Vietnamese Martial Arts and the Memory Gap: When the Ring Lacks a Chronicler

On a late-weekend afternoon, in an old training hall tucked deep in a small alley off Nguyễn Chí Thanh Street in Đà Nẵng, 74-year-old master Nguyễn Văn Bảy opens a yellowed notebook. On its pages are the names of more than two hundred students who have trained under him since 2026, written in purple ink that has blurred with the years. His finger trembles slightly as he stops at one line: a student who once won the national quyền thuật championship in the late 1990s. Then he falls silent for a long while, so long that the ceiling fan in the hall becomes the loudest sound in the room. None of us knows where that student is now, what he does, whether he still practices or long ago gave it up. To the master, that notebook is a lifetime. To the rest of the nation's martial arts, it barely exists.

I came to Đà Nẵng after hearing about a gathering of elderly martial arts masters in Quảng Nam, where they meet once a year to perform forms they know as well as their own breath. No sponsors. No television. No electronic scoreboard. Only a packed-earth yard, the sound of festival drums, and grey-haired men stepping up and stepping down, bowing to one another. When the demonstration ends, everything dissolves into the late afternoon. Beyond a few hurried phone photos, no record is kept. What happened on that earthen yard will, by tomorrow, live only in the memory of a few dozen people.

That is what unsettles me. A martial arts tradition centuries deep is losing its own memory, not because it is poor, but because of how it chooses to preserve itself.

Three branches, three ways of remembering

Within the same current of Vietnamese martial arts, three branches exist with three entirely different ways of keeping information, and the gap between them keeps widening.

The first branch is traditional quyền thuật, the soul of võ cổ truyền. Here, knowledge passes by word of mouth and through the body, from master to student, across generations. Each master holds within himself forms, techniques, and secret manuals that even his own children may never have fully seen. That way of teaching has its beauty: it is selective, it preserves depth, it forces the student to live with the art rather than merely read about it. But it also has a fatal gap. When the master dies before anyone has learned it all, an entire current can vanish in silence.

The second branch is tán thủ, the combat discipline of traditional martial arts. Tán thủ has entered the official competition system, appearing at national and regional sports festivals. It has rules, weight classes, referees, and published results. Yet even here, the data remains scattered. Results from youth and provincial tournaments mostly sit in the ledgers of local organizers and are lost within a few years. No one compiles them into a continuous line of history.

The third branch is modern combat sports, boxing and MMA. This is the branch most conscious of data, because it must conform to international standards. Nguyễn Thị Tâm and Hà Thị Linh in the boxing ring; Nguyễn Trần Duy Nhất and Trần Quang Lộc in the MMA cage. They compete where every bout is recorded, every weigh-in logged, every result searchable. Their records live in international databases such as BoxRec and Tapology, where fans anywhere can look them up with a single click.

That asymmetry creates a paradox: the youngest, least-known fighters have the fullest records, while the veteran masters who carry an entire inheritance within them are the most nameless on paper.

What is lost

I have sat in domestic arenas many times, watching fighters step onto the mat. From my experience following competition, I have come to see that what a fighter leaves on the mat is not contained in any line of results. The breath before engagement. The way a person touches gloves with an opponent. The look in the eyes when stepping through the ropes. These things even a camera struggles to capture fully, let alone a dry number.

Some fights last ninety minutes, but the story lingers for decades. In a tán thủ bout I once followed in Quảng Ngãi, a young fighter lost on points only because he exposed his flank in the final round. On the scorecard, he was the loser. But later I learned he had trained for two years in a hall without a proper mat, on a concrete floor, under a master already past seventy. What was memorable about him was not on the scorecard. It was that, after that defeat, he returned to the hall the next morning.

But the memory of a martial art does not stop at emotion. It is also history, the flow of people, the transmission from one generation to the next. When a master dies with no one recording it, we lose more than a person. We lose the ability to answer seemingly simple questions: where did this form come from, from whom did that master learn, in what circumstances was that technique born. Each broken link closes a stretch of history forever.

I once heard of a master in central Vietnam who owned a handwritten set of documents about his lineage, hundreds of pages thick. He guarded it as if it were his life, lending it to no one, letting no one photograph it. When he died, no one in the family understood its value, and the documents were sold off with the household's scrap paper. An entire lineage, its history, its list of disciples, its own forms, vanished simply because no one copied it in time. That is how the memory of Vietnamese martial arts dies: not loudly, not noticed, only quietly and slowly.

The reverse view

But if I stand only on the side of data, I see something else that must be said plainly. Recording more does not automatically make martial arts better. In international boxing and MMA, people have witnessed enormous databases, rankings updated weekly, and, along with them, an ecosystem in which numbers sometimes overshadow people. A fighter is judged by record, by win rate, by commercial value, to the point where people forget that behind all this is a human life with ambition, fear, and wounds.

I do not believe that one more database will make Vietnamese martial arts better. What we lack is a way of telling stories that respects both the body and the soul. A line of results can tell who won, but not what the loser went through to be there. The oral tradition of võ cổ truyền holds a wisdom we too easily undervalue: it forces the student to slow down, to stay beside the master, to live in the hall rather than merely search online.

The problem is that we stand between two extremes and cannot choose either. On one side, the silence of old training halls, where memory survives only in a few elderly people. On the other, the noise of international databases, where numbers speak for everything. Both are insufficient. What Vietnamese martial arts needs is not to choose one side, but to learn to speak both languages: the language of memory and the language of records.

The signal ahead

The encouraging thing is that a few changes are taking place, however small and quiet. Some young training halls have begun filming their teaching sessions, preserving each form before it is too late. Some young people have set up online pages to compile the history of lineages. These efforts are not yet systematic, but they are flowing, quietly, like the Hàn River at dawn.

Sitting in the stands in Moscow, I learned to listen with my eyes and see with my ears. And in Đà Nẵng, in master Bảy's hall, I learned one more thing: that some notebooks are not written to be published, but only so that a teacher, at the end of his life, still knows whom he has lived alongside. When Hòa Xuân stadium burst into tears, I understood that a brand is not a logo but trust. In that old hall, I understood further that memory, too, is a kind of brand, and it must be preserved before the last person who holds it is gone.