Introduction

No subject has been more romanticized among students of Guangdongs martial arts (and Wing Chun

practitioners in particular) than the Red Boat companies of the Cantonese regional opera tradition. Late

19th and early 20th century martial arts folklore claimed that remnants of the Southern Shaolin Temple (including

the Abbot Jee Shin) found refuge among these wandering performers following the destruction of their sanctuary

by the hated Qing government.

Such stories make a lot of narrative sense. Because of their low social status, and ability to travel from place to

place without engendering too much suspicion, opera companies would seem to be the ideal cover for individuals

fleeing government persecution. They were even expected to house martial arts experts among their casts of

performers.

Of course the acceptance of these stories as historical facts requires us to overlook other inconvenient details,

starting with the likelihood that the Southern Shaolin Temple, imagined in so many Kung Fu legends, never

existed. Further, the anti-government activities of the various secret societies and triad organizations in southern

China during the late 19th century had much more to do with criminal scheming and social posturing than they did

any organized plan for actual political reform. Things become more complicated in the first decade of the

20th century when Sun Yat Sen begins to organize genuinely revolutionary activity among some of these groups,

but that is not what most Kung Fu legends are describing.

Most of the stories that see opera groups as dedicated political cells (rather than convenient covers for wandering

criminals) seem to date to the mid 20 th century or later. Some of them were not first recorded until quite recently.

In a recent post I looked at the actual history of political and revolutionary activities of Cantonese Opera troops. It

is true that these groups were often quite vocal in making political demands, and in one memorable

instance even went into open rebellion against the state (along with many other elements of Southern Chinas

underclass.) Still, a detailed examination of these episodes does not validate the historical accuracy of the Wing

Chun folklore. Rather it strongly suggests that the Red Boat Opera companies were never involved in the sorts of

activities that are generally ascribed to them.

This does not mean that individuals interested in Wing Chuns history are free to ignore the opera connection. I

suspect that it is actually very significant that the orthodox Wing Chun genealogies claim that Leung Jan was

influenced by the Cantonese opera tradition during the mid 19th century (probably during the Opera Ban following

the Red Turban Revolt for reasons which I have discussed elsewhere). In fact, Cantonese opera had a

particularly close relationship with the southern Chinese martial arts and likely had a substantive impact on both

their development and public perception.

It is not my goal in these posts to dismiss any connection between the two. Rather, it may be necessary draw the

line between folklore, on the one hand, and social history, on the other, in order to open a space for new

research. I think that this is a rich topic that could potentially yield findings that would be important not just for our
understanding of hand combat systems like Wing Chun and Choy Li Fut, but also southern Chinese popular

culture as a whole.

Unfortunately this is not the sort of thing that is easily summarized in a single blog post. In my last essay on

the topic I restricted my focus to the somewhat complex relationship between Cantonese Opera and

revolutionary politics in the late Qing and Republic Periods. In the current post I want to introduce some basic

historical and social description about what life was like on the Red Boats. Southern China was a dangerous

place during much of their period of operation. What precautions did they take when plying the waters? How did

the opera companies fit into the local economy of violence along the Pearl River Estuary? Just as importantly,

how did they manage to train their own apprentices in Kung Fu while constantly on the move?

The historical investigation of these questions is complicated by our reliance on oral accounts. Specifically, we

wish to know more about the Red Boats to expand our understanding of the development of the southern

Chinese martial arts. Yet from the 1970s onward (and the process rapidly accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s)

martial arts culture has been read back onto the accounts of the Red Boats themselves. This created a seamless

system of self-reinforcing folkloric accounts easily mistaken for history.

Nor is this challenge restricted to the realm of opera. Traditionally most individuals within Chinese society held

the martial arts in low esteem. They were not an integral part of how people remembered their own cultural past.

Yet after the Kung Fu Craze of the 1970s, where these traditional fighting systems came to be accepted as a

legitimate marker of Chinese identity, this changed. Increasingly they have come to be projected back onto the

past, often in very creative (if totally anachronistic) ways. In the final section of this post I hope to examine a few

examples of this process as it relates to Cantonese opera and consider how we might attempt to control for it.

In a future installment of this series I will examine some 19 th century accounts of Cantonese opera performances,

particularly as they related to military plays. I will also take a closer look at what we think we know about how

these groups learned their martial arts in the first place, as well as the realities of river violence and piracy during

the late imperial period. Hopefully this series of posts will lay the groundwork for future research on the

relationship between the martial arts and opera as related strands in the regions popular culture.

Lastly, I should say a few things about my sources. There are really only a handful of books and articles in the

scholarly literature that focus directly on the history and description of Cantonese opera as it relates to questions

of interest to martial artists. This blog post relies heavily on two sources. The first is an article by the

anthropologists Barbara E. Ward titled The Red Boats of the Canton Delta: A Historical Chapter in the Sociology

of Chinese Regional Drama (Proceedings of the International Conference on Sinology. 1981. pp. 233-258.) Her

work is based on a very large number of interviews (conducted between approximately 1975-1980) with

individuals who lived and performed on the Red Boats. Ward also conducted extensive ethnographic research
with Cantonese Opera companies in her home city of Hong Kong (where she was employed as a professor of

Anthropology at Chinese University of Hong Kong.)

The other source that I have turned too in writing this is a Master thesis by Loretta Siuling Yeung titled Red Boat

Troupes and Cantonese Opera. This research was completed much more recently (2010) and was supervised

at the University of Georgia. Yeung also conducted a number of interviews, but seems to have relied much more

on the historical and secondary literature. This change in research strategy is certainly understandable given the

lack of surviving veteran Red Boat performers in 2010 and the academic goals of a Masters thesis. In general

the historical accounts of Yeung and Ward are quite consistent. Still, the differences which occasionally appear

are also quite suggestive.

nderstanding the Red Boats as a Physical, Economic and Social System

The Red Boats present the student of popular culture with a number of paradoxes. The era in which they plied

the waters of the Pearl River was absolutely critical to our understanding of Cantonese opera. In fact, this is

when many of the traditions and customs that we now think of as ancient and timeless first emerged.

Barbara Ward has noted that echoes of life on the Red Boats can be seen in many aspects of modern, theater-

bound, opera troops in Hong Kong. Everything from the arrangement of dressing rooms to the details of incense

burning rituals looks back to life on the boats. Throughout the post-war period veterans performers who had

actually lived on the boats were lionized and idealized by their younger peers. Yet a number of very basic

questions about these vessels remain unanswered.

During the 1970s Ward and others were able to locate a number of individuals who could give very detailed

accounts of what the structure of these boats had been like. Interestingly almost all of the actual Red Boats were

internally identical.

The vessels were all made to the same basic specifications and were owned either by the opera guild or some

other group of individuals (I have not yet been able to answer this question). Individual opera companies

generally rented these vessels for years at a time, and were responsible for hiring their own crew of sailors. The

high degree of standardization between boats allowed for companies to change ships with little disruption as the

social structure of their company was designed to be compatible with any of the 60 or so specially built Red Boats

which sailed the waters of southern China.

The era of the Red Boats was also much briefer than most martial artists realize. When speaking of these opera

companies I suspect that the vessels themselves were really only part of the entire equation, and possibly a small

one at that. For me the most interesting aspect of Wards extensive research was the discovery that each

Cantonese Opera company had a shared social structure optimized for both performance and life on the boat.
These groups were not generalists or traveling troubadour/mercenaries. Rather they were units composed of

highly specialized performers supported by an elaborate physical and administrative infrastructure. The real

technology of these companies, the thing that accounted for their remarkable success, was actually

organizational in nature. It was their own internal structure and group cultural. The physical layout of the boats

both reflected this and helped it to gel. In fact, Ward found that by the 1980s (more than 30 years after then last

voyage of a Red Boat) it remained remarkably intact.

No historical account, either in Chinese or any other language, mentions Red Boats in southern China prior to the

1850s. It is possible that they were introduced as a social and economic system for organizing opera

performances just prior to the Red Turban Revolt of the 1850s, but if so they made very few voyages before the

decade long opera ban that followed the end of that conflict. The real start of the era of Red Boat activity was in

the 1870s. From that time forward these vessels became a conspicuous aspect of local popular culture.

The purpose of the Red Boats was to allow opera companies to travel from one temple festival to the next during

the performance season. Almost all of these voyages were actually carried out through southern Chinas

extensive river system. These were not ocean going vessels and were not actually capable of moving along

Chinas coastline. Occasionally a pair of boats (they always traveled two at a time) would be dispatched to fill a

contract in Macao, but that was really as far into open water as any of these vessels ever ventured. Even that

journey was probably a harrowing experience for the cast and crew.

The Red Boats themselves appear to have been an artifact of one stage of the economic development within the

Cantonese opera industry. Clearly it took a lot of capital to build these ships, and individual companies had to

earn a lot of money to pay the rent on them. Prior to the 1850s most opera companies still traveled by water (with

few roads in the region almost everyone in southern China did). But there was nothing remarkable about their

vessels and I have yet to see evidence indicating that the internal structure of these companies were

standardized to the same extent that would later become common.

During this earlier period the regions economy was generally smaller and it does not appear that traveling

companies could make all that much money. But as revenues grew in the middle of the century it became

possible for the opera guild to invest in new technologies that would streamline the performance process. In

short, the Red Boat system that modern martial artists seem to be so interested in really appears to be an artifact

of economic changes that were just starting in the middle of the 19th century.

The Red Boat opera companies reached the peak of their popularity in the 1920s. This was really their golden

era. After that they became a victim of their own success. Traditionally Cantonese operas were only performed

on makeshift temporary stages that were erected as part of a temple festival. The temples offered these

performances to the local gods, and were responsible for raising the funds that were used to pay the actors who

stage the performance. The entire community would then come out to watch the show.
In the middle of the 19th century southern China had no (or very few) dedicated theaters. It took a substantial

investment of capital to build the Red Boats, but they were still a stop-gap solution for the opera guild. The truth

was that owning land and building theaters was incredibly expensive. There simply wasnt enough money in

opera to make that viable in most places.

However, the rapid economic growth of the 1920s started to change all of this. As opera companies grew rich,

and more people flocked to cities, suddenly it became possible to build permanent theaters. Access to these

structures was still controlled by the guild, but the cost of staging a performance was vastly lowered if one did not

have to travel to it. And when it was necessary to travel to the countryside to fulfill lucrative festival contracts, a

company could simply book passage on the new steam ships and trains.

Red Boat opera troops continued to travel through the 1930s but the institution was in decline even at that point.

The Japanese invasion in 1938 put a stop to much of this activity. Rumor has it that they even bombed a pair of

boats (possibly the last ones) moored in the harbor of Guangzhou. Other accounts state that the last known

sighting of a pair of Red Boats was in Macao circa 1950.

A number of people have asked me why the Red Boats were never really resurrected after WWII. I think that the

answer is basically financial. The boats themselves represented a certain level of capital investment which made

sense when the Cantonese opera companies were starting to enjoy a surplus (due to changes in the structure of

the local economy) but could not yet afford speedier forms of travel and permanent theaters for off-season

performances. The Red Boats helped to give shape to the internal culture of the modern Cantonese opera

company, but once they ceased to fill their basic economic function they were quickly discarded.