Wu Tang PCA - Classical Cheng Style Ba Gua Zhang

History of Ba Gua Zhang 

          Dong Hai Chuan - The Founder of Ba Gua Zhang (1797 - 1882)              

                                        Cheng Ting Hua (1848 - 1900)               Yin Fu (1840 - 1909)

 The Second Generation of Ba Gua Zhang. The Founders of Cheng and Yin Style Ba Gua Zhang

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Cheng Ting Hua's Youngest son, Cheng You Xin

Cheng You Xin's photos contributed from Liu Jing Ru's personal collection  

Tomb of Dong Hai Chuan and other masters of Ba Gua Zhang: Liang Zhen Pu,Li Zi Miing,

 Wang Shu Jin, Liu Xing Han, and Guo Gu Min in Beijing.  Photos by Tina Zhang

                                                                           A Blend of History and Legend

- Excerpted from Frank Allen's book "The Whirling Circles of Ba Gua Zhang - The Art and Legends of the Eight Trigram Palm" 

                                                               "It Began with a Banquet"

The courtyard was buzzing because the Emperor’s nephew the Prince Su Wang had hired a new martial arts instructor for his household and was giving a banquet to commemorate the occasion. The crowd was excited to see the skills of this new martial arts expert and to taste the culinary delights of the prince’s kitchen. As the afternoon began the Muslim Master of the Springy Leg Style, who was named Sha, enthralled the crowd with the speed and strength of his straight line punches and kicks and impressed them with the quickness of his linear footwork. Then as they discussed the skills that had been displayed by the new boxing master of Su Wang’s household, their minds began to turn toward the impending feast. 

Time to eat was greatly anticipated by everyone except the head chef, who was realizing that he had a major problem on his hands. He had prepared his most delectable delicacies for the prince’s personal table, but now that it was time to serve them, he found that the courtyard pathways to the prince’s table were jammed with over enthusiastic guests and his waiters were unable to serve the prince’s table. Compounding the problem was the simple fact that these dishes were delicacies for a short amount of time after which they were garbage and to serve garbage to the emperor’s nephew was a quick way to lose one’s head. Just as the chef was about to become frantic, the scrub and peel eunuch from the back of the kitchen announced that he could serve the meal. Normally the head chef wouldn’t allow such a man near his delicacies, but at that moment he had no choice, but to take what little opportunity he had presented to him to get that meal served on time and thereby to keep his head firmly attached to his shoulders.

      The chef shuddered as the eunuch grabbed a large serving platter in each hand and ran into the courtyard. The large Eunuch with the very large hands then leaped up onto the courtyard wall and while balancing a steaming platter on each of his out stretched palms, ran around the wall until he reached the prince’s table. The head of the prince’s kitchen closed his eyes when he saw the eunuch actually jump from the wall down onto the prince’s dinning table. When he opened them a slit to peek out and see what had happened he spied the kitchen scrub eunuch serving his delicacies to the prince and the prince’s most honored guests, by quickly, lightly and deftly stepping along the prince’s table while handing food to the waiting diners with a seemingly endless variety of twisting and spiraling movements. With each successive visit to the prince’s table, there became more food and less space on the table and yet the big eunuch never seemed to slow down and his feet never even nudged a plate, cup or platter, much less knocked one over. This elegant footwork was augmented by an ever more flamboyant array of twisting and coiling upper body movements. The prince and his dinning guests were thrilled by this display of skills by their waiter and the head chef was overjoyed by the turn of events.

         That the skill of this eunuch waiter held martial value was not a fact that went unnoticed by the Prince Su Wang. When the meal was finished and the remnants of the feast had been cleared away, the prince called upon the eunuch to demonstrate his martial skills for the prince and his guests. The eunuch stepped to the center of the courtyard and began to walk in spiraling and circling patterns at an ever increasing rate of speed. As he did so his hands and arms traced coiling and circling, thrusting and cutting, soaring and floating designs in the air. His legs and torso seemed to never quit twisting this way and then coiling that way, even when dropping into the lowest of stances, shooting a foot high above his head or standing on a single leg with his other lower limb held high and bent like the leg of a pausing crane. They were movements such as no one had ever seen before and yet their inherent martial value was undeniable and easily discernable to the trained eye. Prince Su Wang was so excited and asked Dong what kind of martial arts that he was doing, Dong answered: “ Ba Gua Zhang!” This is the moment the art of Ba Gua Zhang was born.

       Two of the most trained eyes in the courtyard that day belonged to the new household martial arts instructor, Sha, the Master of the Muslim Springy Leg Style. His were perhaps the only eyes there that were not pleased with what they were seeing. Sha feared that he was seeing someone that he would be required to share the position of household boxing instructor with and Sha had no intentions of giving up any of his new found profits. As the eunuch’s demonstration came to an end, the Muslim boxer decided to defend his household position right there and then and challenged the eunuch to fight him on the spot. It turned out to be the worst decision of Sha’s life as his first lightening attacks some how only struck air as the eunuch seemed to miraculously always be behind him, no matter which way Sha turned. Then things went from bad to worse as Sha found not only his punches and kicks in the air, but his entire body. Being in the air wasn’t the problem. The problem arrived when Sha’s body would slam into the courtyard after being lifted higher than his height and being effortlessly tossed a few feet. After a few of these embarrassing flights with their pulverizing landings, Sha’s entire body was beginning to ache and his head was throbbing, but he was suddenly relieved of his pain when a huge palm slammed into the side of his head, sending him into blissful unconsciousness. When he awoke, Sha was out of a job and the eunuch Dung Hai Chuan had become the one and only martial arts instructor for the household of the Prince Su Wang.            

                  Sha did not intend to let this loss of revenue, prestige and face go unavenged, so he enlisted the aid of his wife. She was the proud owner of a brace of western pistols and considered herself an expert with her chosen weapons. Late that night they crept to the quarters in the compound of the Prince Su Wang, which they had assumed earlier that day would be their own new home. They peered into the window and saw the eunuch asleep on the bed, so the wife positioned herself at the window with her pistols pointed at the shape on the bed, while her husband quietly slipped through the door of the room and moved toward the bed while drawing a dagger with a curved blade and a razor like edge from within his robe. As Sha poised above the bed with his dagger at the ready, suddenly the shape on the bed exploded upwards in a blur and Sha flew against the left wall of the room as his blade skittered across the floor to the right. Before Sha’s wife could take aim at any definite shape in the room, she suddenly felt her forearms clamped in vice like grips as she was hauled through the window and into the room. Her pistols dropped from her now numb hands as she was unceremoniously tossed on top of her groaning husband’s writhing body. The Shas were not complete idiots, so they immediately rolled over on to their hands and knees and began to bang their heads against the floor while begging the eunuch, Dong Hai Chuan to please forgive them and to accept them as students. Dong knew that these two needed close watching, but also believed that they might make better allies than enemies, so he pardoned them and accepted them as his students. The Shas proved the sincerity of their apology and their awe of the eunuch Tung, by becoming loyal and hard working students of the new martial arts master in the house of the emperor’s nephew.

           Stories and legends abound as to where Dong Hai Chuan came from and how he came to be a eunuch in the kitchen of the royal nephew. One of the most popular versions tells of a young thief who was proficient at being a burglar and as a highwayman, which gave him town and country work. Eventually, like most young thieves, he found that he wasn’t quite as proficient as he thought and had to hide in a desolate mountain range to escape capture and execution. Not being from a mountain region the young thief found himself lost and hungry and quickly deteriorating due to exposure. When he was near death, the young thief was stumbled upon by a Daoist hermit whose, cave was nearby. The hermit took the thief to his cave where he nursed the young man back to health. After the thief was healthy, the hermit taught him a Daoist circle walking meditation exercise. This practice made the young man much stronger and healthier, which the hermit hoped would keep the young man from ever again being in the position of needing to be saved from dying of exposure while traveling. Of course the young man was still a thief at heart, so he simply returned to the outskirts of Beijing where he had come from and developed his new found skills into a unique personal martial art which helped him to become a better thief. This worked well for a while, especially in the burglary business where his new lightness techniques allowed him to scale walls and jump into windows. His new martial skills also helped him to overpower security guards while plying the highwayman trade. Eventually this just brought more authorities after the thief, who then tried to escape by becoming a monk and hiding out in a monastery. Unfortunately, due to his nature and personality, the thief was quickly expelled from the monastery for practices of intemperance. Realizing that the Imperial Guards were now looking for him and that when they found him his head would certainly roll, the thief decided on one last desperate measure to save himself. He knew that he needed a good disguise and he knew that hiding close to one’s enemies was the best way not to be discovered. Therefore he decided to become a eunuch which would change his hair patterns and make his facial muscles go slack giving him a perfect and permanent disguise. Being a eunuch would then allow him to work in the Imperial Palaceand hide under the noses of the guards.  According to this one story, this is the manner in which Dong Hai Chuan came to be a eunuch in the palace of Prince Su Wang.

        Another version of the story has Dong as a young revolutionary instead of a thief. In this version he still learns his mysterious circling art from an old Taoist who has just saved the lad from exposure.