Great Kung Fu Masters of Chinese History: Wang Shujin

On this channel, we talk a lot about the three internal Kung Fu styles of Tai Chi, Xing Yi Quan and Ba Gua Zhang. And in this video, I want to talk about a man who mastered and popularized all three of these arts. He came from Tianjin, China. He was part of a secretive Taoist religious sect and got out of the country just before the communist regime took over, relocating to Taiwan, where he taught all three internal arts. He learned Ba Gua Zhang from a student of the founder of the art himself, Dong Haichuan, making him a third generation inheritor of the style. He was known for his extreme focus on generating massive internal power and his ability to take blows to the body that would leave the average man on the floor. We are of course talking about Wang Shu Jin, one of the last great masters of the golden age of internal martial arts. And this is his story. Wang Shu Jin was born in China in 1904 and began training in the martial arts in Tianjin in 1923 at 18 years old. He enrolled in the school of Zhang Zhan Kui, who is also sometimes known by his alternative name, Zhang Zhaodong. His teacher had been a student of the original Ba Gua Zhang master, Dong Haichuan, who brought Ba Gua Kung Fu, a mysterious martial art featuring circle walking, twisting and turning movements to get behind the enemy, and only palm strikes out of secrecy and taught it in Beijing, first in the imperial palace and then later out in society. So Wang learns Ba Gua Zhang and also Xing Yi Quan in this school. Xing Yi Quan is another internal martial art that is based on the movements of the spear and is very aggressive, advancing in straight lines and rarely retreating. Then in 1934 Wang started learning what is called Zhan Zhuang or post-standing Qigong exercises with another master called Wang Xiangzhai. Now this particular master had been very weak as a child and his parents sent him to study with Guo Yunshen, who was like Mr Xing Yi Quan, probably the most prolific master of the art in the mid to late 1800s. He's the guy who invented the half-step crushing fist or Ban Bu Beng Quan, which is now the standard method of doing this technique in many schools of Xing Yi Quan. Now since the whole point of Wang Shujun's master Wang Xiangzhai learning Xing Yi Quan with Guo Yunshen was to improve his health and strength, Guo spent a lot of time simply teaching him standing postures that he would hold for hours to strengthen the body. Things like Xing Yi Quan's San Ti Shi, which is their main posture for generating power, but then there are a load of others as well. This gave him a base of internal power and he discovered that it made his Xing Yi Kung Fu incredibly powerful. In fact he would later tour the country and spar with over a thousand other martial artists and it was rare that he could find someone that could beat him. I have traveled 10,000 li across the country to study, comparing martial arts skills with over a thousand men. There have only been two and a half people that I could not defeat. And then he goes on to name the names of three masters. I'm not sure what the half man thing is all about. I guess that's a Chinese joke, right? A Chinese joke from the early 1900s, probably completely lost on me. Anyway, after this training with Guo Yunshen and later on with other masters, he comes back to Beijing and establishes his school, but he also regularly goes to Tianjin and becomes friends with Zhang Zhaodong, Wang Shujin's master, and would ultimately train Wang Shujin. So while in China, Wang Shujin has already learned from two masters who inherited what they know from two of the greatest masters of those arts that ever lived, Guo Yunshen, the Xing Yi Quan practitioner, and Dong Haichuan, the founder of Baguazhang himself. But Wang's time in China would not last forever. Remember I said he was part of a secretive Daoist sect? Well, that sect was called Yiguan Dao, and it's not really a traditional teaching. They believe in sort of merging the teachings of China's three main religions, okay, Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism, and they even sprinkle in a little bit of Christianity and Islam. Yeah, I know, it's a salad bowl and not really something I would personally want to study. But in China, this sect flourished under the Japanese occupation. However, when World War II was over in 1945 and the communist regime was making its way to conquer all of China, Yiguan Dao became increasingly anti-communist. By the late 40s, Wang could see which way the wind was blowing, so he got out of mainland China in 1948 and moved to Taiwan. And sure enough, when the CCP took control of all of China in 1949, it took them less than a year to make Yiguan Dao illegal. Funny thing is, in 1952, it was banned in Taiwan too. But it did keep going underground, and perhaps the oppression against them wasn't as extreme as in mainland China, and it was then unbanned in 1981. It seems Wang Shujun didn't have any major problems in Taiwan despite his connection with Yiguan Dao. Now, for the period of his life that Wang spent in Taiwan, we have a lot more information, photos, and even videos. He would train with one more renowned master and then teach many students himself, including many westerners. And there are stories of many challenge matches too. So Wang Shujun's final master in Taiwan was a man named Chen Panling. He was originally from Henan province in the mainland. He was proficient in all three internal arts of Xingyi Quan, Baguazhang, and Tai Chi. He actually learned his Yang style Tai Chi from the grandson of Yang Luchan, the art's founder. And he also learned his Wu style Tai Chi from the founder of the art himself. He had served as the vice president of China's National Guo Shu Martial Arts Institute, and he served in the republican government at the provincial level, and thus he also fled to Taiwan when the communists took over. Maybe he was into Yiguan Dao too. It seems he moved in the same circles as the Yiguan Dao people. In 1950, he set up the Zhonghua Guo Shu Jinxiu Hui, or Chinese Traditional Martial Arts Advanced Study Association, which is known as the Guo Shu Federation of the Republic of China today. Just a side note, whenever you see Guo Shu, right, sometimes also known as Guo Shu, that's how they write it in that weird Taiwanese pinyin, that means national art, and it refers to traditional forms of Kung Fu as opposed to Wu Shu, which historically just means martial arts, right? Wu is martial and Shu is arts. But in the modern world, it has come to mean demonstration forms of Kung Fu for competitions with more flashy moves and less practical application, all right? So Guo Shu versus Wu Shu, all right? Guo Shu is traditional, Wu Shu is, I guess you could say, modern. Although, paradoxically, you could use Wu Shu to describe any martial art, but all right, let's keep going. Back to actually talking about Wang Shu Jin, he would be based in Taichung, the largest city in central Taiwan, where he opened a martial arts school shortly after he arrived, and he would be the first person to teach the internal arts of Xing Yi Quan, Tai Chi, and Baguazhang in Japan, where he made numerous trips. Many Westerners actually interacted with Wang Shu Jin and gave accounts of their meetings with him. He also had many Western and Japanese students. For example, there is the famous story that the American boxer Joe Lewis was in Taiwan in the 1950s. He met with Wang Shu Jin, who challenged him to punch him as hard as he could in his stomach, but Lewis refused, saying he didn't want to accidentally kill Wang. Now, there is footage of Wang taking what looked like pretty hard blows to the abdomen, but at the same time, Lewis was a heavyweight champion. His punch must have been pretty hard, but this is a theme in Wang's martial arts career. He weighed 300 pounds, so naturally he had some padding, but on top of that, all the standing Qigong exercises he did made him incredibly good at absorbing blows. You're going to hear more about this later on. But first, a story about another Westerner who challenged Wang. So another Westerner who challenged Wang Shu Jin was the karate master Don Drager, who met Wang in Japan. This story is recorded in the book The Whirling Circles of Baguazhang. Drager once tried to engage in a semi-friendly sparring match with the stocky Baguazhang master, that's Wang Shu Jin. As Drager gripped Wang and set himself up to deliver an explosive throw, he was suddenly hit with an explosive palm strike from a hand that had been less than an inch away from his body. The blow caused Drager to buckle over in pain and to become a Tai Chi student of Wang Shu Jin. Another Westerner who trained with Wang was Bruce Francis, who while studying karate in Japan, went to Taiwan in search of Wang in 1968. He managed to track him down in Taichung and has the following account in an article on his website. Despite my best efforts and despite Wang's enormous girth, his Baguazhang enabled him to effortlessly evade my blows and end up behind me at will. To graphically show me there was so much to learn, he allowed me after several days of study with him to strike him with full power anywhere on his body. After a while I could tell he was getting bored with my low level of skill and my inability to hurt him. Sometimes he would grab me with his arms and bounce me three or four times back and forth off his stomach like a yo-yo. My feet would fly in the air, then Wang would snap me back. I later heard that as a young man in challenge matches on the mainland, Wang had actually broken opponents' spines in this manner. Years later I learned from another teacher that the only defense against this technique was to turn sideways so that your hip bone and not your stomach made contact with his formidable belly, otherwise you were finished. Francis did manage to become a student of Wang Shujun, but only after an initiation where he had to hold a certain Baguazhang standing posture for two hours and every time he collapsed Wang Shujun's student would throw a bucket of water over him. Francis said that despite being only 19 years old and a karate champion, even Wang's students both young and old could all beat him, and he put this down to the amazing level of qi development of Wang and his students. Basically the foundation that Wang taught all his students was Wang Xiangzhai's universal standing pose qigong. No matter which art they were learning from him, he taught static standing postures to develop qi as the foundation of it all. Francis also wrote that Wang would do an activity in his class where he just stood there and let all his students lay into him with their hardest blows to no effect at all, so maybe he could have absorbed Joe Lewis's punch to the belly. Wang died in 1981 at the age of 77, but he goes down in history as one of the last examples of the incredible internal power that the generation of internal martial arts masters who learned in the 1920s and 1930s possessed. Alright guys, that is the video for today. Thank you so much for watching. If you want to support our work, please consider becoming a member for $4.99 a month. You're basically just buying us a coffee each month, but it really helps us out. As a thank you, you get early access to some of our videos before they're public, and your comments are highlighted, so if you ask a question, you're more likely to get a reply. 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