Formosa Neijia

The following is from a guy with the screen name of “smell the glove.” Haha. These are his memories of studying with Gao and some pics of the school that he took. Many thanks to him for letting me post these. As you can tell, Gao was serious about his weapons practice:

Gao Dao-sheng (高道生). I trained with him from 1991-1998 at the Youth Park in the mornings then in the evenings at his school just off Qingnian Road. Seven Star Mantis and Northern Longfist, mostly. Someone recently told me he’s now 97 and still teaching. I know one of his students opened a museum of Chinese martial arts weapons in Beitou and named it after him, but I haven’t been up to check it out yet. Here’s Gao Laoshi with a former student:

I remember when I was learning er lu, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what one particular move was all about. This after fifteen years of martial arts. I asked him, and he told me to punch him as hard as I could in the chest. He said, “Yong li! Yong li! Ni buhui da dao wo!” So I threw one as hard as I could - and he threw me over his head. The floor of the wuguan was cement, and my back hurt like a sonofabitch for weeks. One of the shixiong came over and said, “Next time you want to know about an application, just ask us first.”

Here are a few photos I took of weapons in the school circa early 90s - apologies for lousy quality. Aside from all the mantis and longfist work, I did a couple long staff sets, a few spear sets, four straight sword sets (spent a year on those alone), short staff, broadsword, and double broadsword. BTW, my understanding was that all the weapons are Northern Longfist, etc. There are no Mantis weapons per se.