My apologies. I wrote this yesterday and accidentally published it as “private.”
It seems that there aren’t a lot of pics of Han Qing-tan (韓慶堂) out there. Here are the few that I’ve managed to collect:
Notice how the saber is held behind the right thigh, hiding it from the enemy.
5 responses so far ↓
1 Casey // Jan 8, 2007 at 3:31 am
Thanks for collecting these. The only other one I can think of off the top of my head is one I saw of Adam Hsu standing next to him. I love pictures of old masters. Ilya has a big collection of them, many displayed on the wall of his school, including a Mantis leitai match from like 1930 or so. Unfortunately, I’ve only ever seen one of Wang Songting, which was taken when he won first place in the “senior” sparring division of a Taiwanese tournament. Zhou says he looks grumpy because he didn’t like having his picture taken and didn’t like being consigned to the “senior division.”
Liu Yunqiao, Hong Yixiang and Chang Dongsheng seem to be the easiest older-generation masters to get footage of as they were especially famous, were somewhat younger than Han and Wang and were not camera-shy. I’m sure there’s a lot more out there, but probably confined to people’s basements, etc.
In general, I wish all the masters, including those still living would make more record of their art, especially since martial arts are such a personal thing–even if you teach your student everything you know, he will still have a different flavor from you because he’s a different person. For those who have passed away, I hope their students will continue to share what materials they have, rather than keeping it in a basement. What is the point of keeping pictures or footage of great masters of the past a secret? It’s like keeping a Monet in a dark closet.
2 Casey // Jan 8, 2007 at 3:33 am
Also, just in case you didn’t already know, that’s Shen Maohui Han is kneeling on in the botttom set of pics.
3 Brian L. Kennedy // Jan 8, 2007 at 7:29 am
Happy New Year,
If I remember right he posed for the technique pictures with Doug Bone that are used in Robert Smith’s book Secrets of Shaolin Temple Boxing. The photos in that book have Han Ch’ing tang (wade/giles), Kao Fang hsien and the foreign “crash test dummy” Mr. Bone.
4 Brian L. Kennedy // Jan 8, 2007 at 7:32 am
Oh I forgot to mention, did you remove the Chen Pan Ling post over the weekend? I was going to add to that post, as you maybe already well aware, his son did a book with Chen Pan Ling’s version of pakua in it. Lion Books put it out about 4 years ago or so. The forms are basically the same as the Puttman/Smith version except for some very minor changes.
5 chessman71 // Jan 8, 2007 at 1:21 pm
Brian,
Feel free to make comments.
Yeah, I tool it down and put this post up. Someone asked about pics of Han. The CPL post goes up about now.
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