The Wu Yu Xiang style Tai Chi

I found this video recently of an old gentleman called Mr Han practicing his Tai Chi form in the courtyard in front of the old house of Yang Lu Chan (the founder of the Yang style, pictured top left) in Yongnian County, Hebei province.

The video says he’s practicing Wu Yu Xiang’s (1818-1880, pictured top right) varient of Tai Chi, but I don’t find his performance particularly typical of that style as it is usually presented with much smaller stances than he’s using. It’s possible of course that this is what an ‘older’ version of the style looked like. It’s more similar to what we know as Yang style today.

The Wikipedia take on Wu Yu Xiang was that he was a “scholar from a wealthy and influential family who became a senior student (along with his two older brothers Wu Chengqing 武澄清 and Wu Ruqing 武汝清) of Yang Luchan. Wu also studied for a brief time with a teacher from the Chen family, Chen Qingping, to whom he was introduced by Yang.”, which I think is accurate.

It’s interesting that he learned from Yang LuChan, but also went back to try and find the teacher that Yang learned from, presumably, to find out details he was missing, or simply out of curiosity. It turned out that Chen Changxing (Yang’s teacher) said he was too sick to teach and instead referred Wu to Chen Qingping who was living in Zhaobao (赵堡) village, just down the road. He studied with him for a few months. The whole thing does sound a bit like a brush off to me.

Also, I think we can assume that Wu financially supported the teachers he learned from, since he was wealthy. Here we can see the birth of the Ching Dynasty idea that a martial artist could earn a living purely from teaching these arts.

Wu, and his brothers, allegedly found the documents we now call the Tai Chi Classics in a salt cellar, however, I’d say it’s much more likely that they are the authors of these documents (which are really just a collection of old martial arts sayings), given that they were wealthy scholars. Especially since they definitely did author some other writings on Tai Chi themselves.

Wu taught his nephew Li Yi-Yu, who in turn taught Hao Weizhen (郝為真; 1842–1920) who was the person who made the style popular, so it is often called Hao Style.

The video above is the sort of Tai Chi form I associate with Wu Yu Xiang’s style today, but if we go back to the video taken outside Yang’s house in Yongnian, the Tai Chi starts at 54 seconds. If you notice Mr Han’s performance looks a lot more like Yang style.

If anything I think this just shows that the further you go away from the source of something, the more it inevitably changes. Tiny little changes, amplified by time, end up with big differences in the end results.