About CMARC
About the CMARC Archive: Mission and Standards
An independent archive of Chinese martial arts and the masters who carried them across the world — their lineages, texts, and routes of transmission.
What this archive is
The Chinese Martial Arts Resource Center (CMARC) is an independent digital archive, kept by practitioners. It records the masters who carried Chinese martial arts out of China — the lineages they held, the texts they taught from, and the routes their students took into North America, Japan, Europe, and beyond. Choy Li Fut kung fu, Yang Family Tai Chi Chuan, Bajiquan, the Shaolin and Shorinji lines, and the conditioning arts that cut across schools are all part of the record.
Recording the history of a transmission is how the transmission itself is kept. The archive holds biographical records, system histories, classical texts, weapon studies, and dated historical documents, every one of them sourced — so that what a teacher taught in 1920 or 1998 can still be traced to a document today.
Where the material comes from
Much of the early English-language record was published on the websites of a school in northern Alabama, Golden Eagle Martial Arts Centers, which taught from 1997 across Huntsville, Moulton, Florence, Decatur, Athens, and Muscle Shoals. Three of those pages became reference material cited by encyclopedias and researchers. The archive draws on that material as documents — named, dated, and quoted — the way it draws on any other dated source. It is not affiliated with the school and does not speak for it. The full account is told on thearchive history page.
How the archive writes
Pages open with direct definitions, tie every historical claim to a dated source, state disagreements instead of resolving them silently, and date their revisions. The full standard, including what the archive does when evidence runs out, is published on theeditorial method page.
Where the material comes from
The archive draws on four kinds of material: primary sources, historical sources, secondary scholarship, and the teaching materials of the Golden Eagle schools. Each kind is defined, and the citation standard is stated, on the sources page.
Contact
Corrections, research questions, and donations of historical materials are welcome through the contact page. Corrections receive priority, and every published correction is dated.