Shaobei Boxing
01 · Historical Records
Shaobei Boxing is a boxing style that originated at Shaolin yet has its own distinctive characteristics. Its boxing comprises four divisions — long-range boxing, close striking, seizing and locking, and skillful evasion — in 25 routines. Its weapons art covers the eighteen kinds of ancient battlefield arms — "sabers, spears, swords, and halberds; axes, yues, hooks, and forks; whips, truncheons, hammers, and claws; crutches, cudgels, staves, and jointed staves; and the meteor hammer and bow" — grouped into eight categories with 25 weapons methods. Its internal-skill art consists of seizing-and-locking techniques, bone-dislodging skill, and the eighteen arts. Its cunning art derives from the nine body-applied techniques of the ancient art of triggering and breaking mechanisms.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
It was transmitted by Juekong, a Linji martial monk of the late Ming and early Qing, and Zhang Daqi of Shandong, and has now passed through eight generations. It is mainly spread in Jinzhou, Shenyang, Dalian, and elsewhere in Liaoning, and is also found in Beijing, Hebei, Shandong, and other provinces and cities. The basic content of Shaobei Boxing is collectively called the "two skills and four arts": the two fundamental exercises of the nine-skill exercise and the six-root exercise (including the eight short-boxing sets), together with the four art divisions of boxing, weapons, internal skill, and cunning. Shaobei Boxing takes the promotion of the martial spirit as its highest pursuit and fully displays the martial bearing of the Chinese nation; it takes plain dialectics as its cultural foundation, with a simple and unadorned style; and it aims at combat and fighting, with rich technical content and tight, compact movement structures. Its attack and defense are strongly practical; its boxing force is fierce in delivery yet softened in continuation, drawing in and releasing at will, combining hardness and softness. It is a boxing style conducive to the fitness and self-defense of the general public. Individual and collective teaching and training, exchanges and competitions, demonstrations and performances, and actual combat are its principal forms of practice. Its ancient and distinctive theory and technique embody the essence of China's venerable martial learning; it is a historical witness to and re-creation of traditional sport.
Two foundations and four branches
The umbrella term for the style's content: two foundational trainings and the four branches of boxing, weapons, conditioning and ingenuity.
Four parts, twenty-five boxing routines
The boxing division comprises four parts—long boxing, close striking, lock-breaking and evasive skill—in twenty-five routines.
Eight weapon classes, twenty-five routines
The weapon division covers eight classes and twenty-five routines, from sabre, spear, sword and halberd to whip, mace and meteor hammer.
Conditioning and ingenuity arts
The conditioning branch holds grappling, joint-displacing skill and the eighteen arts; the ingenuity branch derives from ancient trap-breaking body techniques.
Juekong and Zhang Daqi
The style was passed down by the Chan monk Juekong and Zhang Daqi of Shandong in the late Ming and early Qing, and is now in its eighth or ninth generation.
Fierce yet yielding technique
The style is forceful in issuing power yet softening on contact, practised through teaching, competition, demonstration and actual fighting.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
Shaobei Boxing is transmitted most intensively in Jinzhou, Shenyang, and Dalian in Liaoning Province, of which Jinzhou is recognized as the center of origin and dissemination; the Jinzhou Shaobei Martial Arts Research Society bears responsibility for the project's conservation and teaching. It is also found in Beijing, Hebei, Shandong, and other provinces and cities. In the late Ming and early Qing, the Linji martial monk Juekong and Zhang Daqi of Shandong transmitted it outward; it was named "Shaobei" for taking the northern branch of Shaolin boxing. Since the twentieth century, Shaobei Boxing has been taught in the Liaoxi region through research institutes, teaching-and-learning centers, and training bases, and it has reached young people through classroom teaching and general-education courses at universities; teaching sites have also been established in a number of overseas countries and regions.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
In recent years, with its development, it has spread far to a number of overseas countries and regions. Shaobei Boxing is transmitted orally and by demonstration through master-apprentice relations; the lineage, with clear documentation, has now reached the ninth generation. The government attaches great importance to its conservation and transmission: it has built Shaobei transmission bases and established numerous research institutes, teaching-and-learning centers, and training bases to guarantee that inheritors can take on apprentices and teach their art; it has carried out activities to bring the art into schools, strengthening transmission among young people through classroom teaching and general-education courses at universities; it has used community outreach to intensify publicity and widen the circle of inheritors; and it has actively used websites, WeChat, and other new media to teach remotely. At present, inheritors persist in teaching apprentices over the long term and have trained a large cohort of successors; the art shows good conditions of survival. Shaobei Boxing is completely preserved, transmitted over a long period, rich in content, and deep in cultural substance; it is an important component of traditional Chinese martial arts and a precious cultural treasure. It has strong fitness and self-defense functions and contains the learning of feint and solidity, attack and defense, the way of hardness and softness in balance, the subtle transformations of yin and yang, and the art of subduing others while educating them. In both theory and practice it forms a system of its own, developing a school of its own, and has considerable research value and social significance.
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
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