Martial Arts

This expert and readable distillation of several aspects of Chinese martial arts history sums up, definitively in English for the present, the verifiable facts and intriguing legends about the Shaolin Temple in North China, a perennial (though so far unsuccessful) Buddhist applicant for UNESCO World Heritage Site status–somewhat reminiscent of its contested reputation in late imperial (Ming-Qing) China as the birthplace of kung fu, one gathers from this book. Meir Shahar concludes that as the stories about the temple, its fighting monks, and their disciplines entered the late imperial years, China's "martial arts…