REPEATING CROSSBOW CHINESE PROFESSIONAL

Yet Wood also reported accounts of the martial and military arts (broadly defined) of the Manchu, Japanese and Indian peoples as well.

In this post I have excerpted a single section of his discussion of warfare in 19 th century China as it will be of the greatest interest to readers of Kung Fu Tea. This brings us to the content of Wood’s collection. And there is more there than one might think. While far from groundbreaking his volume reminds us of the sorts of accounts that would have been available to a curious reader able to gain entrance to a fair sized library during the second half of the 19 th century. And if we are interested in the ways in which the Western public imagined these practices and their connection to social violence during the 1860s, he is invaluable. Yet if we want to know what the general level of understanding of Chinese, Japanese and Indian martial practice was during the middle of the 19 th century, Wood is a good place to start. The same forces that make them obscure today often limited their relevance even to their contemporaries. That is precisely why these things are so hard to find. The problem with spending huge amounts of effort to locate the lost and forgotten “very first account” of some obscure practice is that it was so often ignored by its intended audience. This is precisely what makes him so useful to us. In the social realm, as in the natural, Wood popularized preexisting discourses rather than creating them. Like Frazer and Durkheim, he conducted his ethnographic research in the library. Yet he did not directly observed most of the societies he discussed in The Uncivilized Races.

REPEATING CROSSBOW CHINESE PROFESSIONAL

After becoming a professional lecturer late in life he did have the opportunity to visit North America on a number of lecture tours. Readers should note, however, that Wood was not a global explorer. Wood’s most popular (and frequently reprinted) effort in this area was the two-volume set The Uncivilized Races, or Natural History of Man (1868). Thus it would not be unusual for a professional author with a penchant for collecting to try his hand at such a profitable game. This is not surprising as by the second half of the 20 th century travelogues had become one of the most popular genera of popular literature throughout the West. While Wood seems to have been preoccupied with the natural sciences, on a few occasions he did venture into the field of traveler’s tales and ethnographic accounts. Both Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Mark Twain cited or referenced Wood’s encyclopedic collections in their own works of popular fiction. They also managed to be referenced in the popular culture of their day. Wood’s books were best sellers during his lifetime and went through many editions. And what he wrote entered the public discussion. While Wood was never the first person to write on some new topic, he was often the second. Instead he excelled as a popularizer of scientific thought. Yet Wood was not really a research scientist.

Born in London in 1827, and educated as a member of the clergy (at Oxford), he gained a fair amount of fame in his lifetime for his writings and innovative lectures on the natural world. Wood was deeply interested in natural history, and he dedicated much of his life to researching, studying and writing about the varieties of biological and social life. That is precisely what makes his early, and often overlooked, accounts so interesting to students of martial arts studies. In this case I am very happy to say that the Rev. When discussing sources such as these I find that there is a tendency to dwell on the rediscovery of “the first” account of some sort of behavior or art. The following post introduces a few accounts of the Chinese (and other Asian) martial practices taken from a book first published in the United Kingdom during the 1860s. Wood and the Popularization of the “Oriental Obscene.” Note the hudiedao (butterfly swords) carried by both individuals. A studio image of two Chinese soldiers (local braves) produced probably in Hong Kong during the 1850s.

Repeating crossbow chinese