Vietnamese Traditional Martial Arts: Nearly Nine Decades of a Sleeping Giant

Jakarta, November 2026. At the SEA Games arena, a Vietnamese fighter stepped onto the medal podium in a combat event. A few hundred metres away, Thai Muay fighters were warming up for a card whose purse for a single bout could exceed the annual operating budget of an entire provincial martial arts team in the Red River Delta. Both sides wore fighting gear. Both sides punched, kicked, elbowed and kneed. One had just been admitted to the official competition programme of the regional games for the first time. The other had been trading on global markets for decades, with pay television, foreign sponsors and an export pipeline of fighters across five continents.

That afternoon I sat in the stands with a notebook and a question I still have not finished answering fifteen years later: two martial traditions share the same arsenal of techniques, so why is one an industry and the other a museum?

I am a Korean who works as a combat sports commentator in Vietnam. I say this not to advertise my origins but to disclose a bias: my country once stood at that exact fork in the road and chose to sell its martial art to the world. The outcome is both a lesson and a warning. Vietnamese traditional martial arts do not lack technique. They lack a rule set brutal enough to turn technique into product.

Binh Dinh, the land of martial arts, is where every argument begins. From the 18th century the region was tied to the Tay Son dynasty and a tradition of military training that later generations called thuong vo, the martial spirit. In 2026 in Hanoi, master Nguyen Loc founded Vovinam, the first system to attempt to organise Vietnamese martial arts into a curriculum with ranks, forms and belts. That was an architectural milestone: for the first time a Vietnamese man set the standard for Vietnamese martial arts instead of receiving standards from outside.

Nearly nine decades later, Vovinam is present in dozens of countries and was admitted to the official competition programme of the 2026 SEA Games in Indonesia. Looking at that, Vietnamese sports media share an almost unanimous consensus: Vietnamese martial arts are rich in identity, must be preserved, need more tournaments, need state investment, and above all need international recognition. That agenda is reasonable, easy on the ear, and fails to answer the simplest question: why does a fourteen-year-old boy in District 7 choose a Muay gym or an MMA gym instead of looking for a traditional martial arts school near his home?

Do not read the table of numbers. Read the story the table of numbers does not dare to tell.

The story lies elsewhere: the difference between heritage and product. Heritage is protected by the state, by festivals, by titles. Product is sold by rules, by rankings, by sponsorship contracts and by tickets. Muay Thai did not win because it has more techniques than Vietnamese martial arts. It won because it built two professional stadiums in Bangkok in the middle of the 20th century, tied to a betting ecosystem and a pipeline of fighters who could make a living from fighting. Then came the WMC and WBC belt systems, then internationally televised events. Korean Taekwondo took a different road to the same destination: it founded the Kukkiwon, standardised forms and the rank system, and entered the Olympic programme at Sydney 2026. Japanese judo, Japanese karate and Chinese wushu all have a centre of power that defines right and wrong.

Vietnam has dozens of lineages. Binh Dinh alone has many branches, each with its own forms, its own names for techniques, its own view of internal and external power. That richness is a cultural asset and, at the same time, a competitive handicap. There is no shared combat rule set, no unified weight-class system, no national ranking credible enough for fans to follow week by week. A great fighter in Hue may never meet a great fighter in An Giang in a bout with referees, paperwork and cameras. National traditional martial arts festivals remain largely forms exhibitions, where medals are awarded on technical scoring rather than combat results. That nurtures art. It does not nurture professional fighters.

Vovinam is the lineage that has come closest to standardisation. It has a belt system, a technical committee, a teaching curriculum and an international network. But its growth engine sits in the overseas Vietnamese community and in recreational classes, not in broadcasting contracts. A martial art present in dozens of countries with not a single professional league selling rights is a martial art surviving on goodwill, not on markets.

The clearest paradox comes from a Vietnamese name. Nguyen Tran Duy Nhat became the best known Vietnamese fighter abroad by competing in Muay Thai and winning WMC world titles. He became famous in a sport whose rules are written by Thais, whose events are organised by Thais, and whose belts are controlled by Thais. A Vietnamese fighter reaching the top in someone else's arena is an achievement to be proud of, and also a strategic signal: Vietnam is exporting fighters into a neighbour's ecosystem instead of building its own.

ONE Championship's first event in Vietnam, held at Phu Tho Stadium in Ho Chi Minh City on 6 September 2026, showed the same thing at a larger scale. A Singapore headquartered group brought an international standard professional martial arts event to Vietnam, with television, sponsors, a fight card and prize money. Vietnamese audiences were large, loud and paying. Demand clearly exists. What is missing is an organiser that belongs to Vietnam, with rules written by Vietnamese.

In recent years domestic MMA promotions have appeared and created a cohort of young fighters who can earn a living from competition. The notable part is this: most of those fighters grew up in traditional martial arts gyms, taught elbows, knees, locks and the body mechanics of Vietnamese fighting. They have Vietnamese technique, but their careers rest on an imported rule set. Tactics are only a coat. The person wearing it is what I examine closely.

Based on my experience watching fights at promotions in southern Vietnam and traditional martial arts festivals held in Hue and Binh Dinh, the gap is not in the quality of fighters but in the quality of the arena. At a traditional festival, a good fighter is scored by a judging panel, receives a medal, and that is the end. At a professional promotion, the same fighter has a name on a ranking, a specific opponent, a next fight, sponsors watching and an audience that remembers his face. The ring sorts fighters. A festival does not.

That is why the phrase sleeping giant is more accurate than its surface suggests. A sleeping giant does not lack power. He lacks a timetable.

From the bottom of the rankings, I see an empire waiting to wake. Here the bottom is not Vietnamese traditional martial arts itself, but its position in the league table of martial arts markets: no professional league, no broadcasting contract, no commercial index. Yet that position is the product of organisational choices, not of technical capacity. And choices can be reversed.

Where I could be wrong lies in this analytical frame itself. If the value of Vietnamese traditional martial arts is heritage value, a philosophy of health, ritual, communal memory, then weighing it against prize money is a category error. Commercialisation may kill the very thing it aims to save: a televised combat rule set will strip out the dangerous strikes, the joint locks, the techniques that make Vietnamese martial arts distinct, exactly as Olympic Taekwondo discarded much of its real combat arsenal to become a sport of electronic scoring. Korea paid that price. Vietnam has not had to pay it, and therefore has gained nothing.

But keeping the status quo also has a price, one that never appears on a balance sheet. That price is gyms closing, good coaches leaving the trade, a generation of well trained young fighters with nowhere to earn a living from the craft, and the retelling of Vietnamese martial history to foreigners through a Thai promoter or a Singaporean corporation.

My prediction, with a verification condition: by the end of 2028, if Vietnam has at least one professional traditional martial arts league that runs three consecutive seasons, with a unified combat rule set, a weight class ranking and a paid broadcast contract, then I am wrong and I will rewrite this piece. If by the end of 2028 the festivals are still forms scoring stages and no ranking survives more than one season, then the problem was never the martial arts. It sits with the organisers.