Sun Style Tai Chi
孫式太極拳The youngest of the five tai chi family styles. Its creator already knew xingyi and bagua and joined all three arts — hence the high stances and mobile step.
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ChinaCharacter & Origin
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Who It Suits
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What the style is built from
Editorial rating on a 0–3 scale, based on how much room each area gets in ordinary training.
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About Sun Style Tai Chi
Sun style tai chi chuan is the youngest of the five family styles. It was created by Sun Lutang, who lived from 1860 to 1933 and came to tai chi as an accomplished master of two other internal arts, xingyiquan and baguazhang. He learned tai chi only in 1912, from Hao Weizhen, a holder of the Wu (Hao) style. The account has it that he met Hao in Beijing, where Hao fell ill and Sun cared for him; in return Hao passed on his school. Sun then joined all three arts into one whole, and that explains why his style looks as it does. The stances are high and the step is mobile: it uses the so-called following step, huobu, in which the rear foot steps up behind the front, so the practitioner never stands with the weight divided and can turn at any moment. Between sections of the form the opening and closing of the palms, kaihe shou, recurs, and it gave the style its nickname. The high stances and flowing step are also the reason Sun style is recommended to older people and appears in movement programmes for joint disease. Sun Lutang was also a writer — the first to publish books on the internal arts under his own name. His daughter Sun Jianyun carried the style on.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.