Notes

Timeline (年表) — Chinese martial arts at a glance

Updated 2026-06-05

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The whole story on one line — the documented milestones of the Chinese martial arts, from the first surviving manuals to the modern diaspora, with the famous legends placed where they actually enter the written record rather than where tradition puts them. For the narrative behind these dates, see A Short History of Chinese Martial Arts.

Deep roots & legend (pre-1500)

c. 527 [legend] — Bodhidharma (達摩) is later said to have come to Shaolin and originated its boxing. This is a Republican-era story, not history; the Yijinjing prefaces that seeded it were forged a thousand years later.
Antiquity — wrestling (角抵 jiaodi), the ancestor of shuaijiao, and the spear, saber and bow as battlefield arts: genuinely old, but undocumented as systems.

The Ming military record (1500s–1600s)

The deepest surviving systems are military, written by officers.

1560s — Qi Jiguang (戚繼光) records 32 boxing postures in his army manual 紀效新書 — the textual ancestor of much that follows, Taiji included.
mid-1500s — Yu Dayou (俞大猷) writes the Sword Classic (劍經), the oldest surviving Chinese stick-and-staff treatise.
1621 — Cheng Zongyou (程宗猷) publishes the first Shaolin manuals — the staff, the long saber, the spear — weapons, not fists. Mao Yuanyi's vast 武備志 appears the same year.

The internal idea & the Qing (1600s–1700s)

1669 — Huang Zongxi's epitaph for Wang Zhengnan gives the first written 內家／外家 (internal/external) distinction — the textual root of the whole internal-arts idea.
1630s → 1784 — bare-handed Shaolin boxing enters the record with the monk Xuanji, surviving in Cao Huandou's 1784 Hand-Combat Classic.
c. 1724–1783 — Chang Naizhou (萇乃周) writes the deepest pre-Taiji theory of internal body-mechanics (documented in depth on the sister Taiji wiki).

The styles crystallize (1800s)

Most of what people now practice is written down — and largely formed — in the nineteenth century.

mid-1800s — Li Luoneng (李洛能) consolidates modern Xingyi; Dong Haichuan (董海川) teaches the first systematic Bagua in Beijing; Yang Luchan brings Chen-village boxing to the capital as Yang Taiji.
19th-c. Shandong — the documented Praying Mantis lineages crystallize around Laiyang; the Wang Lang founder tale is older but legend.
1881 — Li Yiyu's "salt-shop manuscript," the earliest written witness of the Taiji classics.

The Republican reorganization (1900s–1930s)

The arts become public, institutional, and printed for the first time.

1910 — the Jingwu Athletic Association is founded in Shanghai — mass publishing, a cross-style curriculum, branches across the diaspora.
1915 — Secrets of Shaolin Boxing — the most influential and least reliable Shaolin book — appears; Sun Lutang (孫祿堂) begins the book series (1915–1925) that frames Taiji, Bagua and Xingyi as one "internal" family.
1928 — the Central Guoshu Institute is founded in Nanjing and stages the bloody, chaotic First National Examination.
1930 — Tang Hao's Shaolin–Wudang Study founds the critical, evidence-based history of the field — and demolishes the founding myths.
1933 — the modernized Second National Examination (weight classes, referees, protective armor).

Diaspora & modern wushu (1949–)

1949 onward — after the civil war, lineage-holders carry their arts abroad: Liu Yunqiao and Baji to Taiwan, Wong Hon Fan and Seven-Star Mantis to Hong Kong, Cheng Man-ching and Taiji to Taiwan and then New York (1964). See Diaspora.
1950s — the People's Republic codifies modern competition 武術 (wushu) — the standardized routines most of the world now sees as "kung fu" — while traditional lineage transmission continues in parallel everywhere.