tristan3

In ancient China, as in [|other places], both board games and movement games probably come from war training. Board games trained generals in battlefield strategy, and martial arts trained men to fight. According to some stories, it was the Yellow Emperor, about 2600 [|BC], even before the [|Shang Dynasty], who first invented martial arts. We don't know much about that, but certainly people in the [|Chou Dynasty] (about 1100 BC) were fighting using Jiao li martial arts techniques. By about 550 BC, in the [|Eastern Chou Dynasty], Sun Tzu wrote a book called the "Art of War", which describes a lot of martial arts ideas and techniques. Around the same time, [|Taoists] probably began practicing Tai Chi.

By the time of the [|Han Dynasty], about 50 [|AD], we have better information about the martial arts. At this time, Pan Ku wrote a book about Kung Fu called "Six Chapters of Hand Fighting." By 220 AD, about the time the Han Dynasty collapsed, a doctor named Hua T'uo wrote another book about K Just before 500 AD, [|Buddhist] monks came to China from [|India] and founded the Shaolin monastery, which is in central China, near modern Zhengzhou. Chinese monks at Shaolin developed kung fu as an art and to defend their monastery and their country. There are records of the Shaolin monks fighting to defend their monastery from bandits around 610 AD, and fighting to defend their country in 621 AD, at the end of the [|Three Kingdoms] civil wars. After that, we don't hear much more about martial arts in China until the 1500's AD, which is outside the period of this site.

=Ancient Chinese Games=