1. A Visit to the Huo Ancestral Home

Recently I visited Tianjin, the hometown of Huo Yuanjia, and made an excursion to his former residence in the heart of Xiaonanhe ViIlage in Jinghai County, fifteen kilometres southwest of downtown Tianjin.

The house itseIf has a small courtyard and structures having grey tiled roofs and walls consisting of bricks made from dried mud. It is a typical Chinese farmer's home designed for dwelling by an extended family, restored in l9O3 by Huo himself on the site of the old famiIy residence. The original structures were so dilapidated that he was forced to demolish them and virtually start from scratch. At this time, he was 34 years of age.

The Huo family were migrants from Shanxi Province arriving in Tianjin during the late Qing Dynasty. Huo Yuanjia's father Huo Endi, the sixth generation of Huos to practise Mizong Boxing*, had worked as a bodyguard for tWeIve years and was highly regarded. Unfortunately,
he could not earn sufficient money to ensure an affluent life for his family. After his retirement, the family lived on what crops and animals could be raised on their alkaline land, making the best of it by leading a thrifty lifestyle.

As a child, Huo Yuanjia was frail and delicate; thus, his father considered him unfit for martial arts training. The elder Huo, therefore, did not teach him the martial arts of Mizong Boxing handed down from the older generation of the Huo family. Yuanjia was ordered to concentrate on his studies, but he could not reconcile himself to this allocation of priorities. Early every morning while his father was teaching his nine brothers Mizong Boxing, he would climb up the tree in front of the training hall to eavesdrop. He firmly grasped in his mind every movement his father demostrated to his brothers and secretly practised what he learned for more than a dozen years. Yuanjia eventually attained perfection in Mizong Boxing, exceeding the skills of his brothers.

Stepping through the gate of the residence, one sees on the right three rooms facing south and on the left two side rooms. In the centre room, a portrait of Huo Yuanjia hangs in the centre of a walI. Here, he appears more like a scholar, but his strong physique and large hands are not visible. The portrait is flanked by two calligraphy scrolls inscribed with characters meaning "A chivalrous life, a peerless hero". The inscription, written by his son Huo Dongge, could well serve to represent the deeds performed by the great kungfu master.

Next, I visited Huo Yuanjia's former bedroom. Standing against a wall in the small room are some pieces of furniture crafted in the stye of the Ming Dynasty. On one side of the mud brick sleeping platform or kang is a wardrobe cabinet. Most rural homes in the north at that
time were furnished like this.

2. A Real Life Rocky

Old people in the village recall that Huo Yuanjia was not particularly handsome, but attribute his superior physical strength to the unusual anatomy of his breastbone and rib cage. According to their recollection, he had only three ribs instead of seven on each side of his breastbone, moreover, each rib was larger than normal.

Tianjin traditionally has been a port city of strategic significance. Lying some one hundred kilometres from Beijing, it has served as the gateway to the capital by sea. In l860, Tianjin was forced to become an open trading port. The demarcation of British, French and American concessions within the city was followed by an influx of foreigners.

Among these foreigners were the legendary Veronica, a Russian of unusual size and strength, and Myerson, a powerful American boxer nicknamed "Killer". On separate occasions, they reputedly challenged Chinese kungfu masters in Tianjin and Shanghai to a fight and insulted the Chinese by calling them "the sickmen of the Orient". Huo Yuanjia boldly stepped forward and accepted their challenges. In the ensuing matches, he broke the left arm of Myerson and bested the gigantic Veronica. These two exploits were given coverage by newspapers in St. Petersburg and New York.

To promote the development of martial arts and to ensure that Chinese would not be insulted again, Huo Yuanjia set up the Jingwu Physical Training Society in Shanghai. Here he taught his disciples all that he knew about Mizong Boxing, in the process discarding the old family credo that no outsider should be given access to this skill. In addition, he invited masters of other kungfu schools to be coaches so that his disciples could also benefit from other types of boxing.

In l9l0, Huo Yuanjia became seriously ill with tuberculosis and was bedridden. He never recovered and died on September l4 of the same year at the age of 42. Prior to his illness, he had easily defeated ten Japanese judo masters within a very short time. Some people reckoned from this event that Huo was a victim of a revenge murder perpetrated by a Japanese vagabond, but this is nothing more than an unsubstantiated rumour. The fact is that Huo Yuanjia had lived frugally to save every cent for the establishment and administration of the Jingwu Society, being parsimonious to the extent that very plain foods such as water-soaked rice and salted vegetables were his daily fare. At the same time, he was inclined to exert himself so hard that he overtaxed the limits of his strength. When he finally developed tuberculosis, he would never regain his good health.

After his death, he was buried in a northern suburb of Shanghai, but his remains were later moved to his home village. His two-acre plot lies in the southern part of Xiaonanhe Village. The base of the tomb is a platform in the shape of a shield, resembling the badge of the
Jingwu Society. Carved on the platform are three three-dimensional flower beds in red, yellow and blue. They symbolise virtue, intelligence and physical prowess, the ideals of the society.

As one might expect, martial arts are quite popular in Xiaonanhe itself. Many villagers pay their highest respects to the deceased master by practising boxing in front of Huo Yuanjia's tomb. Another indication of their interest in the exploits of their favourite son is that after closed circuit television was installed the first programme shown on the small screen was Huo Yuanjia: A Chivalrous Man. This was a television series produced by a Hong Kong television station based on the life of Huo.

3. Meeting the Legend's Grandson

During my excursion to the Huo home, I had dinner at the house of Huo Wenting, the 65-year-old grandson of Huo Yuanjia. He took out from a cabinet a photo album and showed me several pictures. The most
interesting included one of his grandfater taken at Tianjin in l908, one of his father Huo Dongge in a boxing pose taken in a photo studio when he was young, and one of his mother together with his younger brothers and sisters set in Indonesia.

Huo Dongge had been active in promoting martial arts in Southeast Asia for a long time, setting up the Jingwu Physical Training Society in Indonesia where he eventually settled down. By that time he had already
reached middle age. Later, he married a locaI girl of Chinese extraction. Huo Wenting confided to me that his own mother was healthy and active. In fact, according to Wenting, she came to Tianjin from Indonesia to pay her son a visit.

* Mizong Boxing originated at the Shaolin Temple in Henan Province. lt developed into a separate school of boxing after a
number of kungfu masters had made improvements on it, giving it
a particular style. Mizong Boxing attained a superiority in technique after it had been nurtured by generations of the Huo family. Mizong Boxing calls for fast and accurate blows and for coordinating the strength of the shoulders, arms, waist and legs, with the feet simultaneousIy stomping a loud sound.