‘The Many Lives of Yang Luchan: Mythopoesis, Media, and the Martial Imagination.’
By Douglas Wile, 2022
ABSTRACT:
The life of Yang Luchan, patriarch of the Yang lineage and founder
of taijiquan’s most popular style, is a biographical blank slate upon
which conservative, progressive, orientalist, and just plain rice bowl
interests have inscribed wildly divergent narratives. Conservative
scholar-disciples sought to link him with the invented Wudang-Daoist
lineage, while progressives emphasized his humble origins and health
benefits of the practice. His life (c.1799-1872) straddled the height of
the Manchu empire and decline into semi-colonial spheres of foreign
influence, while successive generations of Yang descendants propagated
his ‘intangible cultural heritage’ through Republican, Communist,
‘open’, and global eras. Practiced world-wide by hundreds of millions,
taijiquan’s name recognition made it ripe for media appropriation, and
Yang Luchan has been remythologized in countless novels, cartoons,
television series, and full-length feature films. The case of Yang Luchan
offers an unusual opportunity to witness an ongoing process of mytho-
poesis and to compare these narratives with traditional Chinese warrior
heroes and Western models of mythology and heroology. If the lack of
facts has not constrained the proliferation of invented biographies, nei-
ther should it discourage the quest for historical context as we sift and
winnow truth from trope in the many reconstructions of Yang’s life.
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