Bhassler wrote:It's mostly baseless stories based on nothing.
I don't think so. I would rather say that most of the common understanding of Tai Chi History is "mostly baseless stories based on nothing". People tend to accept things without looking deeper into the facts.
Everyone acknowledged that the style came from Chenjiagou, Yang came directly from Chen,
That is not exactly true.
Yang Luchan only acknowledged that he learned from Chen Changxin, he never stated that the art was from Chen Village. He called it Mianquan and later it was called Changquan. Yang never called it Chenquan or said anything that could make anyone believe that it originated from Chen village.
If you look at all Tai Chi texts, books and writing before 1930, there was no one who believe that Taijiquan originated in Chen village. so that "Everyone acknowledged that the style came from Chenjiagou" is just not true. Most books doesn't claim Zhang Sanfeng as the inventor even if people mention him, but rather they say that no one knows exactly who it was. The only person who thought that Tai Chi was invented by a Chen family member was Chen Xin, but he thought it was a person name Chen Pu who created it. Chen Pu taught some medicin and digestion exercises that could have had Daoist origin. So this could suggest that even the Chen Clan believed that the art had a certain Daoist influence.
Tang Hao was the first one who even mentioned that Wangting had invented Tai Chi. This is what I wrote in the post:
"Tang Hao based his idea solely on maybe the only thing that points to that Wangting created any martial art. But this was only written as a side note, like an appendix, in the Chen Family Manual (Chen Si Jia Pu), that Chen WangTing created something called Chen Quan, or Chen Boxing. This note was added much late by Small Frame practitioner Chen Xin (1849 -1929) who wrote the very first book about Chen Style Taijiquan. But the thing is that Chen Xin never thought that Chen WangTing should have created Taijiquan. Instead, he believed that a person named Chen Pu should be regarded as the first Chen family member who learned ad taught Taijiquan. So what Chen Xin meant by Chen Quan, or Chen boxing, was not Taijiquan. It was something else."
So in fact, Tang Hao based his whole idea on a mistake he made. He didn't know that Chen Xin thought that Chen Pu had invented Tai Chi and that his note meant something else.
The rest of the history, how the Chen family convinced the government to name Chen Wangting the inventor of Taijiquan is about politics and relationships only.
I have never said that Tai Chi needs to be hard, quite the opposite. What I wrote in this post, or at least meant, was not that Tai Chi must be hard or that it came from hard Shaolin. What I said was that the Tai Chi that Yang Luchan was not developed in the Chen village, that it was probably brought in from outside. Much later it was infused with something that was called Chen Fist which was probably Song taizu long fist or a variation of this art. What Yang Luchan was taught was the original art of Tai Chi (though it was not called so), and first later it was the Chen family Tai Chi changed. Examining facts, this is the theory which I have found to be the most logical. I don't believe that the Yang Luchan Tai Chi was hard, or necessarily very fast, but there are indication that they used sparring and partner exercises using full speed and that they tried to set each other up, so if you didn't do things right you were going to be hurt. This type of practice was common in TCMA back then.
True the bolded part above isn't very clear but you aren't writing professionally so no big deal, haha.
