Six Harmonies Praying Mantis (Liuhe Tanglangquan)
六合螳螂拳The softest of the mantis styles. Unlike the hard Seven Star and Plum Blossom branches, it favors internal work and has its own set of forms.
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Catalogs & Databases for Six Harmonies Praying Mantis (Liuhe Tanglangquan)
About Six Harmonies Praying Mantis (Liuhe Tanglangquan)
Liuhe Tanglangquan, the Six Harmony Praying Mantis, is a northern Chinese style and the most distinctive branch within the whole praying-mantis family. While the Seven Star and Plum Blossom branches belong to the hard schools, the Six Harmony branch is the softest and most internal of the entire family — it does not meet force with force but redirects incoming power instead. It also has its own curriculum: forms that do not appear in any of the other mantis styles. The origin of the mantis style as a whole is traditionally attributed to a man named Wang Lang, but the sources note that many researchers doubt his existence and regard the style instead as a fusion of several Shandong traditions. Legends place its origin in several different periods at once, from the Song dynasty to the turn of the Ming and Qing around the year 1650, and they even include a story of a mantis fighting the wheel of a cart; the source explicitly labels all of these as folk tradition rather than history. For the Six Harmony branch, the transmitter of the lineage is given as Ding Zicheng, though it is written of him that he passed the style on rather than founded it. The catalog has therefore removed both the previously listed founder and the year 1850 from the record and leaves those fields empty. Ding Zicheng's students went on to teach in Shandong and in Taiwan, and it is there that the style still lives on today, carried forward by their own lineages of students.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.