day 276: ba tang quan

concepts:

• history

lessons:

• ba tang quan

this post relates to Sunday, April 18. the schedule for the day was adjusted relative to other Sundays. Ching-Chieh is learning ba tang quan from Sifu as part of an ongoing project, and so we canceled the spear lesson for the day and truncated chen pao quan to a review of the form we've covered to date.

ba tang quan

ba tang quan is not actually a style. it's more a form composed of a series of lines, with movements drawn from baji. much like chang quan has tantui, with its 10 or 12 lines (depending on the version of chang quan), ba tang quan is comprised of 8 different lines with movements unique to each one. while derived from baji, ba tang quan is much more fundamental and deals with only basic aspects of the principles in baji.

from what i could surmise (i missed the background discussion on this, but it appears the Sifu and Ching-Chieh had talked about this more extensively around their class times at UCLA), ba tang quan was developed for the Taiwanese military by Liu Yun Qiao. it was originally meant to comprise their basic training in hand-to-hand combat, and was taught for a period of around 10 years sometime in the 60s and 70s. it was subsequently phased out and replaced by different martial arts training, and has been largely forgotten since that time.

Sifu showed us his copy of the Wutan journal (Liu Yun Qiao actually attempted to publish a periodical journal for Chinese martial arts, with the goal of being a scholarly source dedicated to preserving TCMA, but unfortunately the journal ceased publication after a few years). the copy is an original, and contains pictures of all the lines of ba tang quan, along with explanatory commentary. Sifu said he was using this to reconstruct ba tang quan, in addition to using his own memory of his experiences learning it when he was in the Taiwanese military.

we've learned the first 2 lines the previous Sunday. today we reviewed the previous 2 lines and then learned the next 2. we also did some tentative work learning the 2-person forms for the lines.

all of this consumed a fair portion of the class. not so much because of the lines themselves, but because we were trying reconstruct them based on the journal and Sifu's memory, and this proved to require a bit of deliberation and thought.