Great Kung Fu Masters From Chinese History: Wang Xiangzhai

In this video, we are going to dive into the story of a Chinese Kung Fu master who, while you may not have heard his name before, has a profound influence over how the traditional internal martial arts are practiced. He is the first one to bring a certain secret training practice out to the public and popularize it. He learned from accomplished masters who were the second generation in the main lineage of their art, most notably Xing Yi Quan or Xing Yi Boxing. And he went on to create his own art based on certain aspects of the Xing Yi that he had learned combined with other things to increase the power of internal energy produced. Some of his students went on to become famous for seemingly almost invincible levels of internal power that made their bodies incredibly strong. We are of course talking about a man who famously said he tested his skills with over 1,000 different martial artists across the country and stated that only two and a half could beat him. He won multiple challenge matches against Chinese and foreign opponents and revolutionized training methods in the Chinese internal martial arts. This is the story of Wang Xiangzhai, pioneer of internal power training. Wang Xiangzhai was born in Hebei province in 1884 at the end of the Qing dynasty. This was a time where China faced attack from both outside and within. Foreign powers wanted to carve up China for their own gain but at the same time the Qing dynasty itself was waning. Rebellions such as the Taiping Rebellion and others broke out across the country and this led to instability in the countryside with local warlords rising up and it was actually quite a dangerous time for regular people. Thus there was a craze of learning martial arts amongst the people to protect themselves and the bodyguarding industry became huge with traditional martial artists guarding shipments of goods or transfers of silver across the countryside. At this time many teachers also came out to teach martial arts that had been only taught in secret just a few years before like Xing Yi Quan which had been a secret art of the Dai family used in the bodyguarding business before Li Luoneng brought it out to teach publicly in the mid-1800s. Wang Xiangzhai himself would later say that he encountered the tail end of a convergence of great traditional martial artists. So how exactly did Wang get involved? Well as a child he was weak and sick with a chronic breathing disorder so at eight years old his parents sent him to train with Guo Yunshen who was a student of Li Luoneng who we mentioned a few moments ago so a second generation disciple of Xing Yi Quan and one of the most prolific practitioners of the art. Now it would be unusual for an eight-year-old to get the opportunity to study martial arts with one of the foremost masters of the time. Normally as a child we would only be able to learn from one of that master's students with the hope that as you grew up showed your dedication with years of training in your late teens or as an adult you would get the chance to train with the master himself but Wang Xiangzhai had an unusual advantage in that his older sister was actually married to one of Guo Yunshen's early students and at that time Guo had returned to Hebei province to retire and was actually living in the family home of his older sister and his sister's husband who was Guo's student. So after Guo initially refused with some persuasion by a family friend Wang Xiangzhai moved into his sister's home and was accepted as a student of Guo Yunshen. Now some people still think more of his training may have come from his brother-in-law rather than Guo himself with Guo simply supervising but no matter what it seems he was under the guidance of Guo Yunshen so let's just assume that his training was planned out by Guo Yunshen even if it was his brother-in-law who supervised him on a day-to-day basis. For the first three years Guo did not teach Wang any forms at all he just taught him standing stance training or Zhan Zhuang and he first taught him this posture Hun Yuan Zhuang which is the posture that Wang is practicing in this photo it is primarily for health you can see the feet are equally weighted and these kinds of postures normally don't generate martial power but improve the body's overall health. Now interesting thing is and I want to give a shout out to the website Yiquan Park for this one it's a site all about Yiquan which is Wang Xiangzhai's art that he would go on to found later but they pointed out that you can find carvings of ancient people standing in this position in pottery excavated in China believed to be 7,000 years old it's also mentioned in the Yellow Emperor's classic of internal alchemy or Huangdi Neijing where it states in ancient times there were enlightened ones holding up heaven and earth controlling yin and yang breathing in the vital essence through the air standing alone guarding the spirit the bones and muscles as one thus they could achieve longevity living as long as heaven and earth there was no end this is the life they achieve from cultivating the Dao looking back with what we know now people believe that this passage was referring to standing Qigong postures like the one we just showed you anyway let's keep going so Guo did teach other postures to Wang Xingyi Quan which he practiced has the training stance of San Ti Shi which has a 70-30 weight distribution between the back and front leg and does generate martial power then Guo also apparently taught him shaking the big pole which is another Xingyi training method for developing power in the body as Wang went on training with Guo Guo started teaching him a few movements followed by the five elements fist techniques of Xingyi Quan and later the 12 animals but Guo's teaching was very strict and focused mainly on developing internal strength and willpower rather than knowing a large repertoire of moves and this is something that Wang would embrace as his philosophy in martial arts later on as well Guo died in 1901 so Wang Xiangzhai only actually trained with him for about nine years but let's now move on to the next stage of Wang Xiangzhai's life there were several events that influenced Wang Xiangzhai's study of martial arts and eventually led to the creation of his own style Yi Quan which means intent boxing first was meeting Cheng Tinghua who was one of the few original disciples of Dong Haichuan the man who brought Bagua Zhang or Bagua Palm out of the mountains to Beijing and introduced it to the public in an interview with a newspaper called Shi Bao in Beijing in 1940 Wang Xiangzhai talked about meeting Cheng Tinghua when Cheng visited Guo Yunshen his master and performed a demonstration of Bagua Zhang in my childhood I met Mr Cheng Tinghua I remember he seemed to be like a divine dragon roaming the sky changing infinitely it is hardly possible for a modern person to reach such skill and strength and by modern person he meant a person in 1940 he also goes on to say that he distantly remembers Dong Haichuan and praises his attainment of the Dao but this is strange since Dong is supposed to have died two years before he was born so it could just be that he was remembering what Dong's disciples at the time told him about their teacher another story from Wang's teenage years is that a local cargo escort company had its cargo hijacked and thus had lost its reputation in the area they sought the services of Guo Yunshen to retrain their men and improve the reputation of the company because Guo was already elderly he decided to refuse and sent Wang Xiangzhai to personally deliver a letter to the company when Wang entered the courtyard of the building however he saw numerous weapons on racks as the martial arts nerd that he was he lost self-control and picked up a stick and proceeded to practice his shaking the pole exercises however this was a fatal mistake since there was a custom in the bodyguarding industry in China at that time that if someone from outside touched a weapon it meant a challenge to the company the head of the organization knew Wang was just a kid and didn't mean it so he tried to grab the stick and stop Wang but as he lunged in to grab Wang had already started shaking the pole and the man was thrown several feet away by Wang's power he actually didn't mean to do it but at this time his skills were still limited and he could not stop in time now the chief of the company although he knew it was a mistake and he was actually impressed by Wang's power he still needed to save face so he got another martial artist called Liu Weixiang to come and challenge Wang Liu attacked quickly and Wang could not react in time he ended up getting flung into a small brick chimney that heated a Chinese-style kang which is a heated bed he was knocked straight through the chimney destroying it and was defeated this experience profoundly influenced Wang Xiangzhai and made him realize how important it is to study real combat techniques what the Chinese call shizhan not just with people from your own school who go easy on you but with people who really want to defeat you or even kill you his teacher Guo Yunsheng from that point on started teaching Wang real combat after Guo passed away around the year 1900 and sources for this all say different things some say 1898 some say 1901 some say 1903 but it's around 1900 after Guo passed away Wang kept practicing martial arts with his brother-in-law and he then started helping with the family business and one time he was on a business trip with his father and they encountered a group of bandits he easily knocked several of them down with a few punches and the rest ran away he now knew the power he possessed and was overjoyed however he no longer had the guidance of his teacher Guo Yunsheng and he strayed from a moral path developing a gambling habit his family were very displeased and lost face and thus in 1907 he left home for Beijing and joined the army his skills in martial arts were quickly discovered by a general who thus became fond of him and eventually this led to him marrying that general's daughter it was at this time that Wang traveled all over the country and in his own words I've traveled 10,000 li across the country to study comparing martial skills with over a thousand men there have only been two and a half people that I could not defeat and Wu Yihui of Shanghai it seems by half it meant that the fight had no clear winner all right he didn't fight half a person okay how could you fight half a person it meant a half defeat but this was all because of Wang's emphasis on testing martial skills in the real world he was willing to have challenge matches with other masters and be open about who won or lost unlike certain kung fu masters who would only accept challenges in secret to preserve the reputation of their schools with all this experience in real matches with other martial artists who were fighting for their life to preserve their reputations he incorporated many aspects of other arts into his own including bagua footwork and aspects of tai chi basically he could figure out what worked although interestingly when asked about tai chi in that interview in 1940 Wang really didn't think highly of most of the tai chi masters who were around at that time as masters of the original tai chi quan I should recommend the Yang brothers Shao Hou and Cheng Fu they are old friends of mine thus I know this boxing really has some mechanics but out of a hundred persons not even one gains its essence and even if one can gain it it is still one-sided because the basic skills of intuitive perception already died out a long time ago thus their lower bodies have no real strength to speak of so the gist of what he is saying is that even in 1940 the real tai chi was already lost and what was left was then changed by later generations as for dealing with an enemy in a fight against a master hand please do not even consider it using tai chi unless the enemy is stiff or sluggish even the famous masters of this boxing have no chance to apply their skills so examples like this of Xu Xiaodong defeating so-called tai chi masters in modern times are nothing new it was happening even in the early 20th century so Wang picked what worked and got rid of what didn't and created Yi Quan or intent boxing which at its heart is a stripped down version of Xing Yi Quan with a heavy emphasis on generating internal power through standing stance training which is how Wang started all those years ago here is Wang's daughter demonstrating some of his standing stance exercises or Zhan Zhuang and also some movements for generating internal power Wang died in 1963 but his legacy was carried on by several of his students including one particularly famous student called Wang Shujin who while he mostly taught Bagua and Xing Yi rather than Wang's Yi Quan he taught all of his students Wang Xiangzhai's standing stance exercises for generating power as the foundation of their training and was known himself for having a level of Qi power that made him seem almost indestructible if you want to see a video on Wang Shujin click the link on screen now there's also so much material about Wang Xiangzhai that I feel to do it justice I need to do a part two to this so this video was an overview of his life but next week we will go into detail on the creation of his system of Kung Fu Yi Quan and a few more stories about challenge matches subscribe to the channel so you don't miss it