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| Tainan old fort |
Tainan is different from other Taiwanese cities.
It is one of those places where the modern world and the past seem to exist side by side.
Motorcycles crowd the streets. Everyone carries a smartphone. Convenience stores are everywhere.
Then you turn a corner and find a centuries-old temple squeezed between modern buildings.
Walk a little farther and you enter a narrow lane lined with old houses. Incense drifts from a shrine. An elderly man sits outside drinking tea. Somewhere nearby, people may be practicing martial arts.
This combination of old and new is one of the things that first fascinated me about Tainan.
And it is one of the reasons practicing Kung Fu here has been such a different experience.
Taiwan's Old Capital
Tainan occupies a special place in Taiwanese history.
It was the earliest major urban center on the island and served as Taiwan's capital from the seventeenth into the nineteenth century. Today, the old city still contains temples, traditional buildings, markets, narrow streets and historical sites representing different periods of Taiwan's history.
Its religious landscape is particularly visible.
Temples are everywhere.
Some are enormous and famous. Others are so small that someone unfamiliar with the city might walk past without noticing them.
Tainan's Confucius Temple dates to 1665 and is the oldest Confucius temple in Taiwan. The city also preserves important temples and sites associated with popular religion, Buddhism, Confucian traditions and different periods of Taiwanese history.
You don't need to share these religious beliefs to recognize how deeply they are woven into the cultural landscape.
That environment also matters when trying to understand traditional martial arts.
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| Tainan old street |
A Different Rhythm
When I first moved here after living in Taipei, the difference seemed enormous.
Taipei felt like many large modern cities I had experienced elsewhere: fast, crowded and constantly moving.
Tainan felt slower.
Not the traffic. Tainan traffic has its own philosophy.
But life itself seemed to have a different rhythm.
Food stalls, traditional markets, neighborhood temples and small family businesses remain important parts of everyday life. Some of Tainan's markets have histories stretching back generations, while the city's commercial culture has continually changed through Qing, Japanese and postwar periods.
This doesn't mean Tainan is somehow frozen in the past.
It isn't.
It is a modern Taiwanese city.
What makes it interesting is that older cultural practices remain unusually visible inside modern life.
That distinction is important.
Kung Fu in the Parks
One of the places where this becomes particularly obvious is in Tainan's parks.
Go early enough in the morning and you will often find people exercising.
Some practice Taijiquan.
Some practice Qigong.
Others practice martial arts that a casual observer may not even recognize.
This was one of my great discoveries after moving to southern Taiwan.
Kung Fu isn't always behind the door of a commercial martial-arts school.
Sometimes it is simply there.
In a park.
In a courtyard.
Inside a temple community.
In a small training group with almost no internet presence.
Some traditional teachers are surprisingly difficult to find. A school may have no English website, no advertising and little interest in attracting students from outside its existing social network.
You sometimes find traditional Kung Fu here through people rather than Google.
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| Night Market |
More Than a Martial-Arts Club
Another thing that struck me was the social role of some traditional schools.
A Kung Fu school can certainly be a place to learn martial arts.
But sometimes it is considerably more than that.
It is a community.
People train together for years or decades. They eat together, celebrate together and maintain relationships extending beyond practice.
Age, occupation and social position become less important once training begins.
This was very different from the commercial model of martial-arts schools I had previously encountered.
It also helped me understand something about traditional martial arts that is difficult to learn from books.
A martial art is not transmitted only through techniques. It is transmitted through communities.
Hidden Kung Fu
Tainan's traditional martial-arts culture can also be frustrating.
Some groups are difficult to find.
Some are extremely small.
Some teachers have little interest in publicity.
Language can be an obstacle.
Personal introductions can matter considerably.
And sometimes knowledge is still treated as something belonging first to an established group rather than something that should automatically be offered to anyone willing to pay for lessons.
There are advantages and disadvantages to this attitude.
Closed communities can help preserve distinctive traditions.
They can also contribute to their disappearance.
If only a handful of people know an art and nobody new is allowed through the door, preservation eventually becomes impossible.
That tension between preservation and openness is something I have encountered repeatedly in traditional martial arts.
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| Tainan park |
Kung Fu as Cultural Heritage
The longer I lived in Tainan, the more I began to see traditional Kung Fu differently.
It wasn't simply a fighting system.
Nor was it just a hobby.
For some practitioners, participation connects them with teachers, families and communities extending backward through generations.
Forms preserve movement.
Weapons preserve methods developed for objects that may no longer have any practical role in modern society.
Terminology preserves older ways of describing the body and movement.
Stories preserve memories—although, as historians, we still have to distinguish memory and legend from documented history.
Even the social relationships inside a school preserve something.
This does not mean everything old should automatically be protected from criticism.
Preservation without investigation can preserve mistakes just as easily as knowledge.
But once a tradition disappears completely, investigating it becomes much harder.
One of the Last Places to Explore
I would no longer describe Tainan as a place where Kung Fu remains exactly as it was one or two hundred years ago.
Nothing remains unchanged for that long.
Martial arts evolve.
Teachers reinterpret them.
Students change them.
Society changes around them.
But Tainan remains one of the most fascinating places I have encountered for exploring traditional Chinese martial arts.
The temples, old neighborhoods, parks, food, climate, history and people create an environment unlike anywhere else I have trained.
More importantly, traditional martial arts here can still be encountered as part of living communities rather than simply reconstructed history.
Sometimes you know exactly what you are looking for.
Sometimes your wife hears about a teacher from somebody who knows somebody.
And sometimes you walk into a park and discover a group practicing a long-pole system you have never seen before.
After all these years, that possibility still excites me.
You never quite know what Kung Fu you are going to find in Tainan.