We take the “concrete and palpable” presence of a thing to attest to the reality of that which we have made it to signify; our fantasies find confirmation in the materiality of things that are composed more of objectified fantasy than physical stuff. Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects (Harvard UP, 1991), p. 138 Introduction Strange images occasionally emerge from the annals of kung fu history. This “strangeness” has many sources. Perhaps the most exciting is the shock of discovering something totally new. In all honesty, the historical documentary record on these fighting systems is so thin that the emergence of a single well placed source can still disrupt our understanding of what was going on in a given region or time period. It is heady stuff, and probably why so many document finds of dubious origin have emerged in the last few years (often tied to efforts to create a new tourist destination). Yet strangeness has many sources. More common is encountering a ...