It’s all about the needles

Emei Mountain is the latest hot Kung Fu trend coming out of China, and a group of Kung Fu girls is leading the charge, according to a new article in China’s GlobalTimes.

In April 2024 a video appeared showing nine female Kung Fu performers doing Kung Fu moves against the backdrop of Emei Mountain.

Chen Yufei, 23, one of the group members is quoted in the article: “Unlike the dramatized versions of Emei kung fu in TV shows, which ­focus on legends, our practice is rooted in the practical skills and traditions of Emei martial arts.”

The video shows performance with a variety of Kung Fu weapons including double whips, swords and of course, the famous Emei needles *, but the phrase “traditions of Emei martial arts” raises a few red flags for me.

A standout line from the article reads “In 2008, Emei martial arts, with a history spanning over three millennia, were designated a National Intangible Cultural Heritage.”

Ok, hang on, what?

Mount Emei has long been a sacred mountain for Buddhism, sure. But a 3,000 year old tradition of Kung Fu?

If you look up Kung Fu training camps on Mount Emei you’ll find a complete history of the martial arts and styles there: “Emei School has 1,093 bare-hand fighting skills, 518 skills with weapons, 41 pair practice routines and 276 practice methods.”

Call me a cynic, but I don’t believe any of this. It appears to me that the Kung Fu traditions of Emei Mountain really belong to the work of modern wuxi fiction of author Jin Yong who wrote a lot about a fictional Emei Sect. In his book, The Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber, the Emei School is founded during the early Yuan dynasty by Guo Xiang around the same time as when the Wudang School is established.

Of course, this being a complete fiction hasn’t stopped the Kung Fu tourist industry from setting up shop on Mount Emei. As this 2012 article describes, there was not much Kung Fu on the mountain back then, but it was starting to be set up, complete with a history. But if you look up Mount Emei today you’ll find Kung Fu competitions are held there, and very much like the operation at Mount Wudang, you can go there to study Kung Fu, for the right price.

The all-female Kung Fu troop heralding from Mount Emei seem to be as much a creation of the Kung Fu tourist industry as anything else, at least to me.

So where does their martial arts come from? Looking through various pages on the Internet I found a Reddit post that sounds true to me: ” “Emei” is just a generic term for martial arts from Sichuan, extremely few styles have any actual direct relation to anyone who loved or practiced on Emei shan.  Also almost everything called “Emei” today are modern offshoots of northern Chinese martial arts brought to Sichuan with nationalist troops as they were forced westward by the Japanese in WWII.”

None of which, of course, is to take away from the performance of the Emei all-female Kung Fu group, who are pretty damn good at WuShu.

• Note 1: Mount Emei even has its own weapon, the Emei Ci which are sharp steel rods known as needles or piercers, that can be worn on a ring on your finger and spun around.

A visit to Mount Emei by Will of Monkey Steals Peach: