Tianshan Pai (Tien Shan Mountain Kung Fu)
天山派A northern Chinese kung fu style from Taiwan whose curriculum Wang Chueh-Jen brought into public teaching in the late 1940s.
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About Tianshan Pai (Tien Shan Mountain Kung Fu)
Tianshan Pai, the school of the Tian Shan mountains, is a northern Chinese kung fu style that spread in Taiwan and from there, after 1970, to the United States. Its creator is taken to be Wang Chueh-Jen, a master originally from Sichuan who, after moving to Taiwan, began teaching his curriculum publicly in the late 1940s and went on teaching until his death in 1990. He himself maintained that this was an ancient tradition passed down through more than sixty generations from the Tian Shan range in present-day Xinjiang; some of his own senior students, by contrast, state that it is an eclectic system Wang assembled and first taught as a whole himself. No written evidence for the earlier dating is available, so this page gives no year of origin. Technically the style joins the long lines of northern boxing to a marked sense of rhythm: high kicks alternating with low sweeps, combinations of palm and fist strikes, locks and throws, paired drills and a broad weapons repertoire. The curriculum also includes the internal styles taijiquan, xingyiquan and baguazhang, which matches the make-up of the teaching at the Central Martial Arts Academy in Nanjing. The style was carried to the United States in 1970 by Wang's student Willy Lin, who opened a school in Washington a year later; other teachers followed, among them Huang Chien-Liang.
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