You're Dead to Me - The History of Kung Fu (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: April 26, 2024

Greg Jenner is joined by Dr Leon Rocha and comedian Phil Wang to learn all about the surprising history of kung fu, from ancient China to the present day. Rooted in ancient Chinese exercises designed to promote long life, kung fu was pioneered by the monks of the Shaolin temple before spreading throughout China. But how did peaceful Buddhist monks come to create a martial arts style that would gain global popularity? From the mountains of medieval China to the movie screens of Hollywood, via plundering pirates and legendary nuns, this episode explores the historical development of Chinese martial arts.This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed.Hosted by: Greg Jenner Research by: Jon Mason Written by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner Produced by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Audio Producer: Steve Hankey Senior Producer: Emma Nagouse

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. As women, our life stages come with unique risk factors. Like when our estrogen levels drop during menopause, causing the risk of heart disease to go up. Know your risks. Visit heartandstroke.ca. Full of merriment, mischief and mistaken identity, enjoy this audiobook collection of eight of Shakespeare's most magical comedies, starring David Tennant, Helena Bonham Carter and Miriam Margulies.

Nobody marks you. What, my dear Lady Disdain? Are you yet living? Start listening to BBC Radio Shakespeare, a collection of eight comedies available to purchase wherever you get your audiobooks. BBC Sounds music radio podcasts Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner, I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster and today we are channeling our qi and journeying all the way back to ancient China to learn about the history of Kung Fu.

And to help whip us into shape I'm joined by two very special Kung Fu masters. In History Corner, he's a historian of China and an expert in the history of East Asian science, medicine and technology. He was previously based at the universities of Liverpool and Lincoln, and now works for the University and College Union. It's Dr. Leon Rocha.

Welcome, Leon. Hi, I'm Leon. I know Kung Fu, but only historically, so not massively useful in a fight. And in Comedy Corner, he's a fantastic comedian, actor and author. You will know him from Task Master, Live at the Apollo, Have a Good News for You and his Netflix comedy special. Maybe you've read his, well, sidesplitting book, Sidesplitter. It's fantastic. But you'll definitely remember him from previous episodes of Your Dead to Me on the Borgias Chinggis Khan and the terracotta warriors

Entering the podcast dojo for a fourth time. It's Phil Wang. Welcome back Phil. Hiya. Hiya Greg. Hiya Leon Hiya, everybody. It's good to be back. Hiya. Oh, hello. Very nice. I'm already doing my jump kicks I'm so excited a Phil today We're talking about kung fu and I know from reading your book that you are a black belt in martial arts. I am a black belt in martial arts. I'm a black belt in Shorinji Kempo, which is a Japanese modification of Chinese Shaolin Kung Fu.

Oh. And my father and his brothers became obsessed with this martial arts Shorinji Kempo before I was born to the extent that they all became multiple level black belts, which are called Dan's or like third Dan's fourth Dan black belt. They set up a dojo. So I studied Shorinji Kempo at a dojo as a kid. Before I moved to the UK, I went through a sort of crash accelerated course with my uncle to get a black belt, which I definitely do not deserve. I am without a doubt a Kung Fu nepo baby. And what do you know about the history of Kung Fu?

It's hard to separate sort of real history with a kind of folklore. The folklore come history of it is that Shaolin Kung Fu was developed by Shaolin monks centuries ago because the monks kept getting attacked by bandits. Ooh, he knows things. So what do you know? This is the So What Do You Know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener might know about today's subject and I'm guessing most people have seen at

least one martial arts movie. Kung Fu, or at least Kung Fu-esque martial arts movies are all over the place. You've got your Bruce Lee, so Enter the Dragon, you've got Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, more dragons. You've got my favourite, the Matrix trilogy, you've got Kill Bill, Kung Fu Panda, and then of course the classic pop song by Carl Douglas, everyone was Kung Fu fighting. We know about Kung Fu through pop culture, but how did this martial art first come about? And what does clenching your bumhole have to do with any of it? Leon, could you give us a definition of Kung Fu? Kung Fu or Kung Fu is really a generic name for a number of martial arts from China. Some of these martial arts could indeed be traced back to the Buddhist monastery of Shaolin.

So the term Kung Fu really translates into daily practice or work or something that's a little bit tedious. So, an Excel spreadsheet might be Kung Fu. Although in China today, actually more people would prefer the term Wushu. And although commonly perceived to be ancient, historians generally agree that Shaolin Kung Fu and related martial arts actually came from more or less continuous process of change, of evolution, with key developments happening around the 16th century until the present day. So Kung Fu is give or take 500 years old as we know it now, but the roots are running

deeper. I mentioned ancient China in the introduction. So we're going to go deeper to begin with, Leon. So how far back are we going in time? Leon McClendon Well, there are two important precursor traditions. So the first would be unarmed combat and strength training. And we have written records for that from the Warring States period in China. So we're talking about 53rd century BCE. This mostly involved wrestling and weightlifting and perhaps boxing contests and would have been associated with lower ranking common soldiers. So the sort of second precursor tradition is actually Daoist. Daoism is a school of Chinese philosophy that kind of

came into being in the Warring States period. So, we're talking about the fifth or fourth century BCE. And Taoism as a Chinese philosophy emphasize things like passivity, naturalness or spontaneity or simplicity. These kind of Taoist exercises, they were intended to improve the flow of qi or energy or vital essence around the body. And the goal is to increase longevity and cure or prevent illnesses and usually involves some kind of breathing exercises, physical postures, sometimes meditation. And the text that these exercises were recorded in, that would have been the preserve of high status elite men. So commoners and women are not welcome to do that. A different time.

And that text is called the Daoyin 2, is that right, Leon? Yep, that's right. So Phil, this text, the Daoyin 2, has several postures named after animals. So we're going to do a mini quiz for you. Which of these five postures was not described in the Daoyin 2? Was it the bird stretch, the bear amble, the gibbon jump, the dragon rise, or the crane call? Oh man, I thought this would be a lot easier. Those all sound viable. I'm going to say that

the fake ones are the bear amble and the crane call. Well, I'm afraid we have to add a sixth one, the red herring, because they're all in the document. Oh, I knew it was one of those. sixth one, the red herring, because they're all in the document. Oh, I knew it was one of those. Part of me knew it was one of those. Sorry. I mean, Leon, what's the point of these various poses? Is it sort of similar to yoga?

Is it about stretching and strengthening muscles? Well, many of these postures are really about the flow of chi and the channels of the body in which chi would flow. I feel like I'm going to have to sort of bring the tone down a little bit because the next thing in my script is, Phil, what do you think a buttock pull was? A buttock pull? Yeah. I think it's what happens to me when I stand up too quickly.

You haven't been doing your martial arts. You haven't been training. Not for a while. A buttock pull. I imagine it's one of these sort of feats of strength that a Shaolin master will do. Will they attach some great weight to their buttocks and move it along with the strength of their butts? It's absolutely not that, but that's a great mental image for the podcast.

No, I can't say I do then. The buttock pull is probably one of the most important postures. It involves clenching one's anus. So there's one medical manuscript that would describe how when you're eating and drinking, you should relax the buttocks, straighten your spine, suck in the anus and let the chi pass through you. And that's called, quote unquote, moving the fluid. Let's head over to Henan province in the seventh century, because I think Phil, for the entire

episode, you have been desperately waiting for the Shaolin monks to show up. Yes. What do you know about the Shaolin monastery? It is the preeminent monastery in China. All the dudes are bald, they wear orange gowns, and they meditate on Buddhism. And the story I was always told is that they kept getting attacked by bandits on the road between the monastery and, I don't know, the canteen. And so they developed a system of self-defense to protect them from bandits.

Pretty good. I mean, Leon, can we have the more specific history? So, the tradition of unarmed combat and the tradition of self-cultivation techniques from Taoism, they came together at the Shaolin Temple, which is of course in Mangsong, near the cities of Luoyang and Zhengzhou. Now, the Shaolin Temple is a Buddhist monastery. It's founded in the 5th century CE, allegedly by an Indian monk named in the Chinese sources as Ba Tuo or Fu Tuo. In the 7th century CE, Shaolin became an important center for a new school of Buddhism known as Chan Buddhism or in Japanese Zen Buddhism. By the

8th century CE, it was said that the legendary Indian monk Bodhidharma had founded Chan Buddhism in Shaolin and he sat in a cave near Shaolin temple for nine years and he was staring at a wall and he was meditating. Now, historians generally agree that Chan philosophy actually emerged a century after the death of Bodhidharma, so probably not a whole lot to do with Bodhidharma. But in any case, because of all of these kind of sacred associations and because Luoyang, which is a city that was near the Shaolin temple, was an imperial capital for most of the first millennium CE. The Shaolin Temple actually enjoyed a lot of patronage

from the ruling elite and became fabulously wealthy. The monks are also siding with a certain political faction, is that right? Yeah, that's right. So the 7th century textual evidence celebrates the victory of Shaolin monks over raiding bandits in 610 CE. So, finally we've got some bandits. Wow. So, this is like, this is actually like war. They actually fought them? So, this is possibly a form of self-defense. So, there were bandits who were like, oh, you guys are fabulously wealthy and you have things that we may want to make. So, we're going to attack the Shaolin temple and the Shaolin that we may want to make so we're going to

Attack the Shaolin temple and the Shaolin monks say well, no, we're gonna beat you up. Wow. It's home alone It is home alone Temple alone So by the late Ming period which is the the 1500s We have loads of evidence for the Shaolin martial arts have become more widespread throughout China and Phil do you know which weapon the monks are now notorious for using? Long stick? It is long stick yeah! If it ain't broke don't fix it!

I mean obviously up to this point we've heard about unarmed combat so fists and feet I feel like somehow they've they've cheated slightly by agreeing now that they can use weapons so why the stick why not I don't know, swords or axes? Well, possibly because a staff would be less lethal than blades and they're Buddhist after all and they're not supposed to kill people, although they most certainly did. But also the staff was also a kind of religious symbol in Buddhism. By the 1540s and 50s, now we can bring in pirates into the story. And we've got monks being sent off to go and like hunt down pirates.

I'm sorry, what happened to the meditating? I thought all these guys did was eat soup and meditate and now they're going on trips? Leon, I mean there's one example in 1553 where these monks from Shaolin won a series of victories. They're really violent. Do you want to tell us the story? The 1540s and the 1550s saw a huge number of raids by pirates on the east coast of China, especially in the Jiangnan region. The pirates even started to move inland and pillaged war

cities. And these pirates were known as warco and warco literally meant Japanese bandits, but they were not all Japanese. Some of them were foreigners, possibly Dutch, possibly Portuguese. And there were also actually a large number of actual Chinese people who joined the pirates and were involved in the illegal overseas trade. So it's a real cosmopolitan dream. It's like very mixed. Cosmopolitan pirates.

Yeah, wow. Piracy is very progressive. It's very multicultural. And so in 1553, the Shaolin monks allegedly won a series of really important victories against the pirates at a place called Wenjia Gang and hundreds of pirates were allegedly killed and only four Shaolin monks died. Wow. It's like when you watch, when you read a rare Batman comic where he kills someone, you're like, Batman's not supposed to do that. Now, Leon, I don't know if this is an obvious

question, but there seems to be a pretty glaring conflict here between the Buddhist monks presumed commitment to peace and meditation and moderation and them literally going out and killing pirates with their bare hands. How did they hold those two philosophies at once? So fighting is indeed at odds with Buddhist philosophy. And historians have looked into, you know, the evolution of this. There might be some reasons and pragmatic reasons for the Shaolin temple monks to deviate from the path of peace and to take up violence. These would include self-protection. And then also it's political pragmatism. So they want to be noticed and have

a say on Chinese empire politics, I suppose. There's also a classic Ming manual called the Sin-Yu's Transformation Classic, 1624. What a title, Phil. I mean, you could have called your book Sin-Yu's Transformation Classic. You've missed out there. Sin-Yu's Transformation Classic. I think that's when they brought the brand back. Because they'd rebranded it a whole bunch of times and they were like, let's sell the original version. I said, we'll call it classic. It's just the original recipe.

And it was composed by the author known as the Purple Coagulation Man of the Way. Wow! Confusing title aside, the text that we have mentioned here, the 1624 text, it's really important. It combines Shaolin fighting techniques with the Taoist system of self-cultivation that we heard about at the beginning of the episode, Leon. So we've finally got the fusion of the fighting stuff and the health stuff and they're coming together in the 1620s. Yeah. So the Sinyu transformation classic, which by the way, it's also translated as the Tendon Moving Classic, is a kind of weird text. So it combines military and therapeutic

and religious ideas into sort of one book. It's all about training the body, but potentially also making one invulnerable or immortal. From the 17th century onwards, Shaolin monks, because of the senior transformation classic, they began to increasingly focus on unarmed combat to the extent that the staff now was kind of de-emphasised. And in the 17th century, Leon, we're getting household manuals as well starting to appear. And it's offering advice on household management and lifestyle choices, so anything from like arithmetic divination, nutrition, diet, recipes, arts, jokes, even ideas about romance, etc, etc. And there are also sections on Annam combat and self-defence for the entire family.

And so not everybody's doing kung fu fighting because there's other branches of martial arts. There's wudang, there's tai chi. But the one I want to talk about has got a beautiful name. It's Wing Chun, which means beautiful springtime. What a charming name for extreme violence, Phil. Beautiful springtime to be kicking your ass. Yeah. Wing Chun is a kung fu style that emphas emphasizes a high stance and very, very small, close range movements. So like small jabs as opposed to sort of like long range punching. And in the 20th century, an origin story, a mythic Shaolin nun and she taught Wing Chun to a teenage girl

called Yim Wing Chun. So Wing Chun is the name of this young girl because she was basically just constantly harassed and she had like unwanted sexual advances and marriage proposals. So this mythical Shaolin nun taught this Kung Fu style to this young girl and said, okay, so you can just go and beat up all these lecherous men and harassers. So that's a sort of legendary origin story. In reality, Wing Chun probably developed relatively recently. So we're talking about the late 19th, maybe even the early 20th century in a city called Fushan, which is in Guangdong province in southern China.

Well, you mentioned the late 19th century and Guangdong province, southeast China, which means hooray, here come the British to ruin everything. In the late 19th century, we are talking about the European colonial empire into South China and the horrible stories that come from that. But it's this process thereby where we start to get people in the West becoming aware of Kung Fu because of things like the Boxer Rebellion, which is what Brits call the uprising from the Chinese people. So, Leon, this is a complicated piece of political history. But in terms of the martial arts story, is this a kind of really important meeting of East and West?

Yeah, this is a very important moment. So in the wake of sort of Western imperial interference, particularly the Opium Wars, martial arts became associated with the assertion of Han Chinese identity. It became so popular that it kind of actually threatened the state. So martial arts training was outlawed by the Qing dynasty and actually a number of kung fu masters were executed because it then started to pose a security problem. These themes contributed to the sort of uprisings in the 19th century. So the Boxer Rebellion, which is 1898 to 1901, and it's named after the participants who were martial artists, hence the Boxers. The Boxer Rebellion and their kung fu styles became known to Britain through a number of

channels like military reports or diplomats. Martial arts, although a lot of it was Japanese, started to appear in this country in Britain from around the late 19th century. So Edward Barton Wright invented something called the Bartitsu, which is based on the Japanese Jujitsu, which the suffragettes then learned for self-defense. I had no idea the suffragettes knew Kung Fu. That's incredible. Phil, if you were going gonna invent your own martial arts,

what would you call it and what would it involve? Oh, Wangcheng. Wangcheng, nice, nice. Wangcheng is a highly aggressive, completely unfair martial art. It's random, it comes out of nowhere. It is highly unjust. It is a scourge on society and the government

will try and stop us just like they tried and stop the Shaolin Masters in China. That's Wang Chong. Great. Going to a dojo near you soon, rolling out the franchises. And that brings us, rather beautifully, to Bruce Lee. Phil, Taskmaster fans will know you from your iconic and somewhat scandalous yellow jumpsuit. So in my series of Taskmaster, I wore Bruce Lee's Game of Death outfit, which I wanted to do as an homage to Bruce Lee, but it ended up being an homage to my own reproductive capabilities. So, Leon, why do we get Bruce Lee? What is it historically, culturally that's happening in China and Southeast Asia that gives us this new sort of cinematic art form?

When the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party came to power in China in 1949, the state actually got involved in Kung Fu and downplayed a lot of the spiritual and contemplative elements, transforming Kung Fu into a form of sport and exercise. And so a lot of Kung Fu masters actually left for Hong Kong or Taiwan or America or European countries. And that included Bruce Lee's teacher, Yip Man, who left for Hong Kong, I think it was in 1950, during the culture revolution period. So now we're into 1966 to 1976. Martial arts then came to be seen as elitist and corrupt and superstitious and so forth. And then this led to even more kung fu masters leaving China for Western countries.

So Phil, you get a kind of governmental crackdown on martial arts, which gives us Bruce Lee, essentially. Yes, right. Because his family was, I mean, he was from San Francisco, wasn't he, Bruce Lee? Yeah. And so he sort of went back, as it were, to Hong Kong and sort of kickstarted the kung-fu movie industry. You wore his Game of Death outfit. And I know the beginning of your book, you talk about

Bruce Lee as a sort of bit of an icon. Yeah, I had the formative experience of going to the Bruce Lee exhibition in Hong Kong, and they have his outfits out there. They've got a lot of photos of him, lots of footage of him. And he was just so, I hadn't appreciated before just how like powerful and confident and sexy he was. And it must have been, I mean, it still is to me right now, a pretty revolutionary idea of like the very sexy Chinese guy. And he was doing it in, you know, was it the 60s, the 70s? And he built like a whole culture, a whole industry, an entire cultural movement.

I mean, Leon, in terms of the movies he made, you've got the Five Fingers of Death, the Green Hornet, Into the Dragon, and we get this sort of kung fu craze almost, which then leads on to subsequent other artists. And he's also developing his own martial arts, Leon, isn't he? Yes. So he developed a martial arts style called Ji Kun Dou, which drew on a number of influences, primarily Wing Chun, but also some Shaolin Kung Fu. And I guess really as Phil was saying, what Bruce Lee really brought to the table and that was kind of unique to Bruce Lee, he was incorporating kind of Western bodybuilding cultures and big muscles into Kung Fu. And he also at the same time, he promoted quite a kind of violent and virile Asian masculinity

and a kind of like Chinese nationalism and Asian pride that proved very important culturally and also commercially incredibly successful in Sinophone communities, but also with Western audiences. And Bruce Lee would pave the way for Chinese stars like Jackie Chan and Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh. And he also influenced often directly the careers of Hollywood stars, of white Hollywood stars like David Carradine,

who was of course in Kung Fu, the series, and also Bill from Kill Bill. And one of Bruce Lee's students was Chuck Norris. Wow. Chuck Norris. The internet's favourite meme, Chuck Norris. So I mean Bruce Lee is this incredible icon of ancient story going back really, we could

take it back about two and a half thousand years. So that's a long long history. The nuance window! This is part of the show where Phil and I quietly practice some buttock pulls. Well Leon tells us something that we need to know. So my stopwatch is ready. Dr Leon, take it away please. Well I want to say a little bit about what's happening in Shaolin Temple these days. So if you're not satisfied with just watching Kung Fu on a big screen or small screen, you can learn Kung Fu, you can visit the Shaolin Temple yourself and do a quote unquote Shaolin

Kung Fu summer school. You don't actually have to become a Buddhist monk to do that. The Shaolin Temple by the 1990s and 2000s has become a major tourist center with more than a million visitors every year. It has its own kind of performing troupe that would regularly tour the world. There's an official Shaolin martial arts academy with tens of thousands of students and many of these students would go on to become professional athletes or maybe even movie star or soldiers in elite military units in China or the personal bodyguards for Chinese billionaires. And if traveling to China to visit the Shaolin Temple sounds too time consuming and far

too expensive, you can learn Shaolin Kung Fu at one of the many quote Shaolin franchise schools in large cities around the world. There's one in London, there's one in Paris, there's one in Berlin, there's one in New York, there's one in San Francisco. And all of this is a result of China's economic reforms in the 1980s and 1990s.

And this level of commodification of tradition and consumption of tradition were part of the unleashing of entrepreneurialism and market forces onto Chinese society. It was something that was actively supported and endorsed by the Chinese state. Here you have Kung Fu meets capitalism. An unstoppable partnership. Well, thanks so much, Phil. Thank you so much, Dr. Leon. And listener, if after today's episode

you want more Phil Wang in your life, of course you do. Check out our episodes on the Borgias, Chinggis Khan or the Terracotta Army, all absolute classics. And why not listen to our episode on Chinese pirate queen, Chong Yi-Sao. She's very fun. And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review, share the show with your friends, subscribe to Your Dead to Me on BBC sound so you never miss an episode. But I just like to say a big thank you to our guests in History Corner. We have the legendary Dr. Leon Roshah. Thank you, Leon.

Thank you very much. And to quote Bruce Lee, be water, my friend. I have no idea what that means. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. And in Comedy Corner, we had the ferociously funny Phil Wang. Thank you, Phil. It's been a pleasure.

Thank you so much. I've learnt, I've laughed. I've fought, I've punched. What a wonderful time it has been. And to you lovely listener, join me next time as we spar with another historical opponent. But for now, I'm off to sit in a cave for nine long years

and hope that all the secrets of history are revealed to me. Bye! To the uninitiated, I would describe my family by saying we are very passionate people. I'm cardiff-born, cardiff-bred, and when I die I'll be cardiff-dead. We're musical. There's a lot of big personalities. All of our family perform in some way, whether entertainment or just emotionally performing.

We are hilarious, to be fair. Extraordinary. I really do enjoy life. I don't worry about dying tomorrow because tomorrow is never gonna come. That's how I would describe my family. I'm Charlotte Church and I'm inviting you to listen in on a series of intimate and special conversations about belonging, working class identity and the unbreakable bonds of family. So come and kick back with the Cardiffians babes. Listen on BBC Sounds. As women, our life stages come with unique risk factors, like high blood pressure developed during pregnancy, which can put us two times more at risk of heart disease or stroke. Know your risks. Visit heartandstroke.ca.

Full of merriment, mischief and mistaken identity, enjoy this audiobook collection of eight of Shakespeare's most magical comedies, starring David Tennant, Helena Bonham Carter and Miriam Margulies. Nobody marks you. Ha ha, what my dear Lady Disdain, are you yet living? Start listening to BBC Radio Shakespeare, a collection of eight comedies, available to purchase wherever you get your audio books.