On Language Log, Victor Mair, professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Pennsylania, speculates about how the term passed into the martial-arts realm: It was likely only in the twentieth century that this Taoist term became connected to martial arts, which more typically has been known in Mandarin Chinese as wǔshù (武術).
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The term was also related to a particular method for preparing and serving tea. In English-language literature, one can see the term first appearing in works like John Dudgeon's 1895 essay, " Kung-Fu, or Tauist Medical Gymnastics." As the title implies, kung-fu was then understood to be connected to certain Taoist exercises practiced to regulate one's vital energy, or qì. But in the earlier transcription system known as Wade-Giles (named after two 19th-century British Sinologists), it was spelled kung-fu. But I was surprised to learn that kung fu as we know it was actually born on American soil.Īs I explained in my Wall Street Journal column last weekend, kung fu is a transcription of a Chinese term (功夫) that has historically meant "workmanship" or "skill achieved through great effort." In the system known as pinyin, the standard method of transcribing Chinese characters, the term would be rendered as gōngfu.
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In the 1970s, martial-arts movies from the Shaw Brothers studio (and its Hong Kong rival, Golden Harvest) firmly planted kung fu in the global consciousness. When Run Run Shaw, a giant of the Hong Kong entertainment industry, died earlier this month at the ripe old age of 106, I took the opportunity to look at a term with which he was intimately connected: kung fu.