Ancient martial art undergoes a rebirth in Cambodia thanks to a tireless grandmaster

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Ancient martial art undergoes a rebirth in Cambodia thanks to a tireless grandmaster

Post by Kung-fu Hillbilly »

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Grandmaster San Kim Sean

Ancient martial art that spawned Muay Thai undergoes a rebirth in Cambodia thanks to a tireless grandmaster

By Marissa Carruthers

“You don’t say you do martial arts, you don’t say you went to school, you don’t say you wear glasses. You’ll get killed within one minute,” he says. “You have to keep quiet, do what they want, follow their rules and just say yes. Never say no. They will kill you. It was a very terrible time.”

His first task was to track down the surviving bokator masters, which was no mean feat. “It was a very difficult task,” he says. “I didn’t have much money and had to spend everything I had going deep into the provinces to try and find them. The old generation who survived, they keep quiet. They wouldn’t admit they used to be bokator masters. They saw a lot of people being killed so they were afraid to tell the truth.”

Adding to his drive to revive bokator, San Kim Sean has decided to break the tradition of orally passing down knowledge. In a race against time, he is sketching every move he knows – he says he has mastered all of the more than 10,000 bokator techniques which, together with his lifelong devotion to bokator, has earned him the title of grandmaster – to preserve them for the future.

Full article http://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/article/2 ... dia-thanks
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