Zui Quan (Drunken Boxing)
醉拳A family of Chinese styles imitating a drunk; the instability is both a deception and a source of power, the history mostly legend.
Quick Facts
ChinaCharacter & Origin
Training
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 Zui Quan (Drunken Boxing)
Zui quan, the drunken fist, is not a single school but a family of fighting methods that imitate the movement of a drunk person. In the Chinese martial arts it appears more as an advanced layer inside broader systems than as a standalone style: the Shaolin tradition, Hung Gar, Choy Li Fut and a number of other schools each have their own drunken sets. The principle is simple and yet demanding: the practitioner puts himself into instability, bending and twisting the torso in every direction, swaying and stumbling, and it is out of those falls and weight transfers that the power of the strike comes. The apparent helplessness is a deception meant to draw the opponent into a rash attack into empty space. Besides strikes the repertoire includes grips, locks and throws, and technically it comes close to the internal styles, because it works through release and the guiding of force through the body rather than through bracing. The best known traditional set is the drunkenness of the eight immortals, in which each section corresponds to a figure from Taoist mythology and carries its own combative logic. The style's history is largely legend: the stories of a Shaolin monk who beat his brethren after drinking wine, and of Wu Song from the novel Water Margin, have no support in the sources, and neither the time nor the place of origin can be established. This page therefore gives no founder and no year. Today's zui quan in competitive wushu is a discipline of its own, markedly more acrobatic and theatrical than the traditional versions; the 1978 film Drunken Master did much for its worldwide fame.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.