I'm looking for a strong, heavy monk's spade. Any help?

[GeneChing]

Also, my order arrived! Now I have all three Kung Fu Magazines with information on spades, the First World Traditional Wushu Festival DVD so I can see that guy slinging around his antique spade, and the Shaolin Monk Spade DVD so I can see Shi Yanran doing his thing. I hope you're happy, Gene.

Yes this makes me very happy. Thank you Sha Seng. We need more forum members like you here.

the sun moon shovel is a fantasy weapon created by Chinese opera.

I'm inclined to agree. And I hate it when I agree with bawang.

I thought it was from Journey to the West or Tales from the water margin? Maybe even Romance from the 3 kingdoms?
old xia novels. But hey, it makes sense because those and others were eventually expressed as opera as well.

Hey, just curious, but have you ever sat through a entire chinese opera?

I've sat through many whole operas. But then, I enjoy opera. Part of the point of my cover story was that if you look at the original source material, specifically Journey to the West and Water Margin, the weapons described don't quite fit what we have now. I would venture to say that both opera and religious ritual weapons had a tremendous impact upon many of the long weapons commonly used in Chinese martial arts today. For opera, the weapons evolved to be cartoonish and caricature, so they might be easily read from stage. For religious ritual, they were imbued with all sorts of symbolic adornments. That being said, there is some evidence that once these weapon designs were established, they were indeed used for self-defense. And this might have happened centuries ago, so while their origins might be fantastic, at some point, they may have become practical.

Of course, this is all conjecture, as the evidence for this is rather circumstantial. There is this trend to view things as 'real' or 'fake' but anyone who has studied sinology to some depth realizes quickly that there are often complications, that Chinese culture doesn't simplify so neatly.

As for the outrageously heavy weapons, that does have a lot of precedent in classic novels and myth. Guan Gong's Kwandao was super heavy, as was Sagacious Lu's spade. Today, we can easily attribute this to mythic exaggeration. However, the practice of working absurdly heavy weapons has a longstanding tradition within Chinese acrobatics. Detractors might say 'that's impractical' but keep in mind that opera connection, along with the idea that 'kung fu' doesn't literally mean 'martial arts'; It means time-honed skill. The idea of working long weapons for practical self-defense is obsolete today. If you make the 'lighter weapons are more practical' argument, you might as well be working with graphite. I love watching someone work a super heavy long weapon. That's some serious skill.