Taiwan Today

Jang Yokhua and a small group of enthusiasts are picking up the craft of making traditional bows and the skills of using them.

Every Friday evening, about a dozen people practice archery at the range of the Taipei Jhong Jheng People Sports Center. Compared to those used in archery competitions, the bows these people use seem to be quite “shabby.” They are made of wood, bamboo and horn instead of hi-tech synthetic materials like fiberglass or carbon fiber and there are not any “accessories” such as aiming and balancing devices added to the basic limb-string structure.

It is little surprise that the level of precision demonstrated by these archers is not even close to that in a modern archery competition. But the group of archers, concentrating on their stance, breath and every other detail of each shot, do not seem to mind. What is the fun in it, then, if hitting the bull’s eye is next to impossible? “Traditional archery is the practice of perfect coordination and discipline of mind and body,” says Jang Yokhua, the instructor of the group. “We’re always working on that and trying to get things right and once or twice in a lifetime, we shoot a perfect shot.”

Jang notes that in theory, the precision of modern archery can also be reached in traditional archery, as it is said in the ancient texts of many cultures that the best archers could hit tiny targets from a long distance. In practice, however, such skill can rarely be reproduced by modern-day bare-bow archers. Some of the best archers in South Korea and Japan, where traditional archery is still practiced, have tried to use traditional bows to reproduce some of the scenes described in the old texts by shooting at the same size targets from half the distance, and the best they can get is two or three hits in 100 shots.

For traditional archers today, hitting the target is a bonus for a feat of perfect coordination. For a long period of time before firearms came onto the scene, however, it was a matter of life and death. Chinese legend has it that there was a shamanistic archery cult in ancient China. The shamans and rulers used their bows to keep barbarians from their lands, as well as to perform archery rituals to pray for rain or reduce floods. Something must have gone seriously wrong in their ceremonies, however, as one morning they found that there were 10 suns in the sky scorching all the crops. To save the people, bowman Hou Yi took his bow and arrows to the top of a mountain, shot down nine of the suns and ordered the only one left to rise and fall in a disciplined way.

Although there is no knowing who invented the bow and arrow or when they were invented, the Chinese are believed to be among the earliest archers. Stone arrowheads unearthed from an archeological site in Shanxi province in China provide evidence that bows were widely used by residents in the area some 28,000 years ago. The techniques of making bows and arrows and the skills of using them have also been recorded in words and images in official documents and literary works.

To the ancient Chinese, archery was not only a required skill in war and hunting, but also a measure of education, character and, if necessary, competitiveness. Confucius (551–479 BC) said that a refined person has no use for competitiveness; yet if he cannot avoid it, let him compete through archery.

Refined Competition

On entering the archery range he will salute and show respect for other competitors, while on leaving the range he will share ceremonial wine with them, and thus even in competition he will be acting according to the principles of refined conduct. All in all, through practicing archery and its related etiquette, people not only gained proficiency in a skill of war, but also cultivated their minds and learned how to behave with refinement.

Another significant development came in the Tang dynasty (618–907), when archery became a compulsory subject in military examinations, which spurred an academic interest in archery techniques and resulted in the publication of a number of Chinese archery manuals, which have survived to this day. Hua Yue, a martial artist and poet of the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279), ranked archery the most difficult yet powerful on his list of 18 martial arts and 36 war weapons. Training in archery remained a major concern in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) and the Qing dynasty (1644–1911).

But by the early 1890s, the Qing court, faced with growing military losses to foreign colonial powers, conceded that archery had no place in the modern battlefield and deleted it from the examination syllabus. When bows lost their role in the military, the craft of making them became irrelevant and gradually died out. Jang explains that the construction techniques of the Chinese bow changed little from the days of Confucius. The bow was built from a wooden or sometimes bamboo core, with ox horn on the belly, or inner face of the bow, to take compression, as well as sinew on the outside face of the bow to resist extension—techniques not used in anything else. “A swordsmith can easily become a blacksmith and more or less preserve the craft by making farming tools or other things,” Jang says. “But the technique of bow making is so specific that it can’t be applied to making anything else.” Jang thinks that the last traditional Chinese bowyers went out of business in the 1940s, and the craft remained lost for decades until he started to “rebuild” it about a decade ago.

Jang’s interest in archery started when he was a child. “All boys have the dream of becoming a swordsman or something and try to make swords, bows and arrows with whatever materials they can find,” he recalls of the first bamboo bow he made when he was 11. His more serious archery practice started with modern archery when he was a high school student. He recalls that at that time, American-made hunting bows started to appear in Taiwan and he and some of his friends became interested in them and started to practice in an indoor range in Taipei. After a while, Jang saw an antique Chinese bow belonging to a friend who collected swords, though at the time he had neither the knowledge nor the intention to make his own bows.

After reading some articles in archery magazines when he was studying for a master’s degree in the United States, Jang contacted a few traditional craftsmen who still had the know-how and started to experiment with bow making. After returning to Taiwan with some understanding, he obtained several damaged antique bows from China and cut them up to research how they were made. “One of the courses I took at school was reverse engineering,” he says. “I never thought that I’d have the chance to apply it in real life.”

Knowing how a bow is constructed and actually constructing it are totally different things. The first thing Jang needs to deal with is obtaining the proper materials. In addition to wood, horn and sinew, the making of horn bows also requires a special adhesive made from fish bladders. The wood, which needs to be from an oilless species so that other parts can be glued to it, is fairly easy to acquire, but it is more difficult to find ox horns long and straight enough. “As for sinew and fish bladders, you know the Chinese,” Jang says. “They are usually found well-done with sweet-and-sour sauce in a restaurant.” For a time, he tried to substitute some of the materials with other modern supplies and adhesives, but none of the replacements met his needs.

Next, the actual crafting is a process full of trial and error. The limb and recurves at the ends of a bow need to be perfectly symmetrical, while applying the layers of sinew that determine the strength needed to pull back the string is learned through experience, and even some of the tools need to be homemade. After gluing the parts together, for example, Jang binds them with string and then uses a special tool he made himself to tighten the string in order to compress the pieces to form a strong and seamless bond.

Maturing the Bow

Upon completion, which usually takes around six months, the bow, depending on its length, needs to be bent to a certain angle for between six and 12 months in order for the different internal stresses of the materials to align and combine, or for “maturity,” in the craftsman’s term. The shooting range for Jang’s horn bows can reach 400 meters. To the best of his knowledge, no other bow made of modern materials, single or composite, has the same durability and elastic quality demonstrated by this ancient composite limb structure.

In the past decade or so, Jang has completed only a handful of bows. The lengthy process is an obvious reason, while another is that Jang has invested considerable time in communicating with enthusiasts of traditional archery in other countries and promoting the practice in Taiwan. The sport, however, has experienced difficulties in gaining popularity. Jang admits that for one thing, it is hard to persuade people that there is more fun in traditional archery, with its focus on practice, than in hitting the target in modern archery. Jang admits that modern archery “is all about precision.” “With all those aiming and balancing devices, most people can do pretty well after some practice.”

It is also more difficult to find quality traditional bows. In the past, most local enthusiasts used bows made by an American maker. In recent years, however, there has been another option, the locally made Ji Yun Bow by Ji Yun Archery. Cho Han-ching, owner of the workshop, has only been practicing traditional archery for a few years, taking up the sport after he retired from running a printing company. Like Jang, he made his first bow when he was still a boy, only to realize later that he was not to become a hero who saved the world with his archery skills. Following his retirement, however, he had the time and money to pick up his childhood dream. And after being one of the “victims” of expensive imports, Cho decided to make his own bows. With Jang’s help, he developed Ji Yun bows. Using wood and bamboo for the limb, Cho’s bows have a shooting range of 250 meters. In the past three years, Cho has made about 30 bows in two styles.

So, come Friday evening at the archery range of the Taipei Jhong Jheng People Sports Center, the small group of enthusiasts wind up their horn bows, imported bows or the latest Ji Yun bows and concentrate on their sport and, as usual, they rarely hit the bull’s eye. “It may be a little difficult for others to understand the fun in it,” Cho says. “But for us, this is just like the arrows we’re shooting—there’s no looking back once it leaves the string.”

Write to Jim Hwang at jim@mail.gio.gov.tw