“No national form of fighting approaches Chinese boxing in the diversity and profundity of its forms. Traditionally, Chinese boxing has either been taught by verbal instruction, without books, or taught by secrets handed down by teachers to trusted students. Although effective as a means of transmitting a worthwhile system, this method was vulnerable to amateurs’ stealing and modifying part of the corpus. My intention has been to reflect the real, so that the reader may be equipped to reject the chicanery of the charlatans and their associates in the media. What passes in the West as kung fu (even the name is a distortion) is ludicrous by comparison.”
Robert W. Smith,
Chinese Boxing: Masters and Methods, 1974
Robert W. Smith
(December 27, 1926 – July 1, 2011) was an American martial artist and writer, most noted for his prodigious output of books and articles about the Asian martial arts and their masters. Smith’s writing was an important factor in the spread of Asian martial arts such as judo, karate, and taijiquan into the postwar United States.
