soldiers from the martial arts. Whereas previously a soldier necessarily
learned martial arts to perform his duties, in the modern army soldiers
were sometimes trained in the martial arts of unarmed combat or bayonet
use as a supplement to their real military skills. As Qi Jiguang had
described it in thefifteenth century, unarmed combat was not a battlefield
skill but was used only to enhance the men’sfitness and agility.
Another new development that owed something to this changed per-
spective on the martial arts was the appearance of its serious historical
study. Men like Tang Hao ( 1887 – 1959 ) pioneered thefield of martial arts
history. In the attempt tofigure out where the martial artsfit into modern
Chinese society, it was natural that someone would try to define martial
arts. Tang successfully cut through the veil of myths, folklore, and adver-
tising to begin tracking martial arts practice back to specific times, places,
and individuals. Not surprisingly, this demystification angered rather than
interested many martial artists. The myths of the martial arts were what
attracted many practitioners and validated and valorized many martial
arts teachers. Placing the martial arts in a historical context undercut their
represented world and the heroic narrative that connected them to the
swashbuckling heroes offiction.
The medium offilm drew upon the theater traditions of operatic stories,
reiterating and amplifying the popular performative traditions of martial
arts. Adding to the availability of these heroic stories was the dramatic shift
in the written form of Chinese away from the difficult Classical Chinese
learned by men studying for the civil service exams to the use of vernacular
Chinese. Stories published in newspapers and magazines were more acces-
sible to a broader audience, even if they still drew upon the same classical
literature for material, so tales centered on martial artists transferred
directly from traditional into modern forms offiction. The translation of
classical tales into modern media was also strongly influenced by the late
imperial and early twentieth-century struggle tofind a place for the martial
arts in Chinese culture. In particular, very late concepts of the martial arts,
like the rubric of internal versus external martial arts, were quickly taken
up and amplified in the new stories.
Chinese nationalism, mixed feelings about the imperial past, and the
continuing anxiety about the place of China and Chinese culture in the
now apparently Western-dominated world were all reflected in the new
ideas of the martial arts. Both infiction and in practice the language of
internal versus external martial arts exactly paralleled the larger arguments
about how deeply to absorb Western culture. Was Western science and
physical culture merely external and shallow, as compared to profound,
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