manual of military training, he distilled or derived the techniques from the
styles available to him. Qi’s manual describes a generic form of boxing that
contained the most basic and fundamental techniques without embellish-
ment or theoretical discussion.
The new Qing discourse of internal or soft martial arts created some new
styles of martial arts. These styles, most notably Taiji, Bagua, and Xingyi,
are widely practiced today and have therefore generated considerable
scholarly interest in tracing their origins. Ironically, one of the main reasons
these styles are so prominent today is their recent development. These were
arts that drew from long-standing traditions to craft styles appropriate to a
world of industrial warfare, wherein a martial artist might be an educated,
urban worker in need of gentle exercise rather than a tough warrior in
the countrysidefighting bandits. Yet despite their detachment from the
immediate concerns of combat, they remained insistently martial in their
overall orientation. Much of what the soft or internal styles claim for
themselves in purpose, orientation, and effect can be contradictory. Their
histories are therefore similarly challenging. As Douglas Wile pointed out
with respect to Taiji:
The question of Taijiquan’s origins is hugely controversial. However, when
adjusted for stylistic and ideological partisanship and analyzed strictly on the
basis of scholarly methodology, the various accounts differ according to their
emphasis on the following conceptual tracers: postures and form, training techni-
ques and combat strategies, and philosophy and legend.
If traced as a distinctive form with specific postures and names, then Taiji’s
history may be said to begin with Ming general Qi Jiguang’sQuanjing(Classic of
Pugilism), twenty-nine of whose postures are borrowed for the Chen Village art
of Henan, possibly as early as Chen Wangting in the seventeenth century, and
certainly no later than Chen Changxing ( 1771 – 1853 ) and Cheng Qingping
( 1795 – 1868 ) in the early nineteenth.^13
In a subsequent book,T’ai Chi’s Ancestors, Wile goes a long way toward
fleshing out the actual documentary evidence for Taiji’s background:
This book [T’ai Chi’s Ancestors] introduces three sixteenth to eighteenth century
traditions that contributed critical genetic material to the construction of taijiquan
today....
Qi Jiguang’sEssentials of the Classic of Pugilismbequeathed its postures and
form, Wang Zhengnan’sArt of the Internal Schoolcontributed its philosophy and
ideology, and Chang Naizhou’s writings share much of the language and theory of
the taiji classics.^14
Wile’s approach to the history of Taiji balances between scholarship and
the strongly held beliefs of many contemporary practitioners of Taiji (Wile
206 The Qing Dynasty