When I studied with the late Hung I Hsiang, he was in his fifties. He spoke with a gravelly voice that sometimes conveyed a bit of gruffness, but in actuality, Hung was an intelligent, perceptive, well educated, and articulate man.

Watching him do bagua chang, his small-movement precision was incredible. The potential for misreading Hung based on interpretation of voicetone, raises an important point about bagua people. I have met many over the years who practice bagua for all sorts of animal, human, and spiritual reasons.

Some have been saints, some sinners. The one thing in common about them was that they all tended to be people having exceptional innate intelligence, regardless of whether they had a formal education or not.

Hung had been in a lot of fights. In Taiwan, it was very easy to find a fight if you were so inclined. In the early and middle part of this century, all over the world men used to fight for the sheer joy of it. Such fights often took place in designated social places, such as bars.

In Taipei, fights usually occurred near areas of prostitution. Very commonly, people were drinking in an underworld atmosphere and probably more often than not there were no hard feelings after a fight. Reputations were built, and rumors were spread: “So and so had such and such technique.”

It was also common for criminals, military men, and law-abiding citizens to mix it up for fun, and for onlookers to make side bets on a fight, something that is also common today in saloons throughout the Western world. Hung was very well known, and his reputation led to many challenges.

Those who challenged Hung suffered the consequences. He was a ferocious fighter who had the skill and the hard character that made many challengers regret their folly.

Hung was physically loose and flexible, and was very good at teaching minute martial arts movements and the technical skills of fighting. Hung’s Rou Shou was superb.

He had an amazing ability to move. I had never before seen a person of his size who could undulate his body and move as if he had no bones.

Hung had developed the Dragon Body to the greatest extent possible. He could make his body twist, turn, and fold in ways that had to be seen to be believed. In addition, his hands were incredibly sensitive. He could feel minute shifts of a person’s energy and counterattack instantaneously.

It was as if his hands had eyes. Hung’s specialty was in the use of very tiny fighting angles based on the triangle, the square, and the octagon. Whereas most sophisticated martial artists use these angles,they usually need inches or feet to apply them.

Hung, however, could apply these angles in less than a fraction of an inch of space. He loved analyzing the use of small circles and angles of attack. He was a truly creative martial artist who explored and extrapolated the knowledge he had gained.

After three or four hours of class, Hung and his more committed students would drink tea, eat watermelon seeds, and talk about bagua and fighting angles at open-air tables set up on the sidewalk near our practice hall.

Hung’s understanding and use of small circles and angles of attack made sparring with him fascinating, bewildering, terrifying, and a pure joy. Hung was an excellent teacher of technical fighting applications. He always told me “I cannot teach you how to develop chi, but I can teach you how to use it.”

Hung always emphasized separating the different qualities of the martial arts. All too often people who study different martial arts do them all with the same quality of internal movement and chi.

Hung would constantly reinforce the thought that hsing-i, bagua, and tai chi were very different. When I was initially with Hung during 1974 and 1975, this thought of difference in the internal arts was very difficult for me to grasp, as all this internal “stuff” was simply “different” from karate and Shaolin.

Internal to me at the intermediate stage of learning hsing-i and bagua meant soft, yet Hung’s power was harder and stronger than any karate or Shaolin I had ever experienced. He was soft, and yet not as soft as tai chi masters I had met and studied with. Yet Hung was just as sensitive and able to react effectively in an instant, in just as mysterious a manner as the best tai chi people I had studied with, including Yang Shou Jung (Yang Cheng Fu’s eldest son). Hung’s hsing-i and bagua were clearly better than his tai chi.

The tai chi style practiced by both Wang Shu Jin and Hung I Hsiang was a tai chi/hsing-i/bagua combination style developed by Chen Pan Ling, which also combined the essential elements of the Yang, Wu, and Chen styles of tai chi chuan.*

This was now further complicated by the fact that the hsing-i taught by Hung was a Hebei combination style, with hsing-i movements but bagua dragon body motions and spiraling hand work.

The internal quality of Hung’s bagua was only minutely different from his hsing-i, although it was much more undulating. All of this derived from the fact that his hsing-i and bagua were fused together. Separating the nature of the internal movements from each other was most difficult.

Even more so was clearly separating the different types of chi involved. This was very confusing, as Hung was constantly emphasizing to me and all his Chinese students that we had to clearly separate Shaolin and each of the three different internal martial arts.

They were to be done clearly and separately, so that the unique qualities of each could be distinctly differentiated. It was only later, first through Bai Hua and later Liu Hung Chieh, that I was to clearly attain this ability to separate the different types of chi, which Hung expended much effort to drive home, but which was beyond my reach in those early days.

In the 1970s, Hung I Hsiang had about a dozen exceptionally talented students. Many of his students dominated the full contact tournaments in Taiwan. One named Weng Hsien Ming, won the Taiwan full contact championships three times in a row when he was in his teens.

He then went into the army and didn’t practice at all for over three years. After returning to civilian life, he was able to train for only a few weeks and still capture second place. Another of Hung’s students, Huang Hsi I, also usually won his all-Taiwan full contact tournaments with knockouts.

Huang subsequently became one of the best chi gung tui na doctors in Taiwan. The youngest student was Lo Te Hsiu, known for his heel kick to the solar plexus. Over time, Lo researched and became highly skilled at Hung’s complete post-birth ba gua system.

Hung I Hsiang’s emphasis was not so much on maximizing internal power and chi development. Instead, he focused on the subtleties of how to effectively deliver the power one had and how to rapidly and smoothly change from one technique to another. He did this by showing how to make tiny circles deep within every crevice of the body and how to change internal body alignments with great speed.

He spent a lot of time showing how tiny shifts in body weight could create unusual power vectors. He also made students feel this power not only in terms of strikes, but also by showing how changes in subtle body movements could achieve desired defense/attack application outcomes. He taught his students how to instantaneously release themselves from bad internal alignments that could normally paralyze the body, and resume their attack, much like you smoothly change gears in a stick shift car.

Hung’s emphasis was on how small changes of body movement or chi flow could produce superior practical fighting techniques and overall athletic capacity.

*Note: The author also practiced and researched the Chen Pan Ling tai chi chuan form, which is composed of nine distinct levels of achievement. This research began in Tokyo in 1968 with Wang Shu Jin’s student Chang I Chung and continued through 1987 with Wang, Hung I Hsiang, and Huang Hsi I, and with other students of Chen Pan Ling in Taichung, Taiwan, as well as with teachers in Mainland China. To complete this research and comprehend the roots of this style required an indepth study of the Chen Village form of tai chi, which the author conducted with Feng Zhi Qiang in Beijing, the Wu style of tai chi with Liu Hung Chieh, and the Yang style with T. T. Liang, Yang Shou Jung, Bai Hua, and Lin Du Ying.