Right, I heard that southern martial arts were for farmers and people who plough fields and that northern martial arts were for lords and aristocrats.
Is this true? If so, is this still true?
“True power comes from essence of spiritual” (I created this saying)
Yes…I am a southern farmer…would you care for some okra or peanuts?
Well, as China is a Neo Marxist state, there is no aristocracy, but northern martial arts seem to be popular as ever. I’ve never understood where this comes from, the founder stories of most northern styles talk of villagers or monks (sometimes both). Only Taizhuquan and eagle claw can really make any claim, and both their “founders”, while genuine historical characters, have a whole host of folk myth attached to them, and crop up in stories about all manner of things, so it’s doubtful that they really were the founders.
Also, this is a strange idea that there were no farmers in the north and no gentry in the south, and I think this is from Qing dynasty prejudice and propaganda, as the Imperial court in the north were mainly Manchu, whereas most people in the south were Han.
This sounds strangely like … Ego Maximus 
Indeed, that’s exactly what I thought when I read it :rolleyes:
In the North, there was Mao Tze Tung, a Communist.
In the South, there was Chang Kai Shek, A Nationalist.
In the west, there’s a lot of stories.
you’d be surprised at how many stories about kungfu are anecdotally connecte to the commie/nationalist thing and also evcen more surprised at how much was brushed away from minds forever in the years of 66-76 when all things old were destroyed openly and gleefully in China.
It is rare to find survival of something after totally intact whether it is a book, an idea, a building or even a person.
I think, that personally, all too often in the west we don’t even think about the fact that the last 100 years or so has been one idoelogical struggle after another in China and that all of it was mixed into a big soup and served back out to whoever wanted a tatste.
Kungfu was banned, then altered into a non applicable dance. Book were burned by the millions. Histories were lost, lives were lost, ideas were lost.
Consider yourself lucky to even be practiticing anything if it is even only flavoured with the original kungfu.
anyway, just a rant about north and south.
Ben is right - there are farms and rulers everywhere
The north/south distinction has a long tradition in China, even outside the martial arts. Therein lies the key to such statements - study China beyond the martial tradition and you’ll learn a lot more about CMA. It exists within a context, the context of Chinese culture, so you’ll find many our CMA aphorisms are derivative of greater Chinese cultural ones.
My impression is that this is true, much like in the US, the nation was ruled from the north, while the south was mostly farmlands.