---
title: A History of Chinese Martial Arts
---

Chinese martial arts — often called *wushu*, or colloquially *kung fu* — are a family of fighting and self-cultivation traditions developed over more than two millennia. Their real history is one of military practice, folk and religious culture, and family lineages, repeatedly disrupted in the 20th century and, in important ways, preserved outside mainland China after the Communist era.

## Ancient roots

Combat wrestling (*jiao li*) and weapons drill appear in Chinese records from the Zhou and Han dynasties; martial skill was cultivated for war, for militia defense, and in court and folk performance. Over the imperial centuries these practices were systematized into named methods and transmitted within families, villages, temples, and secret societies.

## Internal and external, myth and lineage

Later tradition split the arts into "external" schools associated with the <PageRef space="briefings" slug="shaolin-temple" /> and "internal" schools (taijiquan, xingyiquan, baguazhang) associated with the Daoist Wudang mountains. Much of this framing — and the romantic origin stories attached to it — is later myth rather than documented history; serious scholarship traces most named styles to the Ming and especially Qing dynasties. Martial brotherhoods were also bound up with rebellion: the Boxer Uprising of 1899–1901 took its Western name from the martial-arts practitioners ("Yihequan") at its core.

## Republican institutionalization

In the early 20th century, reformers tried to modernize and nationalize the arts: the Republic of China founded the Central Guoshu ("national art") Institute in 1928 to standardize and promote them as a patriotic discipline. This era produced much of the surviving written record and many of the lineages that later spread abroad.

## Disruption and diaspora

The 20th century nearly broke transmission on the mainland. The <PageRef space="events" slug="cultural-revolution" /> persecuted traditional masters as feudal remnants and shattered lineages of martial arts, medicine, and religion. Crucially, many authentic traditions survived because masters had already carried them to Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the overseas Chinese diaspora — which became the custodians of arts the mainland had suppressed.

## Modern wushu versus traditional arts

After the upheavals the PRC promoted a standardized, athletic, performance-oriented *wushu* — a sport and spectacle distinct from traditional combat arts — and embraced Shaolin and "kung fu" as cultural heritage and soft-power branding. Honest history keeps these straight: the state-promoted modern forms are real and skilled, but they are not simply the "ancient" arts, much of whose living transmission ran through Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the diaspora rather than the post-1949 mainland.

## Perspectives

Two distortions cloud the subject. Popular culture inflates the antiquity and mysticism of the arts (the Bodhidharma origin myth, "secret" death-touch manuals). And official PRC narratives tend to fold the whole tradition into a continuous, state-stewarded national heritage — eliding both the Cultural Revolution's devastation and the diaspora's central role in preservation. The documented history is richer, and more honest, than either.

## Sources

1. Peter Lorge, *Chinese Martial Arts: From Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century* (2012).
2. Stanley Henning, "Academia Encounters the Chinese Martial Arts," *China Review International* (1999).
3. Meir Shahar, *The Shaolin Monastery* (2008).