Consider for instance the “bat cham dao” (the Wing Chun style name for butterfly swords) owned by Ip Man. In a recent interview Ip Ching (his son),confirmed that his father never brought a set of functional hudiedao to Hong Kong when he left Foshan in 1949. Instead, he actually brought a set of “swords” carved out of peach wood. These were the “swords” that he used when establishing Wing Chun in Hong Kong in the 1950s and laying the foundations for its global expansion.
Obviously some wooden swords are more accurate than others, but none of them are exactly like the objects they represent. It also makes a good deal of sense that Ip Man in 1949 would not really care that much about iron swords. He was not a gangster or a Triad member. He was not an opera performer. As a police officer he had carried a gun and had a good sense of what real street violence was.
Ip Man had been (and aspired to once again become) a man of leisure. He was relatively well educated, sophisticated and urbane. More than anything else he saw himself as a Confucian gentleman, and as such he was more likely to display a work of art in his home than a cold-blooded weapon.
Swords carved of peach wood have an important significance in Chinese society that goes well beyond their safety and convince when practicing martial arts forms. Peach wood swords are used in Daoist exorcisms and are thought to have demon slaying powers. In the extended version of the story of the destruction of the Shaolin Temple favored by the Triads, Heaven sends a peach wood sword to the survivors of Shaolin that they use to slay thousands of their Qing pursuers.
Hung in a home or studio, these swords are thought to convey good fortune and a certain type of energy. In fact, it was not uncommon for Confucian scholars to display a prized antique blade or a peach wood sword in their studies. Ip Man’s hudiedao appear to be a (uniquely southern) adaptation of this broader cultural tradition. As carved wooden works of art, they were only meant to have a superficial resemblance to the militia weapons of the early 19th century.
Ip Ching also relates that at a later date one of his students took these swords and had exact aluminum replicas of them created. Later these were reworked again to have a flat stainless steel blade and aluminum (latter brass) handles. Still, I think there is much to be said for the symbolism of the peach wood blade.
Butterfly swords remain one of the most iconic and easily recognizable artifacts of Southern China’s unique martial culture. Their initial creation in the late 18th or early 19th century may have been aided by recent encounters with European cutlasses and military hangers. This unique D-grip (seen in many, though not all cases) was then married to an older tradition of using double weapons housed in a single sheath.
By the 1820s, these swords were popular enough that American and British merchants in Guangdong were encountering them and adding them to their collections. By the 1830’s, we have multiple accounts of these weapons being supplied to the gentry led militia troops and braves hired by Lin in his conflicts with the British. Descriptions by Commander Bingham indicate the existence of a fully formed martial tradition in which thousands of troops were trained to fight in the open field with these swords, and even to flip them when switching between grips. (Whether flipping them is really a good idea is another matter entirely).
Increased contact between Europeans and Chinese citizens in the 1840s and 1850s resulted in more accounts of “double swords” and clear photographs and engravings showing a variety of features that are shared with modern hudiedao. The biggest difference is that most of these mid-century swords were longer and more pointed than modern swords.
Interestingly these weapons also start to appear on America’s shores as Chinese immigration from Guangdong and Fujian increased in the middle of the 19th century. Period accounts from the 1880s indicate that they were commonly employed by criminals and enforcers, and photographs from the turn of the century show that they were also used by both street performers and opera singers.
Still, these blades were in general shorter, wider and with less pronounced points, than their mid. 19th century siblings. While some individuals may have continued to carry these into the 1930s, hudiedao started to disappear from the streets as they were replaced by more modern and economical firearms. By the middle of the 20th century these items, if encountered at all, were no longer thought of as fearsome weapons of community defense or organized crime. Instead they survived as the tools of the “traditional martial arts” and opera props.
While it has touched on a variety of points, I feel that this article has made two substantive contributions to our understanding of these weapons. First, it pushed their probable date of creation back a generation or more. Rather than being the product of the late 19th century or the 1850s, we now have clear evidence of the widespread use of the hudiedao in Guangdong dating back to the 1830s, and a strong suggestion of their presence in the 1820s.
These weapons were indeed favored by civilian martial artists and various members of the “Rivers and Lakes” of southern China. Yet we have also seen that they were employed by the thousands to arm militias, braves and guards in southern China. Not only that we have accounts of thousands of individuals in the Pearl River Delta region receiving active daily instruction in their use in the late 1830s.
The popular view of hudiedao as exotic weapons of martial artists, rebels and eccentric pirates needs to be modified. These blades also symbolized the forces of “law and order.” They were produced by the thousands for government backed elite networks and paid for with public taxes. This was a reasonable choice as many members of these local militias already had some boxing experience. It would have been relatively easy to train them to hold and use these swords given what they already knew. While butterfly swords may have appeared mysterious and quintessentially “Chinese” to western observers in the 1830s, Lin supported their large scale adoption as a practical solution to a pressing problem.
This may also change how we think about the martial arts that arose in this region. For instance, the two weapons typically taught in the Wing Chun system are the “long pole” and the “bat cham do” (the style name for hudiedao). The explanations for these weapons that one normally encounters are highly exotic and focus on the wandering Shaolin monks (who were famous for their pole fighting) or secret rebel groups intent on exterminating local government officials. Often the “easily concealable” nature of the hudiedao are supposed to have made them ideal for this task (as opposed to handguns and high explosives, which are the weapons that were actually used for political assassinations during the late Qing).
Our new understanding of the historical record shows that what Wing Chun actually teaches are the two standard weapons taught to almost every militia member in the region. One typically learns pole fighting as a prelude to more sophisticated spear fighting. However, the Six and a Half Point pole form could easily work for either when training a peasant militia. And we now know that the butterfly swords were the single most common side arm issued to peasant-soldiers during the mid. 19th century in the Pearl River Delta region.
The first historically verifiable appearance of Wing Chun in Foshan was during the 1850s-1860s. This important commercial town is located literally in the heartland of the southern gentry-led militia movement. It had been the scene of intense fighting in 1854-1856 and more conflict was expected in the future.
We have no indication that Leung Jan was a secret revolutionary. He was a well known and well liked successful local businessman. Still, there are understandable reasons that the martial art which he developed would allow a highly educated and wealthy individual, to train a group of people in the use of the pole and the hudiedao. Wing Chun contains within it all of the skills one needs to raise and train a gentry led militia unit.
The evolution of Wing Chun was likely influenced by this regions unique history of militia activity and widespread (government backed) military education. I would not be at all surprised to see some of these same processes at work in other martial arts that were forming in the Pearl River Delta at the same time.
-BENJUDKINS
*Re photo: GGM Ip Man with his swords. Hong Kong, late 1960s.
