Key Sources and Further Reading

This page sorts what exists. It also covers something specific to this art: the scholarly literature on the religious movement that may lie behind it, which is written by historians who have never heard of baguazhang and is all the more useful for that.

The state of the literature

Three things distinguish writing on baguazhang from writing on taijiquan.

There is less of it, because the art has fewer practitioners and never became a mass health practice. There is proportionally more good history, because the evidence exists to do history with. And the instructional books face a particular difficulty: circle walking is almost impossible to convey in still photographs, so the technical literature is weaker than the historical literature.

The first-generation Chinese books

Sun Lutang published the first book on baguazhang in 1916, and it remains a primary source of the first importance. He had learned from one of Dong Haichuan's senior students, he was an educated man who wrote clearly, and his account preserves the teaching of that generation.

It is also where a great deal of the trigram theorising enters the written record, which makes it valuable in two ways at once: as a record of practice, and as evidence for when the cosmological framework was elaborated. An English translation exists.

Several other books appeared in the 1930s from practitioners in the various branches. They vary in quality and are worth consulting for the differences between lineages rather than for a single authoritative account, since no such account exists.

Historical research

Kang Gewu's research on baguazhang's origins, beginning in the early 1980s, is the essential work. He went to Dong Haichuan's home region, examined local records and traditions, interviewed practitioners, and compiled the documentary evidence including the stele inscriptions.

His conclusions are conservative: he established what can be shown and named the limits, rather than producing a satisfying story. That is precisely what makes the work valuable. Anyone claiming certainty about where Dong learned the art should be asked whether they have read it.

Read alongside this the general histories mentioned in our Foundations sources page, which supply the context of nineteenth-century Beijing martial arts culture.

The sect literature

This is the recommendation most likely to be new to practitioners, and it is the most interesting.

Susan Naquin's study of the Eight Trigrams uprising of 1813 is a detailed scholarly account of the religious movement, its organisation, its use of trigram symbolism, its devotional practices and its suppression. It is not about martial arts and does not mention baguazhang.

That is why it is useful. It lets you assess the sect hypothesis discussed on our Origins page against a historian's reconstruction of the movement, written without any stake in the martial arts question. Her related work on religious rebellion in the same region extends the picture.

Joseph Esherick's study of the origins of the Boxer uprising covers the same part of China a few decades later and describes the relationship between village martial practice, popular religion and rebellion in detail. Between them these books give you the world Dong Haichuan came from.

English-language accounts

Robert W. Smith published the first substantial English account of baguazhang in the 1960s, based on his training in Taiwan. It is historically important as the book that introduced the art to the West and it preserves first-hand descriptions of teachers. It is also credulous about lineage claims, and should be read with that in mind.

The most valuable English-language resource is a specialist periodical published through the 1990s, which combined interviews with practitioners from many branches, translations of Chinese source material, and original historical research. It was unusually rigorous for martial arts publishing and it documented lineages that were poorly recorded elsewhere. Back issues circulate and are worth seeking out.

Instructional books

The honest position is that these can support instruction and cannot replace it, more so here than in most arts.

The two-volume fundamentals series produced from one teacher's curriculum is unusually systematic about the basic training, and covers the material that most books skip in favour of showing changes. Books that begin with the eight palm changes are starting several years too late.

When assessing any instructional book, check whether it treats the step and the turning actions as a subject in their own right. A book that gives them a page and then spends two hundred on changes has misunderstood the art's structure.

On the Yijing side

If you want to evaluate the trigram correspondences yourself, do not rely on martial arts books for the Yijing material, which is generally second-hand and often garbled.

Our own Tao Philosophy section covers the trigrams, the two circular arrangements and the structure of the text. Beyond that, a proper scholarly translation and a study of the text's history will let you check martial claims against the source. The specific thing to check is which arrangement an author is using and whether they know there are two.

Video

For this art, video is more necessary than for most, because the essential information is in continuous movement and in the transitions.

Footage of practitioners from different branches is the fastest way to understand how much the lineages actually differ, which is difficult to grasp from description. Older footage of the generation trained before standardisation is particularly valuable.

What video cannot show is the internal condition — whether a practitioner is genuinely wound up through the waist or merely turned. That distinction requires contact, and no recording will supply it.

What is missing

Three gaps are worth naming so that you stop searching for material that does not exist.

There is no adequate comparative study of the branches. Descriptions of individual lineages exist, but nobody has systematically compared what each does with the same problem, which is the study that would tell us most about what Dong actually taught.

There is very little on baguazhang's applications tested under pressure. The art has a good practical reputation among martial artists, but that reputation rests largely on report rather than on documented testing, and the honest reader should notice the difference.

And there is nothing serious linking the art's mechanics to biomechanics. The rotational power generation baguazhang trains is a well-studied phenomenon in sports science, and nobody has connected the two literatures.

A suggested order

Start with Sun Lutang, to see what the first published account said and how early the theory appears. Then Kang Gewu's historical research, which will tell you what is actually established.

Then Naquin on the Eight Trigrams sect, which will change how you read everything else and which most practitioners have never encountered. Then an instructional book on fundamentals if you are training, and the specialist periodical's back issues if you want the branch-by-branch detail.

Leave the trigram correspondences until last, and approach them through proper Yijing scholarship rather than through martial arts sources.

Reading the sources against each other

The single most useful habit when working through this material is to read the historical studies and the lineage publications side by side rather than in sequence. The lineage publications tell you what practitioners believe and, more importantly, what they were taught to believe and by whom; the historical studies tell you what can be documented. Neither is a substitute for the other. A student who reads only the lineage material acquires a coherent story with no way to test it, and a student who reads only the sceptical historical work acquires an accurate chronology of a practice they have not understood from the inside. Where the two disagree, the disagreement itself is usually the interesting thing, because it tends to mark the point where the art acquired a new audience and needed a new account of itself.

Cautions

Be careful of sources that present a single unified baguazhang. The branches genuinely differ, and an account that harmonises them is concealing the most interesting thing about the art.

Be careful of confident statements about where Dong Haichuan learned the method. Nobody knows, and confidence on this point is a reliable indicator of unreliability elsewhere.

Be careful of trigram theory presented as derivation rather than as labelling, for the reasons set out on our page about it.

And be careful of any book that does not mention the knee. This art has a specific injury risk, and a source that discusses low postures and turning steps without addressing it is not written by someone thinking about the reader.

Key points

• Baguazhang's literature is smaller than taijiquan's but proportionally better, because a documented recent founder made real historical work possible.
• Sun Lutang's 1916 book is the essential primary source and also shows when the trigram theorising entered the written record.
• Kang Gewu's fieldwork from the 1980s is the standard historical treatment and is valuably conservative about what can be established.
• Susan Naquin's study of the 1813 Eight Trigrams uprising is written by a historian with no stake in martial arts, which makes it the best way to assess the sect hypothesis.
• A specialist English periodical from the 1990s remains the best source on branch-by-branch differences and is worth seeking in back issues.
• Judge instructional books by whether they treat the step and the turning actions as a subject; starting from the eight changes begins years too late.