what some monks performed for a powerful and suspicious Qing official.
Whatever their actual abilities, they would not have been wise to show great
martial arts skills to Wang.
The Kangxi emperor bestowed some of his calligraphy on the temple in
1704 , and his son, the Yongzheng emperor, even paid for a large-scale
restoration in 1735. Shaolin had thus recovered enough of its Buddhist
establishment to host the Qianlong emperor in 1750 , but it was still a
shadow of its Ming period incarnation. Most tellingly, after a brief stint
from 1657 to 1661 , no head abbot was appointed until 1999. Without the
draw of martial arts and only limited imperial support, Shaolin was much
diminished. Some part of its martial arts tradition did remain, however,
as the Qianlong emperor sawfitin 1775 to severely admonish the Henan
governor for using Shaolin monks in troop training.^12 Buddhism was the
only acceptable activity for monks at Shaolin.
In the Qing Dynasty, Shaolin’s reputation far outshone its reality. Martial
arts styles claimed spurious connections with Shaolin to gain legitimacy.
Chinese martial artists and scholars tied themselves to Shaolin as the
Chinese source of martial arts, untainted by foreign influence. The author-
ities, for their part, worried that the many religious uprisings, real or imag-
ined, might somehow gain power by connecting with the Shaolin community.
The association of heterodox religious groups, like the White Lotus Sects,
with violent uprisings somehow became connected to Shaolin’s association
with martial arts and thefloating population of criminals and marginal
groups. Shaolin does not appear to have been actually connected, but various
secret societies developed their own mythologies tied to Shaolin. Both offi-
cially and in folklore, Shaolin became a center of Chinese martial arts
resistance to Qing rule.
Taiji, Bagua, Xingyi
Qing records contain dozens and dozens of martial arts styles, and even
these records only scratch the surface of what was in practice on the ground.
There were probably hundreds if not thousands of“styles”of martial arts
practiced in towns, villages, and temples across China. Most of these styles
have subsequently disappeared, or wittingly or unwittingly classed them-
selves under the rubric of some of the main styles currently in widespread
practice. Further research into local cultures will no doubt reveal or recover
a much greater variety of martial arts styles. Most of these styles contain
very similar techniques, whether in boxing, wrestling, or armed combat.
When Qi Jiguang developed hisBoxing Classic(Quanjing) within his larger
Taiji, Bagua, Xingyi 205