Beyond self-Orientalism: Asian masculine landscapes in Chinese and Thai martial arts tourism

Abstract

Martial arts tourism is a burgeoning form of tourism typified by Western ‘martial arts pilgrims’ travelling to Asian ‘martial arts cradles’ for leisure-based learning, training and spectatorship. Despite its growing economic and cultural significance, research on martial arts tourism as a sociocultural practice is scant. This study argues that the intrinsic relationship of martial arts to masculinities and Asian-ness offers the opportunity to study the self-representation of ‘Asian masculine landscapes’ (AMLs) in tourism. By comparing eight destination websites in Thailand and China, this study conceives AMLs as the creative appropriation, transmogrification and hybridisation of divergent images of masculinities circulated at different scales. This conceptualisation speaks to a cultural complexity framework that moves beyond the deterministic and unidirectional paradigm of self-Orientalism by highlighting the productive role of Asian destination ‘image-makers’ as both cultural remediators and improvisers occupying the intermediary position between the homogenising and heterogenising discourses of transnational masculinities.

Introduction

‘Martial arts tourism’ refers to forms of tourist mobility related to martial arts in tourism destinations. Thailand, the ‘cradle’ of Muay Thai, and China, where Wushu (Kung Fu) originated, are top international martial arts destinations. As part of ‘one of the fastest-growing sectors in tourism’ in Thailand, Muay Thai tourism is actively promoted by Thailand’s official tourism body (TAT, 2019). British (11,219 British visitors to take Muay Thai lessons in 2016), Australian (6800), French (5852) and German (4688) nationals are the largest sources of martial arts tourism in Thailand (The Nation, 2017), which suggests a Western orientation in this niche market. Although the COVID-19 pandemic has weakened Thailand’s Muay Thai industry due to fewer visitors, a steady postpandemic rebound is anticipated, given Muay Thai’s international cultural significance (Poole, 2021). Similar to Muay Thai, tourism is essential for Wushu’s ‘indirect dissemination’, which is actively promoted by China for nationalist and economic causes (Theeboom et al., 2017). For Anderlini (2011), the Wushu destination Shaolin Monastery embodies one of China’s most successful international brands. Recently, China’s central regulatory bodies announced the ‘deep convergence’ of martial arts and the tourism, wellness and educational sectors to facilitate industrial upgrades and improve national soft power (General Administration of Sport of China, 2019). These measures foster optimistic market prospects for martial arts tourism in postpandemic China.

Despite its economic and cultural significance, few studies have evaluated martial arts tourism as a social and cultural practice. This study argues that martial arts tourism offers a crucial case for examining images of Asian masculinities in tourism cultures because of the intrinsic relationships of martial arts to both masculinity and Asian-ness (Bowman, 2016). Existing work on gendered tourism landscapes often focuses on the concurrent ‘feminisation’ and exoticisation of Asian destinations in line with Orientalist fantasies (Hobbs et al., 2011; Pritchard and Morgan, 2005; Tan, 2014), whereas cultural representations of Asian masculinities in tourism have received much less attention. At the same time, gendered/racialised self-representations of Asian destinations are often studied under the dominant ‘self-Orientalism’ paradigm (Yan and Santos, 2009), which reduces the complexity of ‘locally produced’ place images to homogeneous Western influences. This study instead proposes an understanding of Asian masculine landscapes (AMLs) in tourism as a context-contingent hybridisation of multiple discourses at different scales. For this purpose, it conducts a comparative analysis of masculine images present on Chinese and Thai martial arts tourism destination websites. Before the analysis, the paper reviews the self-Orientalism tourism literature and offers the contextual background of martial arts tourism and national masculinities in China and Thailand.

From self-Orientalism to Asian masculine landscapes

The notion of ‘Orientalism’ describes the persisting discourses of geographic division that demarcate the advanced, masculine, rational and subjugating West from the stagnant, feminine, irrational and subjugated Orient (Said, 1978), which collapses temporal, gender and racial discourses to legitimate colonial exploitations (Yegenoglu, 1998). After the formal end of Western colonialism, tourism became one of the most important institutions where Orientalism is recirculated (Aitchison, 2001; Pritchard and Morgan, 2000) because these discourses offer easily transferrable tropes for the tourist consumption of ‘difference’ (Haldrup and Larsen, 2009). Although conventional Orientalism renders passive the subject of its study, local developmental demands produce a strong impetus for ‘self-Orientalism’ in global destinations (Yan and Santos, 2009), where the ‘East’ creates self-identities that use ‘the image [that] the West has fictionalised for it’ (Feighery, 2012: 271). While Orientalism is closely associated with the ‘simultaneous gesture of racialisation and feminisation’ (Yegenoglu, 1998: 73), it also perpetuates myths about the intrinsic qualities of Oriental men, such as their ‘violence’ and ‘lascivious sensuality’ (Kabbani, 1994). On the ‘positive’ side, Oriental men have been fantasised – in a classic Rousseauian metaphor – as the ‘noble savage’ who lives virtuously in conformity with nature, untainted by civilisations (Ellingson, 2001). This image has been recirculated in modern tourism, such as Western-led female sex tourism that perpetuates an Orientalist masculinity ‘close to “nature”, more “manly”, or “real gentlemen”’ (Jacobs, 2009: 51; Sánchez-Taylor, 2000) and eco-tourism that projects tropes of ‘noble savage’ or ‘natural men’ onto indigenous bodies (Fennell, 2008).

Despite its contribution in exposing the colonial continuities of tourism cultures, nevertheless, the framework of self-Orientalism has been criticised for its schematic tendency to disregard the multiplicity of local self-representations, reducing them to the duplication of Western fantasies. Huang (2011), for example, argues that the ‘self-Orientalism’ concept perpetuates a self-fulfilling prophecy based on predetermined schemas, neglecting the significance of local cultural references in touristic image-making. Without considering the complexity and multiplicity of local contexts, the self-Orientalism framework depicts a homogeneous landscape of the ‘East’s’ touristic self-representations as undifferentiated importations of Western discourses and images about the ‘Orient’. As such, the framework of self-Orientalism re-perpetuates classic Orientalism – which it intended to dismantle in the first place – of an internally indistinguishable ‘Other’ learning to speak for itself only by adopting the West’s universal language. In the face of such criticism, this study argues that scholars should move beyond self-Orientalism by adopting a more vigorous approach that situate the self-representations of non-Western destinations within concrete ‘historical, cultural, social and political contexts’ (Huang, 2011: 1190). These contexts, this study argues, are not the passive and invisible background of transnational touristic encounters. Instead, they offer productive tropes that continually intersect with ‘Western-style’ ideas, such as Orientalism, in local destinations’ ongoing image-making processes. In line with this idea, recent studies of Asian tourism masculinities have noted their multiplicity and contingency across different spatial contexts (Malam, 2008) and their nuanced dynamics in intra-Asian cross-cultural encounters (Yang, 2022).

In addressing the multiplicity and complexity of local image-making vis-à-vis Oriental masculinities in non-Western destinations, this study proposes the concept of the ‘Asian masculine landscapes’ (AMLs) as a theoretical and analytical tool beyond self-Orientalism. By situating masculinities ‘within’ landscapes, the concept of AMLs critically reflects on the classic subject of the male tourist ‘gazer’, constituting masculinities instead as the ‘gazed’ figures for scrutiny, predication and cultural consumption in tourism landscapes. The term ‘landscape’ underscores the centrality of ‘place’ in tourism representations, which emphasises the mutual referentiality of gender and spatial tropes in tourism image-making that constitute ‘gendered landscapes’ (Pritchard and Morgan, 2000). The plurality of ‘gendered landscapes’ (the ‘AMLs’ should be used in plural) necessitates considering heterogeneous local contexts in the analysis and resisting the inclination of treating ‘Asians’ as a homogeneous entity (Yang, 2022). This position concurs with recent discussions in tourism studies regarding the ‘cultural complexity framework’ to Asian tourism (Ooi, 2019), which rejects reductive, static and essentialist accounts of ‘Asian-ness’ but embraces the internal complexity, diversity, dynamics and contradictions inherent in cultural manifestations both across and within societies. Accordingly, the AMLs concept treats Asian tourism’s ‘masculine’ self-representations as contingent, historical hybridisations of pluralistic discourses circulated at different scales rather than reflections of a singular ‘master-narrative’ or ‘discursive source’ originated in the West.

A crucial context to consider in analysing the AMLs in martial arts tourism is the different constructions of martial arts masculinities in their ‘host’ societies. These ‘local’ constructions open and close symbolic possibilities and afford appropriable tropes that actively shape tourism representations. In Thailand, the classic metaphor of a Muay Thai fighter as a ‘hunting dog’ (ma lai nuea) ‘who is fed, trained, and then sent out to hunt for its master’ speaks to a subservient masculinity with a low status in society (Kitiarsa, 2005). This discourse of marginalised masculinity, however, is overlaid with images of successful Thai boxers as masculine ‘bread winners’ and ‘national heroes’ of Thailand with Muay Thai’s modern institutionalisation, professionalisation and growing international fame (Kitiarsa, 2005). The complex relationships between Muay Thai and hegemonic masculinity speaks to Van Esterik’s (2000) observation of Thailand’s gender cultures as a ‘palimpsest’ where heterogeneous discourses coexist and overlay.

Like Muay Thai, Kung Fu was not associated with hegemonic masculinity in China’s Confucian gender culture that rests on the prioritisation of wen (literary excellency) over wu (martial prowess) (Louie, 2002). Nevertheless, this deprecation of martial prowess is under transformation with the global expansion of martial arts cinema that popularises a new masculinity where wen and wu stand on a more equal footing (Louie, 2014). The AMLs in martial arts tourism to Thailand and China, therefore, are constructed in local contexts where transnational contacts (the modern ‘sportification’ of Muay Thai and the global popularity of Kung Fu cinema) have ushered in new discourses regarding martial arts masculinities that have traditionally been marginalised in the social hierarchy. The next section thus examines different forms of martial arts tourism that selectively appropriate local gender discourses in the construction of AMLs.

Chinese and Thai martial arts training tourism: A comparative approach

In addition to a few studies on heritage preservation (Su, 2016; Su et al., 2019) and tourism motivations (Pookaiyaudom, 2020), existing research on martial arts-related tourism is scant. As such, there is no available definition of the phenomenon. An orthodox definition of martial arts constructs them as knowledge/practices that originate in the battlefield (e.g. Lorge, 2012). This definition, however, is criticised for its conceptual essentialism that perpetuates an untenable military-civil dichotomy (Bowman, 2019). Wetzler (2015), in contrast, considers martial arts as a dynamic ‘polysystem’ comprised of multiple ‘subsystems’, that is, martial arts styles; what takes the ‘central’ or ‘peripheral’ place within this polysystem is subject to changing ‘discourses’ in history (Bowman, 2017). Under this perspective, this study postulates martial arts as the body of ‘core practices’ constituted by contemporary ‘martial arts discourses’ circulated in popular culture and beyond. Thus, both Shaolin Kung Fu and Muay Thai fall within this contextual conceptualisation of martial arts.

From the youxia (wandering vigilante) figure in Chinese classic fiction to contemporary mixed-martial-arts fighter training across countries, martial arts have a long connection to travel and mobility (Judkins, 2019). Martial arts tourism, nevertheless, is distinct from previous forms of travel for its tourism-ness that reflects the modern dichotomy between ‘work’ and ‘leisure’ (Urry and Larsen, 2011). As Connell (2006): 1093) states, ‘it is a truism that tourism is supposed to be about relaxation, pleasure and an increase in well-being’, even when it overlays with ‘learning’; ‘such learning too is expected to be relaxing and quite different from classroom memories’. Accordingly, we can distinguish martial arts tourism, which encompasses leisure travels to martial arts places, fight events and martial arts learning, from the training travels of professional athletes. Notably, this distinction is often blurry with the rise of the ‘apprentice pilgrimage’ that blends holidaying with career and expertise development (Griffith and Marion, 2017). Therefore, martial arts tourism, like ‘martial arts’, is a relational concept that depends on changing discourses and contexts.

Martial arts tourism encompasses both the direct participation and spectatorship of martial arts at the destination. This study, however, focuses on a subset of ‘martial arts training tourism’ – specifically, direct participation – to emphasise the ‘interactive authenticity’ enacted through embodied encounters with the racial other in tourism (Conran, 2006). Even within this subset, martial arts tourism is diverse. Studymartialarts.org (SMA, 2021), a major martial arts training tour booking website, offers on its homepage experiences that include ‘mental awakening’, ‘extreme combat progress’, ‘fitness and weight loss’, ‘improve your self-defence’ and ‘uncover[ing] the ages of culture’. Accordingly, martial arts tourism can be categorised as sports tourism, wellness tourism, spiritual tourism and cultural tourism in different contexts. This diversity speaks to variegated martial arts ‘styles’ promoted in tourism. For example, Chinese Shaolin Kung Fu comprises a ‘traditionalist’ discipline defined by historically transmitted practices connected to a stable body of philosophical/spiritual knowledge, that is, Buddhist ideology (Channon, 2012). In contrast, Muay Thai resembles a modern combat ‘sport’ bound by universally recognised rules, despite the ongoing tension with its ‘traditionalist’ roots in rituals, mythologies and a spiritual ‘ethos’ that embody the art’s continual ‘authenticity’ (Vail, 2014).

The aim of this study is to illustrate the contingent forms of AMLs in Thai and Chinese martial arts training destinations through a comparative tourism approach, which examines two or more cases by using a common research design (Pearce, 1993). Compared to single-case research, comparative studies systematically examine the commonalities and differences between multiple cases to offer general insights into complex phenomena (Pearce, 1993). Due to its sensitivity to both transferable factors and local determinants, comparative research is especially suitable for investigating types of events with high degrees of internal diversity, such as festival tourism (e.g. Nicholson and Pearce, 2001) and heritage tourism (e.g. Li, 2003). The comparative method is suitable for this study because of the extreme heterogeneity of martial arts tourism, martial arts and martial arts masculinities in Asian societies as reviewed above, which cannot be thoroughly illustrated through a single-case study. Moreover, it is coherent with this study’s theoretical aim to ‘pluralise AMLs’ by investigating the multiple interaction patterns between general/global and contextual/local factors that shape Asian destination images. Finally, a comparative method speaks to the comparative nature of martial arts tourism, where potential visitors compare and select from a diverse pool of tourism offerings linked to divergent discourses regarding martial arts, masculinities and places. The next section outlines the research design for the selection and analysis of the comparative materials.

Methods

One key consideration in comparative research is the management of the equivalence of cases (Pearce, 1993). To ensure that the examined cases are equivalent, this study sets the following five criteria for the selection of martial arts destinations: (a) they are ‘touristic’ rather than ‘professional’ (i.e. catering primarily to professional athletes) martial arts training camps/schools; (b) they are targetted at English-speaking foreigners; (c) they are of considerable size; (d) they are officially recognised by key stakeholders/authorities in martial arts tourism; and (e) the type of martial arts that they tutor reflect the national characteristics of the destination country. Given the large number of tourist gyms in Thailand, this study limits its scope to Thai martial arts gyms in Phuket, which is the second-smallest Thai province but receives the most martial arts tourists (Phuykaeokam and Deebhijarn, 2020). Phuket websites are selected from the latest ‘Awesome Muay Thai’ (AMT) directory (TAT, 2021), an official database administered by the Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) to provide ‘everything that tourists as well as Muay Thai fans and practitioners need to know about this unique martial art’. This study selects four of the seven Phuket camps listed in this directory (Tiger Muay Thai (TMT), Sinbi Muay Thai (SMT), Dragon Muay Thai (DMT) and Sumalee Boxing Gym (SBG)) and excludes the camps that primarily target elite professional fighters, do not focus on Muay Thai, or are headquartered outside Phuket.

The website sample for China is limited to sites affiliated with the Shaolin Monastery, China’s martial arts ‘mecca’. Since there is no official directory of Chinese martial arts destinations, this study uses two tourism websites, namely, studymartialarts.org (SMA) and bookmartialarts.com (BMA), to identify destination schools. SMA was established by a group of ‘martial arts travel experts’ to provide ‘the best information on martial arts travel and training’ in Asia (SMA, 2021). BMA indexes ‘a comprehensive selection of great martial arts travel packages located all over the globe’ (BMA, 2021). This study identifies seven schools listed on SMA or BMA that are explicitly associated with Shaolin. Four destinations are selected (Kunyu Mountain Shaolin Martial Arts Academy (KMS), Qufu Shaolin Kung Fu School (QSKF), Yun Tai Shan International Culture and Martial Arts School (YTS) and Shaolin Temple Yunnan Warrior Monks Training Centre (STY)), while schools of smaller sizes (i.e. those that host less than seven masters) or schools that do not focus on Shaolin martial arts are excluded.

This study focuses on the destination websites of these camps/schools as the primary data for the following reasons. Recently, a few speciality websites that offer martial arts training packages have emerged, but the information that they provide is less comprehensive than the destination websites, which contain detailed descriptions of martial arts traditions, training facilities and the destination place. Likewise, although Facebook and Twitter are increasingly used for martial arts tourism promotions, social media advertisements often hyperlink to destination websites for more detailed descriptions. Compared with other platforms, destination websites provide the most comprehensive information for martial arts tourists to imagine tourist experiences, compare different offerings and plan training tours. For this study, the eight destination websites occupy a peculiar position in the transnational flows of Asian tourism images. On the one hand, the self-managed characteristic of these websites allows researchers to access these destinations’ intended ‘self-imagination’ unfiltered by the cultural remediation of third-party tour promoters. On the other hand, their uses of English speak to an international audience overrepresented by potential visitors from advanced Western capitalist societies. Notably, the researcher cannot identify equivalent versions of the eight websites targetted towards domestic tourists in their native language, except for a Chinese homepage of QSKF; this indicates that the selected websites are cultural manifestations accustomed to the ‘international’ contexts rather than mechanic translations of tourism images from the ‘host’ society. Accordingly, the destination websites that this study selects fulfil an ‘intermediary’ role between ‘local’ cultures and global tourism tastes and interests.

The eight destination websites are analysed by using a multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) (Machin and Mayr, 2012). Multimodality considers ‘texts’ as interactive juxtapositions of multiple semiotic modes, such as signs, music, images and cinematic edits. MCDA emphasises the power relations and ideologies embedded in texts that can be discerned only through thorough critiques of both language and social contexts. The present analysis thus focuses on the website layout and design, written texts, online images and visual, editorial and sound choices. Specifically, it attends to the similarities and differences of the AMLs constructed on martial arts tourism destination websites with references to their discursive contexts, which are further explored in the discussion section.

Findings

Due to the dearth of studies regarding the gender ratio and travel motivations of martial arts training tourists, the first question that this study encounters in the website analysis is: why do masculinities matter in martial arts tourism? Even without consulting the literature regarding the long relationship between masculinities and martial arts (Green, 2016; Spencer, 2012) and combat sports (Messner, 1995), the salience of the masculinities on the eight martial arts destination websites is impossible to overlook. Among the approximately 100 Kung Fu and Muay Thai instructors pictured on the websites, only three are female. Likewise, disproportionately more males are martial arts tourists. The question then becomes how are Asian masculinities represented? An initial reading of all websites identifies the following three shared themes across the sites: descriptions of the destination; the martial arts style; and the martial arts instructors. The following sections show how these themes are related to masculinities in their constructions within different national contexts.

Thailand

Masculine visual elements dominate the layouts of the Thai websites. Except for SBG, all homepages of the Thai websites (DMT, TMT and SMT) have a black background and headline with aggressive, bold display fonts, which connote masculinity, strength and assertiveness. Masculinity is also reflected in the Thai gyms’ emblem designs that employ ‘macho’ visual elements (a half-naked Muay Thai fighter (SMT), a ravening tiger (TMT), and a clawing dragon (DMT)). Muay Thai instructors (Krus) are consistently introduced on the Thai destination websites with their extraordinary fighting records and champion titles. SMT, for example, boasts that ‘most of our trainers have fought at a very high level at Lumpinee or Rajadamnern stadiums in Bangkok and internationally’. TMT states that all its trainers ‘had long fight careers and many have won the most prestigious titles’. DMT’s homepage displays a similar banner: ‘the trainers [are] former Muay Thai champion[s] and WBA champion[s]; YES! You train with the CHAMPION!’

Compared with these three websites, SBG’s design is less ‘macho’, and it uses a light-coloured background and sans serif font with sharp edges in its headlines (which connote naturalness and elegance). This design is likely associated with its ‘restorative’ orientation, and SBG offers yoga courses alongside Muay Thai for ‘families’ and ‘couples’. Despite these ‘non-masculine’ elements, SBG features videos of the Muay Thai matches of gym instructors – most end in a brutal knock-out victory – which occupy two-thirds of the space in each trainer’s personal description section. These videos certify SBG’s Krus, like elsewhere, as ‘authentic’ fighters that can defeat powerful opponents in a violent sport.

All Thai websites contain photos of Muay Thai Krus who pose alone in their personal description section. The strong and well-built bodies of Muay Thai Krus are consistently emphasised. Most Krus in TMT, SMT and DMT are photographed from far (waist- or knee-up) social distances (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2020), which places their upper torso characteristics at the visual centre. Most Krus are shown in a Muay Thai stance, with a tight guard and tucked chin, gazing calmly at the camera and actively inviting viewers into imagined sparring. They are either topless or covered with tight t-shirts/vests, and side lighting is consistently employed to create ‘sculpting’ shadows that highlight their chiselled torsos. These visual deployments draw heavily from the posing and photographing techniques in promotional images of prize-fighting events, a cultural realm characterised by violent hypermasculinity (Messner, 1990). The following quote from SMT exemplifies how individual instructors are typically introduced:

Hailing from Songkhla, Keang had his first fight [when] aged just five [years] and has a whopping 225 fights under his belt. Saeng Keang is made of steel. Even after holding pads for some of our larger Western students, he is always happy to jump into the ring to spar or clinch.

Keang is constructed as a man ‘of steel’ by referring to the age when he started fighting, his ‘whopping 225 fights’, and his willingness to spar with ‘bigger Western students’. The smaller Thai boxer who bravely confronts bulkier foreign challengers is an archetypical image of Muay Thai masculinity in popular cultures, including the cinematic representations (Kitiarsa, 2007), where the physically smaller Thai fighter acquires superior masculinity for his courage, athleticism and toughness. TMT, for example, states that ‘Muay Thai fighters are known for their tough skin and ability to ignore pain and injuries, which are quite common’.

The construction of Thai fighters as physically powerful and ‘ultra-tough’ athletes is juxtaposed with what Bowman (2016) calls ‘mythologies of martial arts’ regarding Muay Thai’s ‘origin stories’. The destination websites consistently construct Muay Thai as originally a battlefield art of ancient Thai warriors. TMT, for example, presents Muay Thai as having developed in a ‘Darwin-like’ environment of anti-Burmese and anti-Cambodian warfare, where the Thai warriors’ training centres became ‘the first Muay Thai camps’. As military training, Muay Thai is described as the ‘bodily mimicking’ of the weapons of war: ‘The hands became the sword and dagger; the shins and forearms were hardened in training to act as armour against blows; the legs and knees became the axe and staff’ (TMT). Similarly, SMT associates ancient Muay Thai with Ayuthaya soldiers who dominated Burmese contestants in gladiatorial matches, as these soldiers were captured in anti-Burmese campaigns. As stated by DMT, ‘What all sources agree on is that Muay Thai began as a close combat battlefield fighting skill, more dangerous than the weapons it replaced’.

Although ‘mythologies of martial arts’ embed Muay Thai within the historical landscape of the ancient warrior kingdom that embodies Thailand’s national identity, the training experiences that these websites offer are connected to tourism experiences in a ‘tropical paradise’. In Phuket, you can have ‘serious training, while enjoying a tropical holiday’ (SMT). All destination websites evoke tropes of ‘nature’, ‘wilderness’ and ‘the tropical’ in spatial descriptions: the ‘old banana and coconut plantation’ surrounding the camp (SBG, DMT), the ‘sea and jungle views and a welcome sea breeze’ that you can enjoy from the gym (SMT), and ‘the burn of sand, sun and sea’ as you ‘push yourself to the limit’ (TMT). At the same time, these tropical tropes speak to the necessary environment for the ‘becoming’ of a ‘tough’ body for Muay Thai fighting. SBG and TMT evoke the ‘traditional’ and ‘hardcore’ way that Thai fighters condition their shins by ‘kicking banana trees and rock-solid bamboo shoots’. On the ‘About Muay Thai’ webpage, TMT describes in detail the ‘creative way’ in which Thai fighters use the ‘tropical environment’ for training, including climbing coconut trees, elbowing coconut shells, walking through muddy rice fields and rolling logs against bones.

As shown in this analysis, the four Thai destination websites converge multiple discourses about sporting masculinity, nationalist history and the tropical space in conceiving a hybrid masculine landscape. Before delving deeper into its implications, this study turns to another masculine landscape present in Chinese martial arts schools, which diverges from the Thai destinations.

China

In contrast to the Thai websites, where Muay Thai instructors are certified by their fighting records, Chinese Kung Fu masters’ ‘real Kung Fu’ is certified by their ‘authentic lineage’ (QSKF, YTS). In Chinese martial arts, lineage refers to a practitioner’s relationship to ancestral ‘masters’ in a continuous chain of apprenticeship. Typical descriptions of martial artists on the Chinese websites include ‘the 7th generation inheritor of Chinese Mantis Fist’ (QFKF), ‘the 24th-generation descendant of Chinese most famous Bing Jia Secret Skills’ (KMS), and the ‘17th generation disciple of Meihua Quan’ (STY). These texts express the hosting masters’ embodiment of an authentic tradition of martial arts passed down continuously through history.

In addition to ‘authentic lineage’, the Chinese websites also emphasise the martial artists’ ‘spiritual’ achievements. Unlike the ‘macho’ emblem designs of the Muay Thai camps, the emblems of most Chinese destinations draw on spiritual/literary elements such as the sitting arhat (STY), yin-yang symbol (KMS) and wen character (which denotes culture and literary refinement) (YTS). Naming martial arts masters ‘Shaolin warrior monks’ is ubiquitous, which connotes their simultaneous embodiment of martial and spiritual strength. Accounts of masters’ high spirituality repeatedly appear in selected reviews displayed on these websites. STY, for example, exhibits a single review about the male headmaster on its homepage:

I think I cannot capture in words what you taught me about my life (. . .) You showed me every day to be sincere, to be healthy, to live in the moment. You trained me in willpower. I never saw a person before in my life who is so present with everything. The eyes, the body and the qi. I will always remember you and see you as a great teacher for life.

Here, martial arts tourism is framed as a life-changing spiritual encounter with the ‘great teacher for life’. The martial artist as a spiritual director is a theme that recurs in the ‘Shaolin Kung Fu documentary’ on STY’s homepage, which shows the school’s headmaster in the temple praying, practising and discussing chi, life and healing with celestial Chan music. Chinese martial artists, therefore, are constructed as spiritual persons with ‘amazing wisdom’ (QSKF) and profound spiritual strength; they are constituted as sources of guidance, inspiration and revelation for travellers.

Like the Thai destinations, the spiritual emphases present on the Chinese websites are interwoven with historical ‘mythologies’ regarding martial arts’ ‘origin stories’ (Bowman, 2016). YTS and KMS associate the ‘origin’ of Shaolin Kung Fu with the legendary Indian monk Bodhidharma, who arrived in Shaolin around the fifth century CE. On both websites, Bodhidharma invented Shaolin Kung Fu as a physical and spiritual exercise for Shaolin monks to assist them in their ascetic practices and improve their wellness:

[Bodhidharma’s] primary concern then was to make the monks physically strong enough to withstand both their isolated lifestyle and the deceptively demanding training that meditation requires. It turned out that the techniques served a dual purpose as a very efficient fighting system and eventually evolved into a martial arts style called Kung Fu (YTS).

As this excerpt shows, Shaolin Kung Fu was originally constituted as a wholistic exercise for physical and spiritual wellbeing, whereas the discipline’s military effectiveness was relegated as a secondary status. Notably, martial arts historians have debunked such ‘origin’ narratives by demonstrating that Shaolin Kung Fu emerged as a military art to protect the monastery from pillaging – a common strategy of large landholders during this time (Henning, 1999). This discursive ‘demilitarisation’ of Shaolin Kung Fu’s origin facilitates the prioritised understanding of martial arts tourism as a means of spiritual transformation instead of physical domination. Indeed, the Chinese websites consistently prioritise Shaolin Kung Fu’s spiritual aspect over its physical ‘forms’. STY, for example, argues that the ‘martial arts forms are the most rudimentary part of this process. The highest ability level is achieved when your body is in harmony, and your mind can control your Qi’. For KMS, Shaolin Kung Fu ‘is not meant to fight somebody; rather, it is designed to promote healing [. . .] while other martial arts may focus on training that entails hurting an opponent, the spirit of Shaolin mainly teaches love and gentleness’.

This explicit disavowal of violence and militarism by the Chinese websites stands in stark contrast to the ‘warrior’ discourses regarding Muay Thai fighters on the Thai websites. It transports Shaolin Kung Fu from a combative art to the realm of therapeutic and ‘mindful’ exercises. This ‘spiritual’ discourse is reinforced through the ‘spatialisation’ of martial arts training within China’s ‘spiritual landscapes’. QFSK, for example, describes itself as located within ‘the hall of three beliefs’ certified by the ‘historic statues of Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism on the mountain’. STY boasts of being ‘the only training centre that operates within the walls of an active Chinese Temple. You’ll train, eat, sleep and meditate alongside the Shaolin Temple monks’. Similarly, a group of photos exhibited on the KMS website are captioned as ‘training Shaolin Kung Fu in the Taoism Temple’, which juxtaposes (Buddhist) Shaolin Kung Fu with Taoist landscapes and depicts practitioners exercising on the granite square/stairways of a Taoist temple. In these accounts, different Chinese religious systems are coalesced into a homogeneous fantasy of Oriental spirituality linked to martial arts training.

This spiritual emphasis, however, does not render Chinese martial artists less ‘macho’. Hierarchies of masculinities recur in the selected student reviews exhibited on the destination websites. One student invokes masculine attributes by complimenting Kung Fu masters’ ‘kindness, humbleness and pure badassness’ in the review (KMS). Another student states that the ‘foreigner students can be [such] sissies [but the masters] still will always animate you to keep trying’ (YTS). Visually, the Chinese websites consistently show pictures of martial artists in challenging Kung Fu forms (e.g. animal fists and weaponry dances) and acrobatic stunts (e.g. hard ‘Qigong’ and plum piles exercises) from public and social distances that emphasise their athletic and muscular torsos (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2020). The single-arm, short orange robe is the most worn costume in the photos, exposing the masters’ sculpted upper bodies in their movements. The half-naked bodies of Chinese ‘warrior monks’ connote a masculinity that embodies both spirituality and physical ableness in line with the ‘wholistic’ ideal in modern wellness discourses.

Discussion

As shown in the findings, the differences between the AMLs on the Chinese and Thai destination websites are much more pronounced than their similarities. Through an initial reading, we can claim that the AML on the Thai websites draws more on Western discourses than the AML on the Chinese websites of sporting masculinities certified by athletic achievements (fighting records) and physical toughness. The appraisals of Thai fighters by their abilities to ‘ignore pains and injuries’ speak to the ‘hard men’ ideal marked by the ‘willingness to risk the body in performance’ (Jefferson, 1998: 81); such an ideal is currently celebrated in various ‘gladiatorial’ competitions such as mixed-martial arts and professional boxing popular in America. The emphasis on Muay Thai’s military origin and ‘warriorhood’ legacy correlates with the ‘warrior masculinity’ narrative extensively present in Western sports, which likens modern athletes to mythical warrior heroes for their physical toughness, bravery and unemotionality (Gee, 2009). In comparison, the AML on the Chinese websites appears to reflect ‘local’ discourses of traditional masculinities that place cultural refinement (wen) over physical power (wu) (Louie, 2002). The emphasis on martial arts ‘lineage’ speaks to a Confucian hierarchy that honours master-apprentice relationships and ancestral ties (Louie, 2002). This traditional discourse, furthermore, converges with Buddhist ideology concerning spiritual exercise, non-violence and holistic wellbeing in constructing Shaolin martial artists as the ‘great teachers for life’. The differences between Chinese and Thai AMLs reflect the divergence between Muay Thai – a ‘sportified’ martial arts symbolically close to Western combat sports – and Shaolin Kung Fu – a ‘traditionalist’ martial arts tied to historically transmitted values in the ‘local’ society.

Nevertheless, this dualistic opposition between ‘global’ (Thai websites) and ‘local’ (Chinese websites) AMLs breaks down upon a closer examination of the data. On the one hand, the AML on the Thai destination websites ‘reinvents’ Muay Thai in line with Thailand’s nationalist-historical discourses to signify the country’s innate ‘warrior spirit’ tested and chastened through gruesome anti-foreign warfare (Vail, 2014). Such ‘mythologies of martial arts’ (Bowman, 2016) echo local representations of Muay Thai fighters as ‘national heroes’ emblematic of a distinct and continuous Thai identity that dates back to ancient history (Kitiarsa, 2005). At the same time, the Muay Thai fighters exhibited on the Thai websites diverge from modern Western athletic ideals for their prioritisation of physical toughness over muscular size (the small Thai ‘made of steel’ vis-à-vis the ‘bulky’ Westerner), and their ‘traditional’ and ‘hardcore’ way of training and conditioning by using the tropical environment. Such accounts connote a more naturalistic, vigorous and unmitigated masculinity not found in the West but is exclusively ‘emplaced’ within Thailand’s natural landscapes (e.g. Green, 2016).

On the other hand, the Chinese AML examined in this study, which prioritises spirituality, non-violence, and lineage status, is not entirely ‘alternative’ to Western masculine discourses. Shaolin Kung Fu’s ‘formal’ aspects – such as the stunts, the physical strength and the mesomorphic bodies – are visually prominent on all destination websites. The recurrent depictions of warrior monks’ nude, muscular upper torsos echo visual caricatures of male heroes in Hong Kong martial arts cinema that blend China’s traditional wu masculinity with ‘Western’ ideals that valorise men’s nude, muscular body on visual displays. By speaking intertextually to this ‘neo-wu’ masculinity developed on the silver screen (Lu, 2011) – which has played a crucial role in Shaolin’s booming fame since the 1980s (Farquhar, 2010) – the Chinese destination websites communicate a hybrid image of martial arts masculinities that are simultaneously foreign and familiar, ‘unique’ and ‘relatable’ for Western visitors.

As the above discussion shows, the analysis of the AMLs inevitably moves beyond the self-Orientalism framework that identifies ‘Western fantasies’ as the single ‘source’ of Asian destinations’ stereotypical self-imagination. From a self-Orientalism perspective, analysts can criticise how both Chinese and Thai destination websites are underpinned by postcolonial depictions regarding a homogeneous Chinese ‘spirituality’ and Thailand’s hedonistic ‘tropicality’. Nevertheless, Orientalism underdetermines the complexity of the Asian masculinities that martial arts tourism attempts to assemble. This study shows the multiplicity and heterogeneity of the AMLs in martial arts tourism, which do not follow a predetermined script but creatively select and hybridise multiple discourses at local and global scales. The process of selection and hybridisation is simultaneously a deselection and marginalisation of ‘undesirable’ images. For example, one essential ‘local’ metaphor ascribed to Muay Thai masculinity – the ‘hunting dog’ (Kitiarsa, 2005) – is not present on any of the Thai destination websites, as the dependent master-apprentice relationship that such metaphor connotes is perceived to be antithetical to the Western values of personal freedom and individual autonomy. Similarly, the Thai websites accentuate the physical toughness and ‘warrior spirits’ of Thai fighters while neglecting other essential aspects of Muay Thai masculinities equally valorised in Thailand, for example, the stylistic beauty, composure, nimbleness, and cunning wit of Muay Thai fighting (Kitiarsa, 2005; Spencer, 2013). In comparison, the violent nature and military origin of Shaolin Kung Fu are deliberately underplayed on the Chinese websites in favour of a ‘spiritual’ and ‘wellness’ interpretation of Shaolin Kung Fu, which is coherent with both the Buddhist ideology and Western tourists’ imagination of the ‘Eastern spirituality’ associated with Shaolin.

Conclusion

In tourism studies, two opposite observations coexist regarding the cultural representations of ‘non-Western’ destinations. On the one hand, scholars have criticised the ‘homogenisation’ of global destinations due to the hegemony of Western-centred ideas (Henderson, 2001); criticisms are directed to the spread of Orientalism to non-Western societies, which has resulted in indigenous image-creators adopting a compulsory Occidental script (Yan and Santos, 2009). On the other hand, scholars have also noted the rise of ‘post-Fordist’ tourism marked by diversification, individualisation, and emergent new niche markets (Dujmovic and Vitasovic, 2015); such a trend encourages the discovery of locally ‘distinctive’ place identities that diverge from the ‘standardised’ script (Richards, 2007). This study’s conceptualisation of the AMLs is an attempt to reconcile the two opposite perspectives. By emphasising the multiplicity and complexity of cultural manifestations, the AMLs foreground the intersection of concurrent homogenisation and heterogenisation that underpin Asian destinations’ politics of self-representation. As the findings and discussion show, spatialised images of local masculinities in Thai and Chinese martial arts tourism are determined neither by ‘distinctive’ national cultures nor by ‘universal’ global ideals; instead, they are creative products of selective appropriation and hybridisation of pluralistic discourses at different scales. In this sense, the AMLs in martial arts tourism are not only cultural manifestations but also cultural ‘improvisations’ that exemplify the active, productive role of local image-makers who occupy the intermediary position between the homogenising and heterogenising discourses of transnational masculinities that simultaneously shape the gendered landscapes of Asian tourism.

The diversity and internal hybridity of martial arts masculinities that this study uncovers speaks to a cultural complexity framework that rejects the reductive, essentialist account of ‘Asian tourism’ but foregrounds how cultural members navigate, negotiate and utilise the complex situations in which they find themselves (Ooi, 2019). Such a perspective is more important as contemporary international tourism moves towards a greater segmentation that intersects with nationally, ethnically, regionally and historically specific realms of practice such as martial arts, yoga, cooking, ethnic art, dance and language. The uneven ‘touristic’ transformations of these previously ‘non-touristic’ activities raise critical questions regarding cultural authenticity that is continually contested and reformulated under the divergent forces of asserting local distinctiveness and affirming global imaginations (McIntosh and C. Prentice, 1999). As this study shows, the masculine landscapes of martial arts tourism are quintessential examples of such tension. Future studies can examine the AMLs present in other forms of tourism that actively participate in the ongoing and context-specific ‘hegemony under construction’ (Connell, 2016) through multi-scalic appropriation, transmogrification, rearticulation and hybridisation of multiple discourses concerning race, gender and place.