Keeping martial arts alive in print

The difficulty of obtaining a marital arts training manual has served as the central plot element of many a kung fu movie. In fact, they are really not all that hard to come by. Many modern day teachers of Chinese martial arts have written training manuals that are widely available through the Internet or publishers catalogues. But many modern-day practitioners of Chinese martial arts are driven by a desire to own copies of older, classical martial arts training manuals. These, until recently, have not been so easy to come by.

Training manuals, in Chinese quan pu (拳普), are books or manuscripts that teach the principles, techniques or forms of a martial arts system, as opposed to books which discuss the history of martial arts or works of fiction based on the martial arts. Such training manuals have existed in some Chinese martial arts systems since at least the early Ming dynasty.

Their existence however can be quite tenuous. Older handwritten training manuals may be lost or destroyed; either on purpose or simply by the ravages of time. Printed manuals become unavailable, go out of print, or the publishers close their doors. In either case, the knowledge contained in them becomes lost to modern practitioners.

But these training manuals are being revived. Several publishers in both China and Taiwan are republishing the older manuals; keeping the tradition alive and making the information available to modern readers and martial arts practitioners.

An excellent example of such endeavors is Lion Publishers (逸文出版) in Taiwan. Founded in 1995 by Liu Kan-yi (劉康毅), Lion Publishers in its own words; "seeks to preserve martial arts culture through high quality reprints available at moderate cost."

"I had been in the publishing business since 1992. When I started Lion Publishers I hoped to meet the multiple goals of publishing both old and new martial arts books, having a retail outlet, expanding my martial arts book collection, putting out a martial arts journal, and hosting a Web site," says Liu.

Liu started to collect martial arts books well before he started Lion Publishers. "I went through all the second-hand bookstores in Taiwan, buying up everything that was available. And then I later made a survey of what older martial arts books were available in Taiwan. Initially I worked alone collecting the books, but after a time I developed a `reputation' for collecting old martial arts books and people started to approach me with books for sale or sometimes simply gave me older martial arts books that they were no longer interested in. I then turned my attention to China, where there were far more books available."

With an amused laugh he goes on, "soon, my collection became so large that I was not able to actually read all the volumes and some of the books were so obscure that I could not understand them even when I did attempt to read them. I noticed that these older martial arts books combined usually discussed martial arts in conjunction with broader health programs, Chinese medicine, divination and metaphysics."

Reprinting these older, more holistically orientated Chinese martial arts text was the first goal of Lion Publishers. To date, they have republished over 20 of these older training manuals and Liu hopes to keep that process going for many years to come. There are a great number of valuable Chinese martial arts texts that have gone out of print and risk being forever lost.