fencing, and even a form of football, for “practice in using the hands and
feet, facilitating the use of weapons, and organizing to ensure victory in
both attack and defense” (Gu 1987, 205). So by the Warring States period
(475–221 B.C.), boxing had become a basic military skill to develop
strength and agility for use of weapons in hand-to-hand combat by the
mass infantry forces of that time.
After the Southern Song capital was established at Hangzhou in 1135,
the modern term quan(fist) appears and replaces shoubo as the common
term for boxing. This seemingly abrupt change may have been based on
common usage in the dialect spoken in the new capital. Some support for
this view can be found in a later work by Zhu Guozhen (ca. 1621), who
notes that boxing was more commonly known as daquanin his day (the
term introduced during the Song period and still used today), but was
called dashou(hitting hands) around Suzhou.
One contemporary Song author describes shiquan(employing the
fists) as different from wrestling but similar to the skills used in the mili-
tary. He thus infers that there was a popular form of boxing, similar to but
not quite the same as that practiced in the military. This statement was
probably based on the fact that military boxing was limited to practical,
no-frills techniques employed in military formations, primarily to supple-
ment the use of weapons, while the popular forms were likely to have been
more individualistic and performance oriented, in the manner Ming general
Qi Jiguang (1528–1587) condemned as “flowery.”
During the short, oppressive Mongol rule (1206–1368) that followed
the Song, Chinese (called Hanren) were prohibited from practicing martial
arts, but opera scores from the period reveal that boxing was included in
military scenes of the operatic repertoire. This dramatic use of boxing un-
doubtedly encouraged the “flowery” phenomenon General Qi noted.
The Ming period (1368–1644) opens the first window in China’s long
history through which to get an illustrated glimpse of Chinese boxing. The
Ming experienced a chronic rash of large-scale Japanese and indigenous
marauding and piracy in the southern coastal provinces during the mid-six-
teenth century—an environment conducive to the application of traditional
military martial arts. The ultimate solution came in the form of a well-led,
disciplined volunteer peasant force trained in hand-to-hand combat by
General Qi Jiguang and others. The existence of such a force in turn de-
manded a bottom-up training program supported by standardized, illus-
trated, easy-to-understand manuals that set an example and contributed
greatly to what we now know about the martial arts in general and boxing
in particular. General Qi Jiguang’s “Boxing Classic,” a chapter in his New
Book of Effective Discipline(ca. 1561), not only provides illustrations of
the thirty-two forms Qi selected from the most well-known styles of the
Boxing, Chinese 27