A River of Heartfelt Affection

Divine Fist Dai Erlü, whose twin mastiffs tested his boxing and brought the Shanxi merchants to heel; Li Luoneng, an outsider who studied for ten years and founded Xingyi. During the Kangxi and Qianlong eras, Dai Longbang braved wind and snow to seek a master and learn boxing, creating the Dai family’s Xinyi Boxing. From then on, the Dai family built its reputation on boxing and protected merchants with armed escorts. Its two great escort agencies, Guangsheng and Taifen, traveled the trade routes of the Shanxi merchants far and wide. Dai Erlü made a name for himself throughout central Shanxi when he tested his boxing against twin mastiffs. Li Luoneng, a disciple from outside the family, transformed the Dai family’s Xinyi into Xingyi, founding a new branch of northern martial arts. The third-generation leader, Dai Liangdong, took the ring to expose a foreign murder case, using his iron fists to force the truth into the open. But in times of turmoil, the hardest thing to protect is not an escort agency, but a martial art. Warlords clashed, trade routes collapsed, and the flames of war came one after another. Masters Dai Erlü and Dai Liangdong guarded the art and protected the escorts. Their disciples charged into bandit strongholds, joined the army, and shielded the boxing manual from gunfire. By the time the art passed down to Dai Kui, he had no sons, and the lineage was on the verge of ending. The ancestral rules forbade passing it on to someone outside the family, yet the people truly willing to protect the master, the manual, and the art itself all had surnames other than Dai. Standing before the ancestral tablets, Dai Kui finally spoke the words that would change the fate of Dai family Xinyi Boxing: “Our ancestors made the rules to keep the art from falling into chaos, not to let it die.” From the wind and snow of Qixian to the Shanxi merchants’ escort routes, from the rings of the late Qing to the flames of the War of Resistance, A Long River of Xinyi tells how one martial art preserved its roots through three hundred years of upheaval, and how it eventually left the Dai family to be passed on to the world.