Invincible spirit

Foreigners often thought he was insane. Some even stopped to ask if he needed help when they saw him practising tai chi in airports decades ago.

“Many people overseas weren’t familiar with the martial art,” Chen Xiaowang explains. “Some foreigners even thought tai chi was a Chinese cuisine.”

Chen has travelled the globe, teaching and promoting tai chi, since the 1990s, when he became one of his homeland’s greatest champions. He has earned more than 300,000 disciples in 40 countries.

Chen’s fighting style was developed by his family 19 generations ago. It was popularised in China in the early 20th century by his grandfather, Chen Fake.

“My energy is limited,” he says.

“So, I instruct my apprentices and help them spread Chen-style tai chi around the world.”

His disciples have opened tai chi studios in 120 German cities and towns. Chen’s oldest disciple is a 103-year-old American.

Chen innovated upon his family’s traditional tai chi by developing a simplified version for mass consumption, called the “nine-posture Chen-style”. The family’s martial art style was developed by his ancestor Chen Wangting in Henan province’s Chenjiagou village. Nearly everyone can do tai chi in the settlement, where Chen was born in 1945.

Chen would try to nap after school, but his father would make him get up to do tai chi.

He has remained committed, even in the bleak years of the Great Chinese Famine, when tens of millions of his countrymen perished. 

“People had nothing to eat during the early 1960s,” he recalls. “We devoured tree bark and grassroots. But I kept practising tai chi.”

Chen faced a choice in the 1970s – make money at a stable job or struggle with an uncertain future while performing tai chi.

“I told myself to not worry about the results,” Chen recalls. He made a rule that, no matter what happened, he’d do his routine at least 20 times a day.

The discipline paid off whan he started winning competitions in the 1980s. His first international foray was a 1990 visit to Sydney. Few Australians knew about tai chi then, he says. Chen continues annual consultations to tai chi studios around the world.

“Chen Xiaowang is brilliant at tai chi. He seems invincible,” says Chen Daoyong, who runs a tai chi gym in Beijing.