One of the most poorly understood elements of Asian culture in the West has to be the concept of balloon hats. This idea is thought of as a kind of mystical... wait, wait, no, sorry.

It's qi (chi) that's misunderstood. As the above link shows, EVERYONE understands balloon hats, especially across Asia.

But I recently came across this rather interesting article on qi in martial arts. People not used to the concept tend to think of qi in videogame terms, like this awesome electrical zapping power that you can fire out of your eyes if you just meditate the right way. That's not so.

(You have heard of qi, haven't you? In Japanese, it's called "ki" and that fearsome yell you hear during judo or karate sparring is called a "kiai" -- meant to be an abrupt release of personal ki.)

I've been a student (not a very good one) of tai chi chuan for a while, and I've had acupuncture treatments -- both systems which work by manipulating qi. The suspicion I've built up about the "mystic energy" is that it's more like a measure of efficiency. When every body part is in its proper place, moving in just the right way, everything becomes easier -- almost like your body has transformed into a fluid, or, well, a kind of liquid energy. Smooth and focused. I suppose it's one of those "duck" things: it quacks like mystical flowing energy, it waddles like mystical flowing energy, so you might as well call it a mystical flowing energy.

The article kind of takes the same tack, and it's written by a Westerner who studied at Wudang (remember the "Wudang Manual" in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? Yeah, it's a real place), so I think it's probably on the money.

Pity it didn't have any pictures of balloon hats.