6th stop: A visit to Chenjiagou

Much of the material here has already been covered in Daniel Poon’s excellent website, www.chenvillage.com , and hence I will try not to duplicate too much. I took the coach from Zhengzhou (capital of Henan province) to Wenxian, which took about two hours, crossing the Huang He (Yellow River) on the way. If you want to base yourself somewhere with western comforts, Wenxian has several hotels. To get to Chen village itself, you can either take a taxi (which takes 10 minutes) or there is a minibus, which is of course much cheaper but has no fixed timetable: like a lot of bus services in the Chinese countryside, it leaves when it’s full.

At first blush, Chen village looks like any other northern Chinese farming village:

Chen village

However, a walk through the village soon corrects that notion: I would bet that not many northern Chinese villages of this size have 4 commercial martial arts schools! The first school you encounter as you walk into the village is Chen Bing’s new school, the Chen Bing Taiji Academy.

Chen Bing's school

Further along on the right-hand side is Zhu Tiancai’s school:

Zhu Tiancai's school

Now that Zhu Tiancai resides in Singapore, the school is nominally headed up by his sons Zhu Xiangyi and Zhu Xianghua. However, the school was shut on the day I visited, so I’m not sure how one would go about studying there.  A couple of hundred yards further on, on a road that forks right off the main drag, is the Chen Village Taiji School run by Chen Xiaoxing:

Chen Village Taijiquan School (Chenjiagou Taijiquan Xuexiao)

The Chen Village Taiji School is by far the largest school in the village, and is both a private academic school (minban xue xiao) as well as a martial arts training centre.  Next to the school is a Taiji ancestral temple built by Henan Tourist Board on the site of the Chen family graveyard. My guide, Mr Chen Shiyan, added as an aside that the Chen family had yet to receive compensation from the provincial government for the land, and so I skipped it without regret.

Finally, about 1km outside the school proper is Wang Xi’an’s school, the Chenjiagou Wushu School, run by his son  Wang Zhanjun.

The Chenjiagou Wushu School

Like the Chen Village Taiji School, Wang Zhanjun’s school is both a martial arts training centre and a private academic school. The posters on the outside of the school detail Wang Zhanjun’s recent participation in CCTV’s Wulin Da Hui, as well as the new Guinness world record set  in 2008 when he tossed a 2kg weight 98cm with his dantian.

Unfortunately, as I was in town looking for masters of the ‘small frame’ (xiao jia) Chen style, I only had a brief peek into the schools above. Fortuitously, a large billboard has been fixed to the wall of one of the buildings on the main road with profiles of small frame masters past and present, along with contact details of local small frame masters. After a few phone calls and dead ends, I found myself at the home of local master Chen Zhijing, whose home doubles as the headquarters of the Chen Style Small Frame Research Association.

Chen Zhijing's home

M Chen kindly furnished me with some details about small frame and introduced me to some local masters, pictured below.

Front row L-R: Chen Lizhou, Chen Zhijing, Chen Qinghuan, Chen Bihua

All of the masters above are either disciples or grand-disciples of Chen Kezhong, the noted 18th-generation small frame master.

Chen Lizhou’s case is especially interesting, as he initially studied large frame  under Chen Zhaopi and Chen Maosen, then learnt xin jia (new frame) from Chen Zhaokui in the same ‘batch’ as the ’4 Buddha’s Warrior Attendants’  (i.e. Chen Xiaowang, Chen Zhenglei, Wang Xi’an and Zhu Tiancai), only converting to small frame later in life. All the masters were unanimous in refuting the commonly repeated misconception that the small frame system was created by removing difficult or vigorous movements from the original routines.

They also agreed that stance holding (zhan zhuang) is a relatively recent introduction into the Chen taiji curriculum, saying that neither large frame nor small frame practitioners practiced zhan zhuang prior to the 1980s, and that it was introduced by Feng Zhiqiang on his visits back to Chen village in the early 80s.

The Hidden Tao: Li Jingwu’s life in Taijiquan

I have been reading a book called ‘Hidden Tao [大道显隐]‘ by one Mei Mosheng, which is a compilation of articles commemorating the life of the eminent taiji master Li Jingwu, who learnt Chen and Wu style taiji from some of the greatest masters of his day. As M Li is not that well known in the West, perhaps some introduction is in order.

Li Jingwu in a Chen style posture

M Li was from Shandong, but moved to Harbin when he was 14. While in Harbin, he started learning Mizong quan [lost track boxing, made famous in China by Huo Yuanjia of the Jingwu association] under Liu Ziyuan at the age of 17 in order to heal his legs, which had been frostbitten during the harsh Harbin winters. After 3 years of training, his legs got better and he had achieved a degree of gongfu. In the early ’30s, Li moved to Beijing for business. While there, Li always kept an ear to the ground for martial arts teachers. A friend from his village who had practiced xingyi, taiji and bagua for many years and knew the Beijing martial arts scene well recommended that Li study taiji. Li managed to get a recommendation to study Wu style taiji under Zhao Tie’an, a disciple of Yang Yuting (of northern Wu style) and Wu Jianquan. Among Wu stylists in Beijing, Li Jingwu was known as one of the ’5 tiger generals’ [五虎上将], a group which also included the famous master Wang Peisheng.

L-R: Zhao Tie An, Yang Yuting, Wang Ziying (Wang Maozhai's son, who coached Li Jingwu in push hands)

The Chen style master Chen Fake was also teaching in Beijing at that time (having been invited to teach in Beijing in 1928 by his nephew, Chen Zhaopi). In the early ’40s, through an introduction from Hu Yaozhen, the famous master of xingyi and qigong who also taught Feng Zhiqiang, Li Jingwu became M Chen’s disciple and studied with him for over a decade. Prior to liberation, Li ran a department store in Beijing. 1959 was a turning point in his life, for it was in that year that Li accepted a post to teach taiji full-time at the Beidaihe Qigong Rehabilitation Hospital in Hebei province. M Li spent the rest of his life teaching taiji in the relative ‘backwater’ of Beidaihe.

Chen style ‘Family photo’ taken in Beijing in 1982. Back row, 3rd from left (L3): Chen Xiaowang. L5: Feng Zhiqiang. R5: Li Jingwu. R4: Hong Junsheng. Chen Zhaokui’s disciple Ma Hong is front row, far right.

M Li was unusual in that he made all of his students learn both Wu and Chen styles, and was also unusual in that, although he was mostly known for his Chen and Wu style, he had a good working knowledge of Sun and Yang styles as well. Based on his experiences, M Li created a separate set of neigong exercises, which was later made public in the book ‘Taiji Neigong’. His art is carried on by his disciples such as Lu Dehe, Wang Dayong and Zuo Zhiqiang, as well as by his son Li Shujun and grandson Li Hongshun.

I wanted to share a small extract from this book which I thought was interesting:

“M Li’s neigong was incredibly developed. One time he got me to feel his stomach – it felt as though there was a half-inch wide hard band around his stomach. He was smiling while I did this, he definitely wasn’t holding his breath or anything. Once, during a course of lectures on taiji, whilst explaining the phrase ‘don’t let qi mix with qi’, he said: ‘this is the ancients showing us that there are two kinds of qi: one is breath, and the other is the ‘inner qi’ of the dantian. The meaning of this phrase is not to confuse breath and inner qi. When M Li taught me neigong, he said: ‘it’s a gradual, stepwise regimen that produces gudang qi [surging qi] – it is surging qi that can be used in push hands and fighting. When M Li pushed hands and launched people, you could see his dantian rotating, the spirit flowing up the back [神通于背], and there would occasionally be ‘heng,ha’ sounds. Even in his old age, M Li could still launch people more than a zhang [3 metres] away, a feat made possible by his deep neigong.

M Li lived to be 86, which is a ripe old age, I guess. His taiji combined both health and fighting: even when he was over 80 he could still launch people in a moment. Even after he had had an operation on his legs and he couldn’t walk, he could still push hands with us whilst sitting down – this must have been thanks to his neigong. I remember, one time when I went to see him, he said ‘I’ve gotten old, I’m good for nothing, I can’t even carry a basket of eggs. But if someone applies force on me, I can still use my neigong to yield, neutralise and then launch him. I guess this is ‘reaction force’. However, this ‘reaction force’ can only be used after long practice. This is skill [gongfu] – once you have developed the ‘taiji body’, you won’t lose your gongfu. It can even be used lying on a bed. Finally, M Li said “the neigong of internal martial arts, once achieved, stays with you your entire life, this is one of the unique characteristics of internal martial arts.”