A number of Chinese martial arts that originated from the Ming dynasty is said to be learned by rebels for fighting government soldiers in their bid to overturn the Qing dynasty.

What I don’t remember reading is the timeline to achieve this overthrowing of the government. Is this important to know?

I am reading a book entitled Book and Dagger. It goes into a little known history of how scholars and librarians worked in intelligence during World War II. Those who were selected and accepted to be trained as spies didn’t just undergo training in how to kill but in many other subjects as well. Read the book if you want to get a better idea of how wars are won before troops even step on the battlefield.

During a period of war or before a country decides to declare war it has to prepare. More often than not there is little time to prepare so training whether to be a spy or a solider is time sensitive. A spy has an important role to collect information, disseminate misleading intel and whisper disinformation, set up resistance groups and carry out sabotage.

A spy has but a few months to learn the subjects he has to in order to be an effective spy. And the subjects are many and technical in nature. So now when I think of rebels that want to overthrow the Qing dynasty how did they plan to overthrow the Qing dynasty? Did they just rush the government troops and try to kill them? Did they gather intelligence? Did they carry out sabotage? Did they have to learn how to do all these? Or did they spend their time learning martial arts?

For example, I was told Wing Chun was one of the arts that rebels learned. However, how much time did we have to spend today to get up to competence level. Months or years? More often than not, we have to spend years to master the art. But if there is a war this would be too long a time to spend training. Maybe the movement to overthrow the Qing dynasty wasn’t time sensitive so they could take years back then.

To win a battle or to carry out sabotage requires more than just the ability to excel in physical combat. Many a times spies on the field were caught by the smallest of details that informed the police, the secret police and the soldiers in the countries that they infiltrated that they were not locals.

Because there was not enough time in a day to learn so many things the things that were taught for physical combat had to be something that can be learned quickly, be effective and not take too long to be competent in. Spies who were trained in Britain’s Area B were taught by W.E. Fairbairn who taught them to attack the “fork”. The first thing Fairbairn taught was not play fair in a real fight to the death. Read the book on this part. Though it is a small part of the story it is informative.

Why do I find this information interesting? It is because when I look back I ask myself if I were to teach all over again would I still teach the way I did? And that is one of the reasons why I came up with the latest training that revolves around simple training sequences, basically how training core principles lead to understanding a bigger picture which when expanded can become a systematic art that is made up of drills, forms and other things. However, this time I would put aside the forms because ultimately the forms are but a means of learning.