This stuff was not new then either...or it would be way cruder looking.
It appears all over the central "Yellow River Valley" area predominantly; but it's found as far south as Indonesia too. It is taught under a large variety of names, and just as large a variety of curriculums contained in an uncountable number of forms.
My persuite of all things stemming from Zhao Kuang yin made me see that his material was just the tip of the iceburg. It was just his favorite stuff preserved in some forms to document what he liked.
In reality, there was a massive, massive sea of this art being practiced in every imaginable fashion.
Each school of it has a different wrapper, and curriculum for teaching it, but inside the box, it's all the same skill sets.
My best guess, is that military Generals, who survived a lifetime of battles and finally retired from service, went home and taught for a living. When forms became from common, each choreographed his own sets. So you had all these schools popping up back then, that "Appear" unique on the outside, but inside they are not.
Last edited by Royal Dragon; 08-05-2013 at 06:25 PM.
Those that are the most sucessful are also the biggest failures. The difference between them and the rest of the failures is they keep getting up over and over again, until they finally succeed.
For the Women:
+ = & a
then it happened again when the troops of the southern song (Yue Fei's soldiers) came home and they spread their own martial arts.
That's the next major dividing line. Moving out of Hong Quan into something called Xing Quan, "shapes boxing".
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