Yue Fei, Ji Jike and Three Branches

The art is traditionally traced to Yue Fei, the Song general executed in the twelfth century and later revered as a model of loyalty. The attribution first appears centuries after his death and is not supported by the record. It is nonetheless doing recognisable work: attaching a martial art to a national hero of unimpeachable virtue gives it a pedigree and a moral character at once.

The documented beginnings are with Ji Jike in seventeenth century Shanxi, and three branches descend from that line. The Shanxi and Hebei branches are the ones usually meant by xingyiquan today. The Henan branch, generally called by its own name, was transmitted substantially within Hui Muslim communities, which is a reminder that the religious settings of Chinese martial transmission were not only Daoist and Buddhist.

The internal family into which the art is now placed, with taijiquan and baguazhang, was made current by Sun Lutang in the early twentieth century, and the internal category itself descends from a 1669 epitaph by Huang Zongxi setting an internal school against Shaolin. Meir Shahar's history of the Shaolin monastery examines how that opposition was constructed and what it was doing, and Douglas Wile's work on the late Qing literature shows how much of the philosophical apparatus of these arts was written down in a period much closer to the present than the arts themselves claim.