Formosa Neijia

I am overwhelmed by the number of vids available on youtube, etc. lately. I simply don’t have time to watch them all, let alone ponder what I’ve seen. And forget about trying to blog about all that stuff. There simply isn’t enough time in the day.
Youtube gets 40,000 videos uploaded PER DAY. And that’s increasing. [...]

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I’ve been jokingly accused of turning the Formosa NEIJIA blog into the Formosa TAIJI blog. Not to worry. Posts on baguazhang (BGZ) and xingyi (XYQ) will always have a place here.
Still, I do see my future in Taiwan Chen style for the following reasons:
1. No one has really covered Taiwan Chen style. Robert Smith [...]

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Surprise, surprise. 
I kept running across a certain fellow by the name of Xiao Jian-sheng who claims to do zhaobao taiji here in Taiwan. He practices in the southern part of Taiwan, so I’ve never seen him personally. But I saw his websites here and here, and there are videos of him here and here. Sure enough, [...]

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This is an excellent version of tantui by the famous Taiwan long fist teacher Han Qing-tan. This is very traditional, unlike the wushu-influenced verisons out of China. I think I might have every version of tantui available on VCD and none of them, not one, look this good. Almost everything that’s come out of China [...]

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This one of the nicest versions of Taiwan Chen style that I’ve ever seen. It’s just beautiful. The clip says that this is from Pan Yong-zhou’s (Pan Wing Chow) lineage. The circular, dan tien driven movements stand in direct contrast to the more linear style movements commonly seen from the Du lineage.
I can now understand [...]

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I wasn’t planning a post on this, but it came up on this thread at Empty Flower (EF) and it’s been buggin’ me for quite a while. Here’s the info I have gathered regarding the six men that brought Chen style taiji to Taiwan. I was a bit surprised at what I found. Take a [...]

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Wow, lots of things to discuss lately. I’m a bit swamped right now with work and a sick baby. So I’d like to take this time to comment just briefly on a few things.
First, Tom took the time to respond at length on the discussion about large vs. small Yang frame. I thought his points [...]

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Tom has made a series of long comments on my post about large vs. small Yang frames. These comments are so substantial that I feel they deserve to be made into a separate post rather than being lost in the comment section.
I want to state up front that I don’t fully agree with everything that [...]

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This continues the discussion about large vs. small frame Yang taiji. 
Wujimon brought up an interesting article in this post that I would like to comment on. The article is called A Comparative study between Traditional Yang Style of Yang Chengfu and Cheng Man Ching’s Style by Justin Meehan. This was a really informative article IMO and [...]

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The first post in this series is here.
This vid was contributed by Aboroth (thanks again!) and shows a version of the Yang style form that descended through Li Ya-xuan, a top student of Yang Chen-fu (YCF). This form by Lin Mo-gen is a nice example of Yang style.
This looks very different from Chen Long Xiang’s [...]

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