Jixiao Xinshu

The Jixiao Xinshu is also one of the earliest-existing East Asian texts to address the relevance of Chinese martial arts with respect to military training and warfare.

Several contemporary martial arts styles of Qi's era are mentioned in the book, including the staff method of the Shaolin temple.

As the Mongol forces of Altan Khan raided the northern frontier, China's coastline fell prey to wokou pirates, who were ostensibly Japanese in origin.

Qi Jiguang was assigned to the defense of Zhejiang in 1555, where he created his own standards of military organization, equipment, tactics, training, and procedures.

The chapters included in the 18-chapter edition are as follows:[3] In the Jixiao Xinshu, Qi Jiguang recommended a 12-man team known as the "mandarin duck formation" (Chinese: 鴛鴦陣; pinyin: yuānyāng zhèn), which consisted of 11 soldiers and one person for logistics.

[5] After suffering several defeats to pirates, Qi also made a recommendation for a concerted campaign to integrate musket teams into the army, based on their superior range and firepower compared to bows and arrows.

Once the enemy was within range, each layer would fire in succession, and afterwards a unit armed with traditional close combat weapons would move forward ahead of the musketeers.

Muskets in particular exploded with alarming frequency, leading Qi to eschew reliance on firearms in favor of using melee tools such as swords, rattan shields, and sharpened bamboo poles.

While a hanfull of postures are illustrated, the tone of the verses implies that the reader should already be familiar with the techniques mentioned, or that Qi had little interest in actually divulging any empty hand fighting methods in his text.

Others such as Single Whip, Golden Rooster, Push Mountain, Seven Star Stance, Red Fist, Beast Head Pose, are staples of several northern Chinese martial arts in general.

Some theorize that modern Taijiquan started as the gambits described in the 32 Empty hand verses of Qi Jiguang being taken by Chen Wangting as the basis for his supposedly new art.

The entire listing of late Ming dynasty martial arts was later copied without attribution by a manual of the Shaolin style, the Hand Combat Classic (Quanjing quanfa beiyao).

However, the later manual, with a preface dated to 1784, altered the text, adding a spurious claim that the history of hand combat had originated at the Shaolin Monastery.

In the late 16th century, the Japanese invasions of Korea also spurred great interest in military training methods within the Korean government.

In Japan both the 14- and 18-chapter editions were published several times, and some methods from the Jixiao Xinshu were transferred over to the Heiho Hidensho (Okugisho), a Japanese strategy book written by Yamamoto Kansuke in the 16th century.