Chinese Sword Academy GRTC

06/17/2026

One movement, two jobs. This is tiao.

In the Yangjia Michuan taiji jian system, tiao (挑) literally means to carry something on a pole. The name catches the action, a rising movement from underneath, and inside it live two different weapons.

Used as a cut, tiao snaps upward with the false edge, the upper tip edge rising into the duifang's fingers or wrist just as his thrust comes in. His attack creates the opening, and the same motion that defends you disables his sword hand.

Used as a deflection, the same rising action beats his blade off its line with the flat, or, in its larger form, throws his weapon upward and out of his control for a moment, leaving him open.

In free swordplay, tiao is most often a passive-position method. You're not leading with it, you're responding, either answering an attack as it comes in, or deliberately showing the duifang an opening and letting him take it. Either way, the rising cut captures the active line from him. He attacks, and a beat later the initiative is yours.

One name, one movement, and the choice of edge or flat decides whether it defends, disables, or both at once. That's how jianfa works. The named methods aren't single techniques to memorise, they're actions whose application changes with timing, position and intent.

A detail for the taiji sword people. If you train the public Yang form, you know this cut by a different name, beng (崩). Same rising snap, different lineage, different label. The Michuan system, the older family transmission, calls it tiao.

Where does this rising cut sit in your practice, a wrist cut, a deflection, or have you worked both out of the same motion?

06/16/2026

⚔️ Levelling Up at the Instructor's Retreat

A weekend at our summer instructor's retreat here in Virginia, working face to face on the points that matter most when blades actually meet. This is where the online training from the Academy meets the floor: future teachers and instructors getting hands on, refining the detail that's hard to drill on your own, and levelling up their play together.

Rodell Laoshi focused the weekend on three sticking points that come up again and again. 👇

1️⃣ Deflect completely, don't just push

The most common fault is not actually deflecting. A quarter turn of the waist pushes the duifang's sword off to the side, but leaves it sitting between you and your target, edge clashing on edge. A proper deflection leads their blade into emptiness and leaves you unimpeded, lined up, the whole target open. It's that last three inches, the final turn of the hip, that makes the difference.

2️⃣ Deflect exactly to your jiejin point

Jie means to catch. Find that catching point and rotate around it like there's a rivet there. Hit it cleanly and, for a split second, the duifang's sword becomes your sword: you have control, every target open. Overrun it by even a few inches and you open the door the other way. Deflect strike as one movement, danxing, not two intentions.

3️⃣ Take aim, shape the battlefield

Once the flow comes, deflect strike rather than parry riposte, stop swinging the cut back on momentum and aim it. Send it where it's hardest for the duifang to neutralise, forcing the bigger movement out of them. The sword arm elbow and shoulder are often far more useful than the obvious centre line. Shape the battlefield, make them work to respond, then follow up and go in.

This is what the retreats are for. The Academy's online training builds the foundation wherever you are in the world. The retreats and seminars is where that work gets pressure tested in person, blade to blade, with the people who'll go on to teach it themselves. Together they're how the art spreads and grows.

💬 Which of the three tips could you use most in your own practice? Tell us below.

06/15/2026

Two swordsmen. Two completely different answers to the same problem.

European sabers got longer, lighter and pointier as the 19th century wore on. Faster blades, more thrust, more reach. The Chinese went the other way entirely. Heavier cut, greater curve, take a piece off your opponent every time you land.

In this video Rodell Laoshi and John work through a table of real antiques, Chinese and European side by side. A 17th to 18th century bannerman's goose quill. A willow leaf. An oxtail. Against an 1822 British pipeback, a Franco-Romanian cavalry sabre, and more.

What comes out of it is not "which is better." It is how differently you have to fight depending on what is in your hand. The pipeback man wants you to overcommit so he can use his speed and reach to take your forearm. The dao man wants to take territory like a hungry tiger and overwhelm. Neither is wrong. They are solving the same fight from opposite ends.

One detail worth sitting with: despite the small Chinese hand guard, you don't get hit on the hand more often, because you deflect rather than block. The Chinese saw European swords with complex guards through the whole O***m War period and never copied them. That tells you something about how they fought.

So here is the question for you. If you had a Chinese dao, which European sabre would you least want to face? And if you had the military sabre, which dao would you pick to go up against?

Link to the full conversation in the comments.

06/15/2026

06/11/2026

The study of antique Ming and Qing weapons has always informed our practice. Handling originals teaches you things no replica can, and this restoration was a perfect example.

When this Qing dynasty jian arrived, the blade was hidden under generations of corrosion and the scabbard was beyond saving.

Careful polishing revealed custom quality forging, the kind of work made for an official or an institution with money to spend. No lamination flaws. An active pattern through the central zone of the blade, shifting to a linear grain towards the edges. The layers are very fine. This is not a pattern that shouts across a room, it rewards close study, the way you would examine the hada on a fine Japanese blade.

Two details show a smith who understood the realities of his time.

The edges near the hilt were left deliberately blunt. In the later Qing there was a clear fashion for keeping the forte unsharpened, and the restoration respected that, leaving it as found.

About a third of the way up the blade, exactly where the edges transition from blunt to sharp, there is a crosswise colour change in the steel, most likely from the heat treatment. The smith appears to have left the forte softer and tougher, hardening the rest of the blade for cutting. The lamellar pattern runs uninterrupted across the colour change, so this is heat treatment, not a join in the steel. Battlefield problems solved in the forge.

The restoration itself followed a less is more approach. Original thickness and width maintained along the full length, edges sharpened, centre ridge restored, and a few traces of pitting left in place rather than grinding away sound material. The new scabbard was made from rosewood of the family traditionally sold as huanghuali, a timber so hard it has to be cut slowly to avoid overheating the saw blade.

This is what we mean when we say the tradition is alive. The swords still have things to teach us.

Swipe through for the before and after.

06/10/2026

One of the highlights of our time in China back in the spring was a weekend with the Shanghai Historical Martial Arts, the largest HEMA school in the country.

We taught a seminar on the Saturday, sharing Chinese swordsmanship, and then on the Sunday we crossed swords properly. Full-contact bouts with their team, blade against blade, no choreography.

Most of us didn't share a language. It didn't matter in the slightest. Once the bouts began, everything that needed saying was said through the sword, a deflection, a hard exchange, a nod of respect after a good hit. You understand a person quickly when you face them for real.

There's a particular kind of respect that only comes from testing each other like that. You learn what holds up under pressure and what falls apart, and you come away with a clearer eye on your own practice and more time for the people across from you.

We took our swordsmanship back to China, met one of the finest groups of martial artists you could hope to face, and made the kind of friends that full-contact swordplay always seems to produce.

We're already planning to go back next year. Some friendships are worth crossing the world for.

06/09/2026

Deep in the hills of Longquan stands the man who, by legend, started it all.

This is Ou Yezi, the semi-legendary swordsmith of the Spring and Autumn period, remembered as the founding master of Chinese sword forging. Some two and a half thousand years ago he is said to have sought out this place for its iron ore, its cold mountain streams, and the stones for grinding a blade.

The story goes that he diverted the streams into seven pools set around his furnace in the pattern of the Big Dipper, and forged three famous swords here. The first, when you looked down its length, seemed to hold a great dragon coiled in its depths, like gazing into a mountain abyss. He named it Longyuan, Dragon Abyss.

The town took its name from that sword. Centuries later, in the Tang dynasty, the name was altered to avoid the emperor's own name, and Dragon Abyss became Longquan, Dragon Spring. It has been a byword for fine swords ever since. To this day a quality Chinese blade is a Longquan sword.

It's not hard to see what drew him here. The hills hold waterfalls, old stone bridges and forest, the kind of country where you understand why the old smiths believed the water itself gave a blade its soul.

Standing in front of him, on the trip out to China, it was hard not to feel the weight of that lineage. Everything the Academy trains traces back, in the end, to men like this and the blades they raised over the fire.

06/09/2026

A selection of antique dadao from the Wentaofang Ancient Weapons Museum in Pingyao.

Broad, single-edged and built for the cut, the dadao was a soldier's and militia weapon for centuries, valued for being quick to learn and devastating in close work. Seeing a row of originals like this, with their weight and wear, tells you more about how they were actually used than any reproduction can.

06/08/2026

Somewhere along the way, cutting became a Japanese word.

The katana gets the credit, and the jian gets typecast as a thrusting sword, elegant but not much of a cutter. A lot of people believe that. Do you?

Here's Rodell Laoshi with a piece of bamboo resting loose on a stand, nothing holding it in place. Two descending cuts tracing a figure-eight through the target, the pattern that gives the dragonfly cut its name.

The detail that makes it hard, the bamboo is unsupported. On a fixed target the stand does half the work, the target resists and the edge bites. On a free-resting piece, anything less than perfect edge alignment knocks it off the stand instead of cutting it.

So where do you stand? Is the jian a cutter, or is that the katana's territory? Tell us below.

06/05/2026

An under-200-dollar dadao from Swordier turned up at Rodell Laoshi's door, sent over for an honest review. The question with any sword at that price is the obvious one. Is it the real thing, or a wall-hanger that folds the first time it meets bamboo?

The dadao is the big chopping blade the famous 29th carried into Japanese camps on night raids during the war of resistance, the same weapon some of you saw in the Pingyao museum yesterday. Running at an armed camp with nothing but one of these took a particular kind of nerve.

So the modern version went outside and met some bamboo.

Laoshi's answer turns out to be more useful than a straight thumbs up or down, and it comes down to who's holding it.

Over to you. What was the first sharp sword you trained with, and would you put a 200-dollar blade in a beginner's hands?

Full clip in the comments.