The History of Praying Mantis Kung Fu

Kai Uwe Pel's Seven Star Praying Mantis Kung Fu - A Deadly Game of Strategy

The History of Seven Star Praying Mantis Kung Fu

The monks of Shaolin Temple went about their daily routines in the shadow of Song Mountain where Bodhidharma meditated facing the cave wall and was enlightened. The temple was famed for martial arts developed from his meditative exercise routines that honed the physical body, energy and the mind together. Many visitors and willing students came to Shaolin with imaginations fired by dreams of becoming an invincible righteous warrior of legend. One of these students was Wang Lang.

Wang Lang embraced the hardships of physical training and dedicated himself to becoming a master of Shaolin boxing. During his training he liked to test his skill against his brothers but they also trained hard in the same techniques. In these matches he was often beaten and certainly could not find a way to clearly surpass their skill level. Despite becoming a formidable fighter he was simply one among many dedicated students of Shaolin. As usual at the traditional times in China each year, Wang Lang gathered his belongings, and his bruised ego, and made the long trip to his hometown to visit his family.

During one of these trips, Wang Lang relaxed in the meadows near his home. Accustomed to meditation he sat motionless among the foliage silently taking gentle breaths and enjoying a moment’s peace on his holiday. His eyes were attracted to some movement nearby and he witnessed a struggle between a large cicada and a praying mantis. He was amazed at what he saw. The mantis’ forearms were hooked at the ‘wrist’ and bent at the ‘elbow’. It locked the limbs of the larger cicada and grappled with it by pulling and releasing. Before his eyes seemed to be insects applying techniques for fighting, similar to the martial arts he studied in Shaolin.

Over the next few days Wang Lang captured a mantis and took it to his home. He used a small stick to provoke the mantis and tried to observe the results carefully. When he was ready to return to Shaolin he wrote down twelve key words to summarize his ideas and the strategies he had taken from the mantis. Back in training he developed and practiced these ideas. He combined them with the existing techniques and formed the basis of Mantis Style Boxing. Eventually he realized his goal and was able to beat his brothers with his higher level of skill and knowledge. Before leaving for home the final time he set out standard training routines and Mantis Boxing was born.

The legend of Wang Lang is the mythical starting point of a journey. Once the legendary beginning catches up to its recorded history it continues for nearly two-hundred years, a story with many chapters that finishes in the present at what we collectively refer to as Praying Mantis ‘Kung Fu’. The past two hundred years in China have seen almost continuous states of upheaval, wars, famine, revolution,


invasion and near chaos. It is a remarkable testament to the people that any kind of cultural practice had a continuous development during that time but perhaps fitting that this art is the mastery of violence. All stories are of their time and the story you are about to read is no exception.

Converse to the usual idioms, in order to understand the past we first have to look to the present. Over the years each teacher has produced many students. One school gives birth to many schools and different schools have given birth to many styles. In this modern age of communication and flight the many teachers of Mantis Boxing now have students teaching in many countries, thousands of miles apart. On top of this, the ‘opening’ of China led to the spreading of Mao Zedong’s modern Zhonghua Wushu and the re-development of the Shaolin Temple site. We now have a very large group of people all using the same words and expressions to talk about Shaolin, ‘Kung Fu’ and Mantis Boxing but all with completely different intended meanings. There is no intent here to produce a final definition of these terms but, at least, we must define what we mean when they are used in this book.

Before World War Two the knowledge and culture of Chinese Kung Fu was common and easy to identify. It started in Shaolin with Da Mo and continued through the patriotic secret societies fighting the Qing government. It reached the national stage with the formation of the Jing Wu School in Shanghai. The same folklore and writings could be found in all the post-war Chinese expatriate communities from Hong Kong and S.E. Asia to the Chinatowns of America. Since then, a large amount of new information, stories, techniques and theories have entered the public arena of Mantis Kung Fu. However, almost none of this new information is referred to or pictured in the pre-World War Two material. In this book we are content to draw on the knowledge produced before World War Two that, in Seven Star Mantis, we identify with the great teacher Luo Guang Yu. Another book in this tradition is James I. Wong’s “The Praying Mantis System” (Koinonia Productions, 1981). It is the first book in English about Mantis that attempts academic depth and research.

Wong talks extensively about Shaolin and the origins of ‘Kung Fu’ itself. He admits that credible, authenticated sources are nearly non-existent even in Chinese language. Most documents on the matter are not independent and often written versions of the legends and stories of oral tradition. The Praying Mantis lineage can be traced six or seven generations with reasonable certainty but its beginnings and the early history of Shaolin are lost in legend. The events and personages presented here are only one route through a story with many branches. Its beginnings lie in legend and its true meaning can only be understood through actual physical practice of the system. In this sense, we won’t try to apply academic standards to it the same literal way that Wong does. Wong first put the book together in 1979 as a university paper and was bound to do so. Sections such as Wong’s lengthy biological description of the Mantid species and detailing of the almost completely unrelated “Southern Mantis” systems seem superfluous also.

In Chinese culture the origins of Kung Fu are in Shaolin and the origins of Kung Fu in Shaolin are marked by the monk Bodhidharma’s visit to Mt. Song (Song Shan). The Praying Mantis Style is no different. Teachers in all styles of Kung Fu will happily go back to Bodhidharma, his Chinese name commonly abbreviated to Da Mo, when asked about the historical or cultural side of their art. The exercise routines that are accredited to him in Kung Fu mythology are known today as the Eighteen Luohan Routines (Shiba Luohan Gong). Aligning the mind and body to refine the awareness and internal energy centre is expressed in Chinese language as the cultivation of Qi. These early roots of Kung Fu represent the coming together of fighting techniques, yogic techniques (Luohan Gong) and meditation to form a complete system of the body, energy and mind that, philosophically, is a distinct

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product of Imperial Era China. Therefore we venture that when we use the term Shaolin Kung Fu or Kung Fu in this document we are referring to Chinese fighting arts that come from the Shaolin tradition that combines Buddhist philosophy and yogic meditation with combat techniques and movements. Shaolin Kung Fu is not a style itself, but a tradition from which the styles have evolved.

The age in which Bodhidharma came to China was itself a golden age for Buddhism in that region. China was in a period of disunity falling roughly between Qin Shi Huangdi and the Sui-Tang reunification. This is a complex period of China’s history which includes the famous Three Kingdoms period. The specific setting for Bodhidharma’s visit is referred to by Arthur Cotterell as The Tartar Partition (317-589 A.D.). It is from Cotterell’s work, China (Pimlico, 1988), that I will take the titles for consistency. After northern tribes broke into China and sacked Chang’an and Luoyang, the majority of Chinese scholars and civil servants formed a new state in the south around the city Nanjing. Warlords in the north took to fighting each other and then were conquered themselves becoming the Tuoba Wei dynasty (386-550 A.D.). The country was by then effectively partitioned north and south with Song Shan and Luoyang in the northern half.

The southern kingdom was far less strictly Confucian than its predecessor and open to new ideas after its defeat. Officials worked together with Buddhist monks and, for the first time, Buddhism was able to influence national politics and spread among the people more than ever. In the north, the nomadic customs of the Tuoba Wei were unsuited to urban rule and they gradually took on Chinese systems and culture. During the reign of Xiao Wen Di (471-499 A.D.) the capital was moved to Luoyang and even the use of Tartar language was banned. Xiao Wen Di bowed to popular demand and made many concessions to Buddhism. His successor Xuan Wu finished the task, adding rock carvings and creating countless monasteries around the city. Luoyang became a famed religious centre. Cotterell writes, “In the last years of the Tuoba Wei rule, there were 30 000 recorded temples occupied by 2 million monks and nuns.”

In Yang Xuanzhi’s book Memories of Luoyang’s Temples he recalls 1367 religious buildings around the city. This book, written around 547 A.D., also provides us with the sole credible, independent reference to Bodhidharma. Yang mentions that Bodhidharma was a famous monk of the time who visited the largest temple in Luoyang and commented that he’d seen nothing like it on his travels through India. This would place Bodhidharma’s mythical visit to Song Shan and Shaolin between 471 A.D. and 534 A.D. when the city was ruined by a failed forced abandonment under Gao Yang. Cotterell himself directly refers to Bodhidharma in his book. He states that his legendary meditation session spanning years of facing a blank wall is likely to have taken place in Luoyang. Kung Fu folklore has him in a cave at Song Shan. Bodhidharma was later enshrined as the creator of Zen Buddhism (Chen, Chan) and many more stories about him are available to the interested reader.

We can build a picture of the Shaolin Temple coming into prominence at a time where thousands of temples and monasteries were being built as part of huge national works. Buddhist monks and knowledge were already to be found everywhere in the partitioned Chinese empire. More sophisticated translations of scriptures were becoming available in the wake of huge official projects. Kumarajiva arrived in Chang’an in 401 A.D. and was said to be assisted in his translations by a thousand monks. The southern ruler Liang Wudi (502–550 A.D.) was an ardent Buddhist and famously sent to India inviting 3000 monks to work in Nanjing. During this time, the work done at the Shaolin Temple became the cultural heritage of Kung Fu, the traditional source of its ideas. These ideas and elements,

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along with the Luohan Gong are still within Praying Mantis Kung Fu today which shows us why the legend of Wang Long at Shaolin is still an important part of our history.

Perhaps 1300 years went by between Bodhidharma and the start of the credible Mantis history starting in the 1820’s on the Shandong peninsular. During this time Kung Fu diversified and developed spreading throughout the country. It is still unknown at what time Wang Lang came into this period. However, common knowledge, whether wrong or right, about Shaolin Kung Fu is still quite compact and limited. Traditions of closed doors, secret societies and father to son transmission appear to have kept Kung Fu much more linear than we’d think after 1300 years of change. James I. Wong covers all of this in his book and we shall come back to him now.

Following Chinese-Buddhist numerology a common interpretation is that the 18 Luohan routines were developed into 36 forms, the 36 into 72 and the 72 into 108 which finishes the cannon of Shaolin Kung Fu. Wong goes into much more detail. Shaolin Kung Fu was originally conceptualized as having five animals (Wu Jia Xing). They are the tiger (hu), crane (he), leopard (bao), snake (she) and dragon (long). There is a certain amount of physical imitation of the animals in the form but they have an important philosophical significance too. These are not to be confused with later styles naming themselves after these elements. Wong also has the creator of the 36 routines as being the Song emperor Tai Zu (r. 960-976 A.D.) Tai Zu style kung fu or Long Fist (Tai Zu Quan, Chang Quan) are familiar names to most Kung Fu practitioners today. It is important not to confuse this term, Chang Quan, with post-war Zhonghua Wushu terms today.

Wong then names the five major schools that branched from Shaolin. They are E Mei, Wudang, Fujian, Guangdong and Henan. Wong stops there and dismisses their link to Shaolin as legendary. Henan itself is the site of the original temple and the Fujian Shaolin temple also features heavily in Kung Fu history. Wong appears to be questioning the idea that these are five exclusive branches that came directly out of the original temple with no other influence. The Southern Shaolin branch split again into five families: Hong, Liu, Li, Cai and Mo. In Kung Fu folklore, this was due to the sacking of the Fujian Shaolin Temple by the Qing government. This also points to the Guangdong Kung Fu stemming from the Fujian. Wudang is famously the birthplace of Taiji Quan Kung Fu (commonly known as Tai Chi in English). Taiji Quan focuses on the internal aspects of the arts. It must be remembered though, the combining of internal and external together is ‘Kung Fu’ and we must be wary of persistent stereotypes of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ Kung Fu. Kung Fu is much more complex than this and only practice of it can lead to a real understanding.

It is with surprise that we pick up the history of Praying Mantis Kung Fu, which is clearly in the tradition of Shaolin, far away from these centres. The first person in the modern lineage, Li Sanjian is said to have learned from a monk, a Daoist monk from a temple in Lao Shan, Shandong. This monk, Sheng Xiao Daoren, like Wang Lang, has not been credibly placed as an actual historical person. This early part of the lineage is open to many interpretations. The most common is that Sheng Xiao represents the transition from the monks (historical heritage) to the modern figures that we know. What we do know is that this next chapter of the story unfolds in the middle of the second period of Kung Fu legend: the patriotic secret societies.

The Qing Dynasty (1644-1912 A.D.) was the occupation of China by a foreign people, the Manchu. At the close of the 1700’s Lord Macartney, the first British ambassador to China reported:

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The government as it now stands is properly the tyranny of a handful of Tartars over more the three hundred million Chinese … Superiority animates the one, depression is felt by the other. Most of our books confound them together and talk of them as if they made only one nation under the general name of China; but whatever might be concluded from any outward appearances, the real distinction is never forgotten.(China, Cotterell 1981)

There were many major rebellions through the 1800’s in China and many societies determined to restore Han Chinese ethnic rule. Not all of them are linked with Kung Fu mythology and some give us very different kinds of information about the times. The first secret societies came about to resist the Mongolian occupation of the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368 A.D.). They continued through the Ming and then resurfaced in full after the last official Ming resistance fell to the Kangxi Qing Emperor.

The most famous of all these were the White Lotus Sect (Bai Lian Jiao) and, in the south, the Heaven and Earth Society (Tian Di Hui). The White Lotus had their roots in Buddhism. They believed in the coming of Buddhism’s Eternal Unborn Mother. The White Lotus started a full scale rebellion between 1795 and 1804. Other societies included the Heavenly Principal Sect and the Eight Trigrams Sect. The White Lotus remain the most famous and are thought to have been behind most of the other groups. Their famous slogan, Fan Qing Fu Ming, literally states their aim of restoring the Ming Dynasty to power. Shandong was heavily involved in these sects and furnished many recruits as flooding and famine hit with the Qing government doing little to help.

Two other major uprisings of the time are not to be confused with the distinct Kung Fu pedigree of the White Lotus and Heaven and Earth societies. The Taiping Revolution (Tai Ping Tian Guo) of the 1850’s was a full scale open war. The leader, Hong Xiuquan converted to Christianity following a vision that he was a son of God. By 1853 he controlled the entire south up to and including Nanjing. The famous, and much later, Boxer Rebellion of 1898-1900 was distinctly different again. It was first detected in Shandong and carried the slogan: support the Qing, destroy the foreigner. This was very different to the rebellions of Kung Fu legend that identified toppling the Qing as the way to restore Chinese sovereignty. It does, however, reflect the other feature of the 1800’s in China, the rise of the ‘foreign powers’. This century saw the Opium Wars, the Unequal Treaties and extra-territoriality in the concessions.

The start of our Seven Star Mantis lineage is best explained against the background of the Nian Rebellion of 1851-68. Starting in Shandong but eventually encompassing the lands around the borders of Shandong, Anhui, Jiangsu and Henan, this rebellion was actually a regional breakdown of law and order. The leader Zhang Luoxing was a secret society man with connections to the Heaven and Earth Society. During the Nian, ‘rebels’ operated out of safe bases conducting raids in the manner of bandits. This had been normal in that area for many years and during the Nian it became totally unchallenged for nearly 17 years. While other parts of the world grappled with industrialization and colonialism, 1800’s Shandong was undergoing a golden age of banditry and lawlessness. It is against this background that the 2nd generation Praying Mantis Master Li San Jian worked guarding caravans from attack.

The modern Seven Star Mantis schools all have very similar stories and dates covering this period. They only start to differ after Fan Xudong, where a lot of the lineages start to split. Li Sanjian was born

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in 1821 and learned Mantis Boxing from the monk Sheng Xiao. Sheng Xiao was a Daoist monk in a temple in the Laoshan Mountains. Li retired from his life as a caravan guard and soon after, as an old man, visited the school of Wang Rongsheng (born 1854). He openly derided Wang’s fighting skills and then bested him in a personal match. Wang then followed Li Sanjian as a full-time disciple. Wang Rongsheng was already an accomplished fighter from a wealthy background. His secure position in life had enabled him to open a school. During this period, Wang is supposed to have added his Long Fist boxing to the Mantis system.

Some of the hand forms in Seven Star are said to be added directly by Wang. Examples of these are Cha Chui and Si Lu Ben Da. These forms contain movements from Long Fist and grabbing in the Eagle Claw fashion that use the thumb and a twisting motion. It is reasonable to suppose that certain forms were standardized by Wang but unreasonable to suppose that these techniques were not in Mantis Boxing before him. Wang’s most famous student, Fan Xudong, wrote books while Wang was still alive. In these books he detailed the link to Shaolin and presented a poem showing Taizu Quan Long fist and Gou Lou Cai, among others, being used to form Mantis in the Shaolin Temple. We see that Wang Rongsheng and Fan Xudong thought of these elements as being part of Mantis from long before their own time.

Fan Xudong, born 1841, was famously tall and broad. In his fighting years he had the nicknames The Giant, The Giant with the Broad Sword and The King of Mantis. He opened a school in his hometown of Yantai, Shandong. The stories tell of many legendary feats. He was once cornered in a field by a bull. He took a chance and went for the bull first, striking it in the head. The bull was injured and had to be killed, some say that he even killed it outright. Fan traveled north to an open fighting competition that showcased tough Russian fighters. He took on all comers to win and this earned him his national fame. Fan also had a high level of skill with Iron Palm technique (tie sha zhang). Finally, the 80 year old Fan turned down the offer to teach in a newly formed national school of martial arts in Shanghai, the Jing Wu School, and his student Luo Guang Yu carried on in his place.

No matter how we try to fit the stories and events into the dates and times it is filled with problems. If Li Sanjian was around 60 when he met Wang (about 1881) then by the time Wang was teaching Mantis, Fan Xudong must have been almost 50 years old himself. If Li San Jian was between 40 and 50 years old when he met Wang Rongsheng then Wang must have been between 7 and 16 years old. That makes it unlikely that he was an accomplished master with a public school. These and many other scenarios are certainly possible, but each version discredits some other part of the history. Either the stories or the dates are filled with error. The problem seems to be this: taking the questions and issues of the present and projecting them onto the past. Using the known personages from Mantis history to explain things we don’t understand now.

What we do know about Fan Xudong is that by the time he was teaching in Yantai the system was called “Seven Star” Mantis Boxing and was a complete system from the Shaolin tradition containing Da (striking), Ti (kicking), Na (grappling) and Shuai (throwing). There are many stories explaining the name Seven Star. One story tells that there was a hill or mountain near the Laoshan temple called Seven Star Mountain (Qixing Shan). Fan Xudong had five famous disciples: Yang Weixin, Wang Chuanyi, Lin Jing Shan, Guo Jialu and Luo Guangyu (1886-1944). During Fan’s lifetime, Luo Guangyu went directly from Yantai to teach in the Shanghai Jing Wu School. Shanghai in the 1920’s was a modern city with photography, mass media, a famous national school and literally hundred’s of

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students. Fan Xudong’s system and knowledge was documented and open for the world to see. Fan passed on copies of his books to Luo when he left.

Although no credible copies of Fan’s books are in the public arena now, they were the knowledge base for future written works and future teachings. The traditional way of setting out the system in writing, for example The Seven Long and Eight Short Methods, comes to us from these books. The five books were under the name Shaolin Zhen Quan. Literally True Shaolin Boxing and most often represented in English as The Shaolin Authentics. The title could just as correctly be translated as “Shaolin Kung Fu” by today’s language. The books covered the history of Shaolin, Shaolin Kung Fu, the Luohan Gong routines, Chinese medical knowledge and the Mantis techniques. One of the books contained the previously mentioned poem called The Eighteen Families. This poem claims the existence of Mantis inside the Shaolin Temple and shows the other styles and methods that went to creating it.

As Luo Guangyu grew up, then studied Mantis under Fan Xudong, China was changing again. The imperial era was on the verge of collapse and Sun Yatsen (Shen Zhongshan) was waiting to form a new republic. This new era started earnestly in 1912 but soon broke down into what is known as the Warlords Period. This new period of war and chaos was itself only ended with full scale invasion by the Japanese in 1937. Even as the new republic struggled and fragmented it managed to inspire change. Writers such as Lu Xun abandoned the classic conventions and started to write modern novels. Everyday Chinese became motivated by the new ideologies of socialism and nationalism. China was under the boot of the foreign powers more than ever and ideas for building Chinese power and pride were top priority. One of the ideas was a fully public national school of Chinese Martial Arts: The Jing Wu School.

Turn of the century Shanghai was an enigma. The clichéd view is that it is difficult to know whether it was heaven or hell. This, of course, depended on who you were. Shanghai had become the largest treaty port, ceded during the Opium Wars, and was characterised by its concessions. The centrepiece was The Bund (Wai Tan), a waterfront strip of imposing European buildings overseeing the trade and port activity. Around it were the various concessions to America, Britain, France and Japan among others. The French Concession was built in the French style with tree lined avenues and parks. Foreign nationals enjoyed extraterritoriality. The concessions were policed by their own troops and were not subject to Chinese law. The world famous Peace Hotel saw visits from stars such as Charlie Chaplin and Noel Coward. Local Chinese were employed as a serving class or expendable labour in new factories as rich Europeans socialised in glittering ballrooms and attended the horse races.

As a large industrial workforce grew around the concessions their legal state of limbo allowed gangs (Triads) to step in and run the Chinese side of Shanghai. Perhaps the most famous was Du Yuesheng and his Green Gang. Another famous gangland figure was Charlie Soong, who had links to American Chinese communities. Sun Yatsen and Chiang Kaishek (Jiang Jieshi) famously married daughters of Soong. Socialism also took root among workers under subhuman conditions in Shanghai factories. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had its first national congress there in 1921. 1925 saw the infamous May Thirtieth Incident when British troops opened fire on a Chinese student protest. In 1927, Chiang used the Triads to carry out brutal attacks on strikers, protesters and CCP members known as The White Terror. Supplied by the foreign powers and run by the gangs, every street had brothels and opium dens.

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After the Guangxu Emperor and the Dowager Empress Cixi died in November 1908, sections of the army started to turn to Sun Yatsen’s cause and the imperial age was coming to an end. It was around this time that Tianjin born martial artist Huo Yuanjia came to Shanghai. Huo had a benefactor who he had worked for in Tianjin and the two of them started on a project of opening a national academy of Chinese Martial Arts. Huo was a tough fighter who never shirked from challenges and his personal reputation was the driving force in getting the school open. Unfortunately, Huo had suffered from a liver condition and fell ill. He died within two years of arriving in Shanghai. Three of his students, Chen Gongzhe, Yao Chanbo and Lu Weichang worked hard to keep the school going and by the mid 1910’s the Jingwu school was fully up and running.

The aim of the project was to change the old system of masters teaching a small number of disciples. This kept the number of good fighters small and the knowledge limited. The new school had hundreds of students through their doors so an introductory syllabus was devised. This was known as the Jingwu Ten Basic Forms. These training routines were taken from North Shaolin Kung Fu (Er Lang Men) and Eagle Claw (Ying Zhao Men), they included open hand and weapons. Famous forms from the syllabus include Tan Tui and Gong Li Quan. Next, they invited renowned masters of various styles to come and teach at the school. Among these teachers were four highly skilled masters who became known as the Four Superlords of Jingwu. They were Zhao Lianhe (Er Lang Men), Wu Jianquan (Wu Style Taiji Quan), Chen Zizheng (Ying Zhao Fanzi Men) and Luo Guangyu – teaching Seven Star Praying Mantis.

One of Luo’s contributions to the Jingwu syllabus was to create a set of basic drills similar in format to the Tan Tui. This form is the Mantis 14 Roads (Tang Lang Shisi Lu Tan Tui). The form itself was not new. It is made up of the basic techniques from Fan’s school arranged into simple lines. However, for full-time students he continued to teach the complete system after his teacher Fan Xudong. Luo’s student Ma Chengxin famously won a national free fighting competition (lei tai) which reflected well on his teacher. Also among these students at the Jingwu school in Shanghai was Lin Boyan (1903-1990) from Fujian province. Lin Boyan resided at the school and graduated as a full teacher of Mantis Boxing. Lin is listed as a Jingwu master in the available Jingwu literature and also in books by other students such as Huang Hanxun (Er Lu Zhai Yao, Yi Mei Publishing Hong Kong). Huang Hanxun was the product of the next phase of the Jingwu project: expansion across China and Asia.

The Jingwu teachers started to travel and help graduating students set-up Jingwu schools in other provinces. At the same time, the first generation of Jingwu teachers, such as Chen Gongzhe, started to travel to other Asian countries promoting Jingwu in local and Chinese communities alike. They were especially successful in Malaysia and Singapore, paving the way for Lin Boyan to move there later. Luo Guangyu visited the Guangzhou school and taught mantis to Huang Hanxun (known as Wong Honfun). Together they then developed the Hong Kong school where Zhao Zhimin led the Mantis classes. Huang continued to oversee the development between Luo’s visits and eventually relocated to Hong Kong himself. Then, in 1937, the Japanese Army burst through Wanping to take Beijing and full scale war ensued. The Jingwu dream came to a halt and the original organisation was never to start again in China.

World War Two led to a massive increase in the Chinese Diaspora. Significant migration of Chinese to other nations, and the setting up of overseas communities was underway long before the Pacific War broke out. The war, and the subsequent Civil War and revolutionary period sent thousands into Hong Kong, S.E. Asian communities and Western chinatowns. These three areas became torchbearers for

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traditional Chinese culture, especially Kung Fu. Taiwan remained heavily politicised under Chiang Kaishek and developed the Kung Fu alongside the military as National Arts (Guoshu). Chiang had already been developing similar programs at his Mainland military academy, Whampoa (Huangpu). At this point in our lineage, Taiwan becomes a separate story as we enter the modern era. Luo Guangyu returned to his hometown, Penglai, where he died in 1944. Huang Hanxun and Zhao Zhimin stayed in Hong Kong. Lin Boyan moved to Malaysia to work as a teacher in Singapore. Also going to Malaysia was accomplished Mantis teacher Wong Kamhoong (Huang Jinhong).

Before entering the modern era it is worth coming back to the idea of projecting our present issues onto the past since this is especially true of Luo Guangyu. Luo Guangyu, through being in Shanghai and Jingwu, became very high profile nationally. Jingwu produced periodical magazines and literature and had many photographs taken of the masters. Luo is the first teacher that we really have substantial evidence and knowledge of. It is a mistake to think of him as the start of a new era in Seven Star Mantis. Luo was the end of the era that begun with Li Sanjian and he represented a complete and seamless transmission from Fan Xudong. After the opening of Mainland China in the early 1980’s, and after years of post-war migration, many Seven Star Mantis clubs were emerging with very different movements and ideas.

Luo Guangyu is the earliest standard we have for the Seven Star system so, naturally, clubs that are vastly different now will look to Luo when explaining their differences. These normally start by saying that Luo changed the system from Fan Xudong’s. The reasons given are many, usually cited is the influence of the Jing Wu schools and the other styles there. Modern day Shandong schools make a point of this and look to Fan Xudong and his student Lin Jingshan as original. As with the early history there is simply no evidence or independent references to back this up and discussion of it is pointless. Luo started teaching immediately after he arrived from Shandong while Fan Xudong was still alive. During this time there is no record, written or photographic of any gradual change in the Jing Wu years. It is also never referred to by any of his early students such as Lin Boyan.

After the war ended Hong Kong started to grow towards a place on the international stage. It remained a British colony and stayed active as the rest of China closed its doors to the world. The city continued much in the way of pre-war Shanghai. There was a foreign (British) elite class and the Chinese areas, constantly swelled by refugees from the mainland, became the rule of the Triads. As the newly rich dined on floating palaces in Aberdeen Bay, refugees lived in floating ghettos behind. By the 60’s and 70’s, every street had a Kung Fu school and every cinema showed a Shaw Brothers (Shao Shi Xiongdi) Kung Fu movie. The impact of Bruce Lee films such as The Big Boss and Fists of Fury (Jingwu Men) at the end of the 60’s showed clearly that not much had changed. Kung Fu, the secret societies and Chinese struggle against foreign occupation were all alive and well in post-war Hong Kong.

During the 1980’s Hong Kong boomed and the skyline grew. Rent prices doubled over night and huge slum areas were knocked down to make way for office towers. The boat people in Aberdeen were taken from their waterborne ghetto and re-housed in tall concrete ghettos instead. Mainly returnees to China from conflict-torn Vietnam, they fell victim to the difference between the rhetoric of modern nationalism and it’s cold reality. The Kung Fu schools started to close as few could afford to stay in the city and many that had made money emigrated on to Europe or America. The era was already coming to end. Still, through it, two of Luo Guangyu’s students had thrived keeping schools open and teaching many students. These were Huang Hanxun and Zhao Zhimin. Both of them carried on their schools after the tradition of Jingwu, teaching the Ten Basic Forms and traditional Chinese weapons.

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Huang was very active and soon set about a project of making the Mantis written canon available as fully published printed books. He organised the books around the training forms. Each book would contain a complete set shown with photographs. The historical and theoretical information appeared spread through the books in the introduction or as extra sections. He also made two kinds of traditional notation (quanpu) available for the forms; the original poetic version and a technical version that noted the stances and hand positions. A second print saw only sixteen of the books available for most of this period and finally they stopped when the Yimei publishing company closed its doors. Following the passing of Brendan Lai after an earlier stroke and the retirement of Al Cheng, many modern Huang Hanxun schools look to the sixteen set for the system’s knowledge in the absence of the original five volume format devised by Fan Xudong.

After Huang retired and the Hong Kong Kung Fu scene was fading, his lineage continued mainly in North America. Some of his best students had emigrated there and started schools of their own. The most famous of these are Brendan Lai (Li Dazhong), who went to San Francisco, and Al Cheng, who went to Vancouver, Canada. Zhao Zhimin also had students set up schools abroad. Chui Chuenluen (Chiu Luen, Zhao Lun) went to New York Chinatown and started a strong lineage with many good students. Raymond Ly (Lei Ming) went to Zhao Zhimin through Chuen Luen and later opened his own school in Chicago. Zhao Zhimin had another student, Lee Kamwing (Li Jinrong, 1947-). Li took qualifications in Chinese medicine and had the resources to stay in Hong Kong and open a school in the Mong Kok district along with a clinic. The school opened in 1972 and Zhao Zhimin retired from teaching in 1976. It was to this school that Kai Uwe Pel came in 1980 to begin studying Seven Star Mantis Kung Fu.

Luo Guangyu’s student Lin Boyan spent time in Hankou during the occupation and then worked as a teacher in Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur) and Singapore once World War Two was over. He was nationally renowned as a martial arts teacher in both Seven Star Mantis and Taiji Quan. Lin was originally from China’s Fujian province and had devoted his whole life to the practice of martial arts. Lin preferred a quiet life finally settling in Singapore. He married early, studied well and naturally progressed into a teaching career. From his three children, his daughter Lin Yuting lived with him in Singapore and learned Kung Fu. She still teaches in Singapore at present, as does Lin Boyan’s long term student Koh Kim Kok (Xu Jing Ke, 1949-). Also from Fujian, Xu’s mother emigrated to Singapore in 1959 and he immediately started studying with Lin Boyan. Xu judges national martial arts competitions and still teaches near his home in the Jurong district of Singapore.

The simple approach taken by the Malaysia based teachers such as Lin Boyan and Huang Jinhong was in marked contrast to the Hong Kong schools. The Hong Kong schools, together with their European and American branches, started to develop systems that reflected their size and organization. This included ranking systems with colored belts, previously unused in Chinese Kung Fu. Advanced payment structures were also introduced along with certification. In North America and Europe larger commercial schools were appearing in the martial arts scene along with highly organized competition circuits and standardization. The largest of these appeared as multi-level marketing (or pyramid) schemes that resembled corporations more than the Jingwu schools of old. Kai Uwe Pel began his martial arts training at the changing point of this new era and his resistance to it has shaped his career in Kung Fu.

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Kai Uwe Pel (Germany, 1964-) finished school at sixteen and was exempt from national service for medical reasons. He would later continue his education in computers but was faced with a gap to fill. Having decided to study Chinese Kung Fu he was eventually accepted by letter to study with Li Jinrong in Hong Kong. Pel moved to Hong Kong in 1980 and spent his first years as a full-time residential student. Pel quickly rose to senior rank at the school along with student Kwok Wingho. Finally, his strength and fighting ability stood him apart from other students and, after completing study of the system, he was named as a system inheritor and given permission to teach. Kai Uwe Pel then split his time between teaching in Germany and Hong Kong. His skill in Mantis and also his mastery of the iron palm training and traditional weapons led to many trips and performances. It was during these trips that he started to meet other Mantis teachers. Among them was Xu Jing Ke in Singapore.

Kai Uwe Pel had been training Mantis Boxing for almost ten years but he began to see that he had much more to learn. It became clear that study with Master Xu was the way forward. Pel had already graduated from the Hong Kong school of Li Jinrong but when he asked permission to train with another teacher he was met with anger and refusal. The year before, Li Jinrong approached Pel with a plan for a full belt system with embedded payments. Pel’s desire to leave also attracted bad reactions from his own students and the people around him. Ironically, Pel’s detractors were themselves bringing in a new era where it is now normal to train with several teachers, even of the same style. Disillusioned and disappointed by the double standards and superficial behavior, Pel went to Singapore to continue his own training.

Kai Uwe Pel made an immediate connection with Xu Jing Ke. Training was simple and traditional. Each morning he trained Mantis with Xu and in the evening he trained at the Singapore Jingwu School under Master Chia Shue Foy. In the more relaxed and inward Malaysian Chinese communities, Lin Boyan had quietly continued the traditions handed to him by Luo Guangyu. Pel graduated from Xu Jing’ke and decided on a move to China. Under Chia Shue Foy, who passed away in 2000, Pel had renewed his hope for the Jingwu traditions and eventually found himself in Shanghai working to restore the Jingwu School there. Unfortunately, the move to China was to bring him back into contact with the Kung Fu world he went to Singapore to escape.

From 1949-1976 China underwent Mao Zedong’s theory of continuous revolution. It started with the re-organizing of land ownership into communes and progressed onto large scale disasters such as the Great Leap Forward (Da Yue Jin, 1958-61) and the Cultural Revolution (Wenhua Da Geming1966-76). To understand the scale of upheaval during these times is to understand that normal life, as it was before the war, was almost totally absent during these times. During the Great Leap Forward, the newly formed commune system was ordered to produce steel. By 1960 the shortfall in food production had caused an estimated 30 000 000 deaths. Shandong was one of the three worst hit provinces that produced stories of cannibalism and eating bark from trees. During the Cultural Revolution all ‘olds’ were stopped and teachers of traditional arts were lynched or sent out to farms for re-education. Even the years between were controlled by ideological campaigns aimed at restructuring society. Sports were a main focus and Kung Fu went under the hammer during the mid-fifties. It was dismantled, banned then re-invented as a gymnastic competition sport named Zhonghua Wushu.

Kai Uwe Pel arrived at the Jingwu School in 2002 to find only modern Wushu classes being taught there. The school was run by ex-sports ministry officials with no Kung Fu background and the focus was on building a network with external ‘Jingwu’ schools and demanding yearly fees from them. Some

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older teachers were around but they taught the modern competition basics along with some older forms. Most application seemed to be based around Sanda – a mix of kickboxing and wrestling similar to the Mixed Martial Arts ring competitions also growing in other countries. The Mao years had knocked a hole in the Kung Fu community, not only by driving many teachers out of the country, but by re-engineering Kung Fu itself. The strong nationalism that accompanied China’s return to power also rendered the Jingwu committee unable to fully accept Pel, especially in matters that were part of Chinese culture. Pel parted company with them soon after and continued to teach in Shanghai privately. He is still residing and teaching there today.

The future of Kung Fu and Mantis Boxing is uncertain. It was once thought that larger schools and the use of the media would save Kung Fu and help to spread it. Now it appears that the structure inherent in large schools, competition circuits and the use of media to share information is the greatest threat Kung Fu has ever faced. The often exciting rise of ring fighting sports and Mixed Martial Arts is a huge influence, persuading schools focused on sports competitions to follow suit. Modern Wushu has taken Shaolin and wages a daily propaganda war to claim legitimacy. Teachers use the books and records to fill in their own lack of knowledge and proclaim themselves keepers of tradition. But. If we think carefully, we see that perhaps history is repeating itself. Clubs that devolve or simplify the art to suit their needs will eventually become distinctly not Mantis. Ring fighters will become ring fighters. The next generation of Wushu players will lose touch with the old knowledge completely, their modern forms containing little clues once the teachers pass away. Waiting in the background will be those who have been happy to study the Praying Mantis system in full, quietly getting on with it. The crowds will fade away and the next historical lineage to be written about will remain, clear and inspirational like the true masters before.

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Documents

The History of Praying Mantis Kung Fu