Qi Jiguang is the most celebrated general of the Ming dynasty: the commander who broke the wokou pirates on the southern coast, held the northern frontier, and wrote the military manuals that shaped martial training across East Asia for centuries. When his soldiers needed to face longer weapons and mounted opponents, he armed and trained them with the long two-handed saber.

His saber method was built the way everything Qi built was built: simple, linear, nothing a farmer-turned-recruit couldn't learn fast and use hard. And it survived, recorded in rare Ming and Korean military manuals, because Qi's training methods were valued far beyond China's borders.

This course is a living reconstruction of that form: the historical record worked back into a training method, tested with steel in hand, and taught road by road the way it's built to be learned.

The famous name, on the right weapon

Here's an irony the internet keeps getting wrong. Qi Jiguang is endlessly credited as the father of the miaodao, a claim that doesn't survive contact with the sources: he called his weapon the changdao, and his form was its own system. So while his name gets attached to weapons he never taught, the form he actually recorded goes almost entirely untaught. This course is that form.