Liu Bin's Zhuang Gong Bagua Zhang, Volume Two: South District Beijing's Strongly Rooted Style

Good stuff

I was looking forward to this book after the first volume was so good . The two books are good source material for those studying Chinese martial arts, especially Baguazhang. However I found that this volume had too many fabulous stories of the practitioners from past generations without much serious information. I found that only the story of Tie En Fang to be of value because he had examples of Tie's poetry, in which his insights into bagua after 40 years are expressed and analyzed. I did like the eight variations for the Single Palm Change. The second volume is lacking in several ways. It maybe that I like the bagua system that I study more, but I thought that Zhang Jie' s movements were too big and without subtlety. In both the open hand and weapon forms the movements were all large extended arm circles. The photography of this volume seems to make Zhang Jie small and sometimes difficult to see. It looks like the photo shots were focused on the background instead of filling the photo with Zhang's image. So while the written directions are concise, the sequence of photos show few details.

Lots of history regarding Beijing baguazhang practitioners in the later half of the 20th century. My biggest complaint is that the author neither uses Chinese characters nor proper Pinyin tone markers. So some of the names of the sequences are impossible to explore the root meaning in Chinese. For example, he describes the movements for "Yao Shen Zhang (Rooster Palm)." Yao does not mean rooster in Chinese. But depending on the tone, there are 28 different characters associated with "yao." But Mr. Zhang does not describe what "Yao" means or what the name of the sequence refers to.