Tai Chi Master

Tai Chi Master (Chinese 太極張三豐, in pinyin Tàijí Zhāng Sānfēng) is a Hong Kong film from 1993. It was directed by Yuen Woo-ping, produced by Eastern Production and runs for 96 minutes. The leading roles are played by Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh. In the Western market it was also released under the title Twin Warriors. Two Shaolin monks are expelled from the temple. In the outside world their paths part: one joins the army of a corrupt governor, the other helps the rebels. The main character Zhang Junbao becomes Zhang Sanfeng in the film. Taiji arises in the film as the main character's own invention. The film thus takes up the traditional legend according to which Zhang Sanfeng created taijiquan. It is a legend, not documented history: the first documented attribution of the "internal" Taoist martial art to Zhang Sanfeng is only an epitaph that Huang Zongxi wrote for Wang Zhengnan in 1669. The researcher Stanley Henning, in his study Ignorance, Legend and Taijiquan, criticised the notion that Zhang Sanfeng created taiji and also questioned whether he existed at all. Taijiquan is performed here by a real practitioner. Jet Li is a trained wushu athlete, a four-time national champion, and the styles he practised include taijiquan. Michelle Yeoh originally had ballet training. The film has a loose sequel, Tai Chi Boxer, from 1996. It is unrelated to the 2012 film Tai Chi, in which Jet Li plays Yang Luchan.

Martial arts in this work

Fight choreography

We did not find in the sources who led the film's action choreography; what is documented is the direction by Yuen Woo-ping, the son of martial-arts film actor Yuen Siu-tien, who studied for a year at the China Drama Academy. Jet Li began practising wushu at the age of eight, joined the Beijing Wushu Team in 1974 and was four times the overall national champion between 1975 and 1979. The styles he practised include changquan, taijiquan, baguazhang and xingyiquan. Michelle Yeoh devoted herself to ballet from the age of four and studied it in England at the Hammond School; we did not find in the sources any martial-arts training before her film debut in 1985.

Fact and fiction

The legend the film adapts says that Zhang Sanfeng watched a bird attack a snake, created a set of 75 taiji movements from it and settled in the Wudang Mountains. The film turns it into a story in which a young man expelled from the Shaolin Temple invents taiji. Documented information about Zhang Sanfeng is scant and contradictory. The History of Ming (Ming shi) states that he was born in Liaoning at the end of the Song dynasty and lived 212 years; the dates of his life are not firmly established. According to the same source, the Tianshun Emperor (reigned 1457–1464) did not find him, but gave him the title zhenren, a Taoist immortal. The only written link to taijiquan is a text from 1669, roughly three centuries after his supposed lifetime.

People and martial arts

• Zhang Sanfengthe real person the work is about
• Yuen Woo-pingDirector
• Jet LiActor — as Zhang Junbao (později Zhang Sanfeng)· Tai Chi (real practitioner)
• Michelle YeohActor — as Siu Lin (Qiu Xue)· Tai Chi (portrays the art on screen)