We are a small school on Mount Wudang with a long memory. These pages explain who we are, who taught us, and why we still bow before every class.
Mount Wudang rises out of Hubei Province in seventy-two peaks and thirty-six cliffs, shrouded for most of the year in a damp silver fog that practitioners have been learning to stand inside for more than six hundred years. Our school sits a three-hour walk above the last paved road, in a stone courtyard that was first used for training in the late fourteenth century.
We are not a monastery, though monks still pass through. We are not a tourist academy, though visitors arrive. We are a working school — small, deliberate, quiet — with thirty-eight students in residence and two dozen teachers across our online programs. What we do is one thing: we transmit three internal arts, in the forms they were taught to us, as carefully as we can manage.
In a louder era, the offer of slowness has become unfamiliar. Our work is to make it familiar again.
Every form we teach is first learned at a quarter of its natural speed. Not as a stylistic preference, but because the joints, the breath, and the nervous system cannot actually learn a movement any faster. When students rush, we slow them. When they slow, we wait.
We do not perform. We do not demonstrate push-hands tricks that require a compliant partner. We do not promise energy, enlightenment, or effortless victory. We teach a body of work that is practical, repeatable, and — if done for long enough — quietly transformative.
Our teachers were taught by their teachers, who were taught by theirs. Before we change anything, we first learn it as it was given — which usually takes long enough that we stop wanting to change it. Tradition is not the enemy of aliveness. Carelessness is.
Eighteen generations, from the founder Zhang Sanfeng to the students practicing in the courtyard this morning. The names between are the ones that made the line unbroken.
Between each generation sits between twelve and forty years of daily practice. The dotted sections on this chart represent seventeen teachers whose names are held in the school but are not public. We believe a lineage is not a genealogy — it is a promise.
Our current generation — seven teachers, three in residence on the mountain and four rotating through the online programs and international retreats. None of them will call themselves masters. We use the word anyway, quietly, among ourselves.
Master Li began training at eleven and has not stopped since. He leads the morning form at 5:40 a.m. every day the weather permits, which is most days. In English, he is sparing. In taijiquan, he is the clearest teacher many of us will meet.
Formerly a dancer with the Hubei Song and Dance Ensemble, Chen laoshi came to the school in 2004 and never returned to the stage. She teaches the women's intensive and carries the push-hands curriculum, which she believes is more subtle than most students realize on their first attempt.
Wang laoshi holds the five-element and twelve-animal forms of our xingyi curriculum. A former army instructor, he teaches with a plainness that sometimes disappoints students looking for esoterica and almost always convinces them, by week two, that plainness is the point.
Raised in Bristol, trained on the mountain since 2007, formally accepted into the line in 2019. Thomas runs the translation of our teaching materials into English and teaches the majority of our online foundation courses. He does the job nobody else wants: making the ineffable footnoted.
The founder — part legend, part historical figure — synthesizes the Taoist practices of Mount Wudang into what would later be recognized as the internal school: taijiquan, xingyi, and bagua in their embryonic forms.
Under imperial patronage, the complex of temples on Mount Wudang is finished. Our school sits in a subsidiary courtyard, three hours' climb above the main temple.
Our tenth-generation teacher records the principles of taijiquan in a short manuscript of roughly 400 characters — still the clearest account of internal structure ever written, still studied in our evening readings.
Warlord conflict reaches Hubei. Master Xu Benshan dies in the fighting; the courtyard is abandoned. Two surviving students carry the forms, in silence, through the next two decades.
Master Zhu Chengde returns to the mountain and re-establishes the school with seven students. For twelve years, they teach no outsiders.
A small residential program is opened to non-Chinese students. Three are accepted in the first year. Two leave within six months. The one who stays is now a senior teacher.
After two years of internal debate about whether internal arts can be transmitted through a screen, the school launches a structured online curriculum. It remains our most compromised and most necessary undertaking.
The work continues. Slowly. In English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, and — as of last winter — Portuguese.
We welcome visitors for retreats, interviews, and residential study. The climb to the courtyard is genuinely steep; the weather is genuinely unpredictable. Plan accordingly, and plan to arrive on foot.
From Wuhan · roughly six hours, if the weather cooperates.
The final approach to the school cannot be driven. A paved road ends at the cable-car terminus; from there it is roughly forty minutes on a stone path that has existed in roughly its current form since 1412. Wear shoes you are willing to lose.