that they wore some kind of g-string-like loincloth and shoes but were
otherwise exposed. Male wrestlers were often bare-chested as well though
without, it seems, the same unseemly connotations.
Lin Boyuan argues that the roots of the idea of different martial arts
schools lies in the Song development of the entertainment quarters.^26 This
seems circumstantially to be the case, though there is no hard evidence for
it. Specifically, Lin believes that the articulation of separate schools hap-
pened in the later Song, after the fall of the north to the Jurchen. In thefirst
part of the Song, the martial arts of the military were widely taught and
spread into the farming population. These martial arts then evolved in the
entertainment quarters. The requirements of providing an entertaining
show forced performers to dramatize their arts and make them more
elaborate. Where earlier martial arts dances were direct extensions of
fighting techniques, performed on occasion for their aesthetic interest,
the martial arts of the entertainment quarters were primarily concerned
with aesthetics. The elaboration of the martial arts differentiated the
practices of different performers much more clearly.
Prior to this emphasis on aesthetics, a martial arts instructor was only
interested in teaching a student the basic use of infantry or cavalry weap-
ons. For practical purposes, both armed and unarmed combat uses a very
limited set of techniques. This simplicity is further emphasized by the need
to teach large numbers of students simultaneously, and, in the military, for
those students tofight as a unit rather than as individuals. A unit of
spearmen, for example, has a small range of techniques for using their
weapons en masse. Effectivefighting is more the product of learning to
perform a simple set of techniques with power, speed, and accuracy, and
doing this correctly against an opponent, than of learning a large number
of elaborate techniques. From an entertainment point of view, this may be
acceptable in a genuine contest, but it is less so in a more staged event. Thus
wrestling was probably not elaborated on since wrestling contests could
and had always been used for entertainment in a nonlethal way. But sword
and weapon bouts could not be real. Something had to be done to make the
performances interesting over repeated viewings.
As these practices spread and were repeated, different troupes of per-
formers would have developed their own particular systems of perform-
ance martial arts. Over time they would have taught new performers in the
group their established repertoire. There were certainly regional differ-
ences in nomenclature with respect to the martial arts. Boxing went under
an enormous variety of names, all of which, as far as we can tell, included
kicking and sometimes throwing. Wrestling continued to maintain a
134 The Five Dynasties, Ten Kingdoms, and Song Dynasty