The Long Saber (單刀法選) — Cheng Zongyou, 1621

The Selected Methods of the Single Saber (單刀法選, Dāndāo Fǎxuǎn), printed by Cheng Zongyou in 1621, is the companion to his famous staff manual — and one of the most fascinating documents in Chinese martial history, because it records a current flowing the "wrong" way. At the height of the sixteenth-century wokou (倭寇) pirate wars, when Japanese-style swordsmen were cutting through Chinese troops on the coast, Cheng went and learned the enemy's sword — the two-handed long blade — and set it down in verse and illustration. His manual naturalized a Japanese weapon into the Chinese arsenal, and three centuries later it became the textual root of the living art now called the miaodao (苗刀).

This page is a companion to the staff manual from the same collection:

Shaolin Staff Method (少林棍法闡宗) — Cheng Zongyou's earliest-surviving Shaolin manual, 1621

A Japanese sword, made Chinese

The blade Cheng describes is not the ordinary Chinese military saber. It is the long, two-handed sword — the kind the Japanese called the ōdachi/nodachi — that wokou raiders wielded with such effect that, as Cheng admits, longer Chinese weapons "are again and again defeated by it." Its very name records the novelty: 單刀, "single saber," because — unlike the ordinary dao used in a pair or with a shield — this blade was so large it took both hands, leaving no hand for anything else.

Cheng did not invent the response; he documented one strand of it. He sought out a Zhejiang master named Liu Yunfeng (劉雲峰), who, he says, possessed "the true transmission" of the Japanese method. Because Liu's techniques "had postures and methods but no names," Cheng — exactly as he had done for the staff — drew each posture and gave it a name, so students could remember them. The manual opens with a prose essay, the Discourse on the Single Saber (單刀說), whose first lines state the case plainly:

器名單刀，以雙手用一刀也。其技擅自倭奴……其用法，左右跳躍，奇詐詭秘，人莫能測，故長技每每常敗於刀。余故訪求其法，有浙師劉雲峯者，得倭之真傳，不吝授余，頗盡壺奧。 The weapon is named the "single saber" because one wields a single blade with both hands. Its technique comes from the Japanese … In use it leaps to left and right — strange, deceptive, unfathomable — so that long-reach weapons are again and again beaten by the saber. I therefore sought out its method; there was a Zhejiang teacher, Liu Yunfeng, who held the true Japanese transmission and, without reserve, taught it to me, fully to its depths. — opening of the Discourse on the Single Saber, 1621 woodblock

(The word Cheng uses for "the Japanese," 倭奴, was the era's hostile term for the coastal raiders — literally "the Wo slaves." His admiration for their sword, in the middle of a war against them, is exactly what makes the manual remarkable.)

Cheng was not alone. A generation earlier the great general Qi Jiguang (戚繼光) had captured a Japanese fencing text — the Kage-ryū catalogue (影流之目錄) — from the pirates and worked out his own two-handed method, the 辛酉刀法 of 1561. Both Qi's and Cheng's saber methods were soon absorbed into Mao Yuanyi's vast military encyclopedia, the 武備志 (Treatise on Military Preparedness, 1621). The long saber was, briefly, a current event in Chinese arms.

The book

Selected Methods of the Single Saber is a single compact volume built like the staff manual — verse, picture, and application together:

• the prose Discourse (單刀說) quoted above, on the weapon's origin and virtues;

• a sequence of combat applications against the spear — the long-reach weapon the saber was meant to defeat;

• the twenty-two posture-figures of the saber (單刀勢圖), each a named stance with its illustration, followed by twelve further continuation figures (續刀勢) — thirty-four plates in all;

• and a solo routine (a "connected sequence," tao) with a movement diagram, exactly the device Cheng used to map the staff form.

It was issued in 1621 as one of the four parts of Cheng's collected martial works, 《耕餘剩技》 ("Skills Beyond Farming") — alongside the staff manual, the spear, and the crossbow. A Republican-era reprint repackaged the set as the 《國術四書》 ("Four Books of National Arts"), and it became a touchstone of the early twentieth-century martial-revival presses.

The honest history: a method that lapsed, then was revived

It would be tidy to draw an unbroken line from Cheng's 1621 saber to the saber arts of today. The record does not allow it. As the historian Ben Judkins notes, the actual practice of the two-handed dandao "appears to have died out quickly." Qi Jiguang himself had shown that the surest way to beat a Japanese swordsman was better drill and pole-arms, not a duel of blades — and once the pirate threat receded, the specialized long saber fell out of use. The renewed interest in it during the Qing and the Republic is, in Judkins's careful phrase, best understood as a series of revival movements reaching back to the Ming texts, not a living tradition handed forward from them.

That is the right frame for what came next.

From 單刀 to 苗刀 — the birth of the miaodao

The weapon most people now meet as the heir of Cheng's saber is the miaodao (苗刀): a slender, single-edged blade well over a metre long, gripped in both hands. The name is often mistaken for something ancient or ethnic. It is neither. 苗 means "sprout" or "seedling" — the blade is named for its long, narrow shape, "like a young shoot of wheat" (如麥苗). (Older Chinese texts do mention a different "苗刀" carried by Miao peoples; that homonym is an unrelated weapon, and conflating the two is a common error.)

The name in its modern martial sense was coined only in 1921, when the warlord Cao Kun (曹錕) raised a martial-arts battalion at Cangzhou in Hebei and hired the saber masters Liu Yuchun (劉玉春) and Ren Xiangrong (任向榮) to teach the two-handed blade. The unit became known as the "miaodao battalion" (苗刀營) — and the weapon had its modern name. Liu's outstanding student Guo Changsheng (郭長生), nicknamed "the Swallow" (燕子) for his speed, carried the art to the Central Guoshu Institute in Nanjing, where around 1927 he and Ma Yingtu (馬英圖) codified the standard miaodao forms (taught in various lineages as the "two roads" or "four roads," 二路 / 四路), fusing the saber with the piguazhang / tongbei methods of the Cangzhou school. Nearly every miaodao practiced today descends from that Cangzhou revival.

So the lineage is real but layered: a Japanese sword art, naturalized by Ming soldiers and recorded by Qi Jiguang and Cheng Zongyou, preserved on paper in the 武備志, and then reconstructed and renamed in the Republican era. Cheng's 1621 manual is the indispensable document in that chain — not an unbroken master-to-student line, but the text that made the revival possible.

The companion volumes

The saber was one quarter of Cheng's Skills Beyond Farming. The others:

• 長槍法選 ("Selected Spear Methods") — the spear, which Cheng learned from Li Kefu (李克復) of Henan; the spear was widely reckoned the "king of weapons," and Cheng's treatment sits in the lineage of the famous Yang-family spear tradition.

• 蹶張心法 ("Heart Method of the Foot-Drawn Crossbow") — a rare manual on the heavy foot-spanned crossbow (蹶張弩), spanned by bracing the bow with the feet; one of the few martial-crossbow texts to survive.

• Cheng later added a treatise on archery (射史, c. 1629), notable for being among the first to illustrate shooting technique in detail.

Together they make Cheng Zongyou the most thoroughly documented weapons master of the late Ming — the man who, more than any other, put Shaolin-era martial practice into print.

Reading the original

The 1621 text and its woodblock plates are public domain. The cleanest freely available scan is the 1842 (Daoguang 22) Juwen Hall reprint of Skills Beyond Farming on shuge.org (書格) — which contains the saber, spear, and crossbow (the staff volume is absent there; for the staff, see its own page). The searchable text of both Skills Beyond Farming and the Treatise on Military Preparedness (which reproduces the saber method) is at the Chinese Text Project.

• High-resolution scan (1842 reprint): old.shuge.org/ebook/geng-yu-sheng-ji

• Searchable text, Gengyu Shengji: ctext.org — 耕餘剩技

• Searchable text, Mao Yuanyi's Wubei Zhi: ctext.org — 武備志

Training & demonstration video

• Miao Dao form — full demonstration — a clean single-performer run of a complete miaodao form.

• Miaodao — Second Road, with applications — the "two roads" form shown alongside its fighting applications.

• 苗刀 — traditional technique — a traditional-style presentation of the two-handed saber.

• 苗刀: 迎推刺 — a core technique — a close look at one of the saber's signature thrusting methods.

See also

Shaolin Staff Method (少林棍法闡宗) — the staff volume of the same 1621 collection

Shaolin Kung Fu — the temple, the legend, and the staff-before-fist history

What is Kung Fu? — legend versus history across the styles

Sources

The account follows Cheng Zongyou's 1621 original of 《單刀法選》 (read for the structure, the Discourse, and the Liu Yunfeng transmission), in the Skills Beyond Farming collection — scanned at shuge.org (the 1842 Juwen Hall reprint) and reproduced in Mao Yuanyi's 《武備志》 (1621) at the Chinese Text Project. The verbatim Discourse passage was cross-verified across two independent transcriptions. The historical framing — the wokou context, the rapid lapse of dandao practice, and the Qing/Republican revivals — follows Ben Judkins, Chinese Martial Studies ("Cheng Zongyou, Shaolin's Martial Missionary"), and Meir Shahar, The Shaolin Monastery (2008). The miaodao history and etymology — the "seedling-blade" name, the 1921 Cangzhou naming under Cao Kun, and the Guo Changsheng / Ma Yingtu codification — follow the Chinese Wikipedia article on the 苗刀, cross-checked against martial-history coverage. Cheng's dates are given cautiously as "c. 1561 – after 1621"; his death year is unrecorded.