Home Page Article Archive - New York Internal Arts

Circle Walking in Ba Gua Zhang and the
Cavalry Tactics of the Byzantine Horse Archers
Posted: 4/27/10

Contact with the horse people’s of the Eastern steppes, particularly the Huns, influenced Byzantine cavalry tactics. This tactical innovation emphasized mobility and flexibility over attrition style warfare and was perhaps first employed by military commanders like Belisarius in North Africa and against the Goths in Italy.1 One of the tactics adopted from the steppe horseman was to ride in a curved arc when attacking a strong static defensive formation. This allowed the Byzantine horse archers to shoot all along the arc of the attack ensuring that the enemy would receive arrows from multiple directions, some of them against their unshielded side. This also allowed for the famous Parthian Shot, in which the rider turns backward to release a final missile as his horse is moving away from the opponent (the final arrow on the left in the diagram below).2

Diagram adapted from Byzantine Cavalryman c. 900-1204 3
Tactics stressing mobility and the use of arcs to find and exploit weaknesses in the opponent’s position are characteristic of Ba Gua Zhang’s reliance on circle walking and the curved step as the foundation of its martial tactics. Gao Ji Wu specifically mentions this in his recent book, The Attacking Hands of Ba Gua Zhang:

Ba Gua Zhang is a martial art characterized by walking the circle and rotating the body. The attacking and defending techniques are also based upon circle walking, and upon the palms. Striking the spot by surrounding it and striking from the side (at an angle) in order to avoid head-on conflict or striking the front from the side. Changes in circle walking and rotation of the body are seen everywhere in the attacking techniques of Ba Gua Zhang. 4

These kinds of tactics, combined attacks at multiple angles while walking in arcs, are particularly visible in the Ba Gua Saber.

1 The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire by Edward Luttwak. Cambridge Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009. pp.56-8.

2 Byzantine Cavalryman c. 900-1204, by Timothy Dawson, Illustrated by Giuseppe Rava. Oxford: Osprey Publishing LTD, 2009 p.27.

3 Ibid.

4 The Attacking Hands of Ba Gua Zhang, by Gao Ji Wu with Tom Bisio, photographs by Valerie Ghent. New York: Trip Tych Enterprises LLC, 2010.

Great Article on the Healing Benefits of Qi Gong:
Martial Arts for Health and Fitness
By April Tome - a student with New York Internal Arts in Connecticut