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title: "Foreign Strongmen, the Jingwu & the Big-Sword Army (民國武林與國恥)"
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No genre of martial-arts story is more beloved — or more bound up with national feeling — than the Republican-era tales of Chinese boxers answering the jeer of **"the Sick Man of East Asia" (東亞病夫)**: the ring challenges against touring foreign strongmen, and the saber raised against the rifle in the war of resistance. These are the stories the *Huo Yuanjia* and *Ip Man* films are built on — and also where myth and record diverge most sharply. So, as on the [Stories](https://wulin.openmindspace.org/stories) page, each is tagged **[Documented] / [Tradition] / [Legend]**.
## "The Sick Man of East Asia" — Huo Yuanjia & the Jingwu
**霍元甲 (Huo Yuanjia, 1868–1910)** of Tianjin, master of the **Mizong (迷蹤 / 秘宗) art**, is the patron saint of the whole genre. In **1909** the British strongman **"Hercules" O'Brien (奧皮音)** advertised in Shanghai; Huo answered with a famous public notice — *"the world mocks our nation as a nation of sick men; I am one sick man of that sick nation, and I will try myself against any strong man under heaven."*
**[Legend]** The twist the films leave out: **the match never happened.** By the documented accounts the foreigner kept delaying and then withdrew; Huo never fought him in the ring. **[Documented]** What Huo did instead proved more lasting — in **1910 he founded the 精武體操會 (Chin Woo / Jingwu Athletic Association)** in Shanghai, the first great modern civilian martial-arts body, which spread across China and the diaspora. *(Its 1919 annals 精武本紀 and the 1928 Selangor 精武特刊 are both held in the codex.)*
**[Tradition, with forensic support]** Huo **died that same year, 1910, at 42.** Tradition holds he was **poisoned by rivals** — a Japanese-supplied "medicine" — and unusually the story has some backing: a **1989 exhumation reportedly found arsenic** in his remains. So the foreign-strongman victory is legend; the Jingwu, and probably the poisoning, are real.
## The Thousand-Pound King — Wang Ziping and the Russian
**[Documented, embellished]** Where Huo's matches never came off, **王子平 (Wang Ziping, 1881–1973)** actually fought — and won. A Cangzhou Muslim master of **查拳 (Chaquan)** under Yang Hongxiu, famous for raw strength (his nickname **"千斤王," the Thousand-Pound King**), Wang met the touring Russian strongman **Kang Tai'er (康泰爾)** — billed as a "world strongman" — at **Beijing's Central Park on 14 September 1918**, and beat him decisively. The victory made him a national name; in **1928** he was made head of the **Shaolin (external-arts) Gate at the Nanjing Central Guoshu Institute (中央國術館)**. In later life he became one of China's most celebrated bone-setters.
## Whose victory was it? — the contested Kang Tai'er
**[the honest knot]** Here is a perfect illustration of how martial memory works: **the very same Russian, Kang Tai'er, and the very same 1918 Beijing challenge, are also claimed by the Xingyi master 韓慕俠 (Han Muxia)** and his lineage. When Kang set up his ring, the Tianjin **中華武士會 (Chinese Warriors' Association)** — the body founded by Li Cunyi's circle — sent a delegation (李存義, 張占魁, 韓慕俠 and others) expressly to challenge him. Both the **Wang Ziping (查拳)** and the **Han Muxia (形意)** traditions hand the Kang Tai'er victory down as their own. The honest reading isn't to crown a winner but to see the pattern: **one celebrated victory, claimed by more than one school** — exactly how a martial legend grows.
## The Big-Sword Army — the saber against the rifle (1933)
When the genre moved from the ring to the battlefield, it produced its most famous image: the **大刀隊 (Big-Sword units)** of the **29th Army** at the **Battle of Xifengkou (喜峰口), March 1933**, on the Great Wall. Under **宋哲元 (Song Zheyuan)**, brigade commander **趙登禹 (Zhao Dengyu)** formed a 500-strong saber team that **night-raided the Japanese camps** with broadswords. The army's saber instructor was the Beijing master **李堯臣 (Li Yaochen)**, who devised a simple, practical **無極刀法 (Wuji Saber Method)** — broadsword fused with traditional 六合 sword — taught army-wide. *(The related ****破鋒八刀, "Eight Sabers that Break the Edge,"**** is the other famous dadao method, associated with the Cangzhou 通備 master ****馬鳳圖 Ma Fengtu****.)* The raids stunned the enemy — the Japanese press admitted "a humiliation unseen in sixty years" — and inspired the wartime anthem **《大刀進行曲》 (The Big Sword March, 1937)**.
**Read it honestly.** The Big-Sword raids were real and genuinely brave, and the dadao was a serious close-quarters and morale weapon. But the popular image — men with swords "breaking" a modern army — is partly **wartime propaganda**: the troops also carried rifles, and the saber's role was the night-raid and the close fight, not a replacement for firepower. The courage is documented; the "swords beat guns" myth is not.
## See also
## Sources
**[1]** *霍元甲* and *精武體育會*, Chinese Wikipedia ([zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/霍元甲](https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%9C%8D%E5%85%83%E7%94%B2)) and Baidu — the 1909 O'Brien notice, the un-fought match, the 1910 Jingwu founding, the 1910 death and the 1989 exhumation/arsenic finding.
**[2]** *王子平*, Chinese Wikipedia ([zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/王子平](https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%8E%8B%E5%AD%90%E5%B9%B3)) and HK01 *千斤王* — the 14 Sept 1918 Central Park defeat of Kang Tai'er, the "Thousand-Pound King" name, the 1928 Central Guoshu Institute role. The Han Muxia / 中華武士會 counter-claim to the same victory is recorded in the Xingyi lineage accounts.
**[3]** *國民革命軍第二十九軍大刀隊* and *喜峰口*, Chinese Wikipedia / Baidu — Zhao Dengyu's 1933 saber team, Li Yaochen's 無極刀法, the Big Sword March; with the critical reassessments (e.g. *中時* "背後真相", Zhihu) on the propaganda layer.
**[4]** Codex holdings: *精武本紀* (1919) and *雪蘭莪精武特刊* (Selangor, 1928), in `Sources/northern-kungfu-manuals/`.