They seem to have pursued tai chi primarily as a means of self-cultivation, and possibly for self-defense and leadership in a time of widespread civil breakdown and unrest including banditry, anti-landlord uprisings, and the Nian and Taiping rebellions.

At least one scholar speculates that the owner of that shop may have been a fellow book collector who had learned of the Wu family's interest in the topic, and was seeking to curry favor with Chengqing who among other things was in charge of tax collection.

Over the following years, Wu and his family applied the lessons of this text to the development of their art and created a body of written work around it, which together became known as the first version of the tai chi classics.

Wu's older brothers Chengqing and Ruqing (武汝清; 1803-1887) also wrote on the topic after they retired from government service, though those works along with more by Li Yiyu were not made public until the 1980s and 1990s, so have been called "lost classics".

[17] The term "taijiquan" (the Chinese name of tai chi) may have first appeared in the Wu/Li family's mid-nineteenth century writings, perhaps drawn from the Wang Zongyue text which begins with the words "Taiji is born from Wuji; it is the mother of Yin and Yang".

[18][22][23][20] By the second decade of the twentieth century, Yang Chengfu's disciples and Sun Lutang were using the term "taijiquan" in their publications, including in the titles of some of the tai chi classics.

[25] Scholars believe Wu Yuxiang passed along to his successors and to the Yang family the story of the creation of internal martial arts by legendary Daoist alchemist Zhang Sanfeng.

Wealthy and occupied for many years with establishing and running a smallpox clinic, he devoted much of his spare time to practicing, researching, and further developing the art with his uncle Yuxiang and brother Qixuan, but also took on as a disciple his neighbor Hao Weizhen, for whom he made one of only three handwritten copies of the Wu/Li family tai chi manual.

Tens of thousands of adult tai chi students have also participated in his training programs, including groups from abroad, and he has accepted 140 formal disciples.

In 2020 he appeared in the film submitted by China to place tai chi on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage List, representing the "Wuu" style.

He has written over twenty articles on tai chi, and assisted Yao Jizu in compiling 武氏太极拳全书 (The Complete Book of Wu Style Taijiquan).

[50] Hao Shaoru paused his public tai chi teaching in the 1950s, but thanks to his friend Gu Liuxin he was invited by the government to lead a new class in Shanghai in 1960, and in 1963 published the seminal book Wu Style Taijiquan (武式太极拳) which focused on the 96-movement form.

In 2005 he retired to the San Diego area, where he continued to teach tui na and tai chi, and in 2008 and 2012 two English/Chinese books on the Hao family style were issued under his name by a Hong Kong martial arts publisher.

Thrust into a hardscrabble life at an early age, martial arts provided strength and stability, and his prowess earned him the nickname "Spirit Hand (神手) Li".

After he learned those styles, he created a new system that offers these unique points: compact postures, slow relaxed movements, and footwork that strictly and clearly distinguishes empty and solid.

— Gu Liuxin[note 7][29]Tai chi styles are often categorized by their "frame size", which describes how far the body is extended for small, medium, or large overall reach.

In describing small frame, Gu Liuxin wrote "the left and right hands each control half the body; they do not cross the center line, and they do not extend beyond the tips of the feet".

[28][84] Among other core tai chi principles, opening and closing movements were emphasized in this style from the beginning, however in the first two generations' forms the postures named specifically for that concept were referred to not as "kai he", but with a literary term, "zhuan he" (Chinese: 转合; lit.

Hao was the first to use the term "kai he", or "opening and closing", in the names of specific movements in a form, drawing from Li Yiyu's writing on theory (discussed further below).

The 1977 film of Li Baoyu disciple Ouyang Fang's performance of this form is like a time capsule for us, with few if any changes from the original he'd begun learning almost fifty years before.

[76][87][88] Yang Chengfu and Wu Jianquan modified their primary training forms to a slow even speed, removing jumps and fa jin, to make the art more accessible for the health of the broader public with the encouragement of government officials.

Internally, practitioners focus on bringing energy to the outside perimeter of the body in all directions, so that unlike the classic Yang-style metaphor of "an iron bar wrapped in cotton" this is more like "a crab shell on the outside, and soft inside".

Gu Liuxin gave these examples of changes in that form: "Originally there were also jumping movements until the fourth generation teacher Hao Yueru (1877-1935) removed them.

"[29][91] Accessible to "the old and infirm", yes, and Hao Shaoru did say it was a qigong quan (氣功拳),[50] but it still contains a martial arts core, with lessons on the applications of internal strength and other topics for intermediate and advanced students.

The Li family lineage (as we have named them for the purposes of this article), under Wei Peilin, Yao Jizu, and others, standardized a 108-posture form, in middle frame with no jump kicks or other immediately strenuous movements.

[93][94][95][96][36] In the Li Shengduan lineage, Chen Gu'an standardized another 108-movement form in a small frame approach that, as with the others of this generation, is accessible to a wider range of people yet contains martial training for intermediate and advanced students.

[102][103][104][105][106][107] Partner work includes stationary and stepping push hands (推手, tuīshǒu), as well as two-person sparring routines and freestyle grappling (散打, sàndǎ).

Wu Yuxiang compiled the first eight, the "body methods" (身法, shēnfǎ), while Li Yiyu added the final five "essentials" (要領, Simplified 要领, yāolǐng).

Other styles of tai chi and other internal martial arts also give attention to the importance of opening and closing in all movements, but Li Yiyu was the first to specifically call it kai he in his "Treatise on the Diagram of Substantial/Insubstantial and Opening/Closing", [note 9] and Wu (Hao) masters have uniquely made this concept their central focus.

[126] But when Li Yiyu's student Hao Weizhen began spreading the art to the broader public, he refined his teaching for practical application by replacing "zhuǎn" with "kāi".