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Chapter 3
Defending the Nation
By the second h al f of the Ming period (1368–1644), Shaolin’s military
reputation had been firmly established. A flood of sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century sources attests the fame of the Shaolin martial arts. Late Ming authors
leave no doubt that martial training had been fully integrated into the monas-
tery’s regimen, and that its monks had created their own quintessential fight-
ing techniques.
The late Ming period witnessed a tremendous growth in commercial pub-
lishing. The burgeoning consumer economy required new types of printed lit-
erature: travel guides and encyclopedias, memoirs and local histories, military
treatises and martial arts manuals, no less than a great variety of fiction—novels
and short stories alike. The Shaolin martial arts figure in each and every one of
these literary genres. They are celebrated in the writings of generals and mar-
tial arts experts, scholars and statesmen, monks and poets. By the sixteenth cen-
tury, Shaolin fighting techniques were recorded in every corner of the empire,
from Yunnan in the remote southwest to Zhejiang on the eastern seaboard.
Just how famous the Shaolin martial arts had become is indicated by
proverbial references. Casual allusions to Shaolin fighting appear in every
type of late Ming fiction, from tales in the classical language to short stories
and novels in the vernacular.^1 When fictional tough guys brag that their tech-
niques are superior to Shaolin, they reveal how well-known the latter had
been. “The Shaolin staff is only good for beating up frogs,” proclaims a pro-
tagonist of the Plum in the Golden Vase (Jin Ping Mei) (ca. 1600), proving that
the monastery’s martial arts had become a household name.^2
The Ming evidence differs from the preceding Tang sources not only in
scope but also in the precise information it provides on the Shaolin fighting
techniques. We cannot properly speak of “Tang-period Shaolin martial arts,”
since we do not know how seventh-century Shaolin monks fought. By contrast,
we can describe the late Ming Shaolin combat methods, which attracted to the
monastery military experts from across the empire. By the sixteenth century,