Author: Mr. Li, would you like to start with how you came to learn Tai Chi from the late Grandmaster    Wu Tu Nan?

Li Lian: I started Tai Chi with the late Mr. Wu Tu Nan during the Cultural Revolution. I was 16 then and all the schools were closed down due to the political upheavals. It happened that my school was right next door to the venue where Mr. Wu Tu Nang was teaching Tai Chi, separated merely by a railway line. He was teaching on the grounds of the Planetarium which was across the railway line from the No. 56 Middle School where I went. So I used to climb over the railing of the Planetarium to watch the daily Tai Chi practice. I came to hear about Mr. Wu purely by coincidence, what we Chinese call Yuan Fen (karmic connection). I chanced to spot him one day walking on the street, a very distinct-looking elderly gentleman he was, wearing a large loose mandarin suite and a very smart pair of sun-glasses, carrying a walking stick on one elbow. His steps were so spruce and light, completely without the clumsiness of the average elderly people. What a spruce old man, I remarked to my classmate who was walking with me. My classmate told me that the elderly gentleman was a martial artist and the chairman of the Beijing Martial Art Association. I said well then, why not introduce me to him. He said ‘Oh no. He teaches adults only, not kids’. I later found out where the elderly gentleman was teaching and made the effort to go to watch him teaching every day. I simply assumed that there won’t be any chance of me getting him to teach me so I satisfied myself with watching him teaching every day. And this went on for about 3 months until one day he suddenly addressed me from the other side of the railing. ‘Come over here, kid’, he said, ‘What are you watching’. I told him that I was watching him teaching Tai Chi.

He then said ‘Why don’t you climb over and join us.’ Since then, I started learning Tai Chi from Mr. Wu Tu Nan. He taught me the Ding Shi, holding postures first. That took me over six months to learn. Then he started to teach me Lian Shi, the moving set or the flowing form. Then it was the fast form. Then it came the time I was sent to the rural area for re-education. Mr. Wu told me that there was a Broad Sword form which he wished to teach me when I come back. I was away for about 18 months and when I came back from re-education, I resumed my training with Mr. Wu who started teaching me Song Kung, relaxation drills or techniques. In Tai Chi practice, the most important part is not the Chuan, the boxing bit, but the Kung, the internal techniques. During the process, Mr. Wu passed on to me a great deal of knowledge. As I only just finished primary school and didn’t get any secondary school education, my level of education was poor. Luckily I got the chance to spend a lot of time with Mr. Wu Tu Nan, most of the mornings during the two years when I was 16 to 18 since we happened to live not far from each other, only a couple of streets down. I used to wait for him under the Old City Gate and then we would walk together to the Planetarium for training. On the way Mr. Wu would start to talk to me about Confucianism and Taoism, also tips on writing, which benefited me a great deal on top of his Tai Chi teaching.

When I came back from my re-education in the rural area, I started working in a bank and also started learning traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) from my father who was a disciple of Shi Jin Me, one of the four most prominent Chinese doctors in the city of Beijing. My father brought back textbooks from the Institute of Traditional Chinese Medicine where he was teaching for my training. So parallel to my Tai Chi training and my work, I was also receiving training on TCM. It was during that period that Mr. Wu Tu Nan started to pass on to me some knowledge of Tai Chi Kung. By tradition, he was not supposed to teach Kung to anyone apart from those who have been initiated into discipleship. But he decided to teach me on account of our closeness. Due to the big age gap between us, he thought it appropriate for me to acknowledge a student of his, Mr. Ma You-qing as my master. I was too young to understand why I could not be Mr. Wu’s disciple since I was already training under him right from the beginning. So I postponed the Bai Shi (worshiping as teacher) ceremony with Mr. Ma.  This went on for nearly twenty years and then Mr. Wu Tu Nan started teaching me Xin Fa心法, mind disciplines for Tai Chi.  He was getting too old for performing a lot of the Tai Chi postures, and he felt the lack in what he was teaching me. He was living with his wife but they had no children. So my wife and I were visiting him at home a lot, about twice a week. If I missed a visit, he would call me to urge me to go. It was during those visits that he started to talk to me about some essentials and knacks of Tai Chi practice. But he was getting too old for teaching me some of the postures. I remained within his company until his last moment. Just before he passed away, he gave me 3 tasks to complete. You see in the past I had always called him Grandpa Wu; but then about a couple of years before his death he said I should start calling him Grandpa instead of Grandpa Wu. That brought us even closer, I was like his adopted grandson. He knew he was dying and so he set three tasks for me to accomplish. No. 1 he wished to have a research association established under his name. Secondly, he wanted me to carry on practicing Tai Chi even after his death. He feared that I would stop when he dies. Those things he failed to teach me, he said, he wished me to learn from Mr. Ma Youqing, one of his indoor disciples. The third issue involved his personal possessions as he was a collector of antiques. Soon after this, Grandmaster Wu Tu Nan passed away in January, 1989.

Q: How old were you when you first met Mr. Wu?

A: I was 16. That was in the year 1968. So after his death, I was initiated into the discipleship of Mr. Ma You Qing because there remained a few advanced Tai Chi Kung postures that Grandmaster Wu didn’t teach me due to his advanced age though he passed me all the Xin Fa (Mind Techniques) of Tai Chi. That’s how I came to learn the rest of Tai Chi techniques from Mr. Ma who shared with me his personal experiences of Tai Chi training. You see, though Mr. Wu had many students, he only accepted two of them as his indoor disciples, Mr. Ma You Qing and Mr. Shen Bao He. Though I was not considered a disciple of Mr. Wu due to the age gap, I did learn all the techniques directly from him as his adopted grandson. For that reason, Mrs. Wu  proposed to have a tomb tablet made and set up in memory of Mr. Wu under the names of the three of us (the two indoor disciples and me). So when Mr. Shen Bao-He came down to Beijing, we went ahead to have the tablet set up.

Author: Can you be more specific about the Tai Chi techniques you learned from Grandmaster Wu?

Li Lian: The techniques I learned directly from Mr. Wu Tu Nan include Tai Chi sword and broad sword, Tai Chi Ding Shi (holding form) and Lian Shi (flowing form) as well as Tai Chi relaxation techniques (Song Kung) and most of the Tai Chi Kung (internal techniques). What I picked up from Mr. Ma You Qing are the advanced Tai Chi Kung and his understanding of Tai Chi as learned from Mr. Wu. Mr. Shen Bao He, the other disciple of Wu also joined us for some training sessions and we remain on good terms.

A non-official organisation called Research Association on the Thoughts of Mr. Wu Tu Nan was established in Beijing under the proposal of Mr. Yang Jia Cang, another student of Mr. Wu.  Mr. Wu taught the Tai Chi Kung only to his disciples. So those who were not taught Tai Chi Kung are not considered to be his disciples. Mr. Wu always took great care to watch his students during training sessions and so did Mr. Ma You Qing. One of the advanced Kung techniques, according to Mr. Wu Tu Nan, was rather risky to practice. Part of Mr. Wu’s Kung was also inherited from his family. You see, his grandfather served as a guard at the royal court. As Wu was a sickly child when he was small, his grandfather asked him to learn internal Kung内功from his dad. Later he started Tai Chi training with Mr. Wu Jian Qian, the forefather of Wu-style Tai Chi. The Tai Chi form we are using now is the same form that Mr. Wu Jian Quan was doing in his early years and it was practiced as a holding form and flowing form at separate stages. For some reason, Mr. Wu Tu Nan turned to Mr. Yang Shao Hou for his Tai Chi training after 8 years’ of training under Wu Jian Quan. Wu Tu Nan’s grandfather and father asked Yang to come and teach Wu Tu Nan in their house. Apart from the Yang fast form, Yang Shao Hou also taught Wu Tai Chi Kung. He taught Wu how to cultivate and issue different powers such as bounce power (弹抖劲) and stick and adhere power(粘粘劲) and some Qi Kung (气功energy work)as well as some standing postures 桩功 and relaxation techniques松功. In the circle of Tai Chi, anyone who’s learned within a lineage should also have been taught Kung. To practice Tai Chi without practicing the Kung is a waste of time even you practice all your life, as the saying goes. But only a handful few came to learn about the set of Kung techniques passed on by Yang Shao Hou. Apart from learning the Kung from Mr. Yang Shao Hou, Wu Tu Nan in his early years of Tai Chi training also went to Mr. Song Shu Ming who was in procession of a copy of a rare ancient Tai Chi treatise. Now it happened that a friend of Wu Tu Nan came across a copy of this treatise on a second-hand book stall. He bought it but found it of no use to himself. So he handed it over to Wu Tu Nan thinking it might be useful to him. That’s how Wu came to know of this Tai Chi treatise by Song Yuan Qiao. So Wu went to see Song Shu Ming, a descendent of Song Yuan Qiao with a copy of the treatise. The two of them compared  their copies of the Tai Chi treatise and found they were the same apart from a few words. Song Shu Ming was so overjoyed to discover that Wu Tu Nan was also practicing Tai Chi Kung that he started to reveal some of his Tai Chi Kung secretes to Wu. So, the techniques of Wu Tu Nan were a result of integrating the techniques from both the Yang lineage and the Song lineage into a complex whole. Wu Tu Nan’s Tai Chi system comes with 4 different components: Jin Kung(Power Technique) , Zhao Kung(Applications), Song Kung (Relaxation Technique) and Chi Kung(Chi Building Technique).

Authur: So Tai Chi Kung consists of these 4 parts of techniques.

Li Lian: That’s right. Tai Chi forms including the fast form and push hand training all come under the category of Applications. Wu Tu Nan hand copied 6 copies of the Tai Chi Treatise and gave a copy to six of his Tai Chi seniors. After coming to hear about Song Shu Ming from Wu, they all went to meet with Song to discuss and practice together and found that Song’s techniques were superior to theirs’. So they all started to study Tai Chi Kung with Song. Some of this Song lineage Tai Chi Kung was later carried to Hong Kong.

Mr. Wu Tu Nan was careful to pass on Tai Chi teaching in its original form. I’ve asked him about the many repetitions contained within the Tai Chi form he was teaching. He replied that these repetitions were there to highlight the most essential principles of Tai Chi Chuan. This was also echoed in the way he taught. He would always start people off with Ding Shi, the holding form. You see during Cultural Revolution Wu and his wife was living in poverty having barely enough to eat. But when he taught Tai Chi, he would never chase his students for payments. He simply left the choice to his students whether to pay him or not. See, many students found the holding form hard work. To make it worse, they didn’t get much instructions or explanations from their teacher Wu Tu Nan. As a result, a lot of them simply left after 2 or 3 months of training. So I suggested to Mr. Wu that he should adapt his way of teaching to suit the needs of the students more. But he replied that he will never change his way of teaching because that was the way his master taught him. This means he would stick to the Tai Chi taught by his master Wu Jian Quan without borrowing anything from Song Shu Ming. This is because when he started to write books on Tai Chi, it was Wu Jian Quan’s Tai Chi form he based his writing on. [End of Part I. To be continued]