Below is an excerpt from an article that appeared at Kung Fu Tea, which reminds us that at one time, Chinese martial arts was very much a part of the repertoire of street performers; and that this is a part of the history that shouldn't be overlooked. The full post may be read here.
When thinking about the emergence of modern Chinese martial culture I often speak about the “martial arts marketplace.” I use the phrase as a metaphor for the subaltern space within Chinese society where hand combat ideas and philosophies competed for an audience, legitimacy and paying students in China in the 1920s and 1930s. Still, it is worth remembering that there is a much older, and more concrete, association between martial artists and marketplaces.
Market days and temple festivals were times when large numbers of potential consumers came together in a single place. More importantly, the peasants had just sold their produce and were walking around with money. That made these gatherings a good venue for popular entertainment. Common forms included storytellers, puppet shows, opera performances, acrobats, traveling patent medicine sales demonstrations and martial artists.
The martial arts were much more popular in the country side than in urban areas (with a couple of notable exceptions), and martial culture could easily suffuse all of these forms of entertainment. Story tellers might recite the exploits of the great heroes from Water Margin, puppet shows would portray “Monkey” fighting various monsters with his magical staff, and I recently saw an estimate that up to 1/3 of all of the plays in the traditional repertoire of Cantonese Opera troupes were probably stories of adventure and daring do that focused on the exploits of famous martial artists. These often features extended fight scenes. In fact, opera troupes quite literally competed with one another to offer the most impressive martial displays and showcase the most exotic styles.
And then there were the straight up martial artists. These seem to have come in three varieties. There were local martial arts masters who put on displays, organized classes and recruited students at these events. This sort of market organization was a major force in the growth of Plum Blossom and other styles in Shandong and northern China. Secondly there were traveling bands of performers who attracted a crowd with their displays of strength, dexterity and hard Qi. The resulting crowd was then plied with patent medicines, charms or cheap martial arts manuals. At the end of the day the performers pulled up stakes and moved on to the next town.
Lastly there were the “lei tai” fighters. A lei tai was a raised platform that would be erected so that a large audience could (for a small fee) watch a fight. Professional fighters would come into town and set up the stage. They would usually begin by issuing an open challenge to local fighters, and they would continue to perform for as long as they kept winning. And the longer they performed the larger and more animated the crowd became. Needless to say, big crowds were good for business.
There is a lot of loose talk and gossip about the “good old days” of lei tai fighting that still circulates in martial arts circles today. Having a great grand-master who killed a man in a lei tai fight is seen (for some inexplicable reason) as the ultimate proof of the superiority of ones style. I do not mean to disrespect anyone’s style or creation mythology, but such stories need to be approached with extreme caution.
Martial arts demonstrations could exist only when they were not seen as a threat to law and order by the government. In practice that meant they were a lot more common in the countryside where there were fewer officials and it was easier for a snake-oil salesman to ply his wares. Yet some of this stuff was seen everywhere and you always had to be careful not to let it go to far. Why? Because if the local government decided that you were a trouble causer or were “disturbing the peace” the typical punishment was to literally stake the offender to the ground, strip them naked and them beat them with switches until they bled. If you killed someone in a fight, justified or not, the typical response was a short trial and a public beheading, also conducted in the market place.
No comments:
Post a Comment