to the sixteenth century. As a dedicated martial artist, for that is exactly what
Hutton was, he struggled to make his art relevant to the late nineteenth-
century battlefield. Like much of the discourse on martial arts in China in the
same period, he began to emphasize the more general mental and physical
improvements that fencing provided the practitioner. The sword was still an
archaic weapon from the battlefield perspective, however, and it was unlikely
to be available for personal defense in England. The sports versions of the
martial arts laid claim to the same ability to improve physical and mental
functions, were less dangerous, more widely available, and more socially
acceptable. In the West, at least, sports had overwhelmed combat martial arts
almost completely by the twentieth century.
Combat martial arts followed a different path in twentieth-century
China. Perhaps because China lacked its own tradition of physical culture
fully akin to Western sports, it was only with the introduction of Western
sports that traditional combat martial arts were challenged tofit into a
more modern social order.^2 Chinese martial arts already had a place in
Chinese society, in literature, theater, religion, and combat; it was when
Chinese society began to shift to accommodate Western modernity that the
place or value of combat martial arts was questioned. Its importance in the
literary or religious arenas was less severely challenged. New forms and
sources offiction, and Western religion, obviously did not include Chinese
martial arts, but these arts continued in places like the theater. And as
traditional Chinese theater forms and stories formed the initial sources for
the Chinese movie industry–and even popular writers of vaguely Western-
style novels–the martial arts continued to live in the world offiction.
The radical changes in Chinese popular and literaryfiction in the
twentieth century profoundly impacted the understanding of the martial
arts. Particularly as the twentieth century progressed, a national narrative
concerning the origin of Chinese martial arts began to emerge through
films in particular, but also in popularfiction, that unified practice and
origins. Rather than a disparate, dispersed, and widely spread set of
responses to combat needs, the martial arts were portrayed as having
specific origins, often through a Shaolin or somefictive or historicalfigure,
whose teaching then spread across the“Chinese nation.”The variations in
the narrative were seen as the natural result of historical divergence from
an ideal source. Martial artists trying to sell their skills took up these
narratives to attract students and legitimize their own practice. Students
decided to take up martial arts after seeing movies or reading books about
them. These activities all fed one another, with subsequent movies and
fiction reiterating, amplifying, and adding to the earlier mythology.
Post-Imperial China 215