Late Chinese national hero---- Huo Yuanjia

Huo Yuanjia	Huo Yuanjia Film

The Huo family were migrants from Shanxi Province arriving in Tianjin during the late Qing Dynasty. Huo Yuanjia's father Huo Endi, the sixth generation of Huos to practise Mizong Boxing*, had worked as a bodyguard for twelve years and was highly regarded. As a child, Huo Yuanjia was frail and delicate; thus, his father considered him unfit for martial arts training. The elder Huo, therefore, did not teach him the martial arts of Mizong Boxing handed down from the older generation of the Huo family. Yuanjia was ordered to concentrate on his studies, but he could not reconcile himself to this allocation of priorities. Early every morning while his father was teaching his nine brothers Mizong Boxing, he would climb up the tree in front of the training hall to eavesdrop. He firmly grasped in his mind every movement his father demostrated to his brothers and secretly practised what he learned for more than a dozen years. Yuanjia eventually attained perfection in Mizong Boxing, exceeding the skills of his brothers.
Tianjin traditionally has been a port city of strategic significance. In l860, Tianjin was forced to become an open trading port. The demarcation of British, French and American concessions within the city was followed by an influx of foreigners. Among these foreigners were the legendary Veronica, a Russian of unusual size and strength, and Myerson, a powerful American boxer nicknamed "Killer". On separate occasions, they reputedly challenged Chinese kungfu masters in Tianjin and Shanghai to a fight and insulted the Chinese by calling them "the sickmen of the Orient". Huo Yuanjia boldly stepped forward and accepted their challenges. In the ensuing matches, he broke the left arm of Myerson and bested the gigantic Veronica. These two exploits were given coverage by newspapers in St. Petersburg and New York.

To promote the development of martial arts and to ensure that Chinese would not be insulted again, Huo Yuanjia set up the Jingwu Physical Training Society in Shanghai. Here he taught his disciples all that he knew about Mizong Boxing, in the process discarding the old family credo that no outsider should be given access to this skill. In addition, he invited masters of other kungfu schools to be coaches so that his disciples could also benefit from other types of boxing.

In l9l0, Huo Yuanjia became seriously ill with tuberculosis and was bedridden. Prior to his illness, he had easily defeated ten Japanese judo masters within a very short time. Some people reckoned from this event that Huo was a victim of a revenge murder perpetrated by a Japanese vagabond, but this is nothing more than an unsubstantiated rumor. The fact is that Huo Yuanjia had lived frugally to save every cent for the establishment and administration of the Jingwu Society, being parsimonious to the extent that very plain foods such as water-soaked rice and salted vegetables were his daily fare. At the same time, he was inclined to exert himself so hard that he overtaxed the limits of his strength. When he finally developed tuberculosis, he would never regain his good health. He never recovered and died on September l4 of the same year at the age of 42.