| California
K-12 Education Funding 2025-2026 |
|
|
|
Tai Chi Chuan as a secular martial art probably started with
Chen Wangting (陳王庭) who |
|
is thought to have lived from 1580 to 1660. He is believed to
have been a senior military |
|
officer working for the Ming Dynasty. However, a new dynasty,
the Qing, was proclaimed |
|
in 1636. It took 26 years and a fair amount of fighting to
finally establish the Qing Dynasty. |
|
In a significant departure from tradition, many Ming civilian
officials and military were able |
|
to more or less continue in the service of
the new dynasty. There is no indication whether |
|
Chen Wangting could have continued as a military officer in
the new dynasty, but he |
| retired to the Chen village and
worked on his martial art. |
| His legacy, Chen Family style
Tai Chi Chuan, has survived more than 350 years of wars, |
| pandemics, earthquakes, floods and
famines. About five years ago I moved to the Sierra |
| Nevada foothills in Calaveras County.
I was well aware that Calaveras was a small county, |
| largely rural, poor, without a
college, and with academically below average schools. What |
| I had in mind was to teach two or
perhaps three classes of 15 or 16 special needs students |
| each seven days per week. The core
curriculum would be the sixteen canonical Chen |
| Family style sets - ten with weapons
and six without. There would also be several Tai Chi |
| tools and Qigong exercise sequences
taught. What I needed was about 2500 square feet. |