#长文创作激励计划#著名影星李连杰拍过不少精武英雄, Huo Yuanjia is one of them. In the play, Huo Yuanjia defeated the Western strongmen, opened the Jingwu Hall, and defeated the Japanese samurai, but in the end he was poisoned by the Japanese.
So, is the real Huo Yuanjia really like this? In fact, Huo Yuanjia in reality did not fight the Russian Hercules, but it is a fact that he became famous because of this.
What other unknown historical truths does Huo Yuanjia have, and what happened to his descendants after his death? Where is the Jingwu Gymnastics Club founded by him going? This article explains this.
01 Stealing from one's own family and becoming a faction of its own
Huo Yuanjia was born in a family of dart masters, and he is also a family of martial artists. His father, Huo Endi, had three brothers, and the Huo family had ten sons, who were known as the "Ten Brothers of the Huo Family".
Ranked by age, Huo Yuanjia ranked fourth, but because his young physique did not have the potential to practice martial arts, his father arranged a way out for him not to be a martial artist, but to hope that he would study hard, and take the official exam in the future.
But Huo Yuanjia, who was born in a family of martial arts practitioners, felt the charm of traditional martial arts since he was a child, and watched his brothers practicing martial arts every day, and his heart was even more itchy, so he peeked at how his father taught on weekdays, and then secretly practiced in private.
The Huo family focuses on the Lost Trace Boxing, also known as the Secret Sect Boxing, which is said to have been founded in Liangshan Hao Han Yanqing, so it is also known as Yanqing Boxing. Traditional martial arts pay attention to the teacher's transmission, especially some of the "special skills", and it is difficult to learn without a teacher.
But Huo Yuanjia is an exception, he "steals the teacher" at home and practices by himself, not only has his kung fu improved a lot, but also on the basis of Lost Trace Boxing, he has integrated the essence of other schools and gradually formed his own style.
However, for Huo Yuanjia's martial arts strength, although his father later knew that he was secretly learning, he did not force it, and still told him to study weekdays, so he didn't know his martial arts level.
It wasn't until 1890 that the 24-year-old Huo Yuanjia met his first challenger. At that time, a martial artist came to exchange and learn, and Huo Endi sent Huo Yuanqing, who was better at kung fu, but it turned out that he was not the opponent of the other party.
Seeing this, Horndi was about to play by himself, but Huo Yuanjia had already stepped forward and defeated his opponent in only three moves.
Huo Endi couldn't help but turn from anger to joy, seeing his son step by step and boxing, he had completely mastered the essence of the Huo family's lost trace boxing. He couldn't help but be touched by his son's amazing perseverance and extraordinary understanding.
Since then, Huo Endi finally fully supported Huo Yuanjia's martial arts practice and devoted himself to teaching, thus creating a new generation of martial arts.
Although Huo Yuanjia has excellent kung fu, before the age of 30, he has been unknown, cutting and selling firewood day after day, without fame and ambition.
It wasn't until later that he went to Tianjin and met someone who changed his fate.
02 Tianjin Weiniu knife small test
In the twenty-first year of Guangxu (1895), he had married a wife and had children at this time, and his life was not rich. Approaching the Spring Festival, Huo Yuanjia was going to pick firewood to Tianjin Wei to sell it for a few dollars for the New Year.
Ordinary people can only pick one hundred and fifty or sixty catties of firewood, but Huo Yuanjia can pick three or four hundred catties, which shows his strength. When I arrived at the Xitouwanzi outside the Weixi Gate in Tianjin, before it opened, I met the gangsters who made a living by collecting "land money" and "shoulder money".
How could Huo Yuanjia endure this kind of wretchedness, and had no choice but to throw the little gangster to the ground. As a result, not long after, dozens of thugs came at once, armed with knives and guns to seek revenge on him.
Huo Yuanjia is less than 1.7 meters tall, and he may have a limited advantage in a solo fight like Tyson. But the biggest feature of Lost Trace Fist is that it is fast and ruthless, which just matches his body shape, coupled with his improvement of Lost Trace Fist, especially the characteristics of fighting direction, which makes this punch more suitable for one-to-many fights.
Therefore, those ruffians were naturally beaten by Huo Yuanjia and fled in all directions, and this scene was also seen by the shopkeeper Feng, the owner of the foot shop.
He bought all of Huo Yuanjia's firewood, and asked Huo Yuanjia to come to Tianjin to take over and maintain this territory. In the following year, Huo Yuanjia came to Tianjin Wei and engaged in a foot business.
Shopkeeper Feng also trusted Huo Yuanjia very much and handed over all affairs to him. After Huo Yuanjia took over the footwork, he successively canceled many funds to extort the people, so he was deeply welcomed by the people.
But the essence of the foot line is to act as the overlord of the government to manage the market or the wharf, Huo Yuanjia was unwilling to bully the market, so he offended the government, and then quit the foot line.
But during his time in Tianjin, he became acquainted with a person who had a profound impact on his life, and this person was Nong Jinsun.
Nong Jinsun, known as bamboo, the word Jinsun, a Manchu, originally from Hebei, is also a martial arts enthusiast. His family is better, his father was an official in Hubei, he also grew up in Hubei, and also studied in Japan, after returning to China, he followed Mr. Sun Yat-sen, opened a medicine store in Tianjin, and made friends with revolutionary aspirants under the cover of doing medicinal material business, and was active in Tianjin and Beijing for a long time.
After Huo Yuanjia quit the foot shop, he was invited by Nong Jinsun to Huaiqing Pharmacy, and more importantly, since then, he has also been deeply influenced by Nong Jinsun ideologically, and injected the seeds of patriotic revolution into his heart.
In the early spring of 1900, Li Gang, the bodyguard who escorted the imperial grain, bullied the small traders and was bumped into by Huo Yuanjia, and the two clashed.
This matter was heard by the big sword king Wu, he admired such a righteous man, so he became friends with Huo Yuanjia, and the two became friends. But soon after, Dadao Wang Wu was killed by the Qing army, which touched Huo Yuanjia a lot.
Big Knife King Five, formerly known as Wang Zhengyi, Zibin, a native of Cangzhou, Hebei, is the shopkeeper of Beijing Yuanshun Dart Bureau, because he is good at playing a big knife, so he has the name of "Big Knife King Five".
He is a good friend of Tan Si, one of the six gentlemen of Wuxu, and he is also very supportive of the Wuxu reform organized by Kang Youwei.
After Tan Sitong was killed, he took the risk of collecting his body and sent Tan's bones back to Liuyang, Hunan Province for burial. Since then, in order to avenge Tan Sitong, he has organized the assassination of Cixi's favorite minister Rong Lu several times.
In the same year, King Wu of the Great Sword was unfortunately hunted and killed by the Qing army because of his resistance to the Eight-Nation Alliance, and his head was hung on the city wall for public display.
In order to collect the body of King Wu of the Great Sword, Huo Yuanjia and Liu He, the author of "The Travels of the Old Remnant", tried to steal the body and officially bury it.
From then on, Huo Yuanjia hated the Eight-Nation Alliance very much, hated the cowardice of the Qing government, patriotic enthusiasm was completely ignited, he wanted to repay the country with martial arts, so, with the support of Nong Jinsun, opened a martial arts hall in Tianjin, recruited disciples, and recruited people with lofty ideals to join, report national affairs, and soon an opponent appeared.
Tiandang Theater came to a Russian Hercules, this man can roll up iron plates with his bare hands, and can also tear up thick iron chains, and he also said wildly: Fight all over China's invincible opponents, and let the "sick man of East Asia" see what real kung fu is.
Seeing that this person was so arrogant, Huo Yuanjia was furious in his heart, and immediately invited Nong Jinsun, the owner of the Huaiqing Hall, and his apprentice Liu Zhensheng to go to the theater to ask for a competition with the Russian Hercules.
As soon as the Russian Hercules heard that it was Huo Yuanjia, he immediately coaxed, he said that he was just bluffing, he had no real skills at all, and his so-called kung fu was just a trick used for acting.
In this regard, Huo Yuanjia put forward conditions, asking him to publish an apology, publicly admit his erroneous words and deeds of insulting China, and make amends in public. Although Hercules agreed on the surface, he turned around and fled Tianjin.
Although Huo Yuanjia did not compete with the Russian Hercules, after this incident, Huo Yuanjia became famous, and his prestige for winning glory for the country spread far and wide, and his greater influence after that came from Shanghai.
03 Mingzhen on the beach
With the signing of the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, Guangzhou, Fuzhou, Xiamen, Ningbo and Shanghai were all listed as treaty ports, and Shanghai gradually became an important base for Western powers to enter China.
In 1909, there was another British Hercules named Opiyin at the Luoying Cinema in Shanghai. In his last performance in Shanghai, he offered to compete with the Chinese, and his words were also contemptuous.
Later, a group of patriots Nong Jinsun, Chen Tiesheng and others "wanted to hire famous fighters to compete on stage and show their yellow souls", and Huo Yuanjia was naturally invited.
In March 1903, Huo Yuanjia and his apprentice Liu Zhensheng rushed to Shanghai to negotiate martial arts competitions with foreigners, but the British Hercules were restricted everywhere.
He said that when he first came to China, he did not understand the methods of Chinese competition, so he had to follow the rules of Western boxing, wearing a holster on his hands, and only allowed to attack the upper part of the waist, not his feet.
Huo Yuanjia, on the other hand, insisted on the Chinese way of fighting in the ring, using both hands and feet, without restrictions, if there were casualties, each had his own destiny.
Seeing that Huo Yuanjia would not give in, the foreigner proposed to use 10,000 gold as a deposit, so that Huo Yuanjia would retreat. But with the support of friends in Shanghai, Huo Yuanjia quickly raised the money.
For a while, the negotiations between the two people "you come and go" have been reported from time to time, and the Chinese people have been discussing it a lot. Huo Yuanjia also placed an advertisement in the newspaper: The world ridicules the continent as a sick man's country, and I am a sick man in the sick man's country, and I am willing to try it with the healthy people in the world. He also claimed to be a foreign strongman.
Although the two finally agreed to use wrestling to win or lose by falling to the ground, in the end, like the Russian Hercules, the British Hercules did not dare to play and chose to escape.
The ring of Zhang Yuan's martial arts arena has been set up, in order not to sweep everyone's interest, Huo Yuanjia and his apprentice Liu Zhensheng learned skills with the audience, and all those who volunteered to go on stage to compete were defeated by Huo and Liu's apprentices, just like that, Huo Yuanjia's fame shook Shanghai Beach overnight.
In Huo Yuanjia's lifetime, the only public competition was with the Japanese. Japan is known for its judo, and after hearing that Huo Yuanjia scared away the Russian and British strongmen, he was very unconvinced by this and was determined to try it with Huo Yuanjia.
In September 1910, the Japan Judo Association organized a competition based on the principle of "not harming". At the beginning of the competition, Japan sent five judo masters one after another, all of which were defeated by Huo Yuanjia's apprentice Liu Zhensheng.
The Japanese team leader was not convinced, so he personally went on the field to compete with Huo Yuanjia, and he wanted to play tricks during the competition, but he was unexpectedly recognized by Huo Yuanjia, and finally Huo Yuanjia was beaten to the point that his bones were broken, so he had to admit defeat.
Since then, the martial arts boom in Shanghai has been high, and "Shanghai people know more about the martial arts function of Yuanjia, and it would be a pity if it is not spread." With the help of his friend Nong Jinsun, Huo Yuanjia founded the "China Jingwu Gymnastics" in Shanghai.
He not only taught Lost Trace Boxing to the outside world, but also widely issued hero posts, inviting martial arts experts from all over the country to teach at the gymnastics club, which was undoubtedly a breakthrough feat for the Jianghu faction that was accustomed to its own faction.
After learning of this, Mr. Sun Yat-sen not only praised him, but also wrote a plaque of "martial spirit" for the gymnastics club.
However, just when his patriotic career was beginning to bear fruit, Huo Yuanjia died of illness suddenly.
On September 14, 1910, Huo Yuanjia died of illness at the age of 42. The following year, Liu Zhensheng returned to Li and was buried in his hometown of Xiaonanhe (now Jingwu Town, Xiqing District, Tianjin).
04 The Mysterious Theory of Death
There has always been controversy about Huo Yuanjia's death.
Some people say that he is not in good health, and he will work day and night for gymnastics, new injuries and old problems, and finally run out of oil and lamps, there are also some.
But what about another theory that attributes his death to an elaborate conspiracy?
Since losing to Huo Yuanjia in the Japanese judo team, the Japanese, who have always regarded themselves as samurai, are not convinced, and in order to defeat Huo Yuanjia, they have come up with many strange tricks, and even do not hesitate to use poison in private.
After investigation, they found that Huo Yuanjia was not in good health and needed to take medicine for a long time, so they added a chronic poison to his daily prescription.
A month later, Huo Yuanjia's condition deteriorated and he died.
As for how the Japanese poisoned, there are two theories:
One is that he bought off a certain disciple of Huo Yuanjia, and the disciple secretly mixed poison into daily medicine;
Another theory is that the Japanese recommended a Japanese doctor to Huo Yuanjia, and this doctor added poison to the prescription when prescribing the medicine.
However, in view of various conditions at that time, although it was suspected that Huo Yuanjia died unusually, there was no evidence, and the matter had to be closed.
It was not until the 80s of the 20th century that the descendants of the Huo family renovated the cemetery for him, and found that his bones had black markings when he moved the grave, and then after examination, it was found that he was indeed poisoned during his lifetime, so the fact that Huo Yuanjia was poisoned was confirmed.
In the legend, it is said that Huo Yuanjia has a disciple named Chen Zhen, who was also put on the big screen by Bruce Lee, but in reality, Huo Yuanjia does not have an apprentice named Chen Zhen, his eldest apprentice is Liu Zhensheng mentioned above.
After Huo Yuanjia's death, Liu Zhensheng and Huo's descendants developed the Jingwu Gymnastics Association to a new height.
05 The power of Huo's descendants
In film and television dramas, Huo Yuanjia is always accompanied by a confidante, but in reality, he has already married a wife and had children. His wife, Wang, is from a neighboring village, tall, small-footed, and beautiful, and can be regarded as a small jasper.
There is no love at first sight between them, and they are not childhood sweethearts, the Wang family, like women in the feudal tradition, obey their husbands, take care of all the things in the family by themselves, and live a simple life with Huo Yuanjia.
After Huo Yuanjia's death, although he had the name of the founder of the Jingwu Gymnastics Association, he did not improve financially, and his wife Wang had to raise four children alone, but even if it was so difficult, she did not choose to remarry.
They have four children together, and the eldest son, Huo Dongzhang, became his mother's helper when he became an adult, helping his mother take care of the family's affairs.
The two daughters, Huo Bingru and Huo Dongqin, got married as adults and followed in their mother's footsteps. However, it is a pity that Huo Bingru's marriage was not happy, she got married at the age of 19, and two years later her husband went abroad to work as a Chinese worker and never returned. Huo Bingru was left alone with a son, and later her son also died, and she cried blindly.
His wife, Wang, died in 1960 at the age of 91. In her life, she has only been with Huo Yuanjia for more than 20 years, but she has spent 50 years guarding her family.
The relationship between them is uneventful, but it shows the true greatness of never abandoning, and Wang is an amazing traditional woman who deserves respect.
Let's focus on Huo Yuanjia's second son: Huo Dongge, who inherited his father's will, took over the Jingwu Gymnastics Club, and continued to fulfill Huo Yuanjia's unfulfilled wish.
Jingwu Gymnastics, after Huo Yuanjia's death, was renamed Jingwu Sports Association, and this reform was also in line with the times.
In 1910, Nanyang College (the predecessor of Shanghai Jiaotong University), its principal Tang Wenzhi focused on physical education, and invited Liu Zhensheng, Zhang Fufu, Zhao Lianhe and three others from the China Jingwu Gymnastics School to teach northern boxing.
In September 1912, the president of Jingwu Gymnastics School was already a business celebrity Yuan Heng, under his auspices, Jingwu Gymnastics School successfully held the first Jingwu Games, which shook Shanghai for a while, and also ushered in new development opportunities.
After that, the Jingwu Gymnastics Association was officially renamed the Shanghai Jingwu Sports Association on April 6, 1916. The main reason is that in the historical situation of Shanghai in the late Qing Dynasty, sports assumed the important task of maintaining local law and order, participating in Shanghai's autonomy, and even directly participating in the revolution.
In this sense, sport is the equivalent of the military, and the so-called sports organizations are equivalent to local armed forces.
Later, with the further deepening of people's understanding of sports, the relationship between gymnastics and sports gradually became clear, abandoning the previous view of sports as a force in the military field, and then changing the name of gymnastics to sports.
In this historical context, the Jingwu Gymnastics Association has also been reformed and renamed the Jingwu Sports Association, the main significance of which is to use martial arts as a national sport, which has two meanings:
First, boxing is used in sports
Second, it is said that martial arts are in health, and the future of martial arts can be great.
After the name was changed to Jingwu Sports Association, the corresponding normative system was also established, with its own culture, using sports to interpret martial arts, and since then martial arts have also found a new place to settle down.
On the road to the development of the Jingwu Sports Association, Huo Yuanjia's descendants and disciples have made hard efforts.
In addition to the hard work of the eldest apprentice Liu Zhensheng, Huo Yuanjia's younger brother Huo Yuanqing served as the coach of the Shanghai Jingwu Sports Association, Huo Dongge also coached in the sports club with his uncle, and was also invited by the naval commander Wen Shude to serve as a naval technical combat instructor during this period.
In 1923, Huo Dongge was dispatched by the Central Jingwu Association to Indonesia to develop the Jingwu Sports Association, and then set up branches in Southeast Asia, promoting the influence of Jingwu Sports in the world.
At the same time, the domestic Jingwu Sports Association has also achieved vigorous development in southern cities, but the long-cherished wish of setting up a branch in Tianjin has been repeatedly delayed.
It was not until June 30, 1990 that the Jingwu Sports Association was finally established in Huo Yuanjia's hometown, and as a result, the dream of the Huo family and the dream of Tianjin people finally came true.
Although Huo Yuanjia died young, his martial spirit has always lived in the Jingwu Sports Association, which has been praised by people and brought martial arts culture to all over the world.