A Short History of Chinese Martial Arts

Chinese martial arts have a long history — but most of what people now practice was systematized in the 19th and early 20th centuries, not in remote antiquity. This page sketches the actual textual and institutional history, with the legend clearly labeled.

The Ming military root (1500s–1600s)

The first surviving written systems of Chinese boxing come from Ming-dynasty military texts — written by officers as part of a soldier's curriculum, not by mystics in mountain temples.

• Qi Jiguang (戚繼光, 1528–1588), General Qi, compiled the 拳經捷要篇 (Essentials of the Boxing Classic) as chapter 14 of his military manual 紀效新書 (Jixiao Xinshu), in the 1560s. The 32 illustrated postures are the textual ancestor of much of what becomes Taijiquan three centuries later — several Taiji classics quote these verses verbatim.

• Yu Dayou (俞大猷, 1503–1579) wrote the 劍經 (Sword Classic) — the oldest surviving comprehensive Chinese fencing treatise — in his collected works 正氣堂集.

• Mao Yuanyi (茅元儀, 1594–1640) compiled the vast military encyclopedia 武備志 (Wubei Zhi) in 1621, which quotes both Qi Jiguang and Yu Dayou and preserves much else.

These are the deepest documented textual roots of the Chinese martial canon. The sister Taiji wiki carries the Qi Jiguang Classic of Pugilism in bilingual form; the originals are held in the codex.

The Internal / External split — 1669

The 内家 / 外家 distinction is first attested in writing in **Huang Zongxi's **Epitaph for Wang Zhengnan (王征南墓誌銘), 1669 — a late-Ming-loyalist scholar memorializing his martial-artist friend.

That single paragraph defines an internal-family boxing — using stillness to overcome motion, felling the attacker the instant the hand meets him — by contrast with Shaolin as the archetype of the external. It also attaches the art to a legendary Zhang Sanfeng of Wudang lineage, and gives a continuous chain of teachers down to Wang Zhengnan.

Internal vs External — The 內家/外家 Distinction (full discussion)

This is the textual root of the neijia idea. Our bilingual master of Huang Zongxi's text gives the original Chinese, a fresh open English translation, and commentary.

The Chen-village synthesis — 1600s onward

Across the Yellow River from where the Ming military tradition lived, in the village of Chen Family Ditch (陳家溝) in Henan, Chen Wangting (陳王廷, c. 1580–1660) synthesized a family fighting art that combined Ming military boxing (he quotes Qi Jiguang directly), Daoist breathing, and the village's existing wrestling tradition. The art that descended from his synthesis becomes Chen-style Taijiquan. His Song of the Boxing Canon (拳經總歌) is the earliest of the Chen-family writings — preserved in bilingual form on the Taiji wiki.

Chang Naizhou — the pre-Taiji internal theorist (1700s)

In the same Henan region, across the Yellow River from Chen village, Chang Naizhou (萇乃周, c. 1724–1783) — a scholar-boxer with no documented connection to the Chens — produced the deepest theoretical writing on internal body-mechanics that survives from pre-Taiji China. His 萇氏武技書 (Chang Family Martial Techniques) sets out a fully-worked theory of central qi (中氣), gathering and "passing" the qi, and the production of explosive power — in a vocabulary the Taiji classics would later echo point for point.

Douglas Wile called Chang the "missing link" of internal-arts history. His writings are held in the codex; the bilingual page on Chang Naizhou on the sister wiki gives the central passages with our own translation.

The 19th-century Taiji manuscripts

The Taiji classics as we know them — the Treatise attributed to Wang Zongyue, the Thirteen Postures Song, the Mental Elucidation, the Push Hands Song — exist in writing only from the mid-to-late 19th century, in the small literary circle around Wu Yuxiang (武禹襄, 1812–1880) and his nephew Li Yiyu (李亦畬, 1832–1892). The earliest written witness is Li's **1881 **salt-shop manuscript (鹽店本).

Yang-family Taiji — taught by Yang Luchan (楊露禪, 1799–1872) in 19th-century Beijing — descends from Chen-village Taiji via Yang's training under Chen Changxing. Yang's grandson Yang Chengfu (楊澄甫, 1883–1936) standardized the long form and published the manuals that disseminated Yang-style worldwide.

Dong Haichuan — Bagua, 1860s

Dong Haichuan (董海川, c. 1797–1882) taught the first systematic Baguazhang in mid-19th-century Beijing — a Daoist circle-walking practice elaborated into a martial system. His major disciples — Yin Fu, Cheng Tinghua — founded the two main modern branches.

Bagua Palm (八卦掌) — the full style page

Li Luoneng — Xingyi consolidated, mid-1800s

Li Luoneng (李洛能, c. 1808–1890) of Hebei consolidated Xingyiquan into its modern form, training the generation of teachers (Guo Yunshen, Liu Qilan, Che Yizhai) from whom both Hebei and Shanxi Xingyi descend.

Xingyi (形意拳) — the full style page

Northern Praying Mantis crystallizes — 19th-century Shandong

The mantis tradition's surviving documented art crystallizes in 19th-century Laiyang, Shandong, out of 羅漢短打 short-striking material plus local Shandong boxing. The Wang Lang founder legend is older but unverifiable; the documented lineages run from 升霄道人 → 范旭東 → 羅光玉 → 黃漢勛 (Seven Star, the most disseminated branch), with parallel Plum Blossom, Six Harmony, and (20th-century) Eight Step branches.

Praying Mantis (螳螂拳) — the full style page

The Republican-era reorganization (1900s–1930s)

The early 20th century is when Chinese martial arts became a public, institutional, published phenomenon for the first time:

• Jingwu (精武) Athletic Association — founded Shanghai, 1910; by the 1920s had branches across China and the diaspora (Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines). Standardized a cross-style curriculum (including Tan Tui, Northern Shaolin, the Five Tiger Cannon-and-Spear set) and published in print on a large scale for the first time.

• Central Guoshu Institute (中央國術館) — founded Nanjing, 1928; a state-sponsored institution that aimed to nationalize, standardize, and modernize Chinese martial arts as **國術 **guoshu ("national art"). Held national examinations; published manuals; ran provincial branches.

• Sun Lutang's synthesis (1915–1925) — Sun's three published books treated Taiji + Bagua + Xingyi as one system and helped establish the now-standard "three internal arts" category.

• Tang Hao (唐豪, 1897–1959) and Xu Zhen (徐震, 1898–1967) — the founding evidential historians of Chinese martial arts; their textual studies in the 1930s established what we now consider the scholarly consensus on the Wang Zongyue attribution, the Shaolin origin claims, and the relationship between the Taiji classics and the Ming military tradition.

This period's published Republican-era manuals are the bedrock of the modern open record — and the bulk of what the codex holds in Sources/.

The mid-20th-century diaspora

After 1949, many lineage holders took their arts abroad:

• Cheng Man-ching (鄭曼青) to Taiwan (1949) and then to New York (1964) — the major transmitter of Taiji to the United States.

• Huang Sheng-Shyan (黃性賢) to Singapore (1956), Sarawak (1963), Kuala Lumpur (1970) — establishing the Huang-style network across Southeast Asia.

• Liu Yunqiao (劉雲樵) to Taiwan — the major Baji transmitter outside the mainland.

• Wong Hon Fan (黃漢勛) in Hong Kong — disseminator of Seven Star Praying Mantis worldwide.

Diaspora — Where Chinese Martial Arts Went (Taiwan, HK, Singapore, Malaysia, NY)

Modern competition wushu and the living traditions

In the People's Republic of China, the 1950s saw the creation of modern competition 武術 wushu — standardized 24-form Taiji, modernized 長拳 changquan drawing on Cha and Hua, codified competition routines for sword and sabre. This is what most international audiences see as "Chinese martial arts" today, and what most Chinese youth train in school PE.

In Taiwan, Hong Kong, the mainland, and the diaspora, traditional lineage transmission continues in parallel — Wu Lianzhi's Baji in Mengcun, Yang Jun's Yang Taiji internationally, Wee Kee Jin's Huang Taiji in New Zealand, hundreds of small schools everywhere. Many living lineage holders publish books and video that are in copyright; the codex's policy is to link rather than reproduce.

See also

Internal vs External — the 內家 / 外家 distinction in depth

Diaspora — where the arts went after 1949

Northern Kung Fu Styles — the field guide to the canon

Sources & Method (Extended) — how we work

Companion taiji wiki

The Taiji thread of this history is documented in great depth on taiji.openmindspace.org — biographies of every major Taiji master from Yang Luchan onward, full bilingual texts of all the classics, and a separate Authenticity & Heritage page that treats the historiographical questions in scholarly detail.