Forms & Weapons (套路・兵器) — the routines and the arms

A form (套路, tàolù) is a fixed sequence of movements — the way Chinese martial arts package their techniques for solo practice, transmission, and testing. This section gathers the wiki's form and weapon pages: the foundational drills every northern student meets first, the deep library of empty-hand routines, and the weapons — saber, staff, sword and the great long blades — with a bridge to the Ming-dynasty manuals where those weapons were first written down.

What a form is for

Forms get argued about — are they a training method or a museum piece? The traditional answer is that a taolu is a container: it preserves a style's vocabulary in a fixed order so it can be drilled alone and passed on intact. A typical northern curriculum climbs a predictable arc:

1. Foundational drills — short, repetitive sets that install stance, footwork and a few core powers (the kicking drill, the footwork set).

2. Core empty-hand forms — longer routines that recombine the vocabulary into fighting sequences.

3. Signature / advanced forms — the school's prized, more demanding sets.

4. Weapons — saber, staff, spear, sword, taken up once the empty-hand body is built.

Foundational forms

The cross-style starting points — not the property of any one system, but the shared ground of northern training:

Tan Tui (彈腿 / 潭腿) — the foundational springing-kick drill under most northern schools

Lianbuquan (練步拳) — the footwork-training long-fist set; a standard open beginner form

The Eighteen Luohan Hands (十八羅漢手) — the Shaolin conditioning set at the root of the temple's reputation

The empty-hand library — Northern Mantis

The wiki's deepest form coverage is in Northern Praying Mantis, whose curriculum is documented form-by-form with full move-by-move scripts. Rather than repeat it here, this section points to the two dedicated maps:

Mantis Forms — the script-and-video map of every Mantis form, across all four branches

The White Ape Forms (白猿) — Steals the Peach & Leaves the Cave, with full scripts

The fully-scripted individual forms — Bung Bu (崩步拳) the foundation, Charging Punches (插捶), Eighteen Elders (十八叟拳), Plum Blossom Fists (梅花拳), Picked Essentials (摘要拳), Eight Elbows (八肘), and Eight Step's Force Chop (力劈拳) — all live on that map.

The weapons (兵器)

The classical curriculum is built on the eighteen arms (十八般兵器); the documented weapon forms on the wiki come chiefly from the rich Northern Mantis weapons syllabus, grouped here by the arm rather than by branch:

From living forms to the source manuals

These are the practised weapon routines. The wiki also holds the earliest printed weapon manuals themselves — the 1621 Ming texts where the staff, the long saber and the spear first entered the record. The forms above are how the arms live now; the texts below are where they were first written down:

Shaolin Staff Method (少林棍法闡宗, 1621) — the earliest surviving Shaolin weapons manual

The Long Saber (單刀法選, 1621) — the two-handed saber, ancestor of the miaodao

The Spear & the Crossbow (長槍法選・蹶張心法, 1621) — the Yang-family spear and the foot-drawn crossbow

See also

Northern Kung Fu Styles — the arts these forms belong to

Source Texts — the manuals, in the order they were written

The Four Gates (踢打摔拿) — the categories of technique the forms train