Here are the authors’ bios from the back cover:

Brian Kennedy, an attorney, has practiced Chinese martial arts since 1976. His previous books, published in Chinese, include Witness Examination Skills and American Legal Ethics.

Elizabeth Nai-Jia Guo is a professional translator and practitioner of qi gong and hatha yoga. She has translated a wide range of books into Chinese, including titles on church architecture, the history of science, and criminal law.

Together, Kennedy and Guo write a regular column for the magazine Classical Fighting Arts. They are also the editors of Jingwu: The School that Transformed Kung Fu (Blue Snake Books, 2010).

Their book is divided into two parts. Part one covers the broad historical background of Chinese martial arts in general  and martial arts literature specifically, while part two provides thumbnail bios of more than thirty authors/editors and short synopses of some of their books—often more than one. Both parts are of approximately equal length, and though neither is exhaustive, both are thorough enough. In their preface, the authors state:

"A word should be said about how the two co-authors shared the work. Brian Kennedy was primarily responsible for penning the first half, so the opinions, analysis, and ideas are his and are not necessarily shared by Elizabeth Guo, who was principal author of the second half of this work. The translations and the synopses of the books are largely her work."

We’ll start our survey with Kennedy’s half. He begins with an introduction that lays out the backstory and sources for Chinese martial arts training manuals. While one might expect these books to be valuable collector’s items—and some are in their original publication—Kennedy cites Lion Books Martial Arts Publishing Company, a Taiwanese publisher of martial arts and health books, as a good source for reprints. I’ll also discuss Brennan Translations, another excellent source for translations of such material, near the end of this review.

Kennedy then delves into that deepest and most mysterious of subjects: the historical sources for the martial arts in general and Chinese martial arts specifically. This entails a broad-ranging view that encompasses not only the hundreds of kung fu styles that have existed, but their relationships to the martial arts of other countries. Part and parcel of this is the methodology of martial arts practice, which almost always entails form work but also can incorporate a vast array of other aspects, such as ancillary exercises, chi kung, weapons, and herbal remedies. To get across his ideas, Kennedy utilizes hearty examples from martial arts history, doing his best to stay within the parameters of the real rather than the legendary or the hyperbolic.

To be clear, though, Kennedy is not trying to relate a complete history of kung fu. Instead, he is using the general history of the art of kung fu as a rack to hang his reflections on the familial, social, and cultural aspects of kung fu practice and literature. Included is the distinction between internal and external styles and how their training methods are necessarily divergent. The material here is excellent and very well researched, and it gives a perspective on the development of the Chinese martial arts that even the Chinese seem to have lost in the welter of legend, hyperbole, lies, and cinematic kung fu mayhem. I tend to be wary of kung fu histories since so many of them are littered with error, deliberate as well as unintentional and received, but the more I read about it, the stronger the outlines become, sort of like a shape materializing but not quite fully emerged from a fog. In this respect, Kennedy’s shape seems more distinct than many others, principally because he does not rely solely on historical “fact,” which always is suspect regarding martial arts history, to inform his overview. Rather, he leans on the social, cultural, and political milieus prevalent in different parts of China and Taiwan during their lengthy and diverse histories. These elements characterize his history as much as they inform it.

Any overview of kung fu must, of course, include a discussion of chi/qi, to which Kennedy devotes five pages. His history begins with a caveat from Henry Ford: “History is more or less bunk.” Kennedy extends this sentiment to kung fu literature, and he does expose the bunk—inconsistencies, biases, exaggerations, and pure fabrications—and his reasons are sound and well stated. He is a lawyer, after all. For example, he examines the fantastical tales that arose around Sun Lu-tang, such as Sun being able to pace a galloping horse, and determines that these tales did not originate with Sun but “were the invention of students, friends, or journalists looking for exciting copy.” But Kennedy prefers to concentrate on those authors and manuals that don’t just purport to give the “real stuff” but actually do so, and Sun and his five works are among them.

Next, Kennedy looks at martial arts historians, beginning with Tang Hao, a martial artist who lived part of his life as a wanted man, not because of criminality but because of politics. Of Tang, Kennedy says, “The life of Tang Hao (1897–1959) is worth recounting in some detail. There are three reasons for this: first, he was quite influential. He is viewed as being the greatest Chinese martial arts historian that ever lived. Second, many of his comments and criticisms regarding martial arts history and martial arts writing are still valid today. third, he led an interesting, exciting life.” (See sidebar for a list of Tang’s writings discussed by the authors.)

In his description of Tang—and throughout the first section—Kennedy intersperses details, factoids, anecdotes, and definitions as well as background information and a critical analysis, all economically but interestingly stated. You’ll have to read the book to learn about Tang, but to whet your appetite, I’ll just say that Tang does not give credit to either Bodhidharma or Chang San-feng for knowing or creating Shaolin or Tai Chi, respectively. “Not surprisingly,” Kennedy writes, “Tang Hao made a fair number of enemies, including authors of such books [that gave credit to Bodhidharma and Chang].”

As an example of how Kennedy weaves historical information seamlessly into his narrative, he uses the fact that Tang was threatened physically to examine the familial structure of martial arts schools, in which disciples literally become members of the teacher’s family and form a kung fu brotherhood that stood in defense not just of its organization and teacher, but of its individual members.

Following the section on Tang Hao, which occupies twenty-two pages, come much shorter bios of five other important kung fu historians, each including the titles of some of their more significant works. After this, Kennedy presents a chapter titled, “Westerners Researching Chinese Martial Arts History.” He leads off this chapter with thumbnail bios of several Westerners who were seminal influences in the dissemination of kung fu to the Western world. First is Robert W. Smith, and no wonder. Smith’s books were often the first in English to describe several specific Chinese martial arts, and his influence was significant. Others mentioned in the chapter are Dan Miller, Jarek Szymanski, Stanley E. Henning, Douglas Wile, and Andrea Faulk. He is careful to say that these aren’t the only examples—Donn Draeger and Tim Cartmell readily come to mind, but to be fair, Cartmell is mentioned frequently throughout the book.

The birthplaces of Chinese martial arts are treated in the next chapter. The Shaolin and Wudang connections are examined, as well as several other locations. Unsurprisingly, the author is not impressed with the standard stories of Bodhidharma and Chang San-feng, and he essays a more rational approach to kung fu’s genesis. Many of the ideas he presents will be familiar to readers of martial arts literature, and I leave it to you to judge Kennedy’s accuracy. While I love the mythic genesis stories, I think that historians like Kennedy and those mentioned above often provide more informed and detailed accounts that have greater veracity.

Kennedy covers Chinese martial arts classification schemes next: internal/external, northern/southern, and Shaolin/Wudang. None, he says, are very accurate. He also states that such distinctions “are all of fairly recent vintage, and they all generate controversy whenever they are used.” However, he concludes, they are of “somewhat helpful in finding one’s way around the multitude of systems that make up Chinese martial arts.” He covers internal/external first, which entails a further classification system: hard/soft. The distinctions here are that internal styles rely on intrinsic energy (chi, perhaps) and focus on defense (generally), while external styles rely more on strength and speed and focus on offense. He concludes this section with: “It is worth noting too that the internal–external classification scheme is of recent vintage, first being used in the late Qing and Republican period.”

The northern/southern scheme, he says, refers primarily to Shaolin systems, with the division being defined by: Northern Legs, Southern Fist. Northern styles feature more kicking, and southern styles more handwork. The Shaolin/Wudang classification is a sort of mix between the two schemes described above that relies on the supposed location of the genesis of the arts broken down this way. Any martial art that is not specifically Wudang is Shaolin.

“This classification scheme is long on romance and short on reality,” Kennedy writes. “While it is true that the Wudang Mountains were home to a great number of Taoist temples, it is equally true that none of the three Wudang martial arts were invented there.… This classification scheme was first used by the National Guoshu Academy in the 1920s.”

A discussion of religion and morality in relation to the martial arts is featured next. “The idea that martial arts were linked with either Taoist or Buddhist philosophy came about when martial arts stopped being a practical trade and started to be a form of recreation for the upper and middle classes,” Kennedy writes. “This process began in the late 1800s and accelerated at the start of the Republican era (1912).” This interesting section shows that the move of martial arts away from traditional forms toward fighting forms (mixed martial arts, for example) is, in a sense, simply a return to the practical aspects of the martial arts for a practical era. But it also shows that mixed martial arts don't just take the best of moves that work well in combat and mix them up, no matter where they came from. It also demonstrates that the martial arts can, and have, absorbed a great deal of social, cultural, and spiritual aspects from all the cultures they have entranced through the centuries.

The following chapter is devoted to the Imperial military examinations prevalent during the Republican era. As the dynasties of the past died and a new form of government was rising, some of the older ways that martial artists made a living—teaching, fighting in tournaments, or serving as physicians, street entertainers, or criminals—began vanishing, leaving the military as the predominant career path for martial artists. For those who are interested, Kennedy goes into some detail on the parameters of these examinations.

Next is short chapter that is basically a list of the top twelve Chinese martial arts Classics as formulated by Professor Kang Ge Wu in his The Complete Practical Book of Chinese Martial Arts, and this leads into a chapter that discusses the history of Chinese martial arts training manuals. This begins with the legendary period, moves on to the early woodblock period, the hand-copies period, and the Republican period, and winds up in the modern era. These categories might be self-explanatory, but Kennedy delves at length into each one, divulging a number of interesting details as well as clearly laying out the overarching progression of the development of these manuals in conjunction with the historical, social, and cultural changes taking place in China.

The following chapter is titled “Authorship, Various Editions, Content of Training Manuals, and the Audience.” It examines all the aspects of a book or manual not strictly related to specific content. Prominent authors are highlighted, but Kennedy begins with the problem of ascertaining actual authorship of kung fu training manuals. Only part of the problem is that some of the authors of such manuals concealed their true identities behind the personae of “historical progenitors” of their martial arts. An excellent example of this, Kennedy says, is Wu Yu Xing, one of the top students of both the Chen and Yang families and founder of Wu/Hao style Tai Chi. After all, it seems quite convenient that The Salt Shop Manual containing Wang Tseung-yueh’s Tai Chi Classics was “accidentally" discovered in a salt shop owned by Wu’s brother.

Other difficulties are that some manuals involved the hands of too many authors and editors to determine exactly who was responsible for what. Sometimes uncredited books from the past were passed on with contributions by unnamed persons, and even some single authors remained entirely unnamed or their names invoke no historical background on them. Surveys of works of these several types can be found in co-author Guo’s Part II of the book.

As might be surmised from the above, Kennedy asserts, in a section on different editions, “The vast majority of books mentioned in this survey have had an original publication followed with re-publication in multiple forms from multiple publisher with or without the original author’s or publisher’s consent. Copyright is largely a Western concept.”

The general content of these manuals begins with a quote from Liu Kang Yi, a respected Taiwanese martial arts historian and publisher, who said, “They are all the same manual.” It is an amusing insight that largely bears out, as I can attest after reading hundreds of martial arts books and manuals and reviewing more than a hundred of them, many from the eras covered by Kennedy and Guo's book. But it’s not completely true. The modern era has seen the production of perhaps thousands of similar manuals, but also scores of martial arts books that break the norm in one way or another, whether focusing on history or specific techniques or some other aspect beyond functional training in a form or weapon play. And such more-in-depth books existed even in the Republican period, such as Xiang Kairan’s My Experience of Practicing Taiji Boxing. (This very interesting book is not mentioned in the book now under review, but you can read about it HERE.) Xiang’s book is definitely not the same as the norm, and it wasn’t the only one. But Kennedy presents the basic structure that most of these manuals take.

There is a brief discussions of the artistic aspects of training manuals, and indeed, illustrations and photos abound in both sections, reproduced from the manuals under discussion, to give the reader a sense of the development of the art of the genre. Kennedy then discusses the target audience for these manuals—or more properly, audiences, for the audience changed over time from predominantly the military, then literate upper-class civilians, and finally spreading to the middle-class. The author then devotes a short chapter to Liu Kang Yi, a Taiwanese collector of Chinese martial arts training manuals and founder of Lion Books Martial Arts Publishing. Liu’s goal is “to preserve martial arts culture through high-quality reprints of such older Chinese martial arts training manuals.” Kennedy states that Liu’s collection contains two thousand out-of-print manuals and five hundred more from the Republican era.

Kennedy devotes the next chapter to issues surrounding translation. Just about every translator I’ve read—and that’s a lot by now—issues similar caveats about the ability—or rather inability—of a translation to be both literally accurate and artistically sound. It’s kind of like the problems physicists have with sub-atomic structure, for photons can be viewed as a wave or as a point, but not both at the same time. Frequent readers of martial arts translations undoubtedly have encountered these sorts of caveats, but to Kennedy’s credit, his explanation is both more detailed and explanatory beyond the obvious truism that certain words and concepts in any language can be fraught with such an excess of meanings that accurate translation is completely impossible.

A chapter on how Chinese martial artists made their livings over time is next, and the short answer is as soldiers and law enforcement, physicians, opera troupers and street performers, security personnel and bodyguards, or criminals—sometimes a measure of more than one of these. The author gives a fine breakdown of most of these types and their prevalence during certain periods of Chinese history. And he weaves in historical features that abound in popular culture. One story concerns the association between Chinese opera troupes and Hung Gar Shaolin masters who were on the run from Qing forces after escaping the massacre at the Shaolin Temple, which had been masterminded by the treacherous and evil monk, Bai Mai. (Or so the story goes.)

Next, the author relates the history of the martial arts in Taiwan, which became the de facto repository of Chinese martial arts during their decades of suppression in mainland China. He takes this history from the 1100s, when Chinese settlement of the island really began, supplanting the indigenous Hakka people who were the original immigrants from China centuries earlier. Then he moves rapidly through several succeeding waves of immigration to 1621, each one bringing with it various styles of martial arts.

The chapter then discusses Qing-era martial arts in Taiwan and how they were taught, important manuals of the time, militias, important kung fu centers, styles, and the Japanese era in Taiwan, digressing at each turn to explain the progression, divulge facts, and relate anecdotes. One of the longest and most entertaining is about Liao Tien Ding, the Righteous Thief of Taiwan. Described by the author as melding of Robin Hood and Billy the Kid, but using kung fu instead of arrows or bullets, Liao was a folk hero in his country for attacking and robbing the rich and the police. He was said to have “burglary kung fu.”

Sections on politics and the martial arts and important modern figures follow, and Kennedy points out that a few of these individuals were profiled in Robert W. Smith’s Chinese Boxing: Masters and Methods.

And that concludes Kennedy’s contributions. Part II of the book, written by Elizabeth Guo, profiles more than thirty authors/editors and surveys their more important works. I would characterize Guo’s reviews as far sketchier than mine in terms of depth of survey and criticism, but they are much heavier on the historical background. Certainly, being Taiwanese, fluent in Chinese, and a researcher with a large number of primary resources at her fingertips give depth and veracity to her profiles and surveys. At the very least, she opens the door on significant works and what their publication meant in a larger cultural context as well as to martial arts literary history.

Each several-page chapter covers a single author, or occasionally multiple authors and/or editors. Some cover only a single work, some several. Each gives, to one degree or another, a concise but fairly in-depth historical background on the author, his art, and the genesis of the book in addition to a thumbnail survey of contents. These reviews aren’t a critical response. After all, according to the authors, these all are topnotch or otherwise significant examples of the kung fu authors’ arts—literary as well as martial. Instead they serve to give a basis for critical evaluation and as bait to lure your interest.

I’m not going to try to describe each author Guo discusses. That’s her job, and she does it ably. But I will mention a few. The first profile is of New Book on Effective Military Techniques by General Qi Ji-guang (1528–1587). A complete translation with commentary of this book can be found in Dan Docherty’s Tai Chi Chuan: Decoding the Classics for the Modern Martial Artist. The next one is Sun Lu-tang, whose five books on the internal martial arts were groundbreaking and influential across the entire genre of martial arts literature and elevated his name among internal stylists.

Most of the manuals Gou cites display and discuss open-hand and weapons forms across a number of systems and styles, but there are notable exceptions, such as Shanghai City Police Training Center’s Rope Techniques for Arrest, which discusses and illustrates ways to use rope to efficiently and effectively bind prisoners in ways that serve anywhere between handcuffs and a straightjacket. There also is Western Boxing, an English book translated into Chinese without the translator mentioning the original author’s name.

Guo’s section is followed by a glossary and a helpful index. If the book lacks anything it is a complete bibliography to aid the reader in doing further research and reading. However, I went through the book and compiled a list of all the authors and works that Guo and Kennedy profile. (See below.) Note that this list includes not just the thirty-odd authors of Guo’s section, but also all the ones Kennedy discussed or mentioned in his section. This will give you an excellent idea of who and what to look for should you be interested in reading some of the manuals yourself.

On that note, I have to mention Brennan Translations, a website on which translator Paul Brennan has posted well over a hundred translations of, primarily, the same sorts of books discussed by Kennedy and Guo. In fact, at least fifty of the books he reviews are either specifically named in Chinese Martial Arts Training Manuals or are by authors who are mentioned. So Brennan’s page is an extremely important resource for those interested in this sort of material. (See below for specifics.)

This is just the sort of reference work to appeal to the bibliophile like me. It might not be encyclopedic, but it has much to say about the history of Chinese martial arts manuals, their development, and why they were important, both as a genre and as specific examples. As I said in my opening, I wish I’d known about it when it first appeared. But now that I know it does, I imagine it will not be read this once, shelved, and never read again (by me), but will be picked over again and again as I read more examples of the manuals it discusses and turn to writing reviews of them. Kudos to the authors for a book not just well conceived and well done but much needed.

​

​

​