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(1620 - 1680) Although some transcripts attribute the Famous General Yue Wu Mu Wang (Yueh Fei) as the creator of Xingyiquan, most historical records can accurately point to Ji Long Feng (also known as Ji Ji Ke) as the person most likely to have created it during the early 1600s.

Legend has it that Ji found Yue's ancient boxing manual on Xingyiquan in a cave at Zhong Nan mountain. This would explain the 500 year lapse in the lineage line.

Ji was from Zhu Feng, an area east of Pu County in Shanxi Province. Today, this place is known as Zhang Ying Zhen Village, Yung Ji County.

Ji revolutionized the boxing of his day and was a master of spear fighting. He laid his martial foundation by first mastering boxing at the Songshan Shaolin Temple, a mecca for the development of civilian fighting methods. As legends have it, he was at the temple one day reading a book when he spied two roosters fighting. Their fight inspired him to study their characteristics and tactics further, and from his observations he perceived the true essence of fighting and began an assidious examination of animal characteristics. He called his new method the Xinyi Liuhe Quan - "Mind and Will Boxing of the Six Conformities."

In America, if we say that someone is chicken, we mean that that person is scared and spineless - with no courage. But in Asia, chickens and roosters stand for more admirable traits. The popoularity of cock fights throughout the Asian sphere, which have been held at least as far back as the first milennium, supports that idea. We should not be suprised that in a time when Asian fighters looked at animals to tap that nearly earsed survival instinct some like Jike eventually saw the rooster as inspiration.

Then there are the rooster's symbolic elements. Chinese folk beliefs about the rooster, the tenth animal in the Chinese zodiac, includes it warding off evil. A picture of it over a house protects the structure from fire, and a white rooster on a coffin protects the deceased from demons. Further folk traditions say that the rooster is courageous and beneficiary - the rooster summons the hens to eat the food that he finds - and reliable - the rooster signals the time with his crow. Inspiration did not just come with the rooster's symbolism but also with its inherent behavior and movements, characteristics that revealed a powerful fighting system.

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