Scholars might be forgiven for initially rolling their eyes upon sighting the title of this book on a university or public library shelf. But if our leery browsers deign to open the volume, they will discover that it is serious pioneering work by a noted scholar of Chinese military history and published by a very reputable academic press.
Lorge's is not the first academic book to appear on Chinese martial arts, but it has the great virtue of being both a useful chronological survey history and a compilation of insightful, original research. Lorge has a specific definition of martial arts that sets the tone for the book's goal of historicizing martial arts and refuting myths. “I will argue,” he writes on his first page, “that these arts are the enveloped physical practice of armed and unarmed combat, which must be understood primarily as military skills, not as methods for self-cultivation or religious activity. That said … these skills took on added meaning as markers of status and of certain mental or spiritual qualities” (p. 1). Lorge is forthright about how much historians can and cannot know about the martial arts of past ages: “As a physical practice, martial arts keeps the historian at arm's length by the limitations of textual and archaeological sources. It is usually impossible to prove the continuity of any skill performed over the centuries” (p. 238). He modestly notes towards the end of his survey that he has done “little beyond argue that Chinese martial arts has a history” (p. 243). But that history is virtually unknown in the West, and its details are important, and Lorge's great contribution is serious historical scholarship on a topic that has long suffered from a large dearth of it.
Lorge shows how the development of martial arts was linked to changes in weaponry and warfare over China's vast history, noting at length that Chinese martial arts overwhelmingly entailed the use of handheld military weaponry in battlefield combat. Lorge has blazed a route (not yet a trail, much less a roadway) through Chinese martial arts history. On his way through these woods he cuts down a few noxious myths, such as the Shaolin Temple being the source of martial arts, the Daoist Zhang Sanfeng having invented Taijiquan, or Chinese martial arts being primarily about peaceful, nonviolent inner cultivation. (Sorry, Grasshopper.) He points out that archery was the premier martial art throughout most of Chinese history; that the emergence of imperial China in 221 BCE marked the transition of martial arts from elite, aristocratic practice to widespread popular pursuit and performance entertainment; and that “at the end of the Qing dynasty, the value of Chinese martial arts in self-cultivation became wrapped up with a rising discourse of nationalism… . [S]elf-cultivation through the martial arts became firmly based in a nationalist desire to cultivate a truly Chinese self” (p. 202).
I very much hope that Lorge or someone inspired by him will elaborate on this last point in the future. A penetrating cultural and social history of the emergence of modern popular conceptions of Chinese martial arts in fiction, film, and practice in both China and the West would make for fascinating cross-cultural and social history. How were Chinese martial arts introduced, understood, and exoticized in the West, and how much of this in turn influenced the development of martial arts discourse in China? As with the Great Wall of China, was Western fascination with Chinese martial arts reappropriated by some Chinese as a symbol or indicator of the greatness and uniqueness of their civilization, or at least of their martial traditions? What explains Chinese fascination with martial arts in different periods, evidenced, for example, by the emergence of popular martial arts films in Hong Kong? Ditto for the television drama series Kung Fu during the early 1970s in North America. How did all of this compare with the development and introduction of modern Japanese and Korean martial arts and their global circulation?
There are a few minor bones one might pick with Lorge. He perpetuates the improper use of “fire” by other scholars as a verb to launch projectiles from non-gunpowder weapons. An archer does not “fire” an arrow (p. 43); he shoots or looses it. In his chapter on the Yuan period, he misses an opportunity to discuss briefly the history of the “Three Manly Games” among the Mongols: archery, wrestling, and equestrianism. It is also a shame that this book has neither Chinese characters nor any glossary of Chinese terms.
When I began graduate school almost thirty years ago, I used to jest that I knew nothing of China's “3Ms”: medicine, martial arts, and music. Books like Paul Unschuld's works on Chinese medicine and now Lorge's on Chinese martial arts have relieved me of some measure of this ignorance. Lorge's distinguished and pioneering survey belongs in academic libraries and on the shelves of scholars of Chinese military history and practitioners of Chinese martial arts. It is a commonplace that a good book raises more questions than it answers, but Lorge has gone beyond this, having done the spadework for future crops of questions that may not yet even have occurred to us.
