History & styles

A history of t'ai chi ch'uan

Every martial art has two histories: the one its students tell each other, and the one that survives in documents. T'ai chi ch'uan has an unusually rich version of both, and learning to hold them side by side is part of understanding the art.

The legend: an immortal in the mountains

The oldest story places the art's creation with a Taoist hermit. Wikipedia's article on Zhang Sanfeng describes him as a legendary Taoist whom many believe invented tai chi, said in tradition to have lived as an ascetic and to have settled in the Wudang Mountains; one version has him watching a bird attack a snake and drawing a set of movements from the way the snake stayed still, alert and then struck. The same article is careful to note that other sources point to earlier versions of the art, and that his birthplace and the length of his life are matters of conflicting accounts.

The legend gave t'ai chi a home. The Wudang Mountains in Hubei hold a famous complex of Taoist temples and monasteries and are associated with tai chi and Taoist martial arts, often described as the Taoist counterpart to the Buddhist Shaolin Monastery. Stories of this kind are not worthless because they cannot be proved. They carry what generations of practitioners valued: stillness before action, yielding before force, and an art rooted in a philosophy of change rather than in brute strength.

The documented history: Chen village

When historians go looking for evidence rather than stories, the trail leads to a village in Henan. The earliest well-documented practice, according to Wikipedia's overview of tai chi, began during the Ming–Qing transition at Chen Village and Zhabao Village on the North China Plain, a region where long periods of unrest had nurtured many martial traditions.

The Chen family's own records credit a ninth-generation village leader, Chen Wangting, with shaping the family's training into a distinctive system. Wikipedia's article on Chen-style tai chi describes him codifying earlier Chen practice and bringing in ideas from Chinese philosophy, such as yin and yang, alongside breathing and stretching methods, and it describes Chen style as the oldest known style, marked by silk-reeling movement, alternating fast and slow motion, and bursts of released power. The same article admits that how the Chen family first came to its art is unclear and that contradictory histories abound. What is agreed is that the other family styles trace their teaching back to Chen village.

Yang Luchan and the road to Beijing

The art left the village through one determined outsider. Wikipedia's article on Yang Luchan tells how a young man from a poor family in Yongnian County was referred to Chen Changxing of Chen village, trained there, and was eventually given his teacher's permission to go to Beijing and teach students of his own. Part of that account, including a story of secretly watching his teacher's night-time practice through a broken wall, reads like legend and should be enjoyed as such. The broad outline is not in doubt: Yang Luchan became the founder of what is now called Yang style, and his reputation in the capital carried the art to a far wider audience than a single village could reach.

According to Wikipedia's article on Yang-style tai chi, Yang Luchan's teaching led directly to the development of other major styles. His son Yang Banhou taught Wu Quanyou, whose son Wu Jianquan went on to co-found Wu style; Wu Yuxiang developed Wu (Hao) style, which in turn became an ancestor of Sun style. The family tree that looks so tidy on a lineage chart was, in life, a web of teachers, students, friends and rivals in Beijing and beyond.

From martial art to public exercise

The great turn in the art's history came early in the twentieth century. Wikipedia's overview of tai chi describes how Yang Chengfu, Wu Jianquan, Sun Lutang and others promoted and standardised the art for its health benefits in programmes supported by the Nationalist government, an approach later expanded and institutionalised after the founding of the People's Republic. Yang Chengfu, grandson of Yang Luchan, is especially associated with the large-frame Yang form: Wikipedia's Yang-style article describes him removing the most vigorous releases of power, jumps and stamps from the solo hand form to emphasise the large frame, while keeping them in the weapons forms, and developing a version that was easier to teach to busy modern students.

That choice shaped what most of the world now thinks t'ai chi looks like: slow, even, open and graceful. It also opened a lasting argument, still heard in many schools, about how much of the martial content should be taught alongside the health exercise, and to whom.

Crossing the Pacific

In the twentieth century, teachers who left mainland China carried their family and lineage styles to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia and then North America. Two of them appear elsewhere in this guide. Kuo Lien-ying, according to Wikipedia's article on him, left for Taiwan and later settled in San Francisco's Chinatown; the same article credits him, with a note that a citation is needed, with bringing the Guang Ping branch of Yang style to the United States. Tchoung Ta-tchen, who is described on his own page in this guide, taught in Vancouver and Seattle. Through teachers like these, traditional forms reached parks, community halls and university gyms across the western United States and Canada, alongside the simplified forms that were being spread at the same time.

Reading the history well

• Treat founding stories as tradition. They tell you what a lineage values, not necessarily what happened.
• Look for the documented thread: villages, families, named teachers and the forms they left behind.
• Expect disagreement. Lineage claims were often made by the people who stood to gain from them.
• Remember that every style you meet today has been shaped by decisions made for modern students.

If you want to follow the story into the practice rooms, comparing the family styles is the natural next step, and the page on Taoism, Buddhism and the martial arts looks more closely at the ideas behind the legends. For the lineage that runs through the Pacific Northwest, see Tchoung Ta-tchen.