Our Sword Style

At Sydney Korean Historic Fencing we teach and practise Jo Jang Do, a sword style building on Jedok Geom, a sword form from the late 1500s recorded in Muyedobotongji. Jedok Geom was created by General Li Rusong and taught to the Korean military in the 1590s. However, the style recorded lacks detail. Over the past 8 years, we have been working on our interpretation of the style and initially called it Jo style Jedok Geom, but we now have many more techniques and concepts not recorded in the original manual so we have decided to create a sub lineage of Jedok Geom which we have called Jo Jang Do so as not to confuse the original source material with our extra content. 

Jo Jang Do is the Jo style of using the Jangdo (Korean for long sabre), focusing more heavily on duelling compared to the original Jedok Geom. We focus on putting our sword skills to the test with sparring as our mainstay as opposed to other approaches where sword forms are treated as a pattern or a dance. The style focuses on controlling the opponents blade and utilising the length of the jangdo for effective swordsmanship.

If you want to find out more about the progenitor style Jedok Geom, you can read the book “Joseon Korean Swordsmanship From the Source - Jedok Geom” which breaks down the historic manual into a more palatable and usable version compared to the record in Muyedobotongji. This will give you some more context to the forms and Jo Jang Do describes applications and uses of the techniques in actual combat which is not explained in the source material.

(Book pictured here. We recommend buying the ebook as almost all the money of the physical copies goes to the printers!)