How do we know what we think we know? A good old rambling from Traditional Taekwondo Ramblings

This post just ramblings, and is not to be considered a serious article. It is done to clear my mind and to take you back around 2 years time. 

I had seriously started writing the manuscript for my first book "The Lost Forms of Oh Do Kwan Taekwondo Volume 1 Taegeuk 1-3 Hyeong" and had decided I should include an essential history for the major Kwan. I decided to check a few details on Chun Sang Sup in Korean sources because there were so little to be found in English sources. To my horror most English sources seem to link back to an old article I wrote many years ago... Well so off I went, and my surprise was great when I found that in serious academic discourse in Korean Chun Sang Sup early training is either totally glossed over, vague (he studied Karate in Japan) to wildly conflicting. 

It dawned on me then how much we think we KNOW in English language sources that Koreans themselves are very tentative to give a hard answer to. Not because Koreans lack sources or knowledge, but the opposite. Korean Taekwondo academics researching Taekwondo history have access to all manner of sources that we simply do not have. We are talking interviews, correspondence, paperwork, reports, certificates, pictures, newsreports, first hand accounts both oral and written history that history shows itself for what it often is; messy. 

Kwan Heon - A closer look at Kwan creeds of early Taekwondo part 4: Chang Mu Kwan

«All Kwan generally has the same Heon, but they express it in different ways»

-Cho Woon Sup (Quote from «Taekwondo» page 12) 

Seeing as how we looked at Kang Duk Won in Part 3 (the last post in this series) I only find it natural to stay within Yun Byung In´s lineage and therefore I will look to the other school that resulted from his teachings; The Chang Mu Kwan. In Part 3 we learned that the Chang Mu Kwan was the first Kwan established after the YMCA Kwonbeopbu, and the disappearance of Yun Byung In in the Korean war. Usually I have accompanied each of these posts with a history of the Kwan founder taken from my first book (available here by the way), but I will not repeat the same information on both parts, so if you have not yet read Post 3 I strongly recommend you do that before this one. In fact you might consider going back to Part 1, Part 1.2, Part 2, Part 3 in that order :-)