special section of the city that developed out of aflourishing merchant
culture and the usual entertainment mainstay of brothels. Thus the capital
supported restaurants, brothels, and martial arts performances for the
increasingly wealthy and well-traveled population centered there. Even
after north China was lost to the Jurchen and the capital reestablished at
Hangzhou in south China, a similar section was established in the new
capital. In this area of the city, a wide variety of martial arts was performed
purely to entertain an audience: boxing, wrestling, archery (with bow and
crossbow), fencing, sword dances, and so on. The men and women who
performed there were professional martial artists expert in particularfight-
ing skills. These martial arts would have grown out of both thefighting
techniques of the military and the arts practiced locally all over the empire.
Unlike the Hundred Events, official martial arts performances,
government-sponsored wrestling andfighting competitions, or military
exams, performances in the entertainment quarters were entirely in the
private sphere. They were much more akin to local wrestling or martial
arts competitions held on festival days, often in the village market or at a
temple. The vast concentration of people in the Song capital–well over a
million residents lived in Kaifeng in the eleventh century–created a large
and permanent audience for these performances. This was part and parcel
of the articulation of urban culture in the Song stimulated by the break-
down of the government-controlled market system. Under that system,
markets were carefully regulated,fixed in both time and space and super-
vised by the government. The government’s purpose in this was to tax
goods and ensure accurate weights and measures. For a number of reasons,
Kaifeng, though heavily patrolled and supervised by the army because it
was the capital, did not restrict its marketplaces. This contributed to a vast
increase in mercantile activity and enormous economic development. The
martial artsflourished in this environment along with many other aspects
of Chinese society.
These performers were originally mobile–one of the terms used for the
troopes was“mobile tents遊棚”–and they would set up wherever they
had enough of an audience. The scale of these performance spaces varied
considerably, with some seating somewhat more thanfifty and the largest
reportedly holding several thousand onlookers. At least in the capital, they
were in constant operation:“Not considering wind, rain, cold, or heat, the
audience for the various tents is day after day like this.”^22 Some traveling
medicine sellers tried to exploit the interest in martial arts performances to
increase business. They would set up in a market with a sword or spear
near them, though, as one text noted of these men, they were only trying to
132 The Five Dynasties, Ten Kingdoms, and Song Dynasty