San Francisco | 1959
Two blocks west of Portsmouth Square, down the steps to the other subterranean kung fu school in Chinatown, the altar within the Kin Mon Chinese Physical Culture Studio bore the inscription:
To vanquish humiliation and get revenge
One should study the martial arts industriously
The proper use of the good long fist
Is to punish lawbreakers and to eliminate violence
Wong Tim Yuen sat in his basement studio at 142 Waverly Place as he often did on most afternoons before class, smoking cigarettes and reading the newspaper. Known to some as just “T.Y.,” he looked as meticulous as ever: neatly pressed shirt and pants, dark tie, suspenders, jet-black hair oiled back. He had well-defined features anchored around wide, inquisitive eyes, and a tall, solid frame that by itself implied proper use of “the good long fist.” The name of his school, Kin Mon, translated to mean “the sturdy citizen,” and T.Y. conducted himself as the embodiment of the concept.
Kin Mon was located just across from the Hop Sing Tong, where, like Lau Bun, T.Y. was a long-standing member. Although he was almost fifteen years Lau Bun’s junior, the two of them represented core forces of martial arts in San Francisco’s Chinatown, dating back to the early 1940s. And just as Lau Bun rendered his abilities in numerous capacities for Hop Sing beyond just teaching, T.Y. made his own contributions as well. During the war years, when U.S. servicemen on shore leave would frequently take their Forbidden City revelry too far on the streets of Chinatown, urgent distress calls requesting Hop Sing muscle most often fell to T.Y. In an era when few Americans had ever heard of—much less personally encountered—kung fu, the drunken GIs could hardly have suspected what the alleys of Chinatown were poised to unleash on them.
But those incidents were insignificant, nonsense really, compared to the encounters of T.Y.’s youth. On the wall behind him, through a mild haze of tobacco smoke, was an aged black-and-white photograph of T.Y. as a teenager at the 1928 national martial arts exhibition in Nanjing, China. At the center of the stage stood his teacher, Leong Tin Chee, with T.Y. and senior student Chew Lung flanking him on either side. The three of them all hold martial poses: the master poised tall at the center of the trio, the acolytes baby-faced, lean, and muscular.
Leong Tin Chee spent many years at the turn of the century as a nomadic master who traveled the Chinese countryside conducting demonstrations, meeting challenges, and generally seeking out martial arts around the nation. It was in this context that a teenage T.Y. watched him as a spectator in the crowd, a witness to the makeshift wooden stage trembling beneath the deep power of Leong’s horse stance. Dazzled by the display, T.Y. sought out his tutelage and was taken on as his second student. He studied under Leong for a decade, traveling China and often fighting in his share of brutal le tai competitions, the full-contact platform matches that ended for many participants in serious injury or maiming. From location to location T.Y. evolved into a formidable fighter, shaped by the stark violence of one le tai after the next.
Later, during the Japanese invasion of China, T.Y.’s father eventually found him passage to America, likely saving him from the fate that befell his classmate Chew Lung, who perished from a sniper’s bullet. Upon arriving in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the Hop Sing Tong quickly recruited T.Y. for his martial arts prowess, just as it had with Lau Bun years earlier.
Yet despite his old-world origin, T.Y. would eventually play a quiet role in ushering in a modern and very American era for martial arts. In a grand juxtaposition to the first photo, an adjacent image on the wall captured students of Kin Mon smiling with giddy excitement on the set of the Home show, the popular daytime NBC program with Arlene Francis and Hugh Downs, where the school performed kung fu on television in 1955 (presumably for the first time in American broadcast history). It was a curious showing in light of the old Tong code—of not exposing martial arts to the non-Chinese—especially from Hop Sing, of all places. But time and time again the sturdy citizen in T.Y. saw it differently. His viewpoint may have been deeply buried beneath hard rules and a stern disposition, but in the long view of martial arts history T.Y. would be a pioneering force in unraveling the racial exclusion that surrounded the Chinese martial arts.
More recently, he began collaborating on an instructional kung fu book with his senior student James Lee, who had pioneered his own martial arts publishing company. An English language book by a Chinese master was unprecedented and followed on the heels of T.Y.’s decision to allow James Lee’s close friend and protégé Al Novak to train at Kin Mon on a regular basis. The hulking Novak was the first white student to train within San Francisco’s Chinatown (in 1960), and T.Y. would maintain the trend with a slow trickle of other non-Chinese students throughout the decade.
Sitting there smoking between those two photographs, between NBC and Nanjing, T.Y. was a conduit linking the still-emerging modern era of martial arts to the deep origins of old world China. After all, T.Y.’s system was Sil Lum, which in Cantonese translates as Shaolin. And, as the saying goes, “All martial arts under heaven arose out of Shaolin.”
Or so it would seem.
Located along the Songshan mountain range in China’s Henan Province, the Shaolin Temple is one of the most famous Buddhist monasteries on the planet. Originally constructed at the turn of the fifth century, the temple carries great religious significance, marking the arrival of Chan Buddhism (more often known by its Japanese name, Zen Buddhism) from India to China. However, Shaolin’s global fame is more readily derived from its association with the Chinese martial arts, through its reputation as a kind of kung fu Mecca. Majestically situated and mystically oriented, Shaolin is regarded in global popular culture as the storied wellspring from which the Chinese martial arts have flowed to the entire world.
Yet to really understand Shaolin’s martial arts legacy, it is necessary to understand its most notable detractor. Tang Hao was a Chinese historian who today is scarcely known beyond a small circle of academia. Beginning with his work in the 1920s, Tang Hao was really the first modern historian to examine the origins of martial arts in China. Through the numerous books and articles that he wrote, Tang Hao dismissed much of the prevailing history surrounding the Chinese martial arts as fanciful folklore, particularly with regard to Shaolin. In drawing sharp lines between mythology and fact, Tang Hao’s work was met by the Chinese martial arts community not with interest and gratitude but rather with hostility and outrage.
It is in this precarious balance, between the much-celebrated folkloric legacy of Shaolin and the once-unwelcomed scholarship of the ostracized Tang Hao, that the history of the Chinese martial arts still teeters. It is a peculiar dynamic with few parallels in the modern world, especially as Shaolin’s martial arts mythology continues to thrive well into the twenty-first century.
The early folklore attributed to Shaolin’s connection to the martial arts is tied to the origins of Chan Buddhism in China. The popular rendering asserts that in the fifth century, the monk Bodhidharma traveled from India to spread Buddhist teachings, and that his place of conveyance in China was Shaolin. This made the monastery, in the words of Shaolin historian Meir Shahar, “the symbolic crossing point between the realm of the Buddha and China.”
The martial arts, as the story goes, were a byproduct of this interaction. Noticing the adverse physical effects that long periods of meditation were having on the monks, the Bodhidharma is said to have passed along a series of exercises that the monks could perform to cultivate their physical health, stimulate their mental state of being, and (if ever necessary) employ for the defense of the monastery. Having an abundance of time, the monks honed these exercises into highly refined fighting techniques.
Centuries later, when the monastery was supposedly burned to the ground by the invading Manchus, it is believed that the handful of monks who escaped later disseminated their fighting techniques throughout China. This is said to have led to the formation of a southern Shaolin Temple, which gave rise to the regional styles of the south. Over time the fighting techniques that emerged from Shaolin’s legacy would spread even further, eventually extending well beyond the borders of China to the entire world.
Tang Hao dismissed much of these Shaolin story lines as legend, particularly the notion of the Bodhidharma as the initial source of kung fu. Through intensive research and reporting, he began the process of building an evidenced-based timeline regarding the origin and evolution of the Chinese martial arts that was predicated on historical developments across China’s social, military, and intellectual landscapes. Ironically, the factual history that emerges from Tang Hao’s scholarship is every bit as compelling as the folklore.
While the monastery’s connection to Chan Buddhism is sound (despite debate over the actual existence of a Bodhidharma figure), Shaolin military activity does not surface in the historical record until the early part of the seventh century, when the monks successfully defended their temple and then their adjacent cropland from bandits. Shaolin fighting technique at the time was a far call from the elaborate unarmed hand-combat systems that they are now known for, but rather involved a sort of ritualistic black magic in which younger monks would fight in the field while the elders would stay behind and invoke vengeful Buddhist demons to annihilate their foes.
Later, when Shaolin did earn a reputation for martial methods, it was for its practitioners’ superior aptitude in staff fighting. Under the Ming Dynasty, the Shaolin Monastery became a kind of war college, training future officers in a variety of combat skills. The emphasis on pole fighting (more than half the classes at Shaolin specialized in this area) conveyed a core capability for future officers who would have to train their soldiers in armed battlefield techniques, such as long-spear combat. Shaolin thrived in this role and gained a reputation throughout China for aspects of its military training program. However, the emphasis on staff fighting as core training eventually shifted around the time of the pioneering military theories put forth by a renowned commander.
Qi Jiguang was a celebrated Ming general, national hero, and arguably one of the great military minds in human history. Known for instilling iron discipline throughout his ranks of soldiers by way of rigorous training methods, Qi Jiguang (pronounced gigi-kwan) had considerable impact on military thought at the end of the Ming Dynasty (and on many subsequent generations, as well).
Beginning in 1560, Qi successfully led forces in fighting off marauding pirates all along China’s east coast, enlisting peasant farmers and miners into effective battalions with great success. Where other military leaders proved impotent in dealing with the pirate threat, Qi began to score a series of victories that, by 1564, would result in the pirates withdrawing from China. Later he would have a successful tenure overseeing the bolstering of Great Wall defenses in the far north, preventing any Manchu incursions during his watch.
Over the course of his career, Qi published a pair of books on military strategy that would have considerable impact on training institutions such as Shaolin. In his New Treatise on Military Efficiency, Qi devotes an entire chapter (with the wonderful title “Fist Canon and the Essentials of Nimbleness”) to the topic of unarmed fighting techniques and the benefits of teaching them among the combat ranks. These skills would be not for application on the battlefield, he argued, but for the physical conditioning of troops, and most notably, for their acclimation to the nature of actual combat.
Savvy to the prevailing military currents of the times, Shaolin adapted to this new viewpoint and maintained its relevance as a training institute by featuring unarmed fighting techniques as a primary part of its curriculum.
As martial arts historian Ben Judkins explains: “The popularity of the unarmed martial arts exploded [in China] between 1580 and 1640. . . . Already by the 1580s some Shaolin monks were practicing boxing with the aim of ‘perfecting’ the unarmed arts, much as they had done with the pole.” Most notably perhaps is the unique nature of the period in which these unarmed fighting styles began to emerge during the Ming Dynasty. Historians refer to it as Ming syncretism, an era of a special intellectual atmosphere in China, which saw a harmonious cross-pollination of the three great Eastern philosophies and their practices among the educated classes: Buddhist religious thought was combined with Confucian doctrine and integrated with Daoist philosophy.
This fostered a unique atmosphere for the Shaolin monks and other upper-echelon segments of Ming society to contribute to the development of open-hand fighting styles. (Despite all prevailing story lines, Shaolin wasn’t actually inventing fighting methods at all but rather absorbing them from the peasant class and honing them in its own fashion). Within this context of Ming syncretism, traits of Buddhist meditation, Confucian medical practices, and Daoist calisthenics all appear to have had some role in shaping and integrating the Chinese martial arts.
Yet away from the elite circles and the much better documented segments of dynastic life, the peasant class in China was embroiled in day-to-day currents of violence that, in reality, contrasted profoundly with the image of orderly dynastic society that the Ming architects were inclined to portray. Widespread banditry and other forms of petty crime, combined with flourishes of rebellion, infused common life with a degree of steady violence that would have given the martial arts a simple and widespread relevance at the time. The need for militias and crop-watching units, as well general protection for homes, businesses, and individuals was considerable.
So it was on the heels of the military theories of Qi Jiguang, during the Renaissance-like atmosphere of Ming syncretism among the elite, and in the steady and stark violence of peasant life that the unarmed fighting techniques of the Chinese martial arts began to flourish. Despite all lingering tales of the Bodhidharma, this is the historical point at which Shaolin first specialized in the open-hand combat techniques for which it would be famous centuries later. And in a wider sense, it is when kung fu—as we know it in a modern sense—first began to surface in the historical record in China.
Throughout history the Chinese martial arts have been known by many names: wushu (which translates to “martial methods”), kuoshu (“national art”), chuan fa (“boxing method”), Chinese boxing (a reference to open-hand fighting styles, not Western boxing), and in more recent times, as kung fu (meaning “effort” or “hard work”).
The list of different styles and schools within the Chinese martial arts is long, varied, and extremely colorful: Tiger Claw, Buddhist Palm, Northern Praying Mantis, Southern Praying Mantis, Monkey Style, Bear Style, White Eyebrow, Drunken Fist, Five Animals, Five Ancestors, Six Harmonies Boxing, Cotton Boxing, Ax-Hitch Boxing, and hundreds more. With different features, approaches, and emphasis, these styles have varying regional and familial backgrounds and ultimately compose a diverse and expansive field of techniques. Eagle Claw, for instance, is a northern style that is grappling oriented, showcasing joint locks and pressure-point attacks. By contrast, White Crane is a southern style known for sophisticated hand techniques applied at close range with swift striking motions that are derivative of its namesake animal. Conversely, the globally popular and well-known practice of tai chi chu’an is often described as an internal or soft style of kung fu; the slow movements and meditative nature of the art typically speaks to a greater emphasis on spiritual, mental, and energy-related concepts, as opposed to a more martial orientation.
By the late nineteenth century, the otherwise obscure regional and familial fighting systems around China begin to rebrand themselves in the face of growing peasant class interest in the martial arts. As historian Ben Judkins explains:
During the early 19th century, China had a huge number of local fighting styles. Most of them were very small village or family affairs. Many of these styles did not actually have names, though there were some notable exceptions.
They were not studied so much as a particular “style” of fighting. They simply were fighting. Later in the 19th century as the demand for martial instruction increased, and the number of reasons it was pursued diversified, it became necessary to market these skills on a broader scale than had been undertaken in the past. Names and shiny new creation myths began to appear as the fighting techniques of the previous generation were increasingly repackaged as a “martial commodity.”
The martial brands of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were developed in a similar style to Shaolin’s creation myth of the Bodidharma as the early source of the temple’s fighting-art tradition. Just as the Bodidharma martial arts legend emerged long after the supposed interaction would have taken place, many of the modern creation myths were developed long after the actual genesis of most styles.
As martial arts historian Brian Kennedy writes: “The goal of most martial arts systems’ histories is to give that system prestige—what the Chinese refer to as ‘face.’ Some hope to impress the general public or prove that the system is combat-effective, while others simply aim to inspire students of the system. Still others are concerned only with relating some interesting folk tales. ‘Truth’ rarely factors into the equation.” Scholars refer to this as “invented tradition.” By developing a compelling (and often semimystical) origin story, the school or style could draw new students by hooking onto their martial arts imagination. Essentially, it was highly savvy advertising.
For Wing Chun it was a priestess designing a streamlined defense technique to aid a younger woman fending off a belligerent warlord. For White Crane it was when the patriarch of a southern family tried to scare off a crane and observed the bird’s sublime movements. For Monkey style it was when an imprisoned man observed the agile movements of primates in the nearby trees from his cell window. While some martial artists acknowledge the folkloric nature of these stories, many others, to this day, regard them as fact.
It was in an era of ever-increasing hyperbole that Tang Hao applied a skeptical eye to the Chinese martial arts. By the late 1920s the fledgling republican government in China had created the Central Guoshou Institute as a formal body to promote and organize the Chinese martial arts as a pillar of national physical culture. (Indeed, it was the Central Guoshou Institute that organized the 1928 national competition in which T. Y. Wong fought and performed during his early twenties.) Following an era of widespread martial branding, as well as an explosion of fanciful literature, the Chinese martial arts were ripe for a sober historical assessment. A lawyer by trade and an experienced practitioner of martial arts, Tang Hao was assigned as a lead editor for the publication division of the Central Guoshu Institute.
Like the governmental organization that he worked for, Tang Hao was a reformist who believed that the martial arts could play a key role in the physical culture of a modern twentieth-century China. In 1920 Tang Hao published Study of Shaolin and Wudang, in which he tackled the disparity between fact and folklore in Chinese martial arts history, taking aim, as Judkins put it, “at as many sacred cows as possible.” He dismissed the folklore surrounding Shaolin and criticized much of the quasi mysticism that had been attached to the martial arts in his time.
Immediately, Tang’s work was received with hostility, and as a friend of his would later write in a memorial essay, “some ruthless and self-proclaimed practitioners of Wudang and Shaolin made a plan to attack Tang Hao and beat him up.” This was only prevented when a reputable third party intervened on his behalf (and the fact that people within the Central Guoshu Institute didn’t defend him, suggests he may have been insulting people in-house, as well).
Later in his career he would continue to write about and promote an evidence-based history of the Chinese martial arts, debunking the highly popular book Secrets of Shaolin Boxing and disputing the trend of invented traditions. Later, as he endured periods of bankruptcy and near homelessness during a career that was hardly lucrative, he continued his studies and published books along the same lines for close to two decades.
Yet even as Tang Hao was striving to accurately portray the factual historical origins of the martial arts in China, these fighting systems (and their folklore) were already taking root in foreign nations around the globe.