styleFon jerng

ฟ้อนเจิง · fon choeng

Thai Wikipedia's history of the sport starts it here, in Lanna, as a dance.

Arjarn Sira · CC BY-SA 4.0

What it is

The Lanna martial dance. Jerng means tactics or finesse; fon is to dance. It is performed with weapons and with empty hands, and the Thai-language history of muay thai names it as the origin of the craft.

The long version

The sentence is unambiguous in Thai: วิชามวยไทยจึงมีจุดเริ่มต้นมาจากวิชาเจิง — the craft of muay thai therefore begins from the craft of jerng.

It comes in forms named for what is in the hand. ฟ้อนเจิงหอก with a spear, ฟ้อนเจิงดาบ with a sword, ฟ้อนเจิงลา with nothing at all. The empty-hand form is the one that matters here: a set of movements held as a dance, performed at festivals, which is also a fighting syllabus.

Inference — that is a different relationship between dance and fighting from the one the ram muay has. A ram muay is a ceremony attached to a fight. Fon jerng is the fighting, kept as a dance — which is how a syllabus survives in a place with no standing school and no printed manual.

The English article carries the same claim in a weaker form, dating the training of muay thai from the movements of fon jerng and noting that it survives as a recreational dance in the north today.

Connected to

• Lanna Where it is from.
• The victory drum What is played over it.
• Top maphap The part with no weapon and no opponent.
• Manop Yarana Who taught it, for fifty years.
• The hermit's school The older claim underneath it.
• The dance before the fight The other dance, and a different relationship.

Named here by

• Top maphap The dance it belongs to.
• The victory drum What it is played over.
• Manop Yarana What he taught.
• Lanna The dance.

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