the rum soaked fist: internal martial arts forum

It's been years since I've been abroad, and, to be honest, I want to take a month away to refocus, get away from a few things and do pretty much nothing but train. I had debated a meditation retreat, but this seemed more what I would like to do with my summer.
I'd like to visit China and just really knuckle down, but wouldn't know where to start looking as I don't know what is cheap/expensive, and there seem to be a fair few "come train at wudang/shaolin" packages out there. And I know little of who the legit teachers are. I have a bit of experience (a few years, though fairly casual) with wing chun, but want to move to IMA and these seems like a good opportunity. I have some experience with yang taiji and the 24 form, but to be honest I just want to train hard and learn, so bagua/xinyi/taiji (even baji) all sound good to me as long as the instruction will be good. The spear of baji/xinyi have always intrigued me, but so has bagua's footwork and taiji swordplay, so with good tuition it really wouldn't be a loss to pick one over the others.
So I turn to you RSF, can anyone help me out?

Depends what you want out of the holiday really. If you want a holiday with solitude, beautiful scenery, some philosophy/meditation and some kungfu on the side, then any of the schools on Wudang would be a good choice. But if you want to learn real traditional northern gongfu (as bagua, xinyi and baji all are), then steer clear of Shaolin/Wudang like the plague - they mostly teach modern wushu-ised versions of the main IMA.

The place to go if you are mostly going for gongfu (rather than scenery) is the Beijing/Tianjin area. Even now, that area is overflowing with masters of traditional styles of xingyi/bagua/baji. However, most of the good, traditional teachers do not teach in commercial schools - they teach in parks/at their house. If you're willing to study from several teachers, there are any number of teachers in Beijing for xingyi/bagua/taiji that I could recommend. I'm happy to PM you some recommendations if you decide to go this route.

However, if you just want to study full-time from one teacher for a month, then you should check out Jonathan Bluestein's teacher, Zhou Jingxuan. He teaches very complete, traditional xingyiquan, bajiquan and taijiquan in Tianjin. See their website at http://swz.weebly.com/.

One thing I would consider is a possible trade off between "maybe-not-so-perfect (but likely good enough) teacher PLUS perfect mountain air" vs. "excellent teacher PLUS awful city smog"

Just maybe another variable to take into account, when making your decision.

Best of luck

I did get that impression about the Shaolin/Wudang schools. A lot of "taught by a 37th gen Shaolin lay disciple", but I've no idea how verifiable their skills are.
Ideally I'm thinking full time training, preferably single teachers, but from what I've seen here and all over that does seem a lot harder to plan for the pure gongfu holiday...
Also with my lack of knowledge of Chinese, I imagine it'd be pretty hard to learn in the parks, which was one major benefit of learning from a set school.

Nicklinjm, if you could send me those suggestions I would very much appreciate it. I must admit I'm not really sure how I would go about all the planning, but any more advice would help guys.

Chen Zhonghua seems to have a nice thing going with his full time program in China-- check out practicalmethod.com. He's got a ton of videos online, so you can probably get a pretty good sense of what you'd be getting as far as training, too.

Thanks guy,this all will be very helpful.

Pls check your pm

Will do.