A new website, aipingcheng.com, documents the lifetime achievements of a great Tai Chi Grandmaster. It’s a wonderful resource with videos and photographs spanning decades of elite wushu and tai chi.

Master Aiping learned from an early age from some of the most illustrious masters of the twentieth century, including Fu Zhongwen, Sun Jianyun, and Li Tianji. She went on to become a many-time tournament champion and a charter and long-term member to the Chinese national team.

In the latter third of her career, she has been a beloved and influential teacher to many, many American students. I can attest that Master Aiping is a wonderful teacher—she spent the last two years of her teaching career here in Austin, amazingly just a couple of miles from my house. Here she is, teaching in slow motion one night in class at The Asian American Cultural Center.

Many professional athletes suffer long-term physical damage from their sports–football players come to mind, and ballet dancers. A lifetime of tai chi will have you moving like this in your golden years!

Master Aiping is semi-retired now, but the website brings her long and illustrious career to life. Take a look! aipingcheng.com

This year, I have acquired a couple of books that I can recommend. One is an instructional manual by Chen Zhenglei for Laojia Yilu and Erlu. I’ve been using it as a review of Laojia Yilu, in connection with a video project comparing the Yang and Chen traditional long forms.

Chen’s Tai Chi Old Frame One & Two

In this book, every movement of the form is described in careful detail, with multiple photographic demonstrations by the author (a grandmaster of such eminence that I don’t need to cite his credentials). You certainly could not learn this rather difficult routine by studying Chen’s book. But if you already know Laojia, it is an invaluable resource for refining and correcting your form. I am working it to tatters.

Another book that has recently come to my attention is Martin Mellish’s A Tai Chi Imagery Workbook: Spirit, Intent, and Motion. This beautifully illustrated volume uses sketches, photographs, and diagrams to evoke, explain, and describe the internal experience of Tai Chi.

A Tai Chi Imagery Workbook

This book is not a manual for learning specific forms or styles. Rather, it is a guide to fundamentals such as posture, stepping, balance, and breathing. It would be equally useful to beginners, more advanced students, and (especially!) instructors. It is an attractive and readable book, too.

General Qi Jiquang was one of the most famous and successful military leaders in China’s long history. He came from a military family and assumed a hereditary post in Penglai, Shandong Province, at the age of 17.

Despite his youth, Qi quickly distinguished himself as an exceptional strategist and leader. Qi is best known for eradicating the threat of Japanese Pirates along the coast, but he was also famous for defending Beijing from Mongol invaders and directing the fortification of the Great Wall.

In 2018, I traveled to China with a group led by Master Jesse Tsao. In Penglai, we visited General’s Qi’s residence.

Read more on General Qi’s life and accomplishments here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi_Jiguang. General Qi is also famous for his manuals of military strategy. Read about the Jixiao xinshu here: https://taichinotebook.com/2018/06/17/the-ji-xiao-xin-shu-of-qi-jiguang/.

I have traveled to China twice with groups led by Jesse Tsao. Both trips were wonderful. In 2017, we spent the last weekend in Wuhan. I’m not sure I’d ever even heard of the city before that trip—I certainly didn’t know anything about it. I have only the best memories of it now.

We visited the marvelous Yellow Crane Tower, which is set on a hilltop and surrounded by a beautiful public park.

We visited a huge lake, also set in a beautiful park—the Chinese do not skimp on parks!

But the best thing was Tai Chi in the middle of the city. On Saturday morning we walked to a nearby mid-town park which was, like all the city parks we saw in China, full of people dancing, walking, working out, playing games and—what we were looking for—doing tai chi.

We had no plan, no appointment, nothing set up in advance. We just went to the park. And there we found the lovely Master Tan, dean of martial arts for this whole city of 11 million!

She led us through 24, the 108, Laojia, and a couple of qigong routines I wasn’t familiar with. It was thrilling. We agreed to meet again the next morning.

Sunday morning, in addition to everything we did on Saturday, she demonstrated Wudang Tai Chi sword for us. The whole encounter was unforgettable.

On our last night in China, several of us went walking in a long, wide pedestrian mall not far from our hotel. There is no crime in Wuhan; we were assured we would be perfectly safe, and it certainly felt that way. Safe and relaxed. Throngs of people strolled and shopped into the evening hours, and we joined them, feeling what it might be like to live in China, in Wuhan. I loved it.

Kung Fu Fan is one of two fan forms created by Li Deyin in the early two thousands. Both are popular and widely practiced, at least in China and among Chinese people living here, and both are usually performed to a piece of music also called Kung Fu Fan.

Here is Master Faye Yip performing Kung Fu Fan. She is Li Deyin’s daughter, and I think of her as the gold standard for both of his fan forms.

In an earlier video, Master Faye performs Kung Fu Fan with a group of students at a workshop in Madrid.

Kung Fu Fan has 52 movements, divided into six sections corresponding to six sections in the music. The first and last sections are slow and Tai Chi-like. The second section is faster, the third faster still. The fourth section repeats the second section exactly, and the fifth section starts out fast and emphatic, reaches high point, then stops and slows dramatically.

Most of the movements in Kung Fu Fan are based on traditional tai chi forms, especially sword forms, with the fan substituting for the sword. In the list I’ve got, the names of the movements are followed by the name of the traditional movement in parenthesis. Here’s the list: (PDF) kungfu fan

I’ve found a two-part, two-hour instructional video by Li himself. It’s in Chinese but as usual, he presents it so clearly, with such ample demonstration, that you can learn without understanding what he’s saying (though I wish I could!). The captions that appear on the screen match the list in the PDF above.

Instructional videos:

• Part One
• Part Two

Just for fun, and not to be missed, check out a couple of WOW renditions of the same form in tournament play:

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3XRUF48z2c
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7cz03oIFGc&t=3s

Kung Fu Fan is an entertaining piece to watch, fun to perform, not to mention good exercise in practice.  It works very well as an ensemble piece for as many people as you can fit on the stage. It’s not that hard to learn, at least well enough to perform in the back row, so a lot of people get to be in on the act.

My weekend practice group has performed with as many as seven people, in settings as diverse as Chinese New Year parties, community centers, and nursing homes. Above, Long Feng, Hu Peiyi and I (L-R front row) perform Kung Fu Fan  for a senior lunch at the Gus Garcia Community Center in Austin in 2018.