ABSTRACT
What the world knows as the Asian martial arts began in China. Drawing on the resources of a mature civilisation, the Chinese merged their arts of armed and unarmed combat with Buddhist meditation and Daoist inner alchemy, two of the most dynamic currents of their post-classical culture. Yet the work of synthesis was originally performed neither by Daoists nor Buddhists but by disaffected Confucian literati seeking to define Chinese nationalism in the face of foreign conquest and European hegemony.
