Hakka Martial Arts Documentary

Описание: Documentary on the Hakka martial arts in Hezhou prefecture of Guangxi.
This video features some of the local Hakka martial arts of Hezhou in eastern Guangxi such as the 108 Fist style and the 18 Palms style.
It also talks about the similarities between the local styles and the styles from eastern Guangdong.
The Hakka are a southern Chinese ethnic group which originated in the mountain region in and around Ganzhou in Southern Jiangsu.
Hakka language and culture resulted from proto southern Gan speaking peoples moving into the mountainous region that extends from southern Jiangxi to the area around the Jiangxi, Fujian, and Guangdong borders.
These southern Gan settlers mixed with and were influenced by the language and culture of the She, Yao, and Kam minority groups who were native to central and southern Jiangxi.
The Hakka people grew out of a fusion of these groups.
The culture that emerged was a settled upland agrarian clan based culture.
The Hakka heartland region has little good soil for farming due to mountainous terrain. However it is also the home to the headwaters of many of the great rivers of southern China. It is in the drainage basins of these rivers that the various linguistic and cultural groups of southern China all originated (with the exception of the Hakka who originated in the mountains rather than in a specific great river valley region). Through the Ming and Qing dynasties different river basin regions saw periods of boom and bust. During the boom periods young Hakka lacking sufficient farming land would follow the river waters down out of the mountains to the river valley looking to work as laborers.
This is possibly how the name Hakka originated*.
Western interest in the Hakka people began with the actions of missionaries in southern China but it was during the period of the 2nd Opium War, which took place during the same time as the Hakka Punti wars, that western interest in the Hakka people really exploded among sinologists, missionaries, and particularly among the British political and military establishment who sought to convert and befriend the Hakka in order to use them to further exacerbate ethnic tension to destabilize southern China and the Qing government.
Ethnic tensions between the Hakka and Cantonese people dated back centuries to the early Qing dynasty and the land grabs at the end of the Great Clearance. Those tensions continued to fester among the Hakka minority along the coastal regions of Guangdong.
Large numbers of Hakka people were converted to Christianity by the Basel Missionary society starting in the early to mid 19th century.
In the mid 19th century one of the recently converted Hakka named Hong Xiuquan began to have visions that he believed were from god. These visions proclaimed him as the younger brother of Christ who was sent to establish the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace (Taiping Tianguo).
The "god worshipers society" that he started spread across the Hakka heartland and beyond gaining followers even among many minority ethnic groups.
The subsequent rebellion they started claimed far more lives than WWI, changed the ethnic map of southern China, and greatly weakened the Qing dynasty which would never again recover it's military or political strength.
This turmoil also spawned the birth of huge number of martial arts systems across China. Villages and cities began training in military skills in earnest to protect themselves from the Taiping army and the mass slaughter of civilians that it became known for.
The huge numbers of refugees fleeing the slaughter brought martial arts from distant regions to new areas of China.
Likewise the Hakka followers who made up the core of the Taiping military and government were able to gain huge amounts of battlefield skills and absorbed methods from distant areas of China that the Taiping military marched to.
Many of the major Hakka martial arts can be traced back to the Taiping period.
It was also during the same period and as a result of the upheavals brought about by the Taiping that Hakka people began to migrate to Guangxi, Hunan, and Sichuan.

For more information on the history and origins of the Hakka people according to modern scholarship look at the links below.

https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpresse...

https://eastasiaorigin.blogspot.com/2...