Ma Yueh Liang: The Physician Who Carried Wu Style Tai Chi

Ma Yueh Liang (1 August 1901 – 13 March 1998), courtesy name Songxiu, was born in Beijing into the Manchu Ma clan — and he became the most unusual carrier of Wu Style Tai Chi Chuan. By day he ran bacteriology and serology benches at Peking Union Medical College Hospital; in the early mornings and late evenings he trained and pushed hands with Wu Chien Chuan (1870–1942). He was a noted microbiologist of the 1920s and 1930s, and he became one of the longest-serving leaders of the Shanghai Chien Chuan Tai Chi Chuan Association. With his wife Wu Ying Hua (1907–1996), Wu Chien Chuan’s eldest daughter, to whom he was married for sixty-six years, he formed the Wu family’s great partnership: one carried the family transmission, the other brought modern medicine to explain it. This article draws on his own memoir and the historical record.

Key Facts at a Glance

Name: Ma Yueh Liang (馬岳梁, 1901–1998), courtesy name Songxiu, Beijing, Manchu Ma clan
Family: father’s generation surnamed Hui, eleventh of eleven brothers; fifth uncle Hui Xinwu commanded the Beijing gendarmerie
Lineage: began Wu Style under Wu Chien Chuan in 1921 at age twenty; earlier training in Sanhuang Paochui, tongbei, Shaolin boxing, and shuai jiao wrestling
Medicine: Peking Union Medical College graduate; bacterio-serologist and microbiologist; head of laboratory departments at several Shanghai hospitals
Principal roles: deputy director of the Shanghai Chien Chuan Tai Chi Chuan Association (1931), its president from 1948, deputy director again after the 1980 reopening; researcher of the Shanghai Literature and History Research Institute (1984)
Major works: Wu Chien Chuan’s Tai Chi Chuan (1935, with Chen Zhenmin) — the first book to carry the “Wu style” name — and, with Wu Ying Hua, the core library of the style

The Ma Family: Two Generations of Ties to Tai Chi

Ma Yueh Liang’s connection to tai chi predates him. The Manchu Ma family changed surname each generation; his father’s branch took the name Hui, and his father was the eleventh of eleven brothers, born when his grandfather was sixty. His fifth uncle Hui Xinwu served as Commandant-General of the Beijing gendarmerie (the “Warden of the Nine Gates”).

The decisive detail: Wu Chuan Yau, founder of Wu Style Tai Chi Chuan, and Song Mai Lun, grandmaster of Sanhuang Paochui, both taught boxing at the Hui household — the families were old friends. Young Ma first trained in Sanhuang Paochui, tongbei boxing, Shaolin boxing, and wrestling: a hard, powerful foundation. In 1921, at twenty, he formally became Wu Chien Chuan’s disciple — and committed that hardness to tai chi.

The Union Medical Student: From Odd-Jobs Boy to Microbiologist

Ma entered private school at five; the family’s fortunes fell when he was fifteen, and after secondary school he could afford no further study. In 1919, at eighteen, he took a job as an odd-jobs hand at Peking Union Medical College Hospital — and that job changed everything.

Miss Macoy, the British head of the hospital’s laboratory department, recognized his talent and recommended and sponsored him into Peking Union Medical College, then China’s foremost medical school. After four years he joined the hospital’s bacteriology and serology laboratory, becoming a respected microbiologist of the interwar years.

In 1929, invited by Yan Fuqing, a founder of modern Chinese medicine, he went to Shanghai to help establish the Central Medical College (forerunner of Shanghai Medical University) and Zhongshan Hospital — among the first Western medical colleges founded by Chinese, opening with barely thirty staff. He went on to head the laboratory department of the Shanghai Red Cross Hospital (today’s Huashan Hospital), with concurrent posts at the Shanghai Obstetrics Hospital, the Sino-German Hospital, and Shanghai Union Hospital, and practiced medicine through the war years in Chongqing. From 1946 he led the laboratory at Shanghai Union Hospital, retiring in 1964.

Medicine never crowded out his other skill: from 1941 he treated patients with internal-qi finger therapy (qigong acupoint pressing), famously curing the back pain of an American Hollywood dancer known in Chinese records as Sha Fei — and refusing her offer of a substantial reward.

Refusing the Puppet Post: Two Thousand Miles on Foot

In November 1939 Chu Minyi, foreign-trained physician and cabinet minister of the Japanese puppet Wang regime — and, awkwardly, a disciple of Wu Chien Chuan — offered Ma Yueh Liang the post of Commissioner of Health for Nanjing. Ma’s answer was to pack that very night and leave Shanghai.

For more than half a year he traveled mostly on foot through Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Fujian, Hunan, and Guangxi — over two thousand li — until he reached Chongqing, earning his way with medicine. He returned to Shanghai only after the war.

The Tumultuous Decades: Where the Person Survives, the Art Survives

The second half of Ma’s life coincided with sixty of China’s most turbulent years, and through all of it he and Wu Ying Hua never gave up the transmission:

In 1951 he was imprisoned without charge, sharing a cell with Daoist master Pan Hualing; after three months the director of Shanghai Union Hospital, Wang Yihui, bailed him out.
In 1953–1955 he served a three-year sentence on tenuous “Yiguandao sect” associations, doing forced labor in the laboratory of the Huai River Commission workers’ hospital in Anhui.
In 1966, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, he and nine other boxing teachers were marched to the People’s Square for public struggle sessions, branded one of Shanghai’s “ten reactionary fist authorities.” His home was ransacked and many precious tai chi manuscripts destroyed; nearly ten family members were crowded into a single room.
Yet even then his character held: when two co-workers fell into a well during neighborhood labor, he went down after them and hauled both out, one in each arm. Neighbors with injuries still came to him, and he treated them free as always, saving what he could to support poor students.

Manuscripts can burn and classes can be banned — but where the person survives, the art survives. In 1978 he resumed teaching, in Wuxi; in 1979 the Xuhui district sports authorities invited him and three other veteran masters (Lu Zhenduo, Ji Jinshan, Wang Zhuangfei) to open public classes; and in July 1980, seventy-five-year-old Wu Ying Hua and eighty-year-old Ma Yueh Liang formally reopened the Shanghai Chien Chuan Tai Chi Chuan Association. The physical archive was lost to the Cultural Revolution — the living transmission was not. That is the deepest meaning of “keeping the manual.”

The Chien Chuan Association: Fifty Years of Rise, Fall, and Return

In March 1931 the Chien Chuan Tai Chi Chuan Association opened in Shanghai, with Wu Chien Chuan as president and Ma Yueh Liang as deputy director. In 1938 the association built its “Chien Chuan Hall” atop the YMCA on Tibet Road. After Wu Chien Chuan’s death in 1942, Wu Kung Yi took the presidency; when Wu Kung Yi moved to Hong Kong in 1948, Ma Yueh Liang succeeded him, with Wu Ying Hua as deputy. The association was forced to close in 1954 and was silenced entirely during the Cultural Revolution.

When it reopened in July 1980 the pattern held: Wu Ying Hua as president, Ma Yueh Liang as deputy — “the Wu family in charge, the Ma family at its side,” a configuration that continues today. In 1987 Wu Ying Hua was re-elected; in 1998 their eldest son Ma Hailong took over; in 2019 his son Ma Wenzhao succeeded. Three generations of one family have carried the southern line of Wu Style without interruption.

The Books: From 1935 to a 576-Page Summa

Ma Yueh Liang’s bibliography keeps landing on the key dates of Wu Style history:

Wu Chien Chuan’s Tai Chi Chuan (1935, with Chen Zhenmin; Shanghai Health Magazine Press): the first book in the Wu Chuan Yau line to carry the “Wu style” name explicitly — until then the art was simply “tai chi chuan.” It reproduced more than sixty photographs of Wu Chien Chuan plus fifty-six supplementary photos of Ma himself, and was reprinted repeatedly from 1935 to 1952.
Wu Style Tai Chi Push Hands (1983, with disciple Xu Wen; Hong Kong): over 110 demonstration photographs of push hands, modeled by Ma and his third son Ma Chiang Pao.
Simplified Wu Style Tai Chi Chuan (1986/1988, with Wu Ying Hua; Shanghai Bookstore Publishing House): the popularization volume answering the national call for simplified sets.
Wu Style Tai Chi Fast Form (June 1987, with Wu Ying Hua and Shi Meilin; Henan Science and Technology Press): the Wu family’s 94-movement fast form — never previously taught outside the family — published for the first time.
Authentic Wu Style Tai Chi Chuan (April 1999, with Wu Ying Hua; Beijing Sport University Press): 344 pages gathering the traditional form, the simplified form, the fast form, and push hands.
Wu Style Tai Chi Sword (September 2001, with Wu Ying Hua; People’s Sports Publishing House): the Qiankun sword set, with both husband’s and wife’s memoirs appended.
Wu Style Tai Chi Chuan Explained in Detail (August 2018, with Wu Ying Hua and Ma Hailong; Shanghai People’s Publishing House): the 576-page summation, containing the traditional 108-form, the fast form, the thirteen-move simplified set, and the seated sixteen-form.

His books carry a further distinction: with his Union Medical College training he wrote about tai chi’s health benefits, physiology, and therapeutic value decades before it was fashionable — the founder of Wu Style’s medicine-meets-martial-art tradition of explanation.

Push Hands Stories: The Softest Man in the Room

Ma’s push hands was famous for its softness — “no strength” was his refrain for decades — and for the startling power that emerged from it. The anecdotes read like a miniature wuxia novel:

Leaving the Bund public gardens after teaching, he was ambushed from behind; a twist of his waist sent the attacker flying over his back onto the pavement.
Eagle-claw master Zhu Lianxiang of the Chin Woo Association tried to seize him from behind in a headlock; Ma tucked his chin, turned his shoulder, and Zhu went sprawling.
Tongbei master Sun Heyun withdrew in defeat the instant their hands touched: stuck, unable to advance or retreat.
Challenged in an alley by an American sailor, he answered with retreat-step large pull followed by Fair Lady Works the Shuttle; the man flew backward “like a ball off a wall” — and ended up giving a thumbs-up.
With six or seven men pushing his abdomen together, a single shake of his Golden Cock Stands on One Leg stance toppled them in two directions (filmed by a Hong Kong movie company).
When a visiting Hunan master surnamed Qiu took his hand, one neutralize-and-release seated Qiu so hard he broke the chair’s legs; his student was thrown onto the dinner table, collapsing it.

Into his nineties he still performed forms and push hands in Shanghai’s parks on the first Sunday of every month — and spectators could step up and push hands with him, something unique in the tai chi world. He warned against eager “innovation”: “Return the step and the root takes hold; go back and it becomes natural.”

Honors and Legacy

In 1984 he and Wu Ying Hua were appointed researchers of the Shanghai Literature and History Research Institute on the same day — the institute’s first husband-and-wife appointment — and he was named an honorary committee member of the Chinese Wushu Association. In 1985 he was named a Shanghai “Healthy Elder” and then a national one; in 1995 he received the One Hundred Warriors of Chinese Wushu honor.

His international legacy is equally concrete: in 1941 the dancer Sha Fei published an English account of Wu Style — the art’s first step onto the world stage — and in 1946 she organized a tai chi club at the United Nations. In 1984 the couple visited West Germany, where Ma Chiang Pao established the European Chien Chuan Tai Chi Chuan School; in 1990 they visited New Zealand and helped found the New Zealand Wushu Federation. Wu Style’s presence today in Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, New Zealand, and Hong Kong owes more to the Mas than to anyone else.

Ma Yueh Liang died in Shanghai on 13 March 1998, aged ninety-seven (ninety-eight by Chinese reckoning). Wu Ying Hua had died two years earlier, on 30 April 1996 — sixty-six years of marriage, joined by the art and certified by the books.

Timeline of Ma Yueh Liang’s Life

1901 — born 1 August in Beijing, into the Manchu Ma clan
1919 — age eighteen, odd-jobs hand at Peking Union Medical College Hospital
1921 — age twenty, becomes a disciple of Wu Chien Chuan
1920s — studies at Peking Union Medical College; joins the bacterio-serology laboratory
1929 — co-founds the Central Medical College and Zhongshan Hospital in Shanghai with Yan Fuqing
1930 — marries Wu Ying Hua; the couple lives in Wu Chien Chuan’s household for twelve years, receiving his personal instruction
1931 — Shanghai Chien Chuan Tai Chi Chuan Association founded; becomes deputy director
1935 — Wu Chien Chuan’s Tai Chi Chuan published: the first book to bear the “Wu style” name
1939 — refuses the puppet regime’s health commissionership; walks over two thousand li to Chongqing
1948 — succeeds Wu Kung Yi as president of the association
1953–1955 — three-year sentence and forced labor in Anhui
1966 — struggle sessions and ransacked home in the Cultural Revolution; manuscripts destroyed
1978 — resumes teaching, in Wuxi
July 1980 — association reopens: Wu Ying Hua president, Ma Yueh Liang deputy director
1984 — appointed researcher of the Shanghai Literature and History Research Institute with Wu Ying Hua; visits West Germany, founding the European Chien Chuan school
1995 — named one of the One Hundred Warriors of Chinese Wushu
1998 — dies in Shanghai on 13 March, aged ninety-seven