Martial arts

A 35-year-old PE teacher in China’s Sichuan province started teaching students martial arts in 2011. Students practice sword fighting three times a week. Zeng Ke even built the equipment by himself using car tires. He said he wants to impart traditional culture to the next generation, not just practical skills.

A Chinese father has trained his three children, between the ages of 8 and 12, into local Kung Fu champions. Liu Long says his children started copying his moves as he practiced the martial art. He's been training them since 2017 and leading them to victory at local competitions. Li also says kung fu has improved his children's health and helped them develop good habits in life.

In an attempt to defend the honor of one of China’s great martial arts, a tai chi master named Ma Baoguo became a laughing stock in China in May only to make matters worse this month during a flirtation with retirement. The 68-year-old Ma has long boasted of superb martial art skills and formidable inner strength. He told a journalist in 2017, “I can defeat opponents much bigger and heavier than me with just one finger.”  That does not appear to have been an accurate statement.  An amateur kickboxing trainer 18 years younger than Ma was selected to fight him in May. The two fought in a match broadcasted online from the eastern province of Shandong. The match followed free-form rules, which m

Genichi Mitsuhashi is the first person in the world to hold a master's degree in ninja studies. The 45-year-old spent two years studying the history, traditions and fighting techniques of the ninja at Mie University in Iga, a place that was once home to many warriors.

What can we expect in a new Bruce Lee documentary that we haven’t already seen in previous productions? By drawing on his own personal experience, Vietnamese-American director Bao Nguyen (Live from New York!), who lives between Los Angeles and Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, has delivered something fresh with Be Water, a personal take on the challenges the martial arts superstar faced as he lived between Hong Kong and America. Having gained the family’s permission, Nguyen benefited from unprecedented access to archival material, which was essential, as it is primarily a film told in the past.  Several of Lee’s old friends appear in interviews; hearing from his widow, Linda Lee Cadwell, and daug

Hong Kong martial arts director Yuen Woo-ping’s action scenes are the defining feature of The Matrix trilogy, yet Yuen himself never sought to work in Hollywood. When the films’ sibling directors, the Wachowskis, were preparing the first in the trilogy, a producer for the film had to track Yuen down in Hong Kong and convince him to go to Los Angeles to discuss choreographing the martial arts scenes in The Matrix. “I’d already been asked to work in Hollywood a couple of times, and I’d said no. I didn’t feel that my English was good enough to work there,” Yuen said. “What happened then was that one of the producers of The Matrix contacted Shaw Brothers [a Hong Kong production company] to find

The 41-year-old mixed martial arts fighter Xu Xiaodong has been a controversial figure in China ever since he became famous for beating up what he called “fake” kung fu masters. Unafraid to talk about almost anything, his brash attitude has brought him stardom but also unexpected – and unwelcome – knocks on his door. In November, he set out to prove that he’s more than a tough guy who dared to challenge a cherished Chinese tradition. In the video above, Inkstone follows Xu, nicknamed “Mad Dog,” as he fights the biggest fights of his career, for fame and freedom.  Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more stories about life, culture and politics in China.

Training with swords and machetes, these nuns from Druk Amitabha Mountain Nunnery in Nepal are challenging gender stereotypes with martial arts. Watch the video, above, to see them in action.

I still remember my first ice hockey fight. All the movies I’d watched as a kid, where highly choreographed fight scenes looked like expertly planned dance routines, had horribly lied to me. By the time I realized I was in a fight, at the tender age of 16, it was already half over and I’d taken three or four solid shots to the face and my jersey had been pulled well over my head, rendering me blind. The experience was jarring: unfiltered chaos, blurred vision in one eye from an errant thumb poke, a ringing eardrum from getting punched in the side of the head, the taste of my own blood and swallowing a tooth. There was just disorganized, violent confusion with a skyrocketing heart rate and bu

Martial arts icon Bruce Lee was born in San Francisco’s Chinatown.  Now, thanks to his daughter, Shannon, and her producing partners, his long-fabled passion project, the TV series Warrior, set in his birthplace, has completed its first season.  In the show, our Bruce-esque protagonist, played by British actor Andrew Koji, is a young martial arts prodigy called Ah Sahm, who arrives from China in 1878. The series follows him as he looks for his estranged sister in San Francisco’s Chinatown – then a den of iniquity, specifically: opium, gambling and prostitution – and dealing with violence and racism. Warrior has been praised by critics and fans alike for its gritty realism and depiction of pe