Heroic Grace: The Chinese Martial Arts Film
by David ChuteEditor's Introduction to the catalog of the landmark touring film series curated by Cheng-Sim Lim for the UCLA Film and Television Archive, 2003..
Editor's Introduction to the catalog of the landmark touring film series curated by Cheng-Sim Lim for the UCLA Film and Television Archive, 2003..
It's pointless to dispute the fact that the Chinese martial arts movie has a chronic image problem in the West. Like every major film genre this one has its prestige productions and its Z pictures, its classics and its Golden Turkeys. But while great works such as King Hu's A Touch Of Zen (Xia N?, 1971) have surfaced here occasionally, the form has largely come to be identified with the dregs of its output. The Hong Kong film industry itself was partly to blame, cranking out hundreds of one-week wonders and shipping them directly overseas, to opportunistic distributors, during the short-lived "kung fu craze" of the 1970s.[1]
Martial arts movies have outlasted the disreputable "B" sub-genres they shared drive-in triple bills with in the '70s, the spaghetti Western and the blaxpolitation picture, to become a familiar feature of American pop culture. Oldies radio stations still occasionally play Carl Douglas' 1975 novelty hit "(Everybody Was) Kung Fu Fighting," and listeners smile knowingly. But in the grind-house of the mind the films are a distinctly threadbare and frenetic spectacle, with their plastic wigs and poster paint blood, their posturing machismo, their vertiginous smash-zoom camerawork and sledgehammer sound effects-and above all with their epiglottal dubbed English dialog, so intimately associated with our Kung Fu Theater memories that even hard-core fans enjoy quoting great chunks of it.[2]
There is a great deal more here, however, than meets (or has yet to meet) the western eye. The noble bearing and the altruistic values that American art house patrons admired in the heroes of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), and mistakenly assumed were unique to the revisionist approach of auteur director Ang Lee, are in fact the philosophical wellsprings of an exceedingly ancient and durable genre, the idealistic pursuits that have shaped it from its inception almost two thousand years ago.[3]
The earliest works of published fiction about martial heroes date back to the 3rd century BC, and one of the oldest surviving Chinese feature films, made in 1926, is a silent swordplay saga. Like the Western in the US and the chanbara samurai tale in Japan, these stories embody the central hero myths of an entire culture. These self-help fables of free-lance warriors pursuing justice across an imaginary landscape of heroic fantasy have deep roots in oral legends that pre-date the nation's earliest official historical records by several centuries. We have barely scratched the surface of this ancient genre in the States, and the surface we've scratched has been conveniently pre-tarnished.
A point that needs to be made at once is that what you're getting here are two genres for the price of one.[4] For most Americans, the history of the Chinese martial arts movie begins with Bruce Lee and ends with Crouching Tiger, and there's some justice in that: Lee remains the most ferociously popular international icon of two-fisted (and two-footed) kung fu prowess, while Crouching Tiger offered many westerners their first close look at the righteous swordfighters of the older foundational genre known as wuxia ("woo-shia"), or "martial chivalry." With the examples of Bruce Lee and Crouching Tiger's Li Mubai in front of us, these two forms of martial adventure seem pretty easy to tell apart, almost at a glance. One flies and the other doesn't; one swings a sword and the other throws a punch. But in practice, as Stephen Teo argues in his essay here, the boundary between the two forms is fairly porous, and these glib distinctions don't stand up to close scrutiny.
The umbrella term wuxia simply attributes force or power, wu, to a person of righteous principles, the xia.[5] So the moral splendor of the hero is one of wuxia's key distinguishing features as a genre.[6] Wuxia stories depict heroes who are prodigious martial artists, but the emphasis is on how the prowess used, and to what end. On the other hand the morally neutral Cantonese expression gongfu, which can be literally translated "skilled effort," has by association come to m refer to any "skill acquired after long practice."[7] In this sub-genre the martial arts themselves, as such, become pivotal narrative elements. Suspense may be generated by the hero's struggle to complete an arduous course of training, or the plot may hinge upon the development of an ingenious new technique. Or both, as in Lau Kar-lueng's definitive period kung fu movie The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (Shaolin Sa Liu Fang, 1978). Kung fu stories are always, at least to some extent, about the martial arts. And the history of martial arts cinema can be seen, in part, as an on-going debate between these two approaches, between the airborne wuxia and the down-to-earth kung fu.[8] The kung fu movie was invented, in fact, only in the 1950s, by filmmakers who were also martial artists, partly as a realist response to some of the wilder flights of wuxia fantasy.[9]
Both forms, it must be said, embody a strikingly similar populist approach to self-defense, which is often associated with arming social outcasts against oppression. A Chinese saying insists that "the font of all martial arts is Shaolin,"[10] and when the monks of the Shaolin Temple first broke the code of silence and passed on their top-secret fighting techniques to ordinary citizens, it was to arm them against a corrupt imperial regime. The invasion of China by the Manchus in 1644, which established the Qing (Ching) dynasty, inspired a succession of underground anti-imperial movements that for the next three centuries sought to restore indigenous Chinese to the throne. (The subsequent burning of the Shaolin Temple by imperial forces, in 1768, and the scattering of its adepts, is the wuxia equivalent of the Gunfight at the OK Coral, the Battle of the Alamo, and Custer's Last Stand, all rolled into one.) As recently as the early 20th century one of the great real-life folk heroes of recent Chinese history, Wong Fei-hung (1847-1924), was a martial arts instructor and physician who formed an anti-imperial militia in Canton in the late 19th century.
Japan's samurai warriors were aristocrats, dutiful officials of a mammoth feudal bureaucracy; the pathos of the scruffy ronin is defined by the lofty social position he has been expelled from or has abandoned. The Chinese martial hero may be a natural aristocrat but he is also a counter-cultural figure. The earliest full-blown xia in Chinese fiction, like those in the 16th century novel The Water Margin, were idealistic Robin Hood-style bandits who holed up in remote locations and staged wrong-righting forays against the status quo. The world these heroes created for themselves has since taken on a life of its own, has become a sort of "shared world" alternate universe in which, the mundane laws of physics are suspended, and men and women of spotless virtue roam the landscape searching for fresh challenges.[11] It is a world that is so well known to all Asian creators and consumers of wuxia stories that it even has a name: jiang hu.
In subtitles and dubbed dialogue this key term is often translated as "the martial world" or "the martial arts world." Its literal meaning is simply "rivers and lakes," which has implications similar to "the wilderness" or "the frontier:" a remote and under-populated region where groups of outcasts can safely congregate. But in a more important sense the jiang hu was everywhere and nowhere, permeating the straight world at every level, an alternate social structure which its denizens had fashioned in their own image.
The jiang hu described in wuxia novels and depicted in wuxia movies is a lavishly embroidered and glamorized version of this hardscrabble reality, which was a seething symptom of social chaos, this subculture of bandits, beggars, gamblers, and con artists. There are a few written reports and many more oral legends of popular militias and criminal fraternities that practiced martial arts and contested with each other for pre-eminence. Some were literal secret societies or private armies, founded by mystical sifus chasing a vision of Utopia, an earthly paradise. (Today we'd perhaps refer to them as religious cults.[12]) The elaborate, self-created social structures that evolved in this context still exist, in debased form, in the rituals and terminology of the gangster Triad societies, whose Kowloon capos refer to their milieu not as "this thing of ours" but as "the jiang hu."[13]
The tradition of martial democracy built into the concept of the jiang hu asserts that anyone who trains hard enough can achieve mastery: skill is acquired through hard work, not from a natural endowment. Training is the great equalizer, enabling a smaller and physically weaker person to defeat a larger, stronger foe. This outcome can seem downright paradoxical to Americans, whose action icons tend to be beefy body-builders rather than nimble acrobats. In fact, when the Asian fighting arts first began to attract serious interest in the US, as American GIs returned from Asia after World War II, they were often dismissed as sneaky or unmanly, as inimical to two-fisted Yankee notions of a fair fight.[14]
From The 36th Chamber of Shaolin to The Karate Kid (not to mention The Empire Strikes Back) the classic plot pattern of the normative kung fu movie pivots upon its training sequences. Typically, a young man who has been humiliatingly pummeled into a hang-dog downtrodden state, leaves his home ground to lick his wounds in the wilderness. There he acquires new combat skills from an eccentric and/or legendary sifu. In the final reel the transfigured neophyte, strengthened in body and spirit, brings it all back home to flatten his astonished enemies.[15]
In part because martial arts prowess is defined as a product of training and not just of brute strength, the Woman Warrior has been a central figure in these stories right from the beginning. There are several even in The Water Margin, inspired perhaps by the legends that grew that had grown up around historical figures like General Mu Lan. In movies the tradition has been re-enforced by the cross-dressing performance conventions of Chinese opera.[16] Performers such as Xuan Jinglin and Qin Xi'ang (the grandmother of current kung fu superstar Sammo Hung) were major xia n? ("female knights-errant") of the silent era, paving the way for such latter-day action icons as Chan Po-chu and Siao Fong-fong in the '60s, Cheng Peipei, Xu Feng, and Angela Mao Ying in the '70s, and Michelle Yeoh in the '90s and beyond.
As it happens, one of the genre's most memorable expressions of the efficacy of training was uttered by one of it's supreme villains, Sek Kin's steel-clawed Han in Enter the Dragon (1973): "We are unique, in that we create ourselves. Through long years of training, sacrifice, denial, and pain, we forge our bodies in the fire of our will." For the most part the moral code built into the genre (that is, The Code of the Xia, which mandates using power for good and to protect the underdog) serves to mitigate what could be called the "fascist potential" of its emphasis on the use of force.[17] This does manifest itself regularly, however, at the visual level.
Like all action movies, martial arts films fetishize the implements and the emblems of power: muscles and weapons.[18] Both tend to be displayed with a particular sense of engorged urgency in the moments just before a fight, in anticipation of the testing conflict to come. Canny directors, and some performers, too, have understood that these display rituals could be capitalized upon to produce additional crowd-pleasing effects upon certain segments of the audience.[19] For many decades, of course, it was only the male physique that could be so displayed. Cantonese wuxia films of the '50s are almost as straight-laced as American B Westerns, and their Woman Warriors (even when they aren't actually actresses playing male roles or female characters impersonating men) tend to be sexless tomboys who stay demurely bundled up. Only the slimy bad guys in an old school wuxia film would ever look at a martial sister "that way."[20] Even when the unwritten Shaw Brothers production code began to loosen up in the late '70s, so that the female form could be undraped and displayed as a visual attraction (as in the films of Chu Yuan) this ploy was rarely attempted in a martial context-except in the special sense that in the hidebound masculine world-view of these movies a beautiful and ambitious woman can always be counted on to use her endowments as weapons, the way The Shadow used his psychic skills: to cloud men's minds.[21]
The martial arts may seem a tad impractical, however, for purposes of everyday self-defense: It can take up to ten years to fully master traditional Shaolin-style kung fu. (The wide-legged crouch of the Horse Stance looks like a hernia waiting to happen.) This grueling training process is depicted in many martial arts films with a fierce attention to detail that can seem obsessive. But we should bear in mind that in the Chinese martial arts tradition the habits of discipline and endurance that are acquired in the process are seen as ends in themselves: Reflecting its monastic roots, it has a spiritual dimension somewhat more profound than the fortune cookie version peddled by David Carradine in the '70s television series Kung Fu.
In wuxia films the degree of mastery that can be acquired through training takes off from the ex-urban legends of the jiang hu into a realm that to many westerners looks frankly supernatural. But in Chinese folklore the line between the natural and the supernatural is not always easy to draw. As Sam Ho notes here, the paragons of the increasingly ingrown and fantastic martial arts novels of the 19th and early 20th centuries were prodigies of self-discipline who acquired a the astonishing powers designated by the term Qing gong ("lightfoot kung fu"), shooting bolts of fire from their palms and leaping tall buildings in a single bound. The forces they harness, in other words, are clearly seen as natural rather than supernatural. In fact, these fantasy elements were elaborations of a body of folk beliefs collectively known as shen gong ("spiritual kung fu") the cult of spirit-possession that led the insurgents of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 to believe that they could safely face British rifles unarmed and bare-chested.
How much do you actually need to know about the martial arts to appreciate a good martial arts movie? Just enough, perhaps, to read the visual clues that indicate where a given fighter stands in terms of some very broad distinctions. The ones that crop up again and again are the split between Northern styles and Southern, and between the inner disciplines and outer ones. Roughly speaking, the Northern, Daoist, Wudang-based styles emphasize the husbanding of inner forces, while the Southern, Buddhist, Shaolin styles concentrate on physical prowess and endurance. Thus the soft Northern styles favor broad, sweeping dance-like movements, while the hard Southern styles concentrate on short fast punches. (Bruce Lee was a key exponent of the shorter-harder-faster Southern style known as Wing Chun.)[22]
There are implications galore in these distinctions. Wuxia stories, for example, tend to be oriented toward the Northern Wudang school, concentrating on feats associated with the marshaling of inner forces, like "weightless leaps" and palm power. Li Mubai in Crouching Tiger is specifically identified as a follower of Wudang. The kung fu sub-genre, on the other hand, tends to be dominated by the Southern Shaolin style, with its emphasis on sheer grueling physical ordeals. On that level it makes perfect sense that the proponents of the so-called "new school" of martial arts films, which swept the Hong Kong industry in the '70s, tended to be Southerners, and that it was only at that point that stories based upon the legends of Shaolin began to proliferate, with Lau's 36th Chamber as the prototype. It is also no accident that these were also the films that finally sidelined the Woman Warrior, who had played a noble co-paragon role in the movies of the old school. The qi, apparently, is more democratic than the bicep.[23]
On the other hand is it entirely possible to know too much, to the point that a fixation upon authenticity for its own sake becomes a distraction-as in the famous case of the lifelong New Yorker who gets "gets thrown out of the movie" if a character travels on the IRT between stations that are not actually connected. Those who regard themselves as martial purists insist that the depictions of particular fighting styles must always be as accurate as possible, and reflexively reject any film that incorporates "wire work" or special effects, or in which in which the performers have no real martial arts training. The success of Crouching Tiger indicates, however, indicates that for mainstream audiences this sort of martial fundamentalism has little resonance.
Then too, wuxia stories on both page and screen have always deployed widely varying degrees of realism, as you will see if you stay with this series from start to finish. Some of these films (like Escorts Over Tiger Hills [Hu Shan Hang, 1969] and From the Highway [Luke Yu Daoke, 1970]) hew close to the underlying historical jiang hu realities of bandits, rebels, and bodyguards. Others (like The Six-Fingered Lord of the Lute (Luk Chi Kam Moh, 1965) and Tsui Hark's Zu: Warriors From the Magic Mountain (San Sook San Kim Hap, 1983) are full-bore old school fantasies populated entirely by rival clans of airborne super-swordsmen and women. And as is often the case in creative endeavors, the richest specimens are those that mix elements freely. Stephen Teo notes here that even the archetypal "new style" wuxia film, King Hu's Come Drink With Me (Da Zui Xia, 1966), relishes the shock value of introducing old-school magical fighters into a carefully established context of realistic swordplay modeled (in part) on Japanese samurai films.[24] And Chu Yuan, in his adaptations from the hard-boiled wuxia novels of Gu Long, such as Killer Clans, adopts a wised-up, downright cynical view of the human motivations of his heroes. But Chu also sets his stories in the heart of the mythical jiang hu at its most efflorescent, embellishing it with multi-plane layers of flowers and silks and gilded furnishings, in gorgeous images that look like Maxfield Parrish paintings come to life. (The women in the Gu/Chu films, though often relegated to behind-the-scenes roles as amoral schemers, are also lavishly displayed en dishabille, their undraped bodies employed, in effect, as additional elements of his luxuriant d?cor.)
Even Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a mixed specimen. The ma zei (mounted bandit) character played by Zhang Zheng, and Michelle Yeoh's Shiu Lien, the professional biao shi (security escort/bodyguard), are staple figures of the down-to-earth school. Yet its heroes can also take off and fly when the need arises. Even here, though, the fantasy elements are mixed with baser metals. "I was trying to express the magical characteristics of shenguai ("gods and demons") wuxia," said the film's martial arts coordinator, Yuan Wo-ping. "[But] I still tried to incorporate some realistic touches, so that the people were not just flying through the air. They can leap high, but they always have some kind of springboard on the ground." [25]
Like all the great film genres the martial arts movie is a commodious vessel into which any number of personal styles, attitudes and philosophies can be poured. In fact, the genre's almost limitless flexibility is what has kept it current and enduringly popular for over 50 years, adapting effortlessly to sweeping changes in its demographic. Heroes who were staunch Confucian conservatives in the '50s became youthful rebels in the '60s, satirical cut-ups in the '80s, alienated loners in the '90s. And the very best martial arts films, like those of King Hu and Chu Yuan, transcend every finicky distinction between wuxia and kung fu, the fantastic and the down to earth. What they seem to be hinting at is a form of moral superiority that shines forth in combat as perfection of style. Not just the power but the elegance and beauty of the movements become values to be pursued for their own sake, and they can remain splendid even in defeat.
Movies that celebrate these qualities in their characters while neglecting them on the level of film-craft lose all credibility. But in the hands of a master the heroic grace of great filmmaking tells its own story. It amounts to an additional demonstration of the proposition that a skill acquired through long practice is if not a virtue in its own right then certainly the product of a virtue. It is at once the end product and the ultimate expression of the discipline and the strength of character that were called upon to achieve it. The martial arts movie is, in other words, both fundamentally populist and irremediably elitist. It celebrates the triumph not of the fittest or the strongest, but of the most excellent.
Thanks to Cheng-Sim Lim, Stephen Teo, and Craig D, Reid, for advice and correction. Your kung fu is the best.
1 The craze owed a great debt to the enthusiastic response of the African-American audience to the genre's non-white heroes, a devotion confirmed by the close relationship that soon developed between the kung fu and blaxploitation genres. See Desser, David, "The Kung Fu Craze: Hong Kong Cinema's First American Reception," in The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity, ed Poshek Fu and David Desser, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 19-43.
2 As illustrated by this chapter title from Stefan Hammond's Hollywood East: Hong Kong Movies and the People Who Make Them (New York: Contemporary, 2000): "So. You think your kung fu's pretty good. But still. You're going to die today. Ah ha ha ha. Ah ha ha ha ha ha." Los Angeles journalist Craig D. Reid, who in his college days worked as a kung fu "dubbing artist" in Taiwan, offers this explanation: "In the older Chinese films, Mandarin was spoken in an old fashioned way, perhaps comparable to Shakespearean English vs. American English. The language took on it's own cinematic rhythm, wherein certain words were spoken to punctuate breaks in the dialog. One of those words is the Mandarin ke shi," pronounced ker shuh. The literal translation is 'but.' However when we dubbed we had to come up with something in two syllables to match the mouth movements of the Chinese actors. And thus 'but still' was born."
3 Sam Ho offers a complete family history in "From Page to Screen: A Brief History of Wuxia Fiction," beginning on page TK
4 By some counts there are even more. Craig Reid, who writes regulary about martial arts films, recognizes five distinct subcategories of martial arts pian (films): wuxia pian, gung fu pian, guo shu pian (the official Chinese moniker of the Shaw Brother "new style"), guo shu pian, a post-Bruce Lee mixture of wuxia and kung fu, wu da pian ( modern martial arts and stunt films such as Jackie Chan's Police Story), and Fant-Asia Film, the later coined by Reid himself for "the 1980s mixtures of horror, sci-fi, wuxia and fantasy."
5 The Chinese term most closely related to the English "martial arts" is probably wushu, a generic expression associated by official PRC edict with a form of competitive performance art that transmutes martial movements into gymnastics. See Sam Ho's piece here, beginning on page TK.
6 This moral baseline, which is delineated on page TK as "The Code of the Xia," provides the underlying frame of reference even for wuxia anti-heroes, like the hired killer played by Yue Hua in Chu Yuan's Killer Clans (Liu Xing Hue Die Jian, 1976), who sells his skills to the highest bidder.
7 Bey Logan, Hong Kong Action Cinema (London: Titan Books, 1995) p. 186. One implication is that the catch phrase "Your kung fu is the best" is often used quite correctly even in contexts that have nothing to do with the martial arts. The expression absorbed a fitting jiang hu-like resonance from its association with the computer hacker underground when it was popularized on The X-Files.
8 A classic expression of the debate is Lau Kar-leung's Shaw Brothers epic Legendary Weapons of China (1982), which dramatizes a split in the martial world, in the Boxer era, between an old guard that clings to the folk belief in invulnerability, and a breakaway faction of "modernists" who reject it as a suicidal superstition. The story seems designed to lend a mythic resonance to Lau's own strong preference for authentic rather than fanciful martial arts sequences in movies.
9 When a long series of B movies about Wong Fei-hung was launched in the late 1940s, the stated intention was to depict authentic, practical (and specifically Cantonese) fighting styles on the screen for the first time. See interview with series creator Wu Pang in The Making of Martial Arts Films-As Told by Filmmakers and Stars, ed. Winnie Fu, et al. (Hong Kong Film Archive, 1999), p.37.
10 See Ng Ho, "When the Legends Die: A Survey of the Tradition of the Southern Shaolin Monastery," in A Study of the Hong Kong Martial Arts Film (Fourth Hong Kong International Film Festival, 1980), p. 56.
11 It makes perfect sense that the best short description I've found of the jiang hu and its inhabitants is on the web site for a shared-world role-playing game named (after the Tsui Hark film) Once Upon a Time in China. See http://www.heroic-cinema.com/eric/.
12 Charles Holcombe, "Theater of Combat: A Critical Look at the Chinese Martial Arts," Historian, 52 No. 3, (May1990) pp.411-431.
13 "The wuxia idea of jiang hu has been used in many allegorical ways...the film industry is one such jiang hu, a world that often operates on its own rules and from which powerful influences are generated." Sam Ho, , Introd., The Swordsman and His Jiang Hu: Tsui Hark and Hong Kong Film, edited by Sam Ho (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 2002), p. viii.
14 Desser, pp. 27-28.
15 As Berenice Reynaud observes on p. TK, it's a telling lacuna in the conventions of the genre that the Woman Warrior's training process is almost never depicted.
16 As David Bordwell notes on p TK, Zhang Che's Vengeance (Baochou, 1973), which is set partly in the opera world, is one of the few classic martial arts pictures that alludes explicitly to the relationship between stylized movie fight choreography and stage techniques. (Sammo Hung's The Prodigal Son is another.)
17 "With great power comes great responsibility." Peter Parker, 2002.
18 Action movies are, by and large, male power fantasies. Someone (I wish I could remember who) referred to them as "the dreams of the powerless," a resonant idea considering their perennial popularity in the Third World and in the Inner Cities. In terms of conventional psychoanalytic categories, in other words, their inclinations are more likely to be sadistic than masochistic.
19 "The shirtless stars of Shaw Brothers' kung fu epics filled movie palaces around the world," suggests critic Karen Tarapata in Hollywood East. "Men may come for the mayhem, but the ladies come to see the boys." (Blood Brothers star Ti Lung tops Tarapata's list of "Shaws Throbs.") The shoe on the other foot is dropped in gay filmmaker Stanley Kwan Kam-Pang's landmark documentary Yang + Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema (Channel 4, UK, 1995).
20 In an interview included on the recent Celestial/Intercontinental (HK) DVD release of Come Drunk With Me, actress Zheng Peipei acknowledges that it was a bold step for her in 1965 to pull open her tunic even a discreet fraction of an inch, so that co-star Yue Hua could "suck out the poison."
21 The acceptance of "cross-dressing" in martial arts films does not extend to the spectacle of male actors playing, or even male characters impersonating women, except in the occasional comic drag sequence. While there is a long tradition on the opera stage of males who play female roles exclusively (a profession honorably represented by Lam Ching-ying in The Prodigal Son), and while some such specialists were extremely popular in film adaptations of Cantonese operas in the 1950s [stet] and '60s, the largely male audience for wuxia and kung fu movies was never asked to overcome its discomfort to that extent.
22 According to historian Jean Chesneaux, the secret societies of the real-world jiang hu also split into camps along regional/spiritual lines: "...[T]he chiao-men ('sects') [are] more concerned with religion or superstition...the hui-t'ang ('lodges') [are] more politicized... [Scholars see] the sects as more characteristic of North China, the lodges of South China. ... It is generally agreed that by the mid-nineteenth century China's secret societies were organized in two large systems. The Northern or White Lotus system [and the] Southern or Triad system..." Chesneaux, Jean, "Secret Societies in China's Historical Evolution," in Popular Movements and Secret Societies in China: 1940-1950, Chesneaux ed., (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972), pp 4-5.
23 Many films depict a long-running bitter feud between the followers of Wudang and Shaolin. Sung Dynasty scholar Zhang Sanfeng, a student at Shaolin, supposedly left the temple around 1000 AD to found a school of his own, at Wu Dang Mountain in Hu Bei province. There he created the inner Northern style par excellance: tai-ji. The name "Wu Dang" means simply "what the martial arts should be," which understandably irked some Shaolin loyalists, and fanned rumors blaming Wudang informers for the burning of the Temple. An unusual depiction of the relationship is Lau Kar-wing's Shaolin vs. Wu Dang (1981), which strikes a conciliatory note: a corrupt Ching Dynasty official foments conflict between the schools, until the best Shaolin and Wudang fighters team up to shut him down. See, Ng Ho, "When Legends Die," in Martial Arts Films, pp 60-61.; additional information from Craig D. Reid.<