Southern Taizuquan

[B-Rad]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIsZZanwq6w&NR

Never seen this before. What do y'all think? The form kind of reminds me of crane (As an outsider's first impression, as I don't actually know much about crane either ).

[Royal Dragon]

I have dabbled in this style a bit. It's one of the roots to Okinowian Karate.

The style descended fom the Southern Sung dynasty and is credited to the Sung's imperial family (Same family as the Northern Tai Tzu came from). The most common story I have heard is that it was developed to rapidy train troops after the pasting the Sung got from the north in 1127 AD.

My research has led me to contacts that discoverd the style has roughly 70-75 short little forms spread out amongst various families. Most systems are 6-8 little sets, and are heavy on conditioning and basics. It's very common in Fuzian provence, and various places in Taiwan.

The Master listed above was part of a TV series called "Treasures of Taiwan" I have a copy of the full Tai Tzu segment of that series. It goes on to show more of this same master's system, as well as a number of predominantly Shandong Tai Tzu forms common in Taiwan.

I had originally worked some of the sets out off this tape, only to discover they had some major flaws engineered into them specifically for TV. These consisted mostly of only showing one side , where the actual set works both sides of the body in turn. For example, in one they changed the steps so the form repeted the first side instead of switching.

There are some other Southern style forms out there on YouTube as well. Try various spellings of the styles name, and you find them.