Wang Xian 1944 – 2024

Yesterday, when i still was on a short trip to London with my daughter, i was informed about the passing of my Taijiquan master Wang Xian. While I feel very sad about the great loss for Taijiquan and personally about a great man who is one of the few who had big influence on my own life, i also know that his last years were not easy for him. Nonetheless i will miss him very much and hope that whereever he is now, he will have it better. To honor him I wrote a few words from my personal expériences over the past three decades :

I met and learned from Master Wang Xian the first time in April 1989 during my first training trip to China. It was during the time when Hu Yaobang, the former Secretary General of the Communist Party of China passed away. In every training break Wang Xian was listening to his transistor radio to get all the news about the funeral and the demonstrations that followed his death on Tiananmen Square. These demonstrations finally ended with the massacre on Tiananmen Square on 4th June 1989. It’s maybe because of this sad outcome that the memory of Master Wang sitting on a small chair in our training place listening news from Beijing is so strong in my memories.

It was about one year later when he came to Switzerland for Seminars together with another Taijiquan master, Chen Zhenglei. They stayed in Switzerland for a week and between the two seminar weekends i was able to invite him and Master Chen to my home. Back then i still lived with my parents and my mother was cooking. As we were an international family (Swiss, Spanish, Greek, Italian mixture) Master Chen was impressed by the many languages that were talked in my parents home, while Master Wang was impressed by the rifle collection (old carabiner) of my father.

When i stayed for one year in China i also was able to spend more time in Wenxian for training. There were many remarkable memories from that time, but the most remarkable was a quiet one. Almost every day after training his student Geng Xinhua an he came to my hotel room to write on Wang Xian’s first book. Obviously they didn’t have another place where they could work without being interrupted. They usually were discussing the posture and when they agreed, Master Wang wrote it in his notebook. I learned a lot from these discussions.

On another visit he showed me his school a bit outside of Chenjiagou (which he later handed over to his second son Wang Zhanjun). What was very important for him was surprisingly the different trees he planted himself around the buildings and the courtyard.

It must have been in 2008 if i recall correctly, that he went to the house he grew up every evening after training. There he worked with the workers on the renovation until late in the night. I began to understand how important this house where he grew up was for him. Many years later, my last picture together with him was made in the living room of his house.

These are some of many memories that made him remarkable as a human being to me. Beside that he was an outstanding master of Chen Style Taijiquan. Growing up in Chenjiagou he was fascinated of martial arts since childhood. Starting with Xiao Jia, one of the two major frames in Chen Style Taijiquan he later switched to what we today know as Lao Jia, when 18th Generation Grandmaster Chen Zhaopi returned to the village to teach the next generation. Other masters who learned from Chen Zhaopi were Chen Xiaowang, Chen Zhenglei and Zhu Tiancai. He learned from Chen until he passed away in 1972. It was Wang Xian who then travelled to Beijing to ask Chen Zhaokui to return to Chenjiagou for completing the education of the 19th Generation. He then learned from Chen Zhaokui who returned almost every year to Chenjiagou for several months until Chen Zhaokui passed away in 1981. Wang Xian was always willing to learn and to improve. Therefore, he continued his studies with Feng Zhiqiang a student of the famous Chen Fake. Through the teachings of these famous Masters he became himself a master.

In the 1980s when China opened the country for tourists, foreign Taijiquan enthusiasts began to travel to Chenjiagou to research about the origin of Taijiquan. Of course demonstrations were given by the villagers and usually the demonstrations were given by the best practitioners of the village, namely Chen Xiaowang, Chen Zhenglei, Zhu Tiancai and Wang Xian who later became known as the Four Buddhas Warrior Attendants or the Four Tigers of Chen Style Taijiquan. Wang Xian didn’t have the surname Chen what made him flying a bit under the radar compared with others. Nonetheless were his skills superior and he became well known within the Taijiquan community. He began to teach nationwide and later he was also invited to many countries to teach Chen Style Taijiquan there,  among them Japan, USA, France and even for once Switzerland. Over the decades he taught many students around the globe and over all those years with the same passion. Wang Xian was, unlike many others i met in China, a man with an opinion. When he didn’t like something he didn’t hold back. In his later years he was more relaxed and tempered.

Wang Xian was not only transmitting the curriculum he learnt from his teachers but also was developing routines like Zonghe Taijiquan (his synthesis of Taijiquan) and Taiji Sanshou with a martial approach. In later years he also added shorter routines to his curriculum as he realized that in modern times the students are not able to invest the same amount of time as his generation was able to invest. Although many students around the world may have learnt Taiji Ba Shi, his entry level form, his legacy will always be the martial approach he was teaching with the traditional forms and later extracted into his Sanshou System.

Beside all that and all the memories i shared here and those i didn’t share I’m very grateful that i was able to learn from him over three decades. Until we meet agin…

© Urs Krebs