GrahamB wrote:nicklinjm wrote:Getting back to the original topic, the Chen style jian practiced by Hong Junsheng's students is directly from Chen Fake's daughter Chen Yuxia, who learnt it from her father in the 1930s. So it's almost certain that Chen Fake himself did practice a jian form, i.e. that particular form is not a recent invention. Not sure how the Hong branch jian form relates to that practiced in current Chen village.......
So, what you're saying is there's no record of a Chen jian form until they came to Beijing where the Yang (and Wu?) family were teaching?... how curious
GrahamB wrote:I don't know or care really, these days (I like Nabil's attitude to that) but nobody anywhere (absolutely nobody) mentioned "Tai Chi Chun" before 1912 as far as I can see - one of the Ching Emperors had chosen the name as something like "Tai Chi Emperor" and that meant nobody else was allowed to use it, on pain of death.
Every mention we have of Tai Chi Chuan happened after the fall of the Ching Dynasty when the name "Tai Chi" was back on the market.
And it is a market - this is all marketing - people branding their product different to sell. Let's not lose sight of that.
There are written references to "Tai Chi Boxing" that are dated older, but none of these saw the light of day before 1912, so take them all with a pinch of salt. (From a salt cellar).
此書乃先祖吳全佑府君拜門後由斑侯先師所授是於端芳親王府內抄本在我家已一百多年公藻在童年時即保存到如今
吳公藻識
After my grandfather Wu Quanyou became a formal disciple, Yang Banhou gave him this manual. It is a handwritten manuscript that was made in Duan Fang’s royal mansion. It has been in our family for over a hundred years. I have preserved it up to now since my childhood.
– comment by Wu Gongzao
[This Yang family manuscript exists in two versions, placed side by side below. The pages on the left are the version owned by the Wu family, first shared publicly in its entirety in 1985, and the black & white photocopies on the right are of the version owned by the Yang family itself, first shared publicly in 1993. (Only the Wu family’s version is titled and has a cover, intro, and personal stamps.)
To date these documents, all we really have to go on is Wu Gongzao’s comment of “more than a hundred years”. But when did he scribble his introductory note? The Wu family’s document was included as an extra section for a 1985 reprint of Wu Gongzao’s 1935 manual, but Wu Gongzao had died in 1983, leaving the reprint to be published posthumously. Going by Jin Yong’s postscript to the reprint – dated Jan, 1980 – we are probably safe in assuming the reprint version of the book was already in preparation in 1979 and that Wu Gongzao’s introductory note was made around that time. And if we then assume Wu Gongzao was being accurate when he said “more than a hundred years”, the manuscript would be from no later than 1878. Yang Luchan, Wu Quanyou’s first teacher, passed away in 1872. The manuscript probably cannot be from any earlier than that or Wu Gongzao would more likely have been told that Yang Luchan was to be credited as well as Yang Banhou. It is even possible that the loss of Yang Luchan may itself have served as a motivator for preserving Yang family teachings and that his passing pushed the manuscript into being. Making a simple compromise between the two dates of 1872 and 1878, I will provisionally guess that the manuscript is from the thereabouts of 1875.
GrahamB wrote:Click on the link and you can see that document appears on the 1940s.
origami_itto wrote:
It's hard to imagine the Chen family calling their stuff Taijiquan till after the Yangs popularized it.
robert wrote:And yet Chen Xin's book is titled The Illustrated Canon of Chen Family Taijiquan and taijiquan is used throughout the book. It was written 1910-1920 and publish around 1930. Tang Hao suggests that it's possible that Wang Zongyue learned taijiquan in Chen village, if that's the case he may have introduced the name around 1791.
Some people say that Wu Yuxiang wrote the taiji classics. He went to Chen village to study and ended up next door in Zhaobao village. It's possible he introduced the name to Chen village.
This is not a brag
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