Sibpalgi (18 Korean Martial Arts)
십팔기The Korean syllabus of eighteen fighting disciplines, written down in 1759 and expanded to twenty-four thirty years later.
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About Sibpalgi (18 Korean Martial Arts)
Sibpalgi means eighteen methods in Korean and denotes the set of fighting disciplines that the Korean court wrote down and arranged in the eighteenth century. It is therefore not a school with a founder but a military syllabus: the earlier manual Muyejebo, from the end of the sixteenth century, contained six weapon disciplines, and in 1759 twelve more were added to them, producing the collection Muyesinbo. Its compilation was directed by Crown Prince Sado, who was then acting for King Yeongjo. Thirty years later, in 1790, the court expanded the syllabus again and issued the illustrated Muyedobotongji with twenty-four disciplines; that book is today the main source for the reconstruction of Korean armed combat. The repertoire consists above all of edged weapons: several kinds of sword, among them the two-handed ssangsudo and the one-handed yedo, spears of various lengths, the three-pronged fork dangpa, the long staff gonbang and flails, together with mounted disciplines and unarmed fighting. In Korean the word sibpalgi also has a second, looser sense in which it is used for Chinese martial arts as a whole. Today a modern Korean system assembled from this documentary base is practised under the same name and has its own association; this page therefore gives no founder and treats 1759 as the date of codification, not of origin.
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