While I was writing up my post about the books I’ve bought recently, I noticed a link on Amazon to this: The Whirling Circles of Ba Gua Zhang: The Art and Legends of the Eight Trigram Palm by Frank Allen and Tina Zhang.
Frank and Tina run the Wu Tang Physical Culture Association in New York; they also are affiliated with Zhang Sheng Li’s Milun School in Beijing. I met Tina in the spring of 2004, when I was studying bagua with the Milun School. She’d come to Beijing for a few days to train with Master Zhang, and she filmed me doing a few bagua sets in Ritan Park.
Not long afterwards, I saw their webmaster, Teri Ferrari posting to one of the Yahoo! bagua groups, advertising a DVD course of Zhang Sheng Li’s bagua forms. Since I’d moved to Singapore and couldn’t train with Zhang any more that would have been very useful for me to have. Unfortunately, Teri never replied to any of the emails I sent him asking for more information; I tried mailing Tina, and got a couple of brief replies, but nothing much – they seem very reluctant to actually sell the DVD! I’ve often wondered whether it featured the footage Tina shot of me…
Anyway, so now I see this book on Amazon, but there’s not much detail. Books on bagua are rare enough that I like to collect them – has anyone read this, or know whether it’s any good?
“The Whirling Circles of Ba Gua Zhang will be released by North Atlantic/Blue Snake Books in the summer of 2007. It features the Ba Gua Zhang of Liu Jing Ru and does not have Zhang Sheng Li’s material.
The dvd of Zhang Sheng Li’s Dragon Shape set is available through http://www.wutangpca.com, but it only has Tina Zhang and Frank Allen doing the set.
Thanks for the information, Frank.
[...] at the National Library Ordering from the Wu-Tang April 9th, 2007 Following on from my post about Frank Allen and Tina Zhang’s forthcoming book, and Frank’s response, I’ve [...]
[...] copy of The Whirling Circles of Ba Gua Zhang: The Art and Legends of the Eight Trigram Palm . I wrote about this in a post back in January, at which point it hadn’t been released. It’s by Frank Allen [...]