Rose Li
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Rose Li, teacher of the Chinese internal martial arts, was born into an upper-middle-class, mandarin, family in Beijing around 1914. To protect her health she was given what would more normally have been a boy's name, Shao-Chiang, or 'continuing strong', and was sent to study Tai Chi Chuan, Baguazhang and Xingyiquan with the distinguished teachers Teng Yun-Feng (1873-1941) and Liu Feng-Shan (1852-1937). Meanwhile, she was also sent to western church schools, where she was given the name Rose, and went on to courses in various universities, culminating in an MA in ethnology. The unsettled conditions of the Japanese occupation and the Communist takeover led her to leave China in the late 1940s for further study in the United States, where she took a second MA, in educational psychology, at Columbia University.
The next thirty years of Rose Li's eventful life saw her fully engaged with the western monastic tradition and educational work. In the USA she spent some years in an Episcopal community in Glendale, Ohio and taught in local kindergartens. Partly in order to be closer to her church friends from childhood, she moved to the UK in the middle of the 1960s, becoming a member of an Anglican community in Whitby, Yorkshire and teaching Chinese language at Durham University.
England also offered a more receptive environment for her particular approach to teaching the internal martial arts, for she emphasised gradual self-cultivation, health and spiritual values rather than competition, sport or fighting. She started classes in Durham in 1975 and built up enough of a following in London to move there in 1986; by the time she died in 2001 she had had several hundred students with a core group who had worked with her for ten years and more. They had been exposed to regular weekly martial-arts classes, additional groups in calligraphy and Chinese language, and lively week-long summer schools. Miss Li was one of only a small handful of practitioners, including Cheng Man-ch'ing and Da Liu, who had studied in traditional pre-Communist internal-martial-arts schools and then stepped outside the Chinese-speaking world to share their deep knowledge with young Westerners. Although she deliberately kept a low public profile, this made her a unique figure as a teacher of Tai Chi in the UK.
[edit] Writings
Miss Rose Li, 'Chinese martial arts', in Fighting Arts International, 9 (1975). [1]
[edit] References
Robert W. Smith, 'Rose Li: cherchez la femme', in Martial Musings: A Portrayal of Martial Arts in the 20th Century (Via Media, Pennsylvania, 1999), pp. 250-61. [2]
Alan Peatfield, 'Rose Li: a student's memoir', in Tai Chi Chuan and Internal Arts, 19 (2004), pp. 32-5. [3]
