Nouvelle perspective sur les rebelles de l'Opéra!

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Voici un intéressant textes qui explique la probable (C'est une hypothèse) création de la légende des opéras rebelles et du Wing Chun :

https://chinesemartialstudies.com/2018/09/20/rethinking-wing-chuns-opera-rebels/

Extrait intéressant :

The Red Boat Revolutionaries: Creating a Legend

 

A very interesting picture has emerged from the preceding conversation.  There are at least two periods in the late Qing and early Republic era when factions within the Cantonese Opera community became very visibly involved in radical politics.  Both of these eras were short, but highly visible.  In fact, they were exactly the sort of thing that was likely to imprint itself on the popular imagination.

The first of these occurred in 1854-1855 when Li Wenman led a large number of companies into an open uprising against the government (and helping to lay siege to Guangzhou) in the midst of the Red Turban Revolt.  Far from being covert, most of this violence occurred on the battlefield.  The political motivations of the major leaders of the uprising were far from unified.  One group escaped the government’s victory in Guangdong to establish their own Taiping Kingdom in the north.  Other factions, including many of the bandit and secret society chiefs, appear to have been motivated mostly by the promise of spoils.  The tens of thousands of peasant recruits who filled out the various armies were motivated mostly by physical hunger and economic desperation.  While highly destructive and dedicated to the overthrow of the local government, the Red Turban Revolt was in some respects surprisingly apolitical, especially in comparison to the ongoing Taiping Rebellion in central and northern China.

If you skip forward 50 years another group of radical opera singers appears.  These individuals are dedicated political revolutionaries.  They are ideologically and politically sophisticated, and they seek to spread their radical agenda through the many small theaters and stages that they visited.  Like everyone one else along the Pearl River Delta they journeyed by boat, often in the Red Boats that signaled the arrival of a traveling opera companies.  While never very commercially successful, they made their presence known throughout southern China and then they disappeared, almost as rapidly as they had emerged.

We now have all of the pieces to begin to build a new theory of origins of Red Boats Revolutionaries in the Wing Chun creation myth.  I should point out that this is just a theory and one that probably needs additional refinement and revision.  Given the nature of the discussion I can only marshal circumstantial evidence in its favor, but it may be an idea worth considering.

As Wing Chun started to gain popularity in the late 1920s and 1930s it became necessary to repackage discussions of the art’s history and origins in ways that were compatible with the basic pattern of the Hung Mun schools (all of which claimed an origin from Shaolin) and the expectations of potential students (who wanted a story to tell them what this new art was all about).  Story tellers in the 1930s and 1940s (individuals like Ng Chung So) would have been alive during the final years of the Qing dynasty and may have remembered the revolutionary opera companies on their Red Boats, spreading radical ideology in their wake.  Most of their students, however, would have been too young to have any firsthand knowledge of these events.

In an attempt to bring the story of Leung Yee Tai and Wong Wah Bo into conformation with the highly popular Shaolin ethos, the distant memory of the violent 1854 uprising may have been conflated with the more recent revolutionary opera companies to create the vision of a group that sought to use violent means to overthrow the government while “staying undercover” in their daily lives.  Stories of such groups, often with reference to various secret societies, were rife in southern Chinese folklore and were particularly common in the martial arts tales of the “rivers and lakes.”  In fact, given the fading memories of these two sets of radical opera performers, it seems rather natural that they would fall into this commonly available archetypal pattern.

Adopting this new synthesis would also have the added benefit of giving both Wong Wah Bo and Leung Yee Tai (and hence modern Wing Chun) some real revolutionary credibility.  This could only be helpful given how popular “revolutionary” rhetoric was in the 1930s.  It might also have helped to provide Wing Chun with some rhetorical cover since anyone who examined the art would immediately discover that it was dominated not by the working class (like the more popular Choy Li Fut) but by wealthy property owners and conservative right-wing political factions.

Il souligne aussi la question des opéras durant leur apogée dans les années 20 et Sun Yat-Sen!