Chen Xiaowang World Taijiquan Association
Back

Chen Family Taijiquan First Set

An unfinished translation project.

This document is a description of the taijiquan of Chen Zhaokui. It was originally sixty-seven hand-written pages. At some point it was scanned and assembled into a PDF file which has been floating around on the internet for some years now. It purports to have been dictated by Chen Zhaokui himself.

Little is known (by me, at least) about the authenticity of the document. There is no attribution for the original transcription. There are some clues to its provenance in the writing itself. The author’s opening use of a quotation by Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong would seem to place its origin some time in the 1960s. It is written in simplified Chinese characters which supports that time frame. It is possible that this was the work of taijiquan author Shen Jiazhen (沈家桢) who co-authored a book with Gu Liuxin (顾留馨) on Chen taijiquan (陈氏太极拳) which was published in 1963.

Using a combination of OCR and hand editing, I transcribed the scanned pages into electronic text format for ease of copying and editing. I have also translated to English (admittedly in rough form) the first 18 of the total 67 pages of the original. The rest of the text was translated by Google with little to no manual changes made. The links below are to pdf files, ordered by page of the original scanned document.