artsfit into the Western categories of physical culture? They were not
entirely like boxing or wrestling, or even fencing. The problem was not
so much that the Western martial arts were not, in fact, martial arts, but
rather that they were thought of as sports. Westerners did connect sports
and war, but not necessarily martial arts and war. Playing rugby or other
team sports was imagined to build the right character for war, particularly
among the upper classes who would lead in war, but the same was not
always so for sports like boxing, which had very different class implica-
tions in the West.
Even in the late nineteenth century, Western soldiers actually practiced
very similar martial arts to those of the civilian world, most obviously
shooting with a rifle, but they had largely separated out the respective
hand-to-hand combat arts. The modern Olympics present a useful per-
spective on certain aspects of how Western martial arts developed into
sports and also how modern ideas about sports reinterpreted earlier under-
standings of sports. The ancient Greek games held great religious signifi-
cance, and many of the competitions were in the martial arts. There were
competitions in boxing, wrestling, discus throwing, and javelin throwing,
as well as more dual-use activities like running and equestrian events.
In modern times, the French held several Olympic competitions near the
end of the eighteenth century, and the Greeks staged an international
Olympic competition in 1859. Part of the impetus for the formation of
what would become the modern Olympic movement came from the
Prussian victory in the Franco-Prussian War ( 1870 – 71 ). One of the most
important men driving the Olympic movement in the late nineteenth
century was a Frenchman, Baron Pierre de Coubertin. Coubertin believed
that the failure of French physical culture was a root cause of France’s
defeat in the war.^1 It is therefore not surprising that Chinese thinkers and
leaders came to believe that sports were important in the“revival”of the
Chinese nation. And of course, wrestling, shooting, fencing, and boxing as
well as the now apparently demilitarized track andfield events like javelin
and discus throwing were part of the modern Olympics. Western martial
arts were so fully incorporated into the realm of sports that they appeared
to be unrelated to the skills of the professional military.
Fencing and other martial arts had continued to be practiced in Europe
into the late nineteenth century. In England, the sword had fallen out of use as
a true combat weapon and remained neglected, despite the efforts of anti-
quarian swordsmen like Alfred Hutton,Richard Burton, and Egerton Castle.
Fencing was still seriously practiced in Italy, France, and Spain, however, and
when Hutton researched past masters, he found fencing manuals going back
214 Post-Imperial China