Chenjiagou Taijiquan Gongfu School

I had enrolled in the Chenjiagou Taijiquan Gongfu School run by Grandmaster Chen Zhaosen.   Chen Jun (June), my Shenzhen sifu (website), was trained by Chen Zhaosen and also used to work at the school.  So she referred me there and helped arrange my visit.

I had found June while I was researching the possibility of training in Chenjiagou thanks to Anthony Fidler's very useful China Taichi Guide (link).    Other sources of information were ChenStyle Taijiquan by Davidine Sim and David Gaffney's, the school's own website (link), an old website about Chen Village (link), and the lovely blog by Sarah, a student of the school (link)

June is the only fluent english-speaker in the village and used to run a tea-house where all the foreign-students visiting the village could meet-up.   So she is a real celebrity in the tai-chi world!

I was very lucky that June had planned to visit Chenjiagou at the same time as my holiday, and she helped me a lot by translating, organizing and explaining.    But I also think Id have had a rewarding time visiting on my own.

The school is a 3-story building with a dining-room, training room and offices on the ground floor.   And a large outside courtyard where students train.    On the upper floors are bed-rooms for the students, and some class-rooms.  The 4th floor is a flat roof with corrugated iron roof providing shade.

The photo above shows the view from the roof looking East across the village.  The photo below shows the view looking north-west across the fields.

And looking south across the fields towards the temple.  

The school also has a small orchard nearby which is used as a training-ground, especially in summer when the trees provide some shade from the sun.

This is Chen Zhaosen practicing standing-post meditation in the early morning

The school has been extended recently with a new dining-room and kitchen.    

The school has a cook who provides breakfast (7am), lunch (12am) and dinner (6pm).

This is the cook with Chen Zhaosen's cute granddaughter.

And in his kitchen

The meals are very healthy with a lot of vegetable dishes,  rice or grain porridge or noodles and home-made bread.

I liked the food very much and was glad to be eating so much vegetables and almost no meat.   Arguably the taste is a little bland, and most people spiced it up by adding chili-sauces.  

Training at the school begins at 6:30 with an optional run.

I did this a couple of times and enjoyed it, but I had to be careful not to over-exert my legs.

The early-morning run is followed by exercises - like punching practice below.   Then breakfast (7am).

The main training sessions are 9:00am - 11:30am and 2:30pm - 5:30pm.   Each session starts with a roll-call and a short warm-up run.  This is followed by basic kicking and punching practice.

Then warm-up stretches and a run-through of the Chen Old Form 1st section (74-forms).    The students range in ability from complete beginners to very advanced.   There seems to be a core of long-term students and a regular turn-over of short-term visitors like myself.   I was interested to see that one of the visiting students had Downs Syndrome (front-left in photo below).  

I joined the small beginners group which trained inside.   This group included the other foreigners, June's student Dave who visited for a few days, and later Xi An a french writer of vietnamese descent who was starting a 3-month visit.

Initially we focused on basics like the forward and backward steps, and silk-reeling exercises.  Then move-on to work our way through the first third of the Old Form learning 2 new forms each session.

The correct stance for traditional Chen-style requires a lot of leg strength and stamina, since the basic stance is a squat with 60-70% weight on one leg.  This is very very tiring and we needed to have frequent breaks to rest our legs.   I was very glad I had been training my legs since January.

The main group of students worked out-side on a range of skills. This group seemed to be mainly long-term students of university-age who are perhaps training to become taiji teachers.

They trained on hand forms, and various weapons such as straight-sword and saber (above).

Chen Zhaosen is particularly famous for his skill with the Spring-and-Autumn Halberd (Chun Qiu Da Dao), so many students seem to be specializing in that weapon.

Practice weapons in the store-room.

The students also practiced wrestling.

And push-hands exercises.

Overall the school had a nice family atmosphere with students of different levels all working away to improve their skills.

The grandmaster seems to be a very nice man who clearly loves being a family-man.  And his school has a very nice relaxed atmosphere.   This is his grand-daughter (above)., and here he is training with his grand-son(?).