Wu Tunan Taijiquan

When I was young, I was often ill. My grandfather, the accomplished military general Ziming, once looked at me and said with a sigh: “A real man should be able to go thousands of miles away to give his services. If you have a weak body when your nation calls on you, how will you be able to fight on the battlefield and bring peace to the common people?” Therefore he ordered my father Liquan to give me instruction in internal training early in the morning every day. The following year, my body felt markedly more robust and my former illness never returned.
When I was in high school, I continued practicing martial arts alongside my literary education. As the Beijing martial arts master Wu Jianquan held the position of Taiji Boxing instructor there, my grandfather urged me to learn from him. I learned from Wu from dawn to dusk, even in the peak of winter and summer. When I went to college, even though I was buried in homework, I allowed not the slightest interruption to my practice. Because of this, my teacher saw how hardworking a student I was and then taught me all his secrets.
I later on contemplated that if our beautiful martial arts were only available for a minority to study, this would be a great miscalculation. If we can instead spread martial arts throughout our nation to strengthen all of our people, it would be of the utmost benefit.
Then in the summer of 1924, I was sent to teach in Xishan, the hills to the west of Beijing. Every day I managed to find time to write for my own amusement, and within three months I had set down so much about Taiji Boxing principles, lineages, postures, applications, and pushing hands that I had made a book, which I decided to call Wu Tunan’s Taiji Training. I hoped by way of it that aspiring martial artists would be able to obtain Taiji Boxing’s effects in the shortest possible time and not have to take more than ten years to get there.
When I finished my manuscript, I respectfully presented it to my teacher and requested to shoot photos of him so I could publish it. But hostilities then broke out in Nanjing and Tianjin, and so we decided to postpone the project. That was on National Day [Oct 10] in 1924.

Now that the Northern Expedition [July 1926—June 1928] is finished, the nation is unified, and the government has started afresh [the capital now moved to Nanjing], our new nation is henceforth established. If we wish to achieve the Three Principles of the People [Identity of the People, Power of the People, Livelihood of the People], this depends entirely on making our people strong and prosperous, able to defend themselves and the nation, without a moment’s delay. We should be promoting martial arts right now. To carry them forward, our martial arts comrades should especially be giving practical instruction, in order for the whole populace to be affected by martial arts. We will thus more quickly realize national identity and achieve the aim of rescuing the nation. We must not betray this primary goal when promoting martial arts.

Therefore despite my own limited ability, I have in my spare time from teaching at Nanxun High School gathered together the most valuable wisdom from previous masters and appraised them according to scientific methods. I have also made photos and explanations to show that Taiji Boxing conforms to physics and psychology, is based in physiology and health, and this influences every part of my discussion. Therefore I have called it A More Scientific Martial Art: Taiji Boxing. I offer it as a gift to my compatriots, sharing with all those who are interested. Publishing books is the only real means of truly spreading martial arts. If later generations of students can be inspired by this book to produce further developments, then the future of martial arts will be fortunate indeed. Thus I have written this preface.

– written by Wu Tunan of Beijing at Nanxun High School, Zhejiang, Dec 11, 1928