Since you guys had a really good discussion going on martial arts history, I thought I'd put out some of this information from a different side.
My wife reads Chinese and she reads the signs on businesses out loud so that I could learn. We've been married 25 years now and I barely read 10 characters....you do the math.
Anyway, the way she's read some of the Tae Kwon Do signs here in L.A. is "...Tai Chi Way."
In the 60's when I first started jumping into all kinds of martial arts of all sorts...there was no Tae Kwon Do representation here in L.A.....only Tang Soo Do (translation?...."Tang (Chinese) Era; Soo/Sau=hand/fist; Do=way) and Hap Ki Do or equivalent to Aikido meaning.
Bottom line is they were just showing someof their lineage.
There was one question why the Shaolin Priests lost to the Ching troops was....at least the way the CHinese history goes...a traitorous monk poisoned the water of the high priests and many of the monks, so resistance was minimal.
The popular belief of why so much of Chinese recorded history was lost? Since the Chinese recorded much of their history on parchment paper, and many warlords did not want recorded history to show proper lineage, they burned the parchment whenever they conquered a dynasty....and so recorded history was lost. Instead, many Chinese dynasties depended on verbal history (story tellers who earned their living by relating history to their audiences.) Of course, how much of that was really true or just popular?
Do you guys like alternate history? Or revisionist?
My wife reads Chinese and she reads the signs on businesses out loud so that I could learn. We've been married 25 years now and I barely read 10 characters....you do the math.
Anyway, the way she's read some of the Tae Kwon Do signs here in L.A. is "...Tai Chi Way."
In the 60's when I first started jumping into all kinds of martial arts of all sorts...there was no Tae Kwon Do representation here in L.A.....only Tang Soo Do (translation?...."Tang (Chinese) Era; Soo/Sau=hand/fist; Do=way) and Hap Ki Do or equivalent to Aikido meaning.
Bottom line is they were just showing someof their lineage.
There was one question why the Shaolin Priests lost to the Ching troops was....at least the way the CHinese history goes...a traitorous monk poisoned the water of the high priests and many of the monks, so resistance was minimal.
The popular belief of why so much of Chinese recorded history was lost? Since the Chinese recorded much of their history on parchment paper, and many warlords did not want recorded history to show proper lineage, they burned the parchment whenever they conquered a dynasty....and so recorded history was lost. Instead, many Chinese dynasties depended on verbal history (story tellers who earned their living by relating history to their audiences.) Of course, how much of that was really true or just popular?
Do you guys like alternate history? Or revisionist?