The Two Chinese Histories
Rene Ritchie, November 30th, 2007
H20 is ice and water and steam.
Qi is air and breath and vital essence.
While we often look at facets, a step back can reveal a more interesting and complex whole.
In China, there’s a recognized tradition of ‘Wild History’. This is the history of folk-story, of Wuxia. This Wild History can include figures from real history, for example famed generals, emperors, founders of martial arts, but can re-imagine them in sometimes very different ways. The emperor of Qing could have secretly been switched at birth with a Han baby. The legendary founder of Taiji could have been a Qi-vampire.
The interesting thing is that wild history, while it contradicts real history in some places, is consistent within itself (one wild history story will often use the same fictional frame work as another–almost like a parallel, fictional universe with its own continuity and rules set–take that Warren Ellis!)
The more interesting thing is that wild history, in some times and places, is even more well known and popular than real history, to the point where locals may only recognize characters, even real historical ones, from their wild history portrayals.
King Arthur, Robin Hood, Heracles might be somewhat analogous in the West, if there was a large percentage of people who took them as a consistent, contained history all their own. Washington chopping down the cherry tree might be closer.
Due to the power of the (often romanticized) wild history, it should then come as no surprise that it has been intermingled into politics and commerce for generations.
Sun Yaat-Sen famously instructed his ‘historians’ to take the Xilu (Western Barbarian) wild history (the story of Shaolin helping the Qing fight the Tibetans, then being betrayed by the Qing, burned out, and having to form the Secret Societies) as a way to influence expatriate triads into helping him by leading them to believe they came from nationalistic, romantic roots (Shaolin Han patriots). Even though the story was self-contradictory (the Shaolin at first help the Qing), its power was such that it persisted and even fueled a lot of the MA origin stories dispersed nationalists later brought with them to the West.
The Hakka also showed the power of these stories in disguise, when they hid the name of their martial arts behind a ‘Southern Mantis’ cloak, while their actual history, helping the Qing fight the Hokkien in Fujian and then being turned on and forced to flee south into the Liangguang, was a powerful echo of the ‘Southern Shaolin’ stories that followed.
Others took up Wu-Tan banners with no connection to fabled Wudang, Hebei, and still today you can pick up yellow pages with “Shaolin Temple Karate” Schools, and while Louis Cha’s epics enjoy incredible fame in Asia, Crouching Tiger and Mulan and the like have greatly increased their presence in the west as well.
In Chinese culture, wild and real history exist side by side, like ice and water and steam, air and breath and vital essence, like facets of the same jewel. Perhaps in the west we’ve gotten used to looking at them one at a time, but perhaps we can also learn something interesting by taking that step back and enjoying them for the complex whole they really are.
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