On my 40th birthday, I won Tiger Claw Elite’s 1st Heavy Guandao Championship in the Year of the Rabbit using a guandao that I built called Jade Rabbit Crescent Blade (玉兔偃月刀).
Packed into that sentence are auspicious coincidences that can’t be planned.
I’m not a particularly elite martial artist and I don’t usually build things that I can hold in my hands. I spend most of my time in front of a computer, designing digital services. I did grow up around guandaos (關刀) because Chinese martial arts ran in my family but I didn’t learn how to use one until I stumbled into a completely different martial arts lineage.
This is a meandering story of synchronicity, flukes and lucky opportunities that lead me to reclaiming my cultural heritage.
My Grandpa’s Lineage
The Breaking of the Lineage
What a racecar crash taught me
Stumbling into a New Lineage
Grandmaster Liang has a Heavy Guandao
Accidental Learning Opportunity
Building a Guan Gong costume
Building Jade Rabbit Crescent Blade
The Day of the Tournament
Epilogue
My Grandpa's Lineage
My paternal grandfather, Giai Sam, learned a style of Hung Gar from where he grew up, in rural Guangzhou, China. My grandfather was the eldest son of his father's second wife. As per Chinese primogeniture practices, his father's resources went towards the eldest son of his father’s first wife. My grandfather was not afforded an academic education, so he had to make a living by labouring with his body rather than his mind. He left the farm and briefly toiled in Hong Kong before settling down in Saigon, Vietnam. His fighting prowess landed him a job as head of security for the largest casino in Saigon. The interview for this job involved defeating a well-known fighter. Through this position, he became well respected and made a good living but ultimately a mix of greed, lack of business acumen and unscrupulous business partners landed him in trouble with the law. Because of my grandfather’s misfortunes, he wanted his children to have what he didn’t have: a white-collar education. Although my grandfather continued to practice martial arts, he chose not to transfer his martial arts to his children, including my father.
Both of my parents were born in Vietnam to ethnically Chinese parents. In the 1970s, my parents escaped the Communist takeover of South Vietnam and landed in Vancouver, Canada as refugees. They got married in Vancouver and soon after, they had me and my younger sister. Once my parents were established, they sponsored my grandparents to come to Vancouver in the 1980s. Three generations, each born in a different country to escape instability, each faced with conflicting lifestyle choices.
The Breaking of the Lineage
In Vancouver, my grandfather built up a rack full of Hung Gar style weapons including more than 5 guandaos. Aluminium was his material of choice for blades, but he would sometimes use stainless steel. My grandfather became a respected folk healer in Vancouver's Chinatown but neither I, nor my sister, nor my cousins inherited any of his skills. Despite growing up in Chinatown with predominantly Chinese classmates, I distanced myself from Chinese culture to try and assimilate with the Canadian and US media (cartoons) that I was consuming. Sometimes I watched programming from Hong Kong with my parents. I remember watching TVB's 1996 adaptation of Jin Yong's “The Smiling, Proud Wanderer” (笑傲江湖) called "State of Divinity" but I couldn't grasp the martial arts content. I was more into the love stories and Linghu Chong's stubbornly principled, yet happy-go-lucky personality. When my grandfather died, my father inherited most of my grandfather's weapons, because we had the storage space, but no one in my family knew how to use them.
As a teenager, my younger sister Eliza started learning Northern Shaolin Kung Fu in Vancouver from a Hong Kong immigrant. When my sister moved to Hong Kong as an adult, she started learning guandao from her Vancouver teacher's father until she got too busy with work. She practiced with a store-bought guandao in a style that was different than our grandfather.
What a racecar crash taught me
In 2006/2007, I was in graduate school, and I started using my meagre teaching assistant earnings to race open-wheel formula cars at my local racetrack. Initial D and The Fast and the Furious were what guided my interests. I had gotten enough experience to start feeling oneness with the car, as if it were an extension with my body, and I was able to experience time in slow motion. I wasn't that good though. I got cocky while drifting in the rain one weekend and ended up crashing into a concrete barrier. My sudden loss of oneness with the car made me realize how little I understood my mind and my body connection. That crash wiped out all my savings and I vowed that before I get into a racecar again, I needed to upgrade my mental game.
Stumbling into a New Lineage
Over the next few years, I timed out of grad school and was riding out the 2008 financial crisis with no money and no prospects. I tried to learn meditation from books. I came across CCTV's 2001 adaptation of “The Smiling, Proud Wanderer” called “Laughing in the Wind”. This time I paid more attention to the martial arts and internal cultivation. I loved how Linghu Chong happened to learn the best skills of the era because Masters appreciated his honourable, yet carefree attitude. Yijinjing was the ultimate skill that enabled him to heal his body so he could retire from Wulin happy and healthy. Out of curiosity, I wondered if Yijinjing was a real skill and I found that it was being taught at a school in Chinatown Vancouver by someone named Shou-Yu Liang. I eventually worked up the courage and scrounged enough money to take the course the next time it was offered. That is how I met Grandmaster Liang.
GM Liang taught Yijinjing as a warmup in his Buddhist Qigong class while the main focus was on esoteric Buddhist practices. I was instantly hooked. I later found out that the version of Yijinjing that GM Liang taught was recently composed by the Chinese Health Qigong Association with the intention to standardize and disseminate qigong practices across the world. I recall GM Liang teaching Yijinjing as part of one more 4-month class, but never again. Looking back, it was a fluke that I ever ended up at this school because the thing that I originally wanted to learn was not even part of GM Liang's core martial art or qigong practice.
After a couple years, GM Liang’s Buddhist qigong class came to an end, but I still wanted to stay at the school. There was a possibility of continuing with more advanced Buddhist qigong if enough people were interested but this meant there was an indefinite lull before that class was to be offered. My mindset of learning qigong and meditation in order to be a better racecar driver expanded to include Taiji after observing the other classes at the school. On a whim, I decided to take GM Liang's Advanced Chen Style Cannon Fist Taiji class. This was my first martial arts class and the learning curve for me was steep. I did not know what a bow stance was until weeks later when I worked up the courage to ask a senior student. This Taiji class fully sucked me into the martial side of GM Liang's school and completely changed my life priorities. It wouldn't be until 2022, 15 years after the racecar crash in 2007, that I would find myself in a racecar again.
Grandmaster Liang has a heavy Guandao
I discovered that Grandmaster Liang had a heavy guandao at his house when I went there for his annual Daoist Qigong retreat. His guandao is over 9ft long and displayed prominently across the top of 3 Ikea Billy bookcases in his home training hall. I tried to lift it when no one was looking. I could barely lift one end and was afraid I would drop it if I moved it too much. I saw photos on the wall of GM Liang wielding this guandao with dates that suggested the photos were from when he was in his 50s and 60s. GM Liang would later tell me that the guandao weights 75lbs with a hollow shaft, but when filled with sand, would weigh around 100lbs. This fact rocked my world. All I had ever seen at GM Liang's school were people using floppy wushu swords and bendy spears. There were a few light pudaos in the weapons locker, but I hadn't actually seen anyone use them. I had heard the legends of General Guan Yu and his Green Dragon Crescent Blade weighing 100lbs but I had not believed it would be possible to wield that. But here was photographic evidence staring me in the face. I had asked some of GM Liang's disciples about the heavy guandao and I got the impression that GM Liang didn't teach people how to use a wushu guandao at all, let alone how to handle a heavy one.
Accidental Learning Opportunity
In December 2018, my aversion toward shaving my face lead to GM Liang teaching me how to use a guandao. Earlier that summer, I went to 2 back-to-back weddings in one weekend. Shaving two days in a row left my face feeling really raw so I decided to forgo shaving for a few weeks. Weeks turned into months. "Movember" came and went as yet another excuse not to shave. One December night, GM Liang came up to me during class and jokingly said he knew what I was trying to do; that I was trying to look like Guan Gong by growing a beard. I was completely thrown off by that comment and the only thing I could think of as a response was to say something like, "In order for me to look like Guan Gong, I would need to learn how to use a guandao." He laughed at my comment and said, "You want to learn guandao? Ok I will teach you," and then walked away. I was dumbfounded. Did my coy response actually turn into an opportunity? What would Linghu Chong do? I had no idea how to approach this situation. I was, and still am, just a regular student at the school. I asked a few of the disciples what I should do and the best they could suggest was for me to keep asking to show I was serious. Over the course of the next few weeks, I tried to follow up politely whenever I had the chance. These attempts were not met with the same amount of playful enthusiasm as his original joke. I didn't know how any of this was supposed to work. Was I supposed to bow to show my sincerity? Was I supposed to bring gifts? Was I supposed to come up with a business case with a proposed fee schedule?
Finally, one day, GM Liang walked up to me and said, "If you want to learn how to use a guandao, you need to get one and bring it to the school." He knew my sister lived in Hong Kong, so he suggested that I ask my sister to buy and send it over. I started telling him that I have some at home that my grandfather made but I don't think he quite understood or believed me. After class that night, I went home and rummaged through the attic and found 4 of my grandfather's guandaos. They all needed some attention after being neglected for so many years. I picked the 2 best ones and brought them to the school. GM Liang walked by and saw 2 guandaos on the ground and promptly asked where they came from. I sheepishly said that my grandfather made them, and they were mine now. I don't think he expected me to show up with a guandao so fast, but he laughed and announced to everyone within earshot that I met his first condition and that he would start teaching me how to use a guandao. His second condition was that I was not to shave my beard until I was able to do a satisfactory performance on camera. GM Liang began teaching me how to use a guandao the next day, between regularly scheduled classes.
GM Liang’s guandao form involved several movements that invoke the spirit of General Guan Yu by having the practitioner allude to stroking a beard. GM Liang was insistent that I use the opportunity to stroke my real beard. Even though I did not inherit the martial arts skills from my grandfather, it felt surreal to have my current teaching using weapons that my grandfather built. This was my very first long weapon experience and I had to learn very basic long weapon things from other students who were already proficient in spear and staff. GM Liang wanted me to get really fast at the spinning moves but I noticed I couldn't always spin the guandao with the edge doing the cutting. Sometimes it would feel like I was paddling through the air with the flat of the blade like a canoe paddle through water. Trying to design my way out of poor skills, I mused about a guandao with an oval, indexed shaft, instead of a round shaft, so I can cut through the air without looking at the blade, instead of paddling.
Towards the end of 2019, I finally finished learning GM Liang's guandao form. I caught a glimpse of the latest Kung Fu Tai Chi Magazine that someone was reading, and it promoted the Heavy Guandao championship at the next Tiger Claw Elite Championships. I thought that would be a good opportunity to fulfil GM Liang's condition for teaching me this form. We modified the form to include a variation of the pose from the promotional poster, albeit with me holding my beard instead of a fist above my head. I asked him about the name of this form, and he simply replied that it was called, “Guandao”. In case I needed to declare the name of my form at Tiger Claw, I pitched the name Xiao Yao Guandao (逍遥關刀 Carefree and without restraint Guandao) because of GM Liang’s practice of other Xiao Yao forms. He seemed agreeable. Now I had a beard, and I had a form. But what would I wear and how was I going to get a heavy guandao?
Building a Guan Gong costume
At the beginning of 2020, my friends from Seattle, Owlex Wu and Lowin Perry of OwlexNeverSleeps made me a Guan Gong costume over the course of 3 weekends. Owlex and Lowin are designers and martial arts enthusiasts who love Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I originally wanted to imitate the asymmetric robe from the 2020 Tiger Claw promo image by modifying a pre-made Shaolin or Wudang uniform. After reviewing off-the-shelf options with Owlex, he bought into what I was trying to accomplish and convinced me it would be worth the effort to build a costume from scratch. We realized there isn’t a single costume that will satisfy everyone’s personal head canon of what Guan Gong should look like.
We identified points along 3 aesthetic spectrums that would drive our design decisions: (1) Historical accuracy vs fictional depiction, (2) Fighting on horseback vs on foot, and (3) Warrior vs scholar. We leaned toward a fictional depiction (1) to allude to the gold armour in the Tiger Claw Elite promo but we decided not go as far as recreating mythical mountain-pattern armour. We leaned towards dimensions for a costume and guandao that would suit fighting on foot (2) rather than on horseback. Owlex and Lowin watched my movements to figure out how the costume could add more flow and drama to my performance. We also determined an upper limit for the guandao’s length so that I could perform vertical spins while standing, as opposed to spinning while elevated on a horse. We leaned toward a scholarly (文) depiction (3) to reflect my bias toward internal cultivation over the external martial (武) priorities in my personal practice. This decision drove us to flip the red tunic with green pants combo from the Tiger Claw Elite promo.
We made a yin, matte tunic in the green-blue range to contrast with a pair of shiny, yang red pants and gold armour. The tunic was meant to hide the brightness of the pants until I got into low stances. We also decided that the tunic should be made with 2 sleeves even though Guan Gong is conventionally depicted only wearing one sleeve. We imagined that after a long day of destroying his enemies, scholarly Guan Gong would probably wear both sleeves while hanging out with his friends. We also discussed various dragon accessories and embellishments but I’m just not a fierce, Green Dragon kind of guy. I identified more with the story of the Jade Rabbit who spends his time quietly pounding out an elixir of immortality. I got a rabbit belt buckle and began designing my guandao with Jade Rabbit themes. We got most of the costume done just before the Canada/US border closed in March 2020.
Building Jade Rabbit Crescent Blade
I finally finished building my guandao on May 4th, 2023; 3 days before Tiger Claw Elite’s Heavy Guandao Championship. In March 2020, I planned to make a guandao in 2 months, hoping that 2 weeks of physical distancing would end the Covid-19 pandemic and allow Tiger Claw Elite to proceed. None of those things happened and I squandered most of the intervening 3 years.
The Heavy Guandao Championship specified a minimum guandao weight of 13.75lbs. This weight was determined by filling the shaft of an off-the-shelf guandao from MartialArtSmart with metal ball bearings. My grandfather’s guandaos only weighed between 4lbs to 8lbs. Choosing the off-the-shelf route would have been the obvious and easy choice. Owlex advised me that the main reason to make my own weapon would be so that I can customize the dimensions and the weight balance. On YouTube, I observed that practitioners of other styles tended to wield their guandaos with one hand right under the guard. I reasoned that an average-length, single-handed broadsword would enable more reach and manoeuvrability than the guandao blades typically found on the market. If I wanted to wield a guandao from the base of the shaft for the extra reach, like with a spear or a staff, I would need to build one with the weight biased toward the back. Even though I had no prior experience in working with metal, I got the courage to try because I knew my grandfather found a way to build his own weapons with limited tools and resources.
I procrastinated on building my guandao for 2.5 years because I was frozen by perfectionism and my inability to commit to a blade shape. I got an oval steel tube for the shaft so my hands, rather than my eyes, could tell me whether I’m cutting through the air or paddling against it. My training partner and woodworking enthusiast friend, Bruce Dangerfield, helped me design the guandao to disassemble for air travel and reassemble securely for the performance. In 2021, we finally got around to building a prototype from a carbon fibre shaft of a broken hockey stick, wood offcuts and Chicago screws. We were now confident about the structural design of my guandao from the hockey stick prototype, but I couldn’t move forward until I made aesthetic decisions. There was an online tournament in Summer 2022, so I went to Seattle after the Canada/US border reopened to get costume upgrades. Owlex sketched more Jade Rabbit blades, but I still wasn’t sure how to sculpt 3D shapes in metal. I ended up competing in that online tournament with my grandfather’s guandao and won by a very narrow margin. It felt special to have a gold medal linked to a guandao that my grandfather made. The announcement that Tiger Claw Elite’s Heavy Guandao Championship was going to be held in May 2023 finally kicked me out of procrastination mode. I went to see Owlex at the end of 2022 and came home with a blade and spike design that could be made from layering 2D shapes together.
During the first 4 months of 2023, I spent over 200 evening and weekend hours building my guandao at MakerLabs in Vancouver. My friend, Corinne Leroux, is the general manager at MakerLabs. When I told her about my project, she suggested that I make use of their huge variety of tools and shared some of her personal studio space for me to work in and store my materials. I turned Owlex’s paper sketches into digital models using OnShape. MakerLabs founder, Derek Gaw, took my OnShape files and cut out the blade and spike out of mild steel with a laser cutter. He also gave me metalworking advice when I got stuck. I learned how to weld at MakerLabs from metal artist Sandra Bérubé and Corinne’s partner, Jordan Stangle. I cut and welded the structural components that hide underneath the shaft, but I was not yet confident in welding parts that were visible to the world. Jordan welded together multiple layers of the butt spike so that the weight of the guandao could be biassed toward the bottom. Finally, Corinne cut the 3D guard of my guandao on a 3-axis CNC machine and cut the vinyl wrap on a CNC vinyl cutter. The MakerLabs community really accelerated my learning and building process.
Jade Rabbit Crescent Blade features contrasting elements of yin and yang that match the colours of my costume. The explicit yang-ness of a large blade is muted by the yin-ness of the jade green tone. The Jade Rabbit is a negative space cut-out in the notch above the back spike rather than a solid rabbit ornament attached to the blade. The golden shaft is meant to represent the sublimation of yin and yang qi into golden light, and eventually into the elixir of immortality. On the butt end, I chose a bottle gourd shape because it is just spikey enough without being sharp as well as being a Daoist symbol for health and longevity. The relatively small size of the bottle gourd hides the fact that it is actually the heaviest part of the guandao. I painted the bottle gourd bright red to contrast with the pale green blade. I imagined that the Jade Rabbit would store his elixir of immortality in this gourd.
The Day of the Tournament
On the morning of the Heavy Guandao Championship, I had less than 10 total practice runs with Jade Rabbit Crescent Blade and I was second guessing all my choices in the last 3 years. I had finished the main components of my guandao 3 weeks earlier, but my first practice run resulted in the blade being bent some 15 or 20 degrees to one side of the shaft. I spent all my spare time building a guandao instead of practicing with one. What if I built Jade Rabbit Crescent Blade 6 months earlier? What if I bought a guandao from MartialArtSmart in 2020? The self-doubt and the pressure to perform well was mounting. After assembling my guandao in the arena, I hid my phone because I was getting distracted by “happy birthday” messages. I had to remind myself that my primary goal was to keep my end of the bargain with GM Liang to deliver a clean public performance so I can finally shave my beard. Lo and behold, but not entirely unexpected, GM Liang was the head judge for all the competitions on the main stage, including the Heavy Guandao Championship.
In addition to the Heavy Guandao Championship, I also signed up for the WildAid Tiger Claw Championship to give myself an extra chance at a decent performance. I was fortunate that WildAid ran before Heavy Guandao. Toward the end of my WildAid performance, I slipped during a spinning jump chop, fell on my butt, and dropped my guandao. Whelp, there goes my practice round. I had about 30 minutes to mentally reset for the Heavy Guandao Championship. We did an official weigh-in with Tiger Claw’s scale.
Jade Rabbit Crescent Blade clocked in at about 1 lbs over the 13.75 lbs minimum, so I did not have to add additional weight. This is now the time to exhibit the mental toughness I had accumulated over the years since my racecar crash. I reminded myself that I can only control my own performance. I can’t control my fellow competitors' performances nor the judges’ scores.
When my name was called, I went on stage and performed my form. I was fairly clean. I didn’t fall on my butt. I invoked the angriest Guan Gong facial expressions I could muster. The rest was now out of my hands. The three other competitors performed after me and I was impressed with them all. I had so much adrenaline pumping in me that I couldn’t hold the scores in my mind. A friend standing next to me had to tell me that I had won. Personally, I felt that the guandao skills I performed that day were average. I felt I had let GM Liang down by not practicing what he taught me as much as I could have. He didn’t say so in as many words but after so many years of following him, I feel I can infer that. In this performance, what I was capable of just happened to be good enough for first place.
Epilogue
I think where the judges scored me higher than my fellow competitors was for my commitment to the bit: the beard, the costume, the flashy guandao and the angry eyes. Those non-martial skills were what put me over the top. Whereas I thought I might have been wasting time pursuing aesthetics instead of martial guandao skills, I now realize that the aesthetic elements of a performance are also valuable skills to practice. I couldn’t have made the costume and guandao on my own so in a very practical sense, the real championship was the friends I made along the way. I hope to at least have made GM Liang proud in this regard because he says that a lot of value in practicing martial arts and competing in tournaments manifests in the form of making friends. As a practitioner of weapons that have been obsolete for hundreds of years, training for something that has little contemporary application makes me feel like an isolated weirdo. But it is also this shared commitment to preserving (and hopefully evolving) these cultural traditions that makes bonding with my fellow competitors so easy, even though I see them once a year or less.
I want to thank the people behind the Tiger Claw Elite Championship for continuously providing a venue for us weirdos to keep our skills sharp. I want to especially thank Gigi Oh and Gene Ching for creating the Heavy Guandao Championship. What I hoped to capture in this article was how this championship challenged me at the exact right time to help me reclaim my cultural heritage that I didn’t know I cared about. My process was a serendipitous product of my family upbringing, unpredictable circumstances, and lucky opportunities; sometimes taken and sometimes ignored.
I procrastinated heavily on writing this article using the excuse that I wanted to keep polishing the words. Gene told me that polishing just means to get all the scratches going the same direction. I realized that this championship catalysed me to level up seemingly unrelated skills and imperfectly align them toward my latent desire to build heavy weapons. Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Jin Yong’s stories gave me fantastical targets to aspire to. My grandfather’s weapons made me believe it would be possible to make my own. The Heavy Guandao Championship challenged me to commit to a hard deadline that got uncharacteristically extended by 3 years.
After I won the championship, someone asked me if Jade Rabbit Crescent Blade was designed in reference to 2023 being the Year of the Rabbit. I had honestly forgotten that it was the Year of the Rabbit. This was a complete fluke because my Jade Rabbit theme was already decided in 2020, the Year of the Rat.
The prize for the Heavy Guandao Championship was a gilded statue of Guan Gong. Grandmaster Shou-Yu Liang’s school moved locations during the pandemic and a grand re-opening was set for June 2023. The golden Guan Gong statue is now in an auspicious place, looking after the school.
After one other local tournament and a performance during the grand re-opening, I finally felt like I could shave my beard. Beards may have been fashionable on Chinese men 1800 years ago, in Guan Gong’s time, but it did not work for me at all in my dating life.
There is one last coincidence worth mentioning. My paternal grandmother’s name was phonetically translated as “Phuong Quan” when she immigrated to Canada from Vietnam. After familiarizing myself with how to write ‘guandao’ in Chinese, I realized that the Chinese writing of her family name, Quan (關) was the same as the Guan in Guan Gong. However improbable it might be, I like to think that there is a greater than 0% chance that I am a descendant of Guan Gong.
Next, I want to build progressively heavier guandaos until I can wield my own 100 lbs weapon.
