Clash of Steel 2026 brings Asia's top HEMA fighters to Taiwan
Taiwan's Clash of Steel opened as a two-day HEMA meet built around Steel Longsword, Rapier & Dagger and a workshop slate led by Exiel Li and John Liou.
Clash of Steel 2026 opened in New Taipei City with a compact but high-stakes card: Steel Longsword and Rapier & Dagger, plus a workshop line-up built to draw serious fencers as well as newer entrants. The event pages cast the weekend as one of Asia’s premier HEMA gatherings, and that framing was reinforced by the mix of competition, lectures and technical training that organizers put around the bouts.
The timing mattered as much as the format. The 2026 rules were posted on March 30, the participant manual followed on June 19, and the schedule said any day-of changes would be posted on the event’s Facebook page. That kind of lead-up signals a tightly managed tournament environment, the sort that tends to produce cleaner brackets and fewer disputes once the blades start moving. For an event trying to stand above a local club meet, that structure is part of the point.
Clash of Steel also leaned hard into its regional identity. The event-info page describes HEMA as a 20th-century reconstruction movement that began in the United States and Europe, then notes that more people across Asia are joining through interest in foreign culture or martial arts. The Chinese-language event page goes further, calling it an Asia-focused gathering where fencers from different countries and clubs meet to compete on the floor and socialize off it. That is the clearest sign yet that Taiwan is being positioned not as a stopover, but as a destination on the Asian circuit.
The workshop slate gives the weekend real technical depth. Exiel Li, founder of Vor&Nach Historical European Martial Arts Association and a promoter of historical fencing since 2010, led Capoferro Rapier for the Modern Mind. Other sessions included Deconstructing the Oberhau: The Devil is in the Details, Italian Dagger and Grappling: the Third Remedy of Dagger, and The Death Roll, a longsword grappling and disarm workshop taught by John Liou of Vor&Nach HEMA. That blend of rapier theory, dagger work and wrestling speaks to a card designed for fighters who want more than medals.
The venue also underscores the event’s scale. Clash of Steel settled at Chung Mei Auditorium at Fu Jen Catholic University in New Taipei City, after a 2025 venue-change notice. The traffic guide directs attendees to take the MRT Orange Line to Fu Jen University Station, Exit 1, then walk from the school gate to the round building that houses the auditorium, at No. 510 Zhongzheng Rd. in Xinzhuang District. Tournament, workshop and lecture slots are limited, and that cap makes the weekend feel less like an open festival than a curated checkpoint for Asian HEMA in 2026.
A useful comparison comes from 2023, when Clash of Steel featured about ten workshops and tournaments in steel longsword open and steel single rapier open. The 2026 edition is narrower, but also sharper. By trimming the competitive card and pairing it with focused instruction, Taiwan’s biggest HEMA weekend is making a stronger case that it belongs on the sport’s regional calendar.
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