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Introduction: A Very Brief History of the Wooden Dummy in the Southern Chinese Martial Arts.
I have been shopping for a new wooden dummy (Mook
Yan Jong). Obviously Wing Chun has a long and fruitful association
with the wooden dummy, but this training tool is used throughout the
southern Chinese martial arts. Southern Mantis and Hung Gar boxers
occasionally use the dummy, as do Choy Li Fut practitioners. In fact,
Choy Li Fut employs a great variety of somewhat more mechanical complex
training tools.
Nor is the use of the dummy restricted to martial
artists. Wooden training devices have been used by military forces from
time immemorial. Sima Qian, the brilliant ancient historian, is the
first individual to discuss the wooden dummy. In Records of the Grand Historian (written between the 2nd and 1st
centuries BCE) he mentions that Emperor Wu Yi of the Shang dynasty
(circa 1200 BCE) made “Ou Ren” (a wooden human figure) that could be
used for Shou Bo (bare handed fighting) practice.
Scholars debate how much weight to place on Sima
Qian’s early histories, but for our purposes the details aren’t actually
all that important. Whether their attested use stretches back 2100 or
3200 years, wooden dummies have long been used in traditional Chinese
combat training.
Nor has this use been restricted to the military.
In more recent centuries wooden dummies became a feature of southern
Chinese popular culture. Stories of the southern Shaolin temple
included its hall of diabolical mechanical dummies that a student had to
defeat in order to “graduate” and leave the temple.
Much of this lore was conveyed through popular
novels, stories, street performances and of course opera. Cantonese
Opera troops attracted large crowds with feats of martial prowess and
“military plays.” This made it essential that they have tools for
training martial artists. Wooden dummies, very similar to the sort
still used today, helped to train performers. The Cantonese Opera
Museum in Foshan even displays an antique dummy along with the other
artifacts of the industry’s 19th century past.
As a side note, I have always found it interesting
that in translating their signage the museum refers to these training
devices as “instruments” rather than “dummies.” Obviously there are
lots of percussive instruments in traditional opera, and dummies make a
very distinctive set of sounds when struck. In my lineage of Wing Chun
we count a “movement” of the dummy form as being completed when the
dummy makes a sound rather than when the martial artists move a limb. I
don’t think it requires all that imagination to see the “instrumental”
quality in all of this.
Unfortunately we don’t have a lot of examples of
really old dummies. After all, these objects were made of wood and when
planted in the ground they would eventually rot. This must have been
an issue in a climate as humid and wet as southern China.
The Foshan Period
Dummies likely started to disappear from the local landscape around the turn of the 20th
century.
Opera was being displaced by other forms of entertainment and
the martial arts were decidedly unpopular in the years following the
boxer rebellion. Luckily these swings have a habit of reversing
themselves.
By the 1920s there was increased popular interest
in the martial arts. Part of this was the result of efforts by
reformers (such as the Jingwu Association) to promote the traditional
hand combat styles as a distinct form of unique Chinese physical
culture. However, the growth of the economy and the transformation of
the traditional teaching structures into market-based public schools
also helped the martial arts to gain a following in middle class and
urban areas where they had traditionally been frowned upon. As the
southern Chinese martial arts grew more dummies were produced and put
into place.
Most of these dummies were of a type now called Dai
Jong (Ground Dummies, also sometimes referred to as “buried” or “dead”
dummies). They were constructed from a log or tree trunk that was
anywhere from eight to ten feet long. Generally speaking the lower
three and half feet would be worked into a thick square and buried in a
stone or cement lined pit in the ground.
The still round main-body of the dummy would sit
about three inches above the ground. This was enough room to allow
shredded rattan strips to be slipped into the spaces between the square
base of the dummy and the side of the pit. Packing the area in this way
supported the central pole in an upright position, but it also allowed
for a little give and spring when the dummy was struck or pushed.
Occasionally I see accounts stating that small
rocks are gravel were used to line the hole. I am not sure how
widespread that practice was. It certainly could have been done, and it
would have provided a much firmer body. Nevertheless, the resulting
dummy would not have had much movement.
All of the surviving dummies of the pre-1940s era,
including both the example at the Opera Museum and the Jingwu Hall in
Foshan, are of this type. The picture of the example at Jingwu is quite
interesting because it clearly shows how the main body is reduced to a
square cut, and how that is positioned in a hole in the ground.
Dai Jongs are still commonly seen in a number of
places. They are encountered in Guangdong province and appear to be
fairly common in Vietnam, where at least some of them have been given a
more exaggerated swinging motion. Given the construction of the
traditional one story home in southern China they could be planted
either indoors or in an outdoor training area.
The preceding series of pictures, taken by Leung Ting and published in his book Roots and Branches of Wing Tsun,
show Hak Min Nam (often called by his nickname Pan Nam, b. 1911- d.
1996) working a Dai Jong that has planted in his study. This is a good
real life example of the sort of indoor dummy which Donny Yen is seen
working in the first Ip Man movie. Master Kwok Fu, one of Ip Man’s
original Foshan students, planted his dummy outdoors (presumably
sometime after the Cultural Revolution) and was still teaching students
on it in the 1990s.
This is the sort of dummy that Ip Man would have learned the form on. Obviously Chan Wah Shun and Ng Chung So
would have used this sort of device, and it’s likely that Ip Man owned
one as well.
In general traditional buried dummies seem to be larger
than the latter sort, both in terms of their height and diameter. This
greater size might help them survive longer when buried in the ground
and exposed to the elements. It seems that most telephone poles in the
US are good for 10-15 years and it is likely that this is how long a Dai
Jong could have lasted as well.
Interestingly all of the early dummies seem to have
relatively thick offset arms (rather than the parallel arms that are
more commonly associated with the Ip Man lineage today) and smaller
legs. However, they seem to have roughly the same proportions as modern
dummies. In both cases the top arm of the dummy sits at about the
level of the user’s shoulder.
Hong Kong Period: Ip Man Invents the Modern Wing Chun Dummy
While Ip Man probably owned a dummy in Foshan, our
story does not really begin to get interesting until we reach the
1950s. In 1949 Ip Man and a daughter fled to Macau and then Hong Kong
in anticipation of the Communist conquest of Guangdong. After a number
of years of KMT sponsored anti-Communist campaigns it was probably no
longer safe for him given his prior employment as the leader of a local
police unit. After spending a few months in Hong Kong Ip Man decided to
take up the title of Sifu and become a professional martial arts
teacher.
Of course there were a number of complications. To
begin with, he did not have a dummy. More to the point he had yet to
establish a local reputation, a pool of stable students or a location
for a permanent school. Ip Man would spend the first few years of his
teaching career addressing each of these problems.
Yet by the middle of the 1950s things were looking
up. Ip was building a larger group of more advanced students and it was
now time to consider installing a dummy so that their training could
progress. In fact he was already showing some his students sections of
the dummy form which they were practicing like any other set. In Wing
Chun parlance this is called “using the air dummy.”
While good for a
quick review, it is no substitute for the geometric discipline of the
real thing.
Life in Hong Kong was very different from Foshan.
To begin with, people tended to live in tall apartment buildings, rather
than in one story dwellings with flagstone floors. And outdoor space
was extremely limited in the city, just as it is today.
Our best source of information on the development of modern dummies within the Wing Chun clan during the Hong Kong era is Ip Ching and Ron Heimberger’s (2004) volume Mook Yan Jong Sum Fat. While this can be a difficult book to get a hold of, it has been a great help is assembling the following account. Sometime
in the mid-1950s Ip Man approached a carpenter and friend named Fung
Shek. He explained his basic problem and talked about what he wanted in
a dummy. He then commissioned Fung to devise some means for
constructing a mounting system for a portable dummy (Ip Man moved
frequently during this period) that could be used indoors.
There are any number of ways to mount a dummy, but
Fung’s idea was both simple and innovative. Rather than supporting the
dummy at its base (the traditional method) he instead hung the jong on
wooden slats that passed directly through the body. The thin slats
acted as springs. By moving the supporting structure up the body, where
most of the form was actually performed, the feel of the dummy was
substantially changed.
Most Dai Jongs had a limited rocking motion, if
they moved at all. The new Gua Jong (Live Dummy) was different. It all
had to do with the placement and strength of the slats. When a student
engaged the arms or leg of the dummy they were in effect loading a
spring which would throw the dummy back forward in a more lifelike way
the moment the pressure was released.
In effect a Gua Jong offers a degree of feedback on
your movements that you simply could not get from a buried dummy.
Given that this instrument is often used as a sort of “silent training
partner” every ounce of feedback you can squeeze out of it is valuable.
For instance, in Wing Chun students want to punch towards the
opponent’s “center line.” If you do that with a dummy, from practically
any forward facing angle, you will force the body back onto the slats
and then the recoil will return the dummy to its initial position. But
if your lines of attack are off and you are punching across the front of
the dummy, or simply pushing at its arm, its body will slide along the
rails, retreating from your incomplete strike. Again, this is critical
because it provides instant feedback to the students on the sorts of
subtle pressures that must be “felt” to be understood.
Together Ip Man and Fung Shek fine-tuned the new
creation. The basic idea was sound but it took a bit of experimentation
to work out exactly what sort of slats and mounting system yielded the
best results. The final product was a truly custom, and innovative,
dummy for the young Hong Kong Wing Chun clan.
Fung Shek delivered his prototype to Ip Man in
1956. While Ip Man worked with a number of different dummies over the
years (as he moved from one school to the next) he always kept the Fung
Shek creation with him. It was his preferred dummy to set up in a
school, and eventually in his own home. In fact, this is the same dummy
that used in the now famous series of photographs taken by Tang Sang in
1967. It was always his personal jong. It can now been seen on display in the Ip Man Tong in Foshan.
Some of Ip Man’s more senior students were starting
to branch off and open their own schools in the second half of the
1950s. Fung Shek, with his new indoor mounting system, was the sole
source for dummies in this early period. Unfortunately he does not seem
to have been very prolific and we do not have many examples of his
work.
In reality he was never actually produced that many
jongs. Ip Ching estimates that he only produced 10-12 dummies between
the late 1950s and the early 1960s when he stopped taking orders.
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