Xingyi Roots Series – Hebei Xingyiquan – Zhang Jun

I recently had the opportunity to be part of a mini-documentary series filmed by my friend Will, a fellow kungfu aficionado who runs the informative website and Youtube channel Monkey Steals Peach (https://monkeystealspeach.com/). As part of the series, we visited several teachers from different branches of xingyiquan – both Shanxi and Hebei styles – and also even some teachers of Dai style xinyiquan, the ‘mother art’ of modern xingyi.

Having been on the receiving end of the demos from most of the teachers, I just wanted to use this blog to share some impressions of each teacher. The first teacher we visited was Zhang Jun from Tianjin, shown in the photo below.

M Zhang is a 5^th generation grandstudent of the famous xingyi master Li Cunyi through Li Cunyi’s first disciple, Liu Yunji and then transmitted within the Cui family to Zhang’s teacher, Cui Tongyi.

Unlike a lot of CMA teachers who can be very cautious and secretive, M Zhang was extremely open and straightforward with us, and showed us many intriguing aspects of the Hebei xingyiquan as it has been passed down within the Cui family.

Just to give a little bit of context, Cui Zhenxian, the father of Zhang’s teacher Cui Tongyi, was nicknamed the ‘sword immortal’ (jian xian) as he had learnt a ‘secret’ sword set from his teacher Liu Yunji and was known in  Tianjin wushu circles both for his skill with the straight-sword (jian) and for faithfully passing on the ‘complete’ xingyiquan system as his teacher had learnt it from Li Cunyi. As such he is a very good representative of what traditional Hebei xingyiquan should look like.

Hebei xingyiquan practitioners have a reputation for extremely tank-like whole-body power (zheng jin) and in this aspect M Zhang certainly did not disappoint – he was easily able to demonstrate the trademark sunken, connected structure of xingyi without taking any particular stance. Even our friend Paul Andrews, who was several inches taller and at least a stone heavier than M Zhang, was unable to move him, whereas Zhang was able to uproot us at will.

The most interesting part of the visit for me were that Zhang freely demonstrated the dantian rotation and sinew activation which is often discussed in xingyi texts but rarely shown. In his fajin (at around the 6:00 minute mark of the video below), he explicitly showed and stated that the sinews / fascia need to ‘stand up’ when releasing power:

Later on in the same video (at around 8:09), he discussed and demonstrated ‘Dragon & Tiger Qi’ (龙虎二气), another advanced xingyi topic. As you can see, there is a very concrete vertical undulation of the dantian and spine, which adds to the power of the fajin. This shows that many of the seemingly obscure terms mentioned in the xingyi classics are not nebulous mental visualisations but in fact extremely specific, physical movements which need to be shown hands-on in order for students to get the skill.

Another interesting tidbit which unfortunately was not caught on camera was M Zhang’s ‘party trick’, which was to jump a couple of inches up and down on a bench using purely the movement of his dantian – a sight to behold and surely made me regret not carrying my own camera!