Huo Diange

Huo Diange (霍殿閣, 1886–1942), courtesy name Xiuting (秀亭), carried three identities that rarely appear in one life: sixth-generation grandmaster of the Bajiquan line, martial teacher and guard organizer to the last emperor, and founder of a named branch of the art — Huo-style Bajiquan. The second of five brothers, he was known in his village as 二霍, “Huo the second.”

Two teachers before the Divine Spear

The Cangzhou region was a garrison country whose escort and guard trade employed trained fighters for centuries. Huo grew up in Xiaoji village, Nanpi county, and began at about fourteen under Li Wuyue (李五爺), a local master nicknamed 抄白虎子, who gave him Piaosa quan, Erlang quan, and other foundation sets.

At sixteen, in 1902, he formally entered the school of Li Shuwen (Divine Spear Li). The teacher treated the boy like a son, and held nothing back; for twelve years Huo trained in the close-range method of Bajiquan and the Liuhu spear that Li regarded as the art’s true foundation. Accounts of the lineage agree that Huo was Li’s most famous and most accomplished student.

The demonstration of 1910

In 1910 Huo accompanied his grand-teacher Zhang Jingxing, Wang Zhongquan, and Li Shuwen to the newly founded Chinese Warriors’ Union (中華武士會) in Tianjin, where the three men took posts as instructors. There Huo and his teacher performed a paired Liuhu-spear set that, in the phrase repeated by Cangzhou accounts, astonished Tianjin (藝驚津門). Standing alongside instructors such as Li Cunyi, Zhang Zankui, Li Ruidong, and Sun Lutang, the Cangzhou teenager had become a nationally known martial artist.

Instructor in the northeastern armies

In 1914, on Li Shuwen’s recommendation, Huo became wushu instructor at the officers’ school of General Xu Lanzhou in Heilongjiang. When Xu’s forces redeployed to Shenyang in 1917, Huo followed, teaching in the garrisons of Qiqihar and Harbin. The northeast became his second stage: a decade of army teaching that would soon place him at the center of Manchuria’s political drama.

Tianjin, and the making of a style

Back in Tianjin in 1925, Huo opened the Tianjin Thirty-Fifth Guoshu School. The following year, at Xu Lanzhou’s residence, he compiled Ying Shou Quan (應手拳), distilling his teacher’s most battle-tested techniques into a practical set, and expanded the art’s six big openings into the eight of the Huo family (八大開), adding 霸王折江 and 朝陽手. To the internal work he added board methods and ball methods learned from the Daoist priest Gao Xianyun of the Wudang tradition. The result — systematic, plain, and technically complete — is Huo-style Bajiquan.

The trials at Zhangyuan

In 1927 Puyi, the last emperor, lived in the Zhang Garden (張園) in Tianjin’s Japanese concession. Japanese advisers placed their own men around him; Puyi wanted Chinese masters, and the test was blunt — beat the Japanese bodyguards and the post is yours. Xu Lanzhou and the retired Hanlin scholar Shang Yanying named Huo for the task.

According to the records of the lineage and the memoirs of those around Puyi, Huo held the two-finger method (金剛指) against Kudo Tetsusaburo (工藤鐵三郎), whose grip could not bend it, and threw him with 霸王舉鼎; he defeated Iwata Ainosuke (岩田愛之助) within three moves. His nephew Huo Qingyun lifted another challenger (出口岩田) clean off the ground with 猛虎鑽襠. Puyi appointed Huo martial teacher and Huo Qingyun an imperial guard, and the Japanese bodyguards withdrew.

The court of Hsinking

In 1932 Huo followed Puyi to Changchun, capital of the puppet state of Manchukuo, and was appointed major-general martial officer (少將武官) of the Imperial Household. He organized the palace guard (宮內府護軍) — some three hundred strong, drawn from Huo-family disciples, Cangzhou masters, and banner youths, equipped with German arms — with Huo Qingyun commanding its second company. Huo himself served as the guard’s martial instructor, and in 1935 added a teaching post at the Changchun Sanmalu school.

The Datong Park incident

In late June 1937 (the day is given as June 30, with June 27 and 28 also recorded), members of the guard visiting Datong Park quarreled with a Japanese boatman; a plainclothes Kwantung Army officer took the Japanese side, and the quarrel became a fight. Guard members — most of them Huo-family disciples — fought Japanese soldiers bare-handed, leaving a colonel and two staff officers injured along with dozens of soldiers, and one military dog dead.

The consequence was swift. The Kwantung Army arrested and killed members of the Huo circle on “anti-Manchukuo” charges, disarmed and reorganized the guard, and pushed Huo Diange out of the Imperial Household. The incident was the turning point of his life: from the most trusted master at the court of the last emperor to a sidelined, watched man.

The last years

Huo resigned his post and withdrew from public teaching. The cause of his decline is recorded in two readings: the lineage and official accounts say he fell ill from suppressed anger (氣結成疾); the oral history of Li Guoxiong — Puyi’s attendant for thirty-three years — records a later life of opium and vice. The archive keeps the two readings side by side. Huo Diange died in Changchun in autumn 1942, aged 56 by Western count (57 by the Chinese reckoning), and his coffin was returned to Cangzhou for burial.

The spear that pierces without breaking

Huo inherited his teacher’s spear reputation and, in Cangzhou accounts, matched it. The Cangzhou martial gazette records his training method — piercing incense points, mirror faces, and stripping bark from jujube trunks with the spear tip — and his party-piece: flies smeared with blood on a large mirror, struck down one by one without cracking the glass (扎蒼蠅不破鏡面), according to the gazette. Other feats — halting a car by standing force (千斤墜), cracking a stone slab with a stamp at a banquet, catching a thrown sword mid-leap (八步趕蟬) — belong to the transmitted legend rather than the gazette. All sources agree he fought to the point of touching, never to injury.

Huo Qingyun and the Changchun lineage

Huo’s nephew Huo Qingyun (霍慶雲, 1905–1987) was adopted as his son at eight, renamed by Puyi in 1928, and known as 鐵架子 — the iron frame — for his ability to absorb force. He served the court until 1945, chaired the Changchun Martial Arts Research Association from 1950, took over the Sanmalu school in 1959, and died in 1987.

Around uncle and nephew, Changchun became the art’s second homeland. Four venues carried the line: the north court in Huo’s home (1932–1942), the south court at Sanmalu under the sworn brother Zhou Xinwu from 1935, the east-station charity hall of Yang Bin after 1942, and the Gongzhuling Guoshu School founded by Qu Yixin in 1946 with Huo Qingyun as head coach. Disciples and descendants — Qu Yixin, Yang Bin, Zhao Bingnan, Tan Jitang, Li Weixi, Li Weizhou, Li Shunan, Wang Yuhu, Li Guangrong, Huo Qingfeng, Lei Zhenjiang, and after them Huo Wenbo, Ma Deshan, Yuan Qingchun, and Li Shudong — made Changchun the center of Huo-family Bajiquan, a line recognized in the national intangible heritage listing of Bajiquan (2008, Ⅵ-28).

On screen and in memory

In 1986 the story reached mass culture: a thirty-six-episode television series, 《康德第一保鏢傳奇》, produced in Changchun. Its theme song swept the country, and its broadcast was cut short after two months by broadcast regulators. The series was based on a 1986 biographical novel by Qi Tiexiong and Huo Wenxue, a member of the Huo family — the first full biography of the master.

Cautions

• Age at death. 56 by Western reckoning, 57 by the Chinese count of full years. This page gives 56.
• The Datong Park date. June 27, 28, and 30, 1937, appear in different sources. The archive says “late June 1937.”
• The cause of decline. The lineage’s account (suppressed anger) and Li Guoxiong’s oral history (opium and vice) are both kept, per the archive’s two-source convention.
• The “hanjian” question. Huo served a puppet regime as a court officer and consistently resisted Japanese military control until his removal. Historical judgment of him is genuinely mixed; the archive states both facts.
• The two-finger defeat of Kudo. Recorded in lineage histories and memoirs of Puyi’s household, not in official documents. The archive says “according to the records.”
• The Japanese names. 工藤鐵三郎 and 岩田愛之助 are the mainstream renderings; 若田 and 出口岩田 appear in other sources.

The record continues

The biographical page on Li Shuwen records Huo’s teacher and the same Zhangyuan selection; the system page on Bajiquan and Piguazhang describes the art he taught and reorganized; the page on Liu Yunqiao records the other great student who carried the art, by a different road, to Taiwan. Huo’s line is the northern road — through Tianjin, the last court, and the city that still calls itself Bajiquan’s second homeland.