Chinese martial arts, whether orthodox in Shaolin or Wudang, or some other sect, in historical facts and legends, their protagonists are mostly Han Chinese, or to be precise, the ancient Huaxia nation. And China is a vast country, is there a place for 55 ethnic minorities in the Chinese martial arts family? The answer is yes.
Miao: ancestor Chi (chī) You, long two hornscontact with the Miao compatriots, you will often hear them mention "Meng Chi You", that is, the ancient history of China's famous Chi You. They believe that Chi You is their ancestor.
Chi You and the Yellow Emperor fought, the Yellow Emperor is one of the ancestors of the Chinese nation, and Chi You is then another different from the Chinese nation. The first thing you need to do is to get your hands on some of the most popular products and services in the world, and then you'll be able to get your hands on some of the most popular products and services in the world.
Chiyu statue
People talk about this history in fact often ignore some details, these details are very interesting to see today. According to the "Shiben" this very crippled ancient history books, and the Yellow Emperor fought Chi You or a martial artist and inventor, he invented five kinds of weapons: Go, Shu (read shū, long-handled hook head of the musical instruments and weapons), halberd, chief spear, Yi spear. These five kinds of weapons should be very lethal at that time, and they were later developed and became important weapons of war in the Cold War era. We should be sure that war and the use of various skills and weapons on the battlefield are fertile ground for the birth of martial arts. So Chi's contribution to martial arts certainly can not be considered small.
In the academic research of the Song Dynasty, they also described Chi You as a corner (jué) power master. They said he had horns on his head and used them against people when he fought with the Yellow Emperor. There is a similar story in the Song Dynasty, said that under the Chi You have 72 brothers, they all have copper head and iron forehead. This text description with the ancient Chi You portrait consistent, the portrait of Chi You human head and animal body, a hand holding a hand holding a sword, head with two horns.
"World this" is probably the book of the Warring States period, from the Song Dynasty has almost 1500 years. About Chi You's statement, from the Warring States to the Song Dynasty both continuity and change. Changes are, Chi image richer but also more metaphysical, has not been a normal human. However, Chi You's value of force is also rising, has become a superhuman.
Said history, we say a little reality. Today's Miao will still be martial arts?
If you throw this question to the master of the lusheng, his answer may be: "Yes, our lusheng dance is also our martial arts." In a Miao village in the Nanpanjiang River valley in Shizong, Qujing, I saw the lusheng dance they perform, confirming this answer. Some of the difficult maneuvers in the lusheng dance are downright acrobatic. For example, one of the moves is that when blowing the lusheng, a person has to lie down on the ground and roll over, doing some very strenuous movements, while at the same time the tune of the lusheng cannot be broken. In addition, there are all kinds of fancy maneuvers when they pass the rusheng from one hand to the other, and the difficulty doesn't look too bad.
丨Miao Lusheng Dance
The Miao's Lusheng is said to have 360 tunes and a social function, usually one person blows after the other - no ensemble. There are a variety of meaning-rich movements when blowing, and when doing so one needs to show respect for their predecessors, with courtesy but also moments of showmanship. Up to now, the movements of the Lusheng dance have become very complex. A strong young man can play and dance for three to five minutes at most.
Maybe some people think that this kind of Miao dance is not martial arts, because there is no "real combat" function. Indeed, with the Chi that era of the battlefield with weapons against, unarmed wrestling (wrestling) compared to the modern fusion of these music, dance, social functions within the action is not a martial art. The problem is that the Chinese martial arts since the departure of the battlefield, leaving the relevant professions (such as constables, dart masters) into the public eye, and even after being artistic, more is the function of performance and ceremony, its social and cultural functions far greater than its actual function. On the battlefield, of course, they are real swords and knives, but street selling and stage juggling are all products of visualization and socialization, and are really distant from the actual combat ability that we are particularly concerned about today. In this sense, the Lusheng dance in Miao villages can be seen as a martial art.
The martial arts component of Miao culture goes beyond the lusheng. The spirit of martial arts runs through many places. In their folk songs, there are very sad descriptions of the separation of men and women brought about by war; in their funerals, they will go around the house where the dead are parked to show that they are on the rounds; and the tree flower poles during the treading of the flower mountain have more origins in rallying the people to fight.
Yi: Dagger Dance, the past play is a weaponThe Weishan Yi have a team of people who gather every year at festivals such as February 8 and the Torch Festival to play with daggers, dance and sing.
Their daggers look a lot like the ones used by Guan Yunchang in the TV series "Romance of the Three Kingdoms," but they're not as long, and their wooden handles are less than 2 meters long.
The Yi Dagger Dance
During the dance, some villages (such as Sanjia Village) are using two identical daggers to play against each other, and the movements are quite dangerous, with the daggers cutting against each other, piercing upwards, spinning around the body, chopping straight forward, and blocking the daggers.
There are 80 sets of these moves in total***, and this is the only legacy left. I talked to the people who are best at this dance, and they said that in the past there were more than 80 sets, but at present they can only dance 80 sets. This 80 sets of what they call "knife method", and divided into many different categories, there are "large knife" "small knife" "plum blossom knife
According to the "knife method", there are a lot of different categories.
According to legend, the large knife used to be their weapon. In a certain war, due to the lack of troops, the clever general played the empty city trick by having a limited number of soldiers play knives around a field, which was so loud that it rolled up gusts of yellow soil and scared the enemy away.
The most amazing thing is that, as the old people tell it, they used to learn the big knife dance in order to practise their movements; they tied radishes to their arms, sharpened their big knives, and some of these movements when they danced with the big knives chipped the radishes on their bodies, piece by piece.
It is true that I have observed this action, and martial arts say that this is a protective action. But the fact is, the way you do it, you're not going to be able to do it right, so it's a good idea to practice with the carrots, and it's a good idea to do it right.
The Dehong Jingpo Knife Dance
It's worth mentioning that the Knife Dance is performed in the courtyard of a Yi family home or in front of the Guanyin Temple, where the venue is very limited and the number of people is very high. Therefore, the technical difficulty of playing the big knife movement does not lie in how to cut people precisely, but in how to avoid cutting people precisely. This is the opposite of swordplay on the battlefield, but the reasoning is the same: it's all about precise training of the body, it's all about dodging and dodging, it's all about skill and experience.
There are actually quite a few dances like the Big Knife Dance. The Zhuang in Wenshan have a weapons dance, said to have been left behind by a Zhuang military leader called Nong Zhigao in the Song Dynasty. They have many kinds of weapons, and the most special one I remember is the fork. The fork is made of wood, and combined with their movements, it looks to be the nemesis of spears and large knives.
Speaking of which, I can't help but wonder which is more powerful, the Yi Dagger Dance or the Zhuang Wooden Fork Dance, if they were on the same stage -- a question that reminds me of a classic Netizen topic: who can fight better, Donnie Yen or Jet Li?
The Dai ethnic group: playing bad Dai boxing is not good peacock danceMinority martial arts, not to be ignored, there is also the Dai boxing. Muay Thai everyone must have heard of, I personally feel quite violent. Dai, Thai culture and national origin, but they are quite different in martial arts.
The Dai Quan is a lot milder, and the layman may see it as similar to the boxing and kicking skills taught in those martial arts schools on the side of the Shaolin Temple in Songshan. They have unarmed boxing routines, knives, sticks, as a layman I can not understand, but feel very powerful, not messing around.
According to a Xishuangbanna elephant foot drum inheritor, he loved martial arts when he was a child (in the 1980s and 1990s) and learned from an elder, who must have learned from an even older elder. This lineage is self-contained and probably has little to do with the kung fu craze of the 1980s and 1990s. In his opinion, the root of playing the elephant foot drum is Dai Quan, and if you can't play Dai Quan well, you can't play the elephant foot drum well. The Dai martial arts may also include the Peacock Dance.
The Dallas Cowboys are the first team in the world to be awarded the title of "Best Winner of the World Cup" by the NCAA, and the first team to be awarded the title of "Best Winner of the World Cup" by the NCAA. The Peacock Dance imitates the movements of a peacock, which is also very much in the spirit of martial arts. In fact, a large part of the ancient martial arts is related to the imitation of nature. This truth is not abstract, but it explains the cultural phenomenon of dance and martial arts very well.
Reading history, you must have heard of Hua Tuo. This traditional Chinese medicine practitioner was also a master of martial arts, and is said to have choreographed the "Five Animal Circus" in imitation of animals. This kind of movement can be martial arts, can also be understood as today's radio gymnastics. In ancient times, it was believed that absorbing the essence of animals could be used for human beings, so learning from animals was a shortcut.
The routines that gave birth to this martial art have since carried on and become an important legacy of Chinese martial arts. Among them are various kung fu styles named after small animals, such as Praying Mantis Fist, which is said to have been realized by someone who lost a martial arts competition and overheard a praying mantis fighting. There are many others, such as Snake Fist, Eagle Claw Kung Fu, Toad Kung Fu ...... By imitating animals to overcome the enemy is the reasoning that human beings should learn from nature by taking in everything.
Day to day that is kung fu
What exactly is the relationship between martial arts and dance?
There is an anti-Japanese TV drama about a group of Chinese people being trapped in a city by the Japanese army, and a few Peking Opera martial arts performers finally resisted by sharpening their stage prop knives, and then killing many of the enemies by taking advantage of their flexibility. The plot makes sense. The close relationship between dance and martial arts is also evident. In "The Interpretation of Names? 释言语" has this sentence, "Wu, dance, conquering movements, such as things to inspire." The Shih Ming (释名) is a very old book, from the Eastern Han Dynasty, and its interpretation of wu and dance represents the views of that era, and even a number of eras before that. Our understanding of martial arts is on the one hand mythical and on the other hand far removed.
In fact, martial arts are not only related to dance and war, but also closely related to our daily life. There is a fable in the book Zhuangzi, in which an old tortoise is killed and offered as a god, but the old tortoise is reluctant and says, "I'd rather be alive, ordinary. God is too far away, martial arts warrior is too far away, martial arts star is too far away, let's turn martial arts into words related to life, just like the radio exercise (in some places, it is adapted from the folk dance movements), every day, although there is no halo, but the accumulation of time is "kung fu".
In fact, there is a very abstract philosophical truth in Chinese martial arts, which is that no move is better than a move, and nowhere is kung fu. When it comes to the attitude towards martial arts, we can't forget to mention that although there are all sorts of exaggerated descriptions of martial arts in Chinese culture, the Chinese people don't revere martial arts in their bones, but rather emphasize the importance of literature over martial arts. It is believed that the problem cannot be solved by force alone, but must be rooted in culture and politics. Behind the prosperity of China's martial arts culture, it is not violence and conquest that carries the pursuit of the art of peace and softness