[Kyorgi]

I found this chart in one of my books:

Date School Name head master style
1944 chung do kwan won kuk lee tang soo do
1944 song mu kwan byong jik ro tang soo do, kong soo do
1945 mu duk kwan kee hwang tang soo do
1946 chang mu kwan byong in yun tang so do
1953 O do kwan Hong Hi Choi Mix of hard styles

[Hengest]

Panta mate, you misunderstand me. TKD didn't exist, it wasn't that it was unknown to the west. If you look at the list of schools kyorgi kindly supplied, you'll see that they all mention kong soo do or tang soo do, the Korean pronunciations of the two ways of writing "karatedo" in Chinese characters. Dojang at that time used Japanese dogi and Japanese dojo etiquette and taught Japanese kihon and Japanese kata. TKD was a later development. Even Hwang Kee, who was a bit more forward thinking than the rest, was using Shotokan and Goju Ryu kata at the Mudokkwan.

setsu: Yeah, what Choi taught during his army days was the karate he learned getting his nidan at Tokyo University. He's quoted as saying: "I began to teach Karate to my soldiers as a means of physical and mental training. It was then that I realized that we needed to develop our own national martial art, superior in both spirit and technique to Japanese karate."

[BLACK PANTA]

sorry hengest my bad.

[BLACK PANTA]

found this link about Tang Soo do
http://www.tang-soo-do.co.uk/thestyle.html

[Hengest]

No worries Panta.

BTW, that link is typical of the badly researched rubbish that you get on so many martial arts sites, not just Korean.

Its claim that tang soo do comes from the "ancient Korean art" of soo bahk do, which, in turn, comes from the hwarang art of soo bahk bup sol is completely arse about face and just plain wrong in most places.

Soo bahk do was the name Hwang Kee later adopted for tang soo do, not the other way around. And as for soo bahk do coming from soo bahk, that's just a joke. Nobody really knows what soo bahk was. It's long, long dead in the Koreas but was probably some form of imported Chinese boxing. That said, I was reading an article by Stanley Henning the other day that said it may have been little more than a slapping game!

[BLACK PANTA]

Wow thanks Hengest. I heard that not many people teach or know Hwarang Do(sp?), is this true?

[Hengest]

I heard that not many people teach or know Hwarang Do(sp?), is this true?

The art of Hwa Rang Do is fairly commonplace these days, but what it actually refers to is an eclectic system devised by Joo Bang Lee in the '60s, based largely on hapkido.

Some try and claim it's related to the hwarang, but it's highly unlikely. The hwarang probably didn't have a single unified system of combat. They were trained to be leaders, not warriors, so while they seem to have had training in archery and charioteering, their studies were mainly academic, studying strategy, philosophy and the arts.

[nEo-Wolf]

Has anyone heard of Han-Kuk Mu-Do? I think it's relatively new and I will be doing a seminar soon about it. It's supposed to be like Korean Kickboxing...

[Hengest]

Has anyone heard of Han-Kuk Mu-Do?

I hadn't heard of it, so I did a little digging. It sounds like a UK version of what the Koreans have tried to do with kyuk too ki or kun gek do. Could be interesting. I note that it still harps on about being based on 2,000-year-old combat forms though...

[nEo-Wolf]

I hate forms, but what can you do? I have to remember like 10 TKD forms, a new load of WKA kickboxing forms and some for the Han-Kuk Mu-Do... Like you said, it could be interesting to do though...