Hand Combat 133
Other Fighting Styles
In the winter of 1930, pioneering martial arts historian Tang Hao (1897–1959)
traveled to Chen Family Village (Chenjiagou) in Wen County of northern
Henan. Tang, whose research combined textual scholarship with fieldwork,
was searching for materials on the origins of Taiji Quan, which was known to
have been developed at the village. He unearthed there two Qing documents
suggesting that the foundations of the world-renowned technique had been
laid in the seventeenth century: a family history that attributed the Chen bare-
handed style to the clan’s ninth-generation ancestor, Chen Wangting (ca.
1580–ca. 1660), and a poem by the latter describing his invention of a quan
technique. Most scholars have accepted Tang Hao’s view that Chen Wangting’s
martial art was either the same as—or the immediate ancestor of—the Taiji
Quan with which we are familiar today, even though in Chen’s surviving writ-
ings the term taiji does not appear.^56
Chen Wangting had served as an official in the Ming dynasty. During
the 1610s and 1620s he had been appointed regional inspector for Shan-
dong, Zhili, and Liaodong. He also had firsthand battle experience, having
participated in several military confrontations with the Manchus along the
northern borders. By the Qing invasion of 1644, however, he was living in re-
tirement at his native village, where he dedicated himself to the perfection
of his bare-handed technique. Musing on his experiences, he versified, “I
sigh, as I think of those years; when, clad in armor and wielding a spear, I
swept away the bandits’ hordes, repeatedly putting myself in danger.... Now,
old and withered, I have nothing left but the [Daoist] book Yellow Court^57 to
keep me company. When bored, I invent techniques of hand combat (quan);
during the busy season, I till the land; taking advantage of my leisure, I in-
struct a few disciples and descendants, enabling them to become easily as
strong as dragons and tigers.”^58
Chen Wangting created his bare-handed style in the vicinity of the Shao-
lin Monastery; his native Chenjiagou village was located approximately
thirty-five miles north of the temple (see map 4). Moreover he laid the foun-
dations of Taiji Quan during the very same period, the seventeenth century,
when the Shaolin monks were turning their attention to hand combat. It
should not come as a surprise, therefore, that his Taiji Quan shared common
traits—such as an emphasis upon “close-range hand combat” (duanda)—
with Shaolin Quan. The term taiji (supreme ultimate) figures in Shaolin’s
Hand Combat Classic (figure 30), just as the monastery’s legend of the staff-
wielding Vajrapâÿi found its way into the Chen family’s military writings.^59
“Most people,” writes Matsuda Ryûchi, “believe that Taiji Quan and Shaolin
Quan are completely different forms of hand combat. Actually, in their basic
postures, hand methods, leg methods, and other fighting aspects, the two
styles are entirely alike.”^60
Taiji Quan was not the only bare-handed style that emerged at the Shao-