Cheng Man-ch'ing

Cheng Man-ch'ing (WG) or Zhèng Mànqīng (py) 鄭曼青 [(1902-1975)] was born in Yongjia (present-day Wenzhou), Zhejiang Province (his birthday was on the 28th year of the Guangxu emperor's reign, 6th month, 25th day, which corresponds to July 29, 1902). He died March 26, 1975); his grave is near the city of Taipei. Cheng was trained in Chinese medicine, T'ai Chi Ch'uan, calligraphy, painting and poetry. Due to his skill in these five areas (among some of the traditional skills and pastimes of a Confucian scholar in traditional China) he was often referred to as the "Master of Five Excellences." Because he had been a college professor, his students called him "Professor Cheng."

Early Years
Cheng's father passed away when Cheng was very young. Around the age of nine, Cheng was struck on the head by a falling object, likely a stone from a stone wall around his family's garden, and was in a coma for a short while. He recuperated slowly, and was apprenticed to a well-known artist, Wang Xiangchan, in hopes that simple jobs like grinding ink would help his health. Within a few years, his teacher sent him out to earn his living at painting. Cheng's aunt Chang Kuang, also known by her artist's name of Hongwei Laoren, was a well-known painter. During Cheng's childhood, his mother took him out to find medicinal plants and taught him the fundamentals of traditional Chinese herbal medicine.

Cheng taught poetry and art in several leading colleges in Beijing and Shanghai and was a successful artist. At the age of nineteen, he was a professor of poetry at an esteemed art school in Beijing. Later in Shanghai, he became acquainted with influential figures including Wu Changshi, Cai Yuanpei, Zheng Xiaoxu, Xu Beihong, and Zhang Daqian.

In his twenties, he developed lung disease (believed to be tuberculosis partly from exposure to the chalk dust from the school blackboards). Ill to the point of coughing up blood, he began to practice T'ai Chi Ch'uan more diligently to aid his recovery. Cheng retired from teaching and devoted himself for several years to the study of T'ai Chi Ch'uan, traditional Chinese medicine, and literature.

In addition to his childhood instruction, Cheng Man-ch'ing received formal Chinese medical training. While he was teaching painting in a Shanghai art school, one of his friends grew ill and was unable to find relief. Cheng Man-ch'ing wrote a complex prescription for his friend, who took the medicine and recovered fully. One recollection is that a retired traditional doctor named Song You-an came across the prescription. He demanded to be in contact with the person who wrote it, as the sophistication and erudition of the prescription showed exceptional talent and competence. As war was raging across China at that time, it took several years before Cheng Man-ch'ing was able to present himself for study. With Song, Cheng received instruction and became conversant with the Chinese pharmacopoeia.

Another version of this story, also attested to by Professor Cheng's students, is that the physician who encountered Cheng's prescription was then head of a medical school far west of the seacoast; this physician was the son of a traditional doctor, whose own father had been a doctor, and so on back twelve generations. Thus, Cheng Man-ch'ing for a year or two became the premier student of the director of a medical school who was twelfth in an unbroken lineage of physicians.

In 1928 he met the well-known master Yang Chengfu, with whom he began to study Yang style T'ai Chi Ch'uan, which he did until 1935. Cheng, according to Yang's son Zhenji, ghostwrote Yang's second book The Substance and Application of T'ai Chi Ch'uan (Taijiquan tiyong quanshu, 1934), for which Cheng also wrote a preface and most likely arranged for the calligraphic dedications.

Cheng taught T'ai Chi Ch'uan, practiced medicine, and continued his art practice in Sichuan Province during the Sino-Japanese war years. By 1946, he had developed a significantly abbreviated 37-move version of Yang's traditional form. He wrote the manuscript for his Thirteen Chapters during this period, and showed them to his elder classmate Chen Weiming, who gave it his imprimatur.

Taiwan
Cheng moved to Taiwan in 1949 and established a career as a physician and as a teacher of his new T'ai Chi Ch'uan form, as well as practicing painting, poetry, and calligraphy. He published Cheng's 13 Chapters of T'ai Chi Boxing in 1950 which has been translated into English twice. He started the Shih Chung T'ai Chi Association in Taipei, where many now well-known students (Benjamin Lo, Liu Hsi-heng, Hsu I-chung, Robert W. Smith, T. T. Liang, William C. C. Chen, Huang Sheng Shyan and others) trained with him. Though he tended not to advertise it, he served as one of the painting teachers of Soong Mei-ling, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, whom he taught to paint lotuses; and as personal physician to Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan and perhaps earlier.

United States
In 1964, Cheng moved with his family (Madame Cheng, two sons, and three daughters) to the United States, where he taught at the New York T'ai Chi Association at 211 Canal Street in Manhattan. He then taught at the Shr Jung T'ai Chi school at 87 Bowery in New York City's Chinatown section, with the assistance of his six American senior students, known as the "Big Six": Tam Gibbs, Lou Kleinsmith, Ed Young, Mort Raphael, Maggie Newman, and Stanley Israel. Half a dozen later students/assistants are known as "the Little Six": Victor Chin, Y Y Chin, Jon Gaines, Natasha Gorky, Wolfe Lowenthal, and Ken VanSickle. Other American students include Herman Kauz, Patt Benton, Robert Ante, Patrick Watson and William C. Phillips. In Taiwan, Cheng's students continued running the school in his absence. It operated initially under the direction of Liu Hsi-heng. Hsu I-chung is the current director.

While living in New York City, Cheng often spent several hours in the early afternoons studying or teaching classes of three or four students in the C. V. Starr East Asian Library in Columbia University, usually in a small, mahogany-panelled loft above the main floor. For relaxation, he raised orchids.

Writings
In 1967 in collaboration with Robert W. Smith, Cheng published "T'ai Chi, the Supreme Ultimate Exercise for Health, Sport and Self-defense." He wrote over a dozen other books on a variety of subjects, including the I Ching, the Tao Tê Ching, the Analects of Confucius, books of poetry, essays, medicine, and art collections. Translations of his works include: "Master Cheng's New Method of T'ai Chi Ch'uan Self-Cultivation"; "Cheng Man Ch'ing: Essays on Man and Culture"; "Cheng Man Ch'ing: Master of Five Excellences," and "T'ai Chi Ch'uan: A Simplified Method of Calisthenics for Health and Self-Defense."

Cheng Man-ch'ing's T'ai Chi Ch'uan
Cheng Man-ch'ing is best known in the West for his T'ai Chi Ch'uan. The following are some of the characteristics of his "Yang-style short form."


 * It eliminates most of the repetitions of certain moves of the Yang long form.
 * It takes around ten minutes to practice instead of the twenty to thirty minutes of the Yang long form
 * The hand and wrist are held open, yet relaxed, in what Cheng called the "Fair Lady's Hand" formation (as opposed to the straighter "Chinese tile" formation of the Yang style)
 * The form postures are not as expansive as Yang Ch'eng-fu's form
 * Cheng postures are performed in "middle frame" style, which changes the movement of the feet from the Yang version.
 * Cheng's concept of "swing and return" in which the gathering momentum from one movement powers the next (smoothly, with connection); moving from substantial to insubstantial (yin to yang) and back again - one metaphor is of a series of interlocking gears, whose tiniest movements cannot be initiated independently of one another. For one gear to move all must move.

These, and other important changes and natural developments, allowed Cheng to teach larger numbers of students in a shorter time. His shortened form became extremely popular in Taiwan and Malaysia, and he was among one of the earliest Chinese masters to teach T'ai Chi Ch'uan publicly in the United States. His students have continued to spread his work around the world.

It should be noted that Cheng rejected the appellation "Yang Style Short Form" to characterize his t'ai chi. When pressed on the issue, he called his form "Yang Tai Chi in 37 Postures." Even this may be misleading, however, since Cheng seems deliberately to have downplayed the length of his form. The postures in his form are counted differently from those in the Yang Cheng Fu form. In the older form each movement counts as a posture, whereas in the Cheng form postures are counted only the first time they are performed, and rarely or not at all when they are repeated. Moreover, certain postures which appear in the Cheng form, such as High Pat on Horse, are not counted at all. These differences in how the postures are counted have led some Cheng practitioners, such as William C.C. Chen, to characterize their own forms as exceeding 70 "movements," and indeed, upon close comparison with the Yang Cheng Fu form, Cheng's postures, if counted the same way as Yang's are, would number over 70.

Cheng's changes to the Yang style form have never been officially recognised by the Yang family and (perhaps partly because of the continued popularity of Cheng's shortened form) his style is still a source of considerable controversy among some T'ai Chi Ch'uan practitioners.

Another controversy surrounding Cheng was (as with virtually all martial arts historically) who among his main students received what is often called the "true transmission" of the teachings, i.e., the (often secret, 'inner door') set of fundamental or "core" movement-principles, techniques and associated training practices which make up T'ai Chi. Cheng, however, dismissed such arguments, saying that anyone could acquire the "true flavor" of T'ai Chi by diligent practice according to the strict principles which are common (and essential) to all T'ai Chi styles. (A book by one of his New York pupils, Wolfe Lowenthal, was even called "There Are No Secrets.") In New York City, among Prof Cheng's senior students, Maggie Newman is still teaching.