Cheng Man-ch’ing

Cheng Man-ch'ing was born in Yongjia in Zhejiang Province, in the area now identified with Wenzhou. Sources record his birth in the traditional Chinese calendar differently; the widely used Gregorian conversion is 29 July 1902. He became known through the rubric of the "Five Excellences"—poetry, painting, calligraphy, medicine and taijiquan—an honorific that expresses the cultivated-scholar ideal surrounding his public memory.

In the early 1930s Cheng studied Yang-style taijiquan with Yang Chengfu. His formation extended through both martial practice and the arts. During the upheavals of Republican-era China and the Sino-Japanese War, Cheng taught, practiced medicine and wrote. His work to make a lengthy form more teachable reflected broader efforts to disseminate practice across changing circumstances.

By the mid-1940s Cheng had organized an abbreviated curriculum commonly called the 37-posture form. He removed many repetitions and counted recurring actions differently from the conventional long-form sequence. Cheng's own framing remained Yang-style taijiquan in 37 postures, organized within the principles he had studied. His *Thirteen Treatises* and later instructional publications supplied textual principles alongside physical demonstration.

Cheng moved to Taiwan in 1949, where he continued medicine, painting, calligraphy and taijiquan teaching. His Taipei school attracted Chinese and international students who later formed important branches of his lineage. In 1964 Cheng relocated with his family to New York. He taught first on Canal Street and later at Shr Jung on the Bowery. His willingness to teach students outside the Chinese community widened access to taijiquan in the United States at a formative moment.

Cheng died in Taipei on 26 March 1975. Students carried his curriculum into schools and associations across North America and Europe, while films and photographs preserved aspects of his demonstration style. His legacy is unusually interdisciplinary: movement teaching sits beside medical, literary and visual-art practices. For dancers and movement practitioners, his importance lies in how a codified sequence can be edited for transmission without losing its principles—and in how teaching networks transform a local lineage into an international movement culture.