Formosa Neijia

As I said yesterday, Mike Martello is doing an excellent job introducing miao dao training to the world. His videos show his skill and dedication in preserving this traditional sword method. Take a look.

This is the old four roads routine that was brought to Taiwan by Han Qing-tan — the famous long fist teacher. He learned this form while he was at the Nanjing GuoShu Academy. There is speculation that this form was adapted from pigua for use by the military at some point. It appears to be a simplification of earlier material done on a straight line, as if for army troops to practice.

This is the long form that Mike does. He learned this from an old gentlemen in Taipei who informed him that the flavor he was expressing in the old four roads wasn’t correct. IMO, this form shows more traditional pigua-derived movement and can obviously be linked to the more traditional forms for the weapon. Mike’s flavor, however, is much more to my liking than most of the miao dao forms I see from the mainland. As you can see, his form above doesn’t have much of a wushu flavor.

Finally, this is a real treat. This is the two-man version of the miao dao material. Here, the form is done by beginners with bamboo shinai as a basic practice. The idea at this stage is to work on timing, distance, etc. Later, when the material is more familiar, students will move on to using more authentic styled wooden swords so they can practice edge-to-edge sparring. As anyone with genuine Chinese sword experience will tell you, edge-to-edge contact is important for training the jings that are so vital to correct Chinese sword usage. So keep in mind that that kind of training follows this basic practice.

I thank Mike once again for making these videos public. He’s doing a great service and I think we’d all encourage him to keep up the good work.

BTW, Mike’s youtube site is here. I’ll be profiling some of his other material later.