Date November 5^th 2025.

Conversation with Tony Henrys, East Midlands Tai Chi Teacher about Tony’s recollection of training with Master Fu Zhongwen in Shanghai in the early 1990s

Q: Okay, to start with, tell me how you first got interested in Tai Chi?

TONY: When I as about 15 or 16 I was interested in karate, and I started to get interested Zen as well. I did Judo in the police force; I started to attend Karate class when I was 15 or 16 years old then I looked at Aikido for a while and one two other martial arts.

I eventually started to look at Tai Chii but there were no classes around locally when I started which had any sort of depth, so I went down to London to attend a few seminars to with Master Chu King Hung and I had private lessons with his main student John Solagobade. I also trained with Master Jonh Ding , he had a class down in London and I used to go down once a month.

After a while, while I started to feel the need to go to China, so I did some research. Initially I did a tour of some Asian areas, I went to Bangkok and then to Hong Kong.

Q: what sort of date are we talking about here?

TONY: Well would it be roughly around 1994/5 five and I met a few different teachers in Hong Kong, but I soon realise that I’ve got to go directly to China.  I started to make enquiries about getting to China because I wanted to get to the core of the Yang family style and I was experiencing various versions of Yang Tai Chi which I wasn’t satisfied with.

I was at that time corresponding with Erle Montague, who was sort of quite a popular Tai Chi teacher and one his students Stephen Hurst came over to England and stayed with me.

Q; How did you know about Master Fu?

Well it was from press articles, reading and by word-of-mouth.

I found out a Qi Gong course at the University of Shanghai and together with another guy who was a kung fu guy I went over there to study QG

Q: Wasn’t there something about letters of introduction?

TONY: Yes, I’ve got Erle to give me an introduction letter because he knew Master Fu.

I went over to Shanghai, and I can’t remember how long the course was, maybe about a month I think.  I went to Master Fu’s house,  stood outside with quite a few other people, some Americans and Japanese, to see if he would teach us.

Q:How did they go in? Was there a student that would do the communication between you all and Master Fu and did every one succeed in getting tuition with him?

No, he picked and chose who he was going to teach.  We were invited in and  I talked to him for a while, you know about what I’ve done and with whom and he said that he would teach me.

One of the reasons he said he would teach me was because I was English and he said he really loved stories of the English chivalry, the Knights in their armour, King Arthur and all that.

I started to go to his house each night after we finished at the university. I’d make my way to his house, with another guy actually who was a former British karate champion but I can’t remember his name.

Q: So you would go to the university during the day and then during the evening go to Master Fu’s  house to train. What was his house and training area like?

TONY: Just a small place with a large yard at the back. Yeah that was it really.  We would go round as often as we could, and he was just an open book to learn from, he was fantastic. First, he wanted to me to show him my form and my form at that time would be the form I’d learnt from Chu King Hung in London.  I told him I wanted to learn the original form.  In my training at the time, I was proficient at the form, pushing hands etc but something didn’t sit well with me. I’d been in the police force prior to this and I’ve been involved in lots of incidents on the street so I knew what would work and what wouldn’t in a fight , and I didn’t feel right about what I was learning at the time.

Anyway, I showed him my form from beginning to end and he just said “I’ll show you how to do it properly”.

Q: Okay so just tell me a little bit about how your training sessions went? How did Master Fu work with you? How did he correct you? Where were you training?

We just went through the form posture by posture and for each one he’d give us correction via an interpreter. Give us correction and an explanation of what was right and wrong.  Over time we trained on the hand form, sword and sabre.

Initially training was in the backyard at his house. we had an interpreter. The backyard was nothing fancy, just a clear dirt space, pretty basic.  If you needed the toilet, he’d just point to a grate in the corner and you’d pee there.

We trained with him for about two months, 3 to 4 times a week.  Sometimes he’d come to the university as well and would teach us there and that was good because although he was just training the two of us, there would be lots of people around and they would come up and talk to him because he was very famous.

Q; You once told me an interesting story about Master Fu using his skills in real life. Tell me about that?

Master Fu said that when he was young he used to go to Master Yang Cheng Fu’s house on the other side of the city. As he walked back one night, he could hear a woman screaming and it was a Chinese woman. The city was a port so there were lots of foreigners there and three men were assaulting her and it really upset him. He went up to them, and he said “please stop” but they told him to go away. He said it again, but they wouldn’t stop and they turned on him. All he would say about what happened next was “I had to make them unconscious”. That was it, he never said any more, like it was almost embarrassing that he’d had to sort them out.

He also used to say that training with Master Yang was very physical. It would be so intense that when he would return home, he’d have to go up the stairs on his hands and knees, he couldn’t walk.

Q: Tell me some more insider tales about him.

TONY: One time, we were sitting with Master Fu talking in his house.  I asked him if he was able to completely relax when he was asleep or did he ever wake up or sleep fitfully? Master Fu said that when he goes to sleep, he always woke up in exactly the same position as he lay down in, without moving at all.

I was really impressed with this because I’d read in my studies of Zen and the early Christian mystics that when were people fully open to the universe and they are at peace, they can sleep without moving or turning, so I was really interested in that.

I was also really impressed how very nimble and flexible he was for a man in his 80s.  I remember one time we were sitting talking and the phone rang in the next room.  He was sat in a very low settee, and he quickly and gracefully got up and went to answer it. We looked at each other and we couldn’t believe that someone of 80+ could do that, remember he was a big man, almost a wide as he was tall.  We tried to get off the settee and couldn’t do it, we had to heave ourselves up.

Q:  Tell me the story about pushing hands with Mast Fu.

TONY: Both myself and my English Karate colleague pushed hands with Master Fu but we had a very different experience.

I mean pushing hands with Master Fu, I saw that as a real honour> It was really great, he was so soft.  I didn’t dare to try anything because I thought it would be an insult, I wouldn’t dream of it. The other guy was a bit more bullish, a  British Karate champion and he did try it on. I saw him try it and  after we both finished, I said to him “I saw you tried to push him over” and I was surprise when he said “well I wanted to see whether he could do anything about it”. I said “what was it like?”  He said “do you know the Empire State building, well just imagine being at the bottom of it and pushing,  it was just absolutely not gonna move”!