Before I begin, I should admit my bias: I love Taiwan. After living, training, and researching martial arts here for many years, it is difficult for me not to. But my belief that Taiwan has an important place in the history and preservation of Chinese martial arts is not based simply on personal affection.
Taiwan's unusual history created an environment in which several different layers of Chinese martial culture met. Martial traditions arrived from Fujian and Guangdong during earlier migrations, while another major wave of martial artists came from different parts of mainland China after 1949.
Some traditions developed here in relative isolation. Others changed, mixed with local culture, or disappeared. And even today, it is possible to encounter martial arts in Taiwan that are almost completely unknown outside the communities that practice them.
For someone interested in traditional Chinese martial arts, Taiwan is an extraordinary place.
Before Chinese Settlement
Taiwan's martial history did not begin with Chinese kung fu.
The island was inhabited by Austronesian indigenous peoples long before large-scale Chinese settlement. These peoples had their own hunting, fighting, weapon, and warrior traditions.
Chinese settlement increased substantially during the seventeenth century, particularly from the southeastern coastal province of Fujian.
This migration would have enormous consequences for the martial culture of Taiwan.
Koxinga and the Zheng Period
One of the great turning points came with Zheng Chenggong (鄭成功), better known in the West as Koxinga.
A Ming loyalist fighting against the newly established Qing dynasty, Zheng attacked the Dutch colonial forces on Taiwan in 1661. The Dutch surrendered the following year.
Zheng intended Taiwan to serve as a base for continued resistance against the Qing.
His forces brought military traditions from the Chinese mainland, while increasing numbers of immigrants from southeastern Fujian established communities in Taiwan.
Historical research into Taiwanese martial arts specifically traces part of Taiwan's pre-1949 martial culture to this period. Researchers note that settlers from Fujian brought martial practices with them and that some of Zheng's soldiers were skilled martial artists.
This is important because Fujian became one of the great centers of Southern Chinese martial culture.
And Taiwan's relationship with Fujian would continue for centuries.
Fujianese Martial Arts Take Root in Taiwan
Successive waves of settlers brought much more than people.
They brought their languages, religions, temples, customs, clan structures—and martial arts.
Traditional martial arts in this environment were not necessarily practiced in commercial schools like those we know today. They could be connected with families, villages, temples, militias, religious organizations and local communities.
During periods when government control was weak, communities also had very practical reasons to develop fighting skills.
Robbery, local conflicts and armed disputes were real problems. Research into Taiwanese martial history describes martial-arts schools and organizations emerging in towns and villages partly in response to the need for local security during unstable periods of Qing rule.
This helps explain something that still makes Taiwanese martial arts fascinating today:
they can be extremely local.
A particular system may have survived within one family, village, temple or small community while remaining virtually unknown elsewhere.
The Hakka Martial Tradition
Another important element came from the Hakka (客家) communities, many of whose ancestors migrated to Taiwan from Guangdong and Fujian.
They brought their own martial traditions.
Historically, some Hakka martial systems remained closely associated with particular families and communities, and some were less accessible to outsiders.
This points to a larger problem when we try to understand Chinese martial arts through books, movies or the internet:
visibility is not the same as importance.
Wing Chun, Taijiquan and Shaolin are internationally famous.
That does not mean they represent the entire Chinese martial tradition.
Countless smaller systems never became commercialized or internationally popular. Some remained confined to a particular geographical area.
Taiwan still contains examples of this older martial landscape.
Secret Societies, Rebellion and the Southern Shaolin Legend
Taiwan also experienced repeated rebellions and secret-society activity during the Qing period.
Organizations associated with the Tiandihui (天地會), or Heaven and Earth Society, became part of the complicated social and political history connecting Taiwan with Fujian and the wider Southern Chinese world.
This is particularly interesting for martial-arts historians because secret-society mythology later became intertwined with stories about anti-Qing rebels, Shaolin monks and the legendary Southern Shaolin Temple.
Here we must distinguish between martial tradition and documented history.
Stories about Southern Shaolin are often presented within kung fu communities as established historical fact. The actual history is considerably more complicated.
Taiwan—and southern Taiwan in particular—is important to this investigation because of its connections with the secret-society traditions through which some of these narratives circulated.
I will examine the Southern Shaolin question separately because it deserves an article of its own.
Taiwan's Southern Martial Arts
Over the centuries, Taiwan became home to numerous Southern Chinese martial traditions.
White Crane is particularly important to me personally, and Taiwan preserves several Crane traditions and lineages.
But Crane is only part of the story.
There are many lesser-known systems, family traditions, temple-associated practices and local branches of Chinese martial arts. Some have familiar names but practices very different from better-known systems bearing the same name.
Others are almost impossible to find information about in English.
This is why field research remains important.
You cannot understand the diversity of traditional Chinese martial arts simply by searching YouTube or reading the most popular kung fu books.
Sometimes you have to visit the teacher.
Sometimes you have to go to the temple.
And sometimes you simply walk through a park and discover people practicing something you have never seen before.
For me, that is one of the great attractions of researching martial arts in Taiwan.
1949 Changed Everything
The next great transformation came after the Chinese Civil War.
In 1949, the government of the Republic of China relocated to Taiwan following its defeat by the Chinese Communist Party. Soldiers, officials, intellectuals, civilians—and martial artists—came with it.
For Taiwanese martial arts, this was a watershed.
Academic research on the development of Chinese martial arts in Taiwan identifies the post-1949 period as a distinct foundation period. Martial artists arriving from mainland China established schools and transmitted traditions that had originated in many different regions. Martial arts also entered physical-education programs and became increasingly institutionalized.
This transformed Taiwan's martial landscape.
Before this migration, Taiwanese Chinese martial culture had been heavily influenced by the southern coastal provinces, especially Fujian.
Now practitioners arrived carrying martial traditions from other regions of China.
Systems such as Taijiquan (太極拳), Xingyiquan (形意拳), Baguazhang (八卦掌), Bajiquan (八極拳), Northern Praying Mantis, Long Fist and Pigua became part of Taiwan's martial environment.
Taiwan consequently developed something quite unusual.
Older Fujianese, Hakka and local traditions existed alongside martial arts brought by twentieth-century migrants from across China.
The political separation between Taiwan and mainland China after 1949 also meant that martial arts subsequently developed under very different social and political conditions on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait. Researchers studying Taiwan's martial history explicitly identify this divergence.
Taiwan and the Western Kung Fu World
There is another part of this history that is often forgotten.
Ask people who introduced Chinese martial arts to the Western world and the most common answer will probably be:
Bruce Lee.
His influence was unquestionably enormous. Few individuals did more to change the international image of Chinese martial arts.
But the real history is much larger than one man.
Foreign students were studying Chinese martial arts in Taiwan during the twentieth century, particularly systems such as Taijiquan, Xingyiquan and Baguazhang.
Taiwanese and mainland-born teachers living in Taiwan also traveled abroad or emigrated permanently, establishing schools and passing their arts to new generations of students.
For a period when mainland China was comparatively difficult for many foreigners to access, Taiwan became one of the important places where outsiders could encounter traditional Chinese martial arts.
Its contribution to the international transmission of kung fu deserves much more attention.
Preservation Does Not Mean Nothing Changes
We should also be careful with the word preservation.
Taiwan is not a martial-arts museum frozen in the seventeenth century.
Martial arts here changed.
Some systems disappeared.
Some teachers modified what they learned.
Different lineages influenced one another.
Competition changed training.
Modern lifestyles changed training.
Political and educational institutions changed martial arts as well.
Research into Taiwan's postwar martial history shows exactly this process: traditional kuoshu (國術) passed through periods of institutional development, competitive standardization and later diversification.
Preservation therefore does not mean pretending that nothing ever changes.
It means trying to determine what changed, what survived, where it came from and why.
The Traditions Are Disappearing
There is another reason this work has become increasingly important.
Traditional martial arts must now compete with modern combat sports, entertainment, work schedules, changing lifestyles and countless other activities.
Some old teachers have only a handful of students.
Some have no successor.
Family traditions can disappear when the next generation has no interest in practicing them.
And when the last practitioner of a small system dies without teaching or documenting it, something more than a collection of fighting techniques disappears.
Terminology disappears.
Training methods disappear.
Stories disappear.
A small piece of cultural history disappears with them.
That is why preservation cannot consist merely of repeating legends about the past.
We need to practice, document, photograph, film, translate, compare sources, interview practitioners and question historical claims while the people who possess this knowledge are still here.
Taiwan as a Living Martial Arts Archive
I do not want to romanticize Taiwan as the last untouched home of "authentic kung fu."
It isn't.
No place is.
But Taiwan's history created an extraordinary martial environment.
Older Fujianese traditions arrived through centuries of migration. Hakka communities brought their own traditions. Local Taiwanese martial culture developed around them. Then, after 1949, another enormous migration brought practitioners and systems from many other regions of China.
The result is a martial landscape with several historical layers existing on one relatively small island.
Academic research increasingly recognizes this distinct development of Chinese martial arts in Taiwan.
After years of living, training and researching here, I still occasionally encounter something I did not know existed.
That is one of the reasons I continue this work.
Traditional martial arts are not preserved by simply believing everything our teachers told us.
Nor are they preserved by rejecting tradition simply because it contains legends.
They are preserved by practicing, documenting, researching, questioning and passing them on.
That is what being a martial custodian means to me.
References
I would put a short reference section at the bottom rather than making the article look like an academic paper.
Ko, Ling-Mei, Meng-Chi Ting & Ping-Chao Lee. “The Development of Chinese Martial Arts in Taiwan since 1949.” The International Journal of the History of Sport, Vol. 34, No. 15, pp. 1603–1616.
Kuo, Chien-Wei (郭建緯). Research on the Development of Wushu in Taiwan (臺灣武術發展之研究). Chinese Culture University, 2020.