Qing Gong

Qing Gong Is Balance, Vaulting, and Landing Work — Not Flight

轻功 (輕功, qīng gōng) — “light skill” — is a system of balance, explosive leaping, climbing, and controlled landing training developed across Chinese martial arts, opera, and acrobatic traditions. Its documented capabilities stop well short of flight. No credible martial text records a person remaining airborne without support or reducing body mass.

It forms an exact pair with Hard Qigong: where hard qigong trains the body to absorb and deliver force, qing gong trains the body to evade force and move rapidly through obstructive terrain. The traditional phrase describing the relationship is straightforward: “Hard skill resists, light skill evades.” The two were almost always trained together by the same practitioners: caravan guards, soldiers, and opera martial performers required both durability and agility to survive their work.

The “light” (輕, qīng) in the name describes three specific qualities, not a reduction in mass:

1. Lightness of movement — silent, controlled steps that do not announce position
2. Lightness of landing — controlled distribution of impact through bent knees and rolling, rather than stiff, noisy falls
3. Lightness of posture — relaxed, efficient movement that does not waste energy on unnecessary tension

Qing gong is not a branch of internal qigong. It is classified in all traditional manuals as external skill (外功, wài gōng), trained through repetitive physical conditioning rather than meditation or breathwork alone. Traditional references to “lifting qi” (提氣, tí qì) describe core bracing and breath control at takeoff, not mystical levitation.

The Written Record Starts With Equipment, Not Elevation

The earliest reliable descriptions of qing gong training describe equipment and progressive overload, not supernatural ability. Every documented training method follows the same principle as hard qigong resistance training: the practitioner starts at a low difficulty level, increases load incrementally over years, and never skips stages.

This pattern is consistent across every verifiable source from the Ming dynasty onward:

• Ming general Qi Jiguang’s 1561 military manual Jixiao Xinshu lists jumping, climbing, and footwork as basic soldier training, setting explicit minimums: a 3-chi (≈96cm) jump across a gap and a 5-chi (≈160cm) climb of a wall without hand assistance, as baseline requirements for infantry [1].
• Qing-era martial manuscripts from Shaolin and Wudang describe leg weights (沙綁腿, shā bǎng tuǐ — sand leggings, or 鉛瓦, qiān wǎ — lead plates tied to the calves), jumping pits (跳坑, tiào kēng), winnowing basket rim walking (走簸籮, zǒu bò luó), pile walking (走樁, zǒu zhuāng), and rope walking as standard drills.
• The 1928 Republican-era manual Wushu Huizong (武術匯宗, “Compendium of Martial Arts”) by Wan Laisheng — the most widely distributed martial arts textbook of the period, adopted by the Central Guoshu Institute — documents these same drills in full, step-by-step detail, with no mention of levitation, weight loss, or mid-air suspension [3].

There is no mystery and no secret to these methods. They are tedious, physically demanding, and follow standard exercise science principles of progressive overload. Claims of secret internal techniques that produce flight without physical conditioning appear exclusively in popular fiction, not in training manuals.

The Recorded Methods, Method by Method

All verifiable qing gong systems share an identical core set of drills. Each drill targets one specific physical capability. None require supernatural ability.

Weighted Progressive Training (Leg Weights and Lead Plates)

First, practitioners strap sandbags or lead plates to their calves, starting at approximately 0.5–1kg per leg and increasing gradually over a period of 2–5 years, while running, jumping, and performing stance training daily. Traditional manuals specify that weights must never be increased until the practitioner moves completely naturally at the current load; sudden increases are described as a cause of permanent knee and ankle injury.

• Physical principle: Standard resistance training. After years of weighted movement, removing the weights produces a measurable increase in leaping height and running speed, proportional to the load trained.
• Source: Wan Laisheng, Wushu Huizong, 1928; Shaolin training manuscripts; Ziran Men curriculum.
• Common exaggeration: Popular accounts claim practitioners can “leap twenty feet in a single bound” after removing weights; no verified demonstration has ever exceeded ordinary elite athlete jumping range after weight training.

Jumping Pit Method

Practitioners dig a pit, initially shallow (ankle to calf depth), and practice jumping out of it from a standing start, feet together. As the jumper can consistently exit the pit without effort, the pit is deepened by several inches. Training continues until the practitioner can exit a pit deeper than their own height.

• Physical principle: Progressive depth overload, building explosive leg power identical to modern depth jump training used by track and field athletes. This is the most empirically verifiable qing gong drill, with measurable progress at every stage.
• Source: Multiple Qing-era manuscripts; Wushu Huizong, 1928; verified as still taught in contemporary Shaolin and Wudang schools.
• Common exaggeration: Claims of jumping over 3-meter walls from a standstill; no pit depth training in any manual produces vertical leap gains beyond what elite high jumpers achieve through modern training.

Pile and Rope Walking

Practitioners walk, then run, across rows of wooden stakes driven into the ground (梅花樁, méihuā zhuāng — plum blossom piles), starting at low height and wide spacing and progressing to higher, narrower, irregularly spaced piles. Advanced practitioners progress to tightrope walking between posts.

• Physical principle: Pure balance and proprioception training, identical in principle to gymnastics balance beam and slackline training, developing ankle stability, core control, and precise foot placement. This drill directly supports silent rooftop travel and movement on narrow surfaces.
• Source: Wudang Taihemen manuals; Beijing opera martial training curricula; Baji stance training.
• Common exaggeration: Claims of running across the tops of grass blades or rice paper without tearing it; no verified demonstration of this ability exists outside staged performances using supported surfaces. Standing meditation (zhan zhuang) provides the static foundation for the balance required in this drill, but dynamic pile work is an entirely separate, moving skill.

Climbing and Wall Work

Practitioners train ascending vertical surfaces through three sub-drills:

1. Sloped board running: Starting with a wooden plank set at a shallow angle against a wall, running up the plank, and gradually increasing the angle until the plank is nearly vertical.
2. Wall stepping: From a short run, driving the feet against a vertical wall for 3–5 steps to gain enough height to grasp the top edge, then pulling the body over.
3. Ledge and tile traversal: Learning to move across tiled rooftops by stepping on rafters (not unsupported tile centers), using handholds on eaves and ridges, and distributing weight across the smallest possible contact points.

• Physical principle: Traction, momentum, and upper body pulling strength. The “three steps up a wall” capability demonstrated by Chen Shixing relies entirely on forward momentum converted to upward motion during foot contact with the wall, identical to modern parkour wall runs.
• Source: Escort agency (biaoju) training manuals; Republican police and military climbing curricula; verified contemporary demonstrations. This skill was of direct practical use to Baji-Pigua practitioners serving as caravan guards and military instructors, including those in Li Shuwen’s lineage, who trained wall scaling for both offensive and retreat use.

Breath and Tension Control (“Lifting Qi”)

Traditional manuals refer to “lifting qi to the crown” (提氣至頂) at the moment of takeoff. This describes a measurable physical action: sharp intake of breath, core bracing, and upward focus of tension through the spine immediately before a jump, identical to the breath control used by modern high jumpers and weightlifters to stabilize the torso.

• Physical principle: Intra-abdominal pressure bracing for power transfer. There is no element of weight reduction or mystical upward pull involved.
• Source: All traditional manuals consistently describe this as a supporting technique, not a standalone method of elevation.

The Figures: Who Was Recorded, Who Was Novelized

This section groups qing gong figures by evidence level, following GEMAC editorial policy. Anecdotal and fictional figures are included as phenomena rather than presented as verified historical people.

A. Verified, Measured Athletic Achievement (Republican Era)

The only reliable numerical records of elite human jumping ability in 20th-century China come from official national athletic competitions, not martial arts anecdotes.

• Fu Baolu (1914–1943): Cleared 3.90 metres at the 1935 Sixth National Games, breaking his own national record of 3.75 metres from 1933, and then 4.015 metres at the Olympic training-camp trial in May 1936 [5][6] — the best-recorded Chinese pole vault of the Republican period. He represented China at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the only member of the delegation to advance past the preliminary round, and was killed in 1943 flying with the air force. The 4.015 figure is frequently and wrongly dated to the 1935 Games.
• 1935 Sixth National Games results: The men’s high jump was won at 1.77 metres and the men’s long jump at 6.76 metres [5]. Both stand as the highest reliably measured jumps recorded in China before 1949, and they are the right comparison for any claim about what a conditioned body could do.
• Wan Laisheng (1903–1992): Natural Gate (Ziran Men) master and author of Wushu Huizong, who trained and publicly demonstrated qing gong footwork throughout his career and whose book states plainly that the skill is agility trained daily, not flight [3]. Contemporary accounts of his demonstrations — the winnowing basket rim, the basket-and-brick circle — describe balance work, and the witnesses recorded what they saw without inventing elevation.
• Chen Shixing (b. 1970): Wudang Sanfeng School master, filmed climbing a 4-metre wall on momentum and descending a cliff face in controlled stages. The footage circulates widely and the outlet and year quoted for it vary; the archive reports the footage and not the attribution [8]. He rejects supernatural readings of his own ability, describing it as climbing and jumping trained over decades.

B. Anecdotal Figures from Histories, Gazettes, and Biji Literature

These figures appear in official histories, local gazettes, and Qing-era biji (note-form) literature. They are second-hand accounts, not directly verified, and are included here as part of the traditional record of how qing gong was perceived, not as confirmed masters.

• Shen Guang (c. 570–620 CE, Sui dynasty): Recorded in both the Northern History (Bei Shi) and the Book of Sui (Sui Shu). When a rope broke on the flagpole at Chanding Temple in Chang’an, Shen Guang went up it and reattached the line, then came down hand over hand to land on his hands and walk backwards several paces without falling. Onlookers called him “Flesh Flying Immortal” (肉飛仙). The pole is given as 十餘丈 — more than ten zhang, roughly 30 metres — not the thirty zhang that later retellings supply [2]. The account is in an official dynastic history, which is why it belongs in this section rather than the fiction section; the descent and the pole height are still the kind of detail a compiler could have embroidered.
• “Sour Cake Wang” (酸糕信): Recorded in Qing Bai Lei Chao (1916) [4], a Guangzhou pastry maker who learned martial arts from a wandering master and became a rooftop burglar known for climbing walls “like an ape.” He was eventually captured by a fellow student trained specifically to counter his roof work — which is the most interesting detail in the story, since it says his method was a method, capable of being answered.
• Wang Sui (Shandong, Qing era): Also recorded in Qing Bai Lei Chao, a former bandit turned escort guard [4] who could reportedly leap a wall of about one zhang (roughly 3.2 metres) and lift a stone lion of 500–600 jin. Even in the anecdote, the wall height sits inside what a trained athlete can reach with a running start and a hand on the coping.
• Zhang Changzhen (1862 or 1868 – 1945), “Drunkard Zhang San”: Beijing-based master and former imperial guard, around whom the “walking on water” and “no trace on snow” legends grew. The sources disagree on his birth year, and the archive keeps both. Later tellings have him explaining the river crossings as long jumps from dry stepping stones and the rooftop work as ordinary climbing off brick courses and eaves; those explanations belong to later recounting, not to a documented interview, and are noted here as tradition rather than testimony.

C. Fictional Figures and Literary Tropes

Almost all popular global conceptions of qing gong originate in fiction, not in martial training manuals.

• Water Margin characters (14th century): Shi Nai’an’s novel gives Shi Qian (“Flea on a Drum”) and Yan Qing remarkable climbing and stealth abilities. Shi Qian’s ability to scale walls silently and move across rooftops becomes the template for all later fictional “light skill” characters. Even in this early text, characters climb using handholds and footholds — they do not fly.
• “Grass-Top Flight” (草上飛, cǎo shàng fēi): First popularized in Pingjiang Buxiaosheng’s 1923 novel Jianghu Qixia Zhuan [7] (江湖奇俠傳), the foundational work of modern wuxia fiction. The novel introduces characters who can run across the tops of grass blades without bending them, cross rivers on floating reed tops, and climb perfectly smooth walls like geckos (壁虎游牆). These descriptions are literary rhetoric, not training descriptions — they push “lightness of step” from “quiet and precise” to “massless.” The 1928 film adaptation The Burning of Red Lotus Temple, the first Chinese martial arts feature film, used early wire work to depict these feats, cementing the visual association between qing gong and flight.
• Jin Yong (Louis Cha) wuxia system (1955–1972): Jin Yong’s novels formalized a standardized naming system for fictional qing gong techniques: Lingbo Weibu (凌波微步, “Rippling Step”), Tiyun Zong (梯雲縱, “Cloud-Ladder Leap”), and others, each associated with specific martial schools. These techniques include double jumps in mid-air (pushing off empty air to gain additional height), which violates basic physics and appears nowhere in martial training literature. Jin Yong’s work was adapted into films and television series across the Chinese-speaking world, and these names remain the most widely recognized terms for “qing gong” among global audiences today.
• Stage tradition terminology: Opera and acrobatic troupes referred to their tumbling and leaping routines as “light skill” from the Qing dynasty onward. These are genuine acrobatic skills — flips, high jumps, tumbles, and precision landings — but they are performance skills trained for the stage, not battlefield traversal.

D. Disputed and Contested Figures

• Gan Fengchi (c. 1680–c. 1760, early Qing dynasty): Gan Fengchi appears in the Draft History of Qing (Qingshi Gao) “Arts and Techniques” biography section, which records him as a martial artist from Nanjing who studied under Huang Baijia (son of Huang Zongxi) and a Shaolin monk, noting his “great strength, able to lift an ox.” He is associated with both hard qigong (the iron arm feat of having a cart wheel roll over his arm without injury) and agility training, but no specific qing gong feats are reliably attributed to him in contemporary sources. Later novels and anecdotes attribute a wide range of supernatural abilities to him, including being able to jump over houses and dodge projectiles at close range. These later attributions date from the late Qing and Republican periods, not from his lifetime. His actual life is better documented than most martial figures of the period: he was arrested by Zhejiang governor Li Wei in 1729 on suspicion of anti-Qing organizing, and released. Sources differ on his age at death (70s or 80s), and the story that he was killed by a farmer’s manure-soaked bamboo whip is pure later fiction.

Where Skill Ends and Theater Begins

Qing gong’s fake is not the same fake as hard qigong’s, and the difference is worth stating precisely. Hard qigong’s carnival trick is a prop fake: the nail is dull, the stone is pre-cracked, the brick is drilled, and a trained eye can dismantle the object. Qing gong’s fake is an attribution fake: the performer really does the thing, and the audience draws a false conclusion about what the thing proves. The action is honest and the inference is rigged. This is a harder kind of fraud to catch, because there is nothing to inspect — only a claim about what the feat means.

The acrobats and opera performers of the tradition genuinely leap, tumble, balance on tightropes, and land from height. None of that is staged. What gets staged is the meaning:

1. Borrowed structure (借物). Running across a row of eggs, treading a paper hoop, walking the rim of a winnowing basket — these are balance skills, and they work because the egg shell carries load along its vertical axis, the paper hoop is tensioned, and the basket rim is a braced circle. The audience is told the man is weightless. The truth is that the object was chosen and the weight was distributed.
2. Borrowed launch (借势). A springboard under the boards, a shallow ramp, a downhill run-up, a favourable wind — all of these manufacture one impressive repetition. The feat was real; its repeatability was the lie. A man who can jump two metres off a springboard once has not demonstrated that he can jump two metres off flat ground at will.
3. Borrowed sightline (借位). The single most common stage device in every tradition: the angle of the audience’s eye conceals the handhold, the ledge, the platform edge. Roof work filmed from below is a different act from roof work filmed from the side.
4. Borrowed credit (借口传). A feat performed once by one man, in one place, in his twenties, becomes in retelling the settled ability of a lineage, a school, or a village. This is how a single successful jump across stepping stones becomes “crossing water on the surface of the river.”

That last mechanism is what separates qing gong’s legends from its tricks. No one is lying about the vault; someone is lying about what the vault was for, and about how many men could do it, and about how often.

Cinema then repeated every one of those mechanisms at industrial scale. Early wuxia films of the 1920s used trampolines and hidden platforms. King Hu and Zhang Che in the 1960s refined wire work into a visual language. Tsui Hark’s Swordsman and Once Upon a Time in China series, Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), and Zhang Yimou’s Hero (2002) carried that language to global audiences, where it became the default meaning of the words “Chinese light skill.” None of it is mysterious. Thin steel wires, rigging, and post-production removal do the work; the performer supplies the posture and the timing.

The critical distinction remains this: the skills taught in martial schools — jumping, climbing, balance, landing — are real and trainable within measured human limits. What the tradition’s advertisements added was flight, weightlessness, and mid-air redirection, none of which any surface can supply.

What the Numbers Actually Say

The measured limits of human jumping ability provide a hard, non-negotiable ceiling for every qing gong claim. There is no evidence that any qing gong training method produces jumping ability exceeding the documented limits of elite track and field athletes, and substantial anatomical reason to believe it cannot.

The verified human performance records — global and Chinese — are as follows:

Ability	World record (elite athletics)	Republican Chinese mark	Qing gong anecdotal claim
Men’s high jump	2.45m (Javier Sotomayor, 1993)	1.77m (1935)	“三丈 wall leap” — 9.6m, physically impossible
Men’s long jump (running)	8.95m (Mike Powell, 1991)	6.76m (1935)	“Crossing a three-zhang river in one bound” — no verified case
Men’s pole vault	6.23m (Armand Duplantis, 2023)	4.015m (Fu Baolu, 1936)	“Second-storey roof unaided” — inside vault range, not a free jump
Vertical wall run	~4m with momentum	No Republican record	Chen Shixing, 4m wall ascent on film

Three conclusions follow directly from these numbers:

1. Any claim of a standing jump higher than approximately 1.8 meters exceeds the highest measured high jump performance in history. It should be treated as fictional.
2. Any claim of crossing more than 9 meters in a single running jump exceeds the world long jump record. It should be treated as fictional.
3. Any claim of climbing more than 4–5 meters up a vertical wall in a single effort without equipment exceeds the best verified parkour and qing gong demonstrations. Claims of “leaping to a three-story roof” (typically 9–10 meters) are off by an order of magnitude.

These numbers do not diminish qing gong. A trained practitioner who can reliably clear a 2-meter wall in full clothing and footwear, move silently across a tiled rooftop at night, and land a 3-meter jump without noise or injury possesses a remarkable, hard-won physical capability. That capability is enough for its original practical purpose — evasion, pursuit, climbing compound walls, and crossing rough terrain in the dark. It does not need to be flight to be impressive.

Why the Legend Exists

The gap between what qing gong training actually produces and what it is popularly believed to produce is not accidental. The legend grew from three separate, practical needs, each of which pushed the description of skill further from reality:

1. Military and criminal utility: Caravan guards, night patrol soldiers, burglars, and bandits all benefited from being believed to appear and disappear supernaturally. A reputation for being able to fly over walls and cross roofs without a sound was a deterrent: if a guard was thought to be able to descend silently from any rooftop, burglars would be more cautious; if a burglar was thought to be able to escape over any wall, pursuers would be slower to give chase. Exaggeration served a direct tactical purpose.
2. Performance and entertainment value: Temple fairs, Tianqiao performance grounds, and village opera stages relied on spectacular feats to draw audiences. A performer who could do a back flip was good; a performer who was billed as able to “fly over rooftops” would draw a much larger crowd. The gap between actual performance and advertised skill was an established part of folk entertainment economics.
3. Literary narrative necessity: Wuxia fiction required characters who could appear and disappear at dramatically convenient moments, bypass locked doors and guarded walls, and fight in visually spectacular locations (treetops, roof ridges, water surfaces). Giving characters the ability to leap impossible distances and move weightlessly removed every plot obstacle created by walls, guards, and distance — it served narrative, not descriptive, purposes. Each generation of fiction added a new layer of exaggeration to keep the feats impressive to audiences who had seen the previous generation’s tricks.

All three pressures pushed in the same direction for centuries: toward greater exaggeration, away from the boring, gradual, measurable reality of daily training. The legend of flight is not a fraud perpetrated on a gullible public. It is a natural, predictable outcome of the overlap between martial skill, performance, and storytelling.

What Survives

Qing gong as a living training tradition survives in four forms in the 21st century:

1. Traditional martial arts curricula: Leaping drills, weighted training, pile walking, and wall climbing remain part of formal training in Shaolin, Wudang, Baji, Ziran Men, and multiple southern styles, though they are rarely emphasized as heavily as they were in the Qing and Republican periods. Most modern training focuses on forms and sparring rather than obstacle traversal.
2. Wushu taolu difficulty movements: Competitive modern wushu includes difficulty jumps (旋子, xuán zi — butterfly twist; 騰空飛腳, téng kōng fēi jiǎo — jumping front kick; 側空翻, cè kōng fān — aerial cartwheel) that directly descend from traditional qing gong tumbling and leaping, but are trained for form competition rather than practical traversal.
3. Professional acrobatics and opera: Beijing opera martial roles and acrobatics troupes continue to train tumbling, leaping, and high-wire balance skills directly descended from Qing-era performance qing gong, preserving the performance branch of the tradition.
4. Dialogue with parkour: Since the 2010s, a growing number of both traditional martial artists and parkour practitioners have noted the extensive overlap between the two systems: wall runs, precision jumps, vaults, landing rolls, and cat hangs are all core to both traditions. Traditional qing gong adds balance components (pile walking, winnowing basket work) that are not central to parkour, while parkour adds urban obstacle creativity not found in traditional training.

The supernatural version of qing gong — the weightless flight across bamboo tops and water surfaces — has never existed outside story and film. The actual training, however, is very real. It is as unglamorous, as physically demanding, and as effective as hard qigong: years of daily, incremental, painful training to build a body that can jump higher, land softer, balance more precisely, and climb faster than an untrained person. That is the record. It does not need wires or magic to be worth preserving.

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Cautions

• No levitation. No credible martial text records a person remaining in the air without support or changing direction mid-jump without a surface to push against; that capability enters the tradition entirely through wuxia fiction and film wire work.
• No weight reduction. Qing gong never reduces a practitioner’s body mass. The “lightness” trained is silent contact, controlled landing, and efficient movement, not a literal decrease in weight. Claims of practitioners weighing “only three jin” after training are fiction.
• The numerical limits are strict. No qing gong practitioner has ever demonstrated a vertical leap exceeding the 2.45m world high jump record under measured conditions. Any claim of jumping higher than two stories, crossing a 10-meter gap unaided, or landing without injury from a three-story fall should be treated as physically impossible.
• Jin Yong techniques are fictional. Lingbo Weibu, Tiyun Zong, and other named qing gong techniques from Jin Yong, Gu Long, and other wuxia novelists are literary inventions, not historical training methods. They do not appear in any pre-20th century martial manual.
• Film wire work is not martial skill. The flying sequences in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero, and similar films are achieved with steel wires, rigging, and post-production editing. They are stunt work, not qing gong.
• Theatre has its own physics. Opera and acrobatic performers really do jump, tumble, and balance; what they do not do is jump without a floor. Their skills are genuine and their purpose is spectacle, not rooftop evasion.
• Fu Baolu’s 4.015m belongs to 1936, not 1935. The 1935 Sixth National Games record was 3.90m; the 4.015m clearance came at the Olympic training-camp trial in May 1936. Sources also give 4.15m for the latter figure.
• Shen Guang’s pole is 十餘丈, not thirty zhang. Both the Northern History and the Book of Sui give “more than ten zhang,” roughly 30 metres. Retellings that say seventy metres are inflating the record, not recording it.
• Anecdotal records are not measurements. Qing biji stories and gazette accounts of superhuman leaping are second- and third-hand reportage, not experimental data. They record how people thought about qing gong, not what its practitioners could demonstrate.
• Zhang Changzhen’s explanations are later recounting. The account of him explaining his river crossings as jumps from dry stepping stones circulates in later retellings, not in a documented interview; his birth year is also given as both 1862 and 1868.
• Gan Fengchi’s agility feats are later additions. Gan is documented in the Draft History of Qing, but the leaping and roof-jumping attributed to him appear in later novels and anecdotes, not in sources from his lifetime. His attested strengths were in fist technique and heavy lifting, not in light skill.
• Weight training does not produce superhuman jumps. Long-term weighted leg training produces measurable but modest gains in leaping ability, on the same order as standard resistance training used by modern athletes. It does not produce multiples of normal jumping distance.
• “No trace on snow” is a training goal, not an achievable result. Training to move silently and leave minimal footprint is a real component of qing gong practice; leaving no footprint at all on soft snow is physically impossible for an adult human.
• The Chen Shixing wall climb uses momentum, not magic. Chen’s verified 4-meter wall ascent relies on a running start and three foot contacts with the wall to generate upward momentum, a technique fully explained by basic physics. It is an impressive demonstration of trained skill, not a defiance of gravity.
• Qing gong is not internal alchemy. It is external conditioning, trained through repetitive physical drill. It does not require advanced meditation, internal alchemy practice, or secret qi transmission to learn.

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The record continues

• For the companion art of force absorption, read the full entry on Hard Qigong.
• For the northern close-combat system that integrated qing gong climbing and leaping into its military curriculum, see Baji-Pigua Zhang.
• For the most famous Republican-era Baji master whose lineage included wall-climbing and leaping training, see the entry on Li Shuwen.
• For the static stance foundation that underpins the balance required for pile and rope walking, see Standing Meditation.
• For the close-quarters trapping and locking skills that complement evasive light skill training, see Chin Na.