Thursday, November 12, 2009

Xingyi in Taiwan



Stopping back in Taiwan for another look at the Tang Shou Tao martial arts system.
This style represents a fusion of traditional Chinese arts with the structure and ranking borrowed from Japanese systems.
I love this stuff. Look at the beauty of the forms-- and I think the guy demonstrating the chicken and swallow forms may be Su Dong Chen, who went on to be a famous master in his own right.
From Wikipedia:

Tang Shou Tao is not a separate style of martial art, but rather a practical, step-by-step, systematic approach to learning internal martial arts and developing highly refined levels of skill. It incorporates elements of all three of the major Chinese internal arts (xingyiquan, baguazhang, and taijiquan) as well as Shaolin kung fu and qigong. However, the emphasis of this system is on xingyi and bagua. Although the system itself was formed and founded by Hung I-Hsiang during the 1950s and 1960s, the roots of using the commonalities of bagua and xingyi in practice and application can easily be traced back through Hung's teacher Chang Chun-Feng (張俊峰) to his teachers, Li Cunyi (李存義) and Gao Yisheng (高義盛).
When Hung I-Hsiang took a trip to Japan, he was very impressed with the way martial arts instruction was organized there. He liked the uniforms, the belt system, and the systematic approach to training. Subsequently, he adopted many of the Japanese style martial arts school characteristics when he opened his own school. The students had belt ranks, wore Japanese style uniforms, and Hung devised a more systematic approach to martial arts instruction than what was typical of most Chinese style schools.

--Very cool stuff...

4 comments:

Wim Demeere said...

Wow, blast from the past. I remember seeing the "way of the warrior" documentary all those years ago. It was inspirational, to say the least.
IIRC, the episode on goju ryu was pretty good too.

Thanks for the memories!

Wim

j said...

Hi John,

That's actually one of Hong Yi Xiang's sons doing the Swallow form, not Su Dong Chen. Su doesn't appear in the Way of the Warrior film. However, his classmate Luo De Xiu is the young fellow doing the Ba Gua demonstration in the park with Hong watching.
-Jess O

Dojo Rat said...

Jess;

Thanks, I found all the pictures of Su with Hong (at link) and saw somewhere that he was in that documentary, but perhaps it was Luo De Xiu I was thinking about.
Thanks for checking in, always glad for your thoughts.

Abi said...

Dear John

First thanks for sharing my videos in your blog.
The one who demonstrates the forms is indeed Hong Zi-Han (A-Han),one of master Hong's sons. We just paid the Hong family a visit in Taiwan and had a small ceremony at master Hong's grave site.

All the very best,
Abi Moriya (Israel)