Nhat Nam
Nhất NamVietnamese art unified from 1983 by Ngô Xuân Bính out of Thanh Nghệ traditions; strong in Russia and Belarus.
Quick Facts
VietnamCharacter & Origin
Organisation & Competition
What the style is built from
Editorial rating on a 0–3 scale, based on how much room each area gets in ordinary training.
About Nhat Nam
Nhất Nam is a Vietnamese martial art that was given its present form from 1983 onward, in Hanoi, by Ngô Xuân Bính. This was not a matter of creating a new system out of nothing but of unification: Ngô Xuân Bính gathered and organized the fighting traditions of the Thanh Nghệ region, that is, of the provinces of Thanh Hóa and Nghệ An in the northern part of central Vietnam. He recorded the result in a pair of books called Nhất Nam căn bản, meaning the Foundations of Nhất Nam, whose first and second volumes form the technical canon of the whole art. Its roots reach deeper still: according to Vietnamese sources, Nhất Nam derives from an art called Hét, or Hec, which was practiced in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in the provinces of Thanh Hóa, Nghệ An, and Hà Tĩnh, and the name Nhất Nam was adopted once its various branches had been unified. Technically it rests on the principle that the weaker overcomes the stronger: an attack is not met head-on but evaded so that it misses, and only then does a strike follow to a vulnerable point. According to master Đào Trung Hiếu, Nhất Nam works with low stances, soft movement, and speed, turning an opponent's own force back against him, and it was created specifically for the physical build of the Vietnamese. Training places as much weight on moral conduct and measure as on physical preparation; Ngô Xuân Bính remarked that martial arts are not about violence but a path toward self-improvement and toward harmony between the individual and the community. How the art reached abroad is unusual too. During the nineteen-nineties it settled above all in Russia, spreading from there into Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine; it is also practiced in Switzerland and in the United Kingdom. England has its own Nhất Nam federation, and Switzerland has the association L'association Suisse de Nhat-Nam.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.