I met Master Sun Ru Xian at his apartment at 9am. We were waiting for some other people to arrive, so we chatted for a while. He’d already prepared a personal curriculum for me, based on our conversation the previous Sunday: the basic eight palms, including the I Ching diagram for each, single and double palm changes, and the nine palaces.

Then we went to start our class. The others trickled in slowly: the Chinese student I’d met before, who’s studying xingyiquan and a Shaolin form, plus a younger couple, a Dutch guy and an English woman, who are studying tanglanquan.We each worked on our own thing, as Master Sun moved between us.

For me, Master Sun had me working on the first three basic palms, plus the single palm change. He teaches Cheng style, but there are a number of differences from what I’ve learned from Madam Ge, especially “Great Roc Spreads its Wings”, and the Single Palm change.

I haven’t been practising for some time, so my bad habits are reasserting themselves - in particular, my qi being too high, causing my stepping to be unrooted, and my shoulder muscles being tight. To deal with the former, he had me hold bricks, especially in the Great Roc palm - the muscles get tired really quickly and have to un-knot.

After the class, the Chinese student (Peter), his wife, and I went to a nearby martial arts supplies shop to buy strap-on weights for the wrists or ankles. We each bought a 4kg set for the wrists, and a 5kg set for the ankles - at only 10RMB per set, why not?

I enjoyed the class a lot; it’s nice to have a bunch of people around training in different forms. At the end I was tired, but not too tired… I’m thinking of taking a training in xingyiquan with Peter, and then following on immediately after with another class of bagua…

I mentioned that a chat with Carlos had got me thinking about yiquan… So, I did a bit of googling, and discovered that I’m not the only one with yiquan on my mind. That in turn led me to realise that Tabbycat is blogging again, which I hadn’t been aware of. More than that, he was in Beijng! So, I dropped him an email… but a bit too late; he’d just left for the States again. Well, I’ll be here for a while… Anyway, as I’ve often mentioned over the last couple of years, I have a real problem with being stiff, particularly in the shoulders. I’m very tempted to sign up later in the year for one of the Yiquan Academy’s 30-day intensive beginners’ courses; I really think that intense sessions of zhan zhuang might do the trick as far as relaxing and opening the joints goes, not to mention posture…. Well, we’ll see.

I’ve caught up again with Will, who was the senior student at the Beijing Milun School back when I was here before in 2004/5; he’s too busy running his restaurant these days to do much martials arts beyond a bit of Chen taiji. The food is very good, though!

I called Master Sun Zhujin, to talk about meeting him for classes. If I understood him correctly, he’s free to teach on weekends. Unfortunately, I couldn’t understand where he lives! It got a bit frustrating; I’ll have to call him back again when I’ve enlisted a Chinese-speaker to help me….

As I’ve mentioned, Master Liu Jingru lives way down in the south of Beijing; I’m way up in the north, and it’s just not practical for me to get down there. However, I’d been in touch with his main student, Kong Cheng, who was so helpful to me last June (it was Kong Cheng who took me to Dong Hai Chuan’s grave). Kong Cheng happened to be in Wudaokou this morning, so we met up. He was in a real hurry; he’s flying Italy tonight, and will be there until June, teaching acupuncture and bagua in a series of cities. We met at Lush, where I was having breakfast.

As we chatted, I mentioned the difficulty I was having, ie that all the bagua teachers are very far from the University district. “Oh, but there’s one very close!”, he said, “Do you want to meet him?”. A couple of minutes later, we were in a taxi, on our way to meet Master Sun Ru Xian, who lives just north of Tsinghua University, near the Yuanmingyuan ruins. He’s studied a lot of internal martial arts, and is first and foremost a xingyi man. I spent a few hours talking to him; he’s really nice and down to earth, as is his wife. He has a few very friendly dogs as well! My luck continued to hold good; one of his students was there, a Chinese guy who had taken his MBA in Singapore (U of Chicago), and speaks excellent English.

Master Sun asked whether I wanted to learn for health, performance or application; I said application, which was clearly the right answer. He spent a lot of the time throwing me around (his apartment fortunately has big, soft sofas), and it looks like I might start training with him next week. He’s a heavyset guy in his 50s, very strong. He’s a student of Liu Jing Ru amongst many others. We also chatted about Yiquan, which he learned from Wang XiangZhai; he pointed out quite rightly that it’s only something to study if I have a lot of spare time.

Well, funny how things turn out…