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| Sifu Hong Guo Rong |
Hidden Treasure in the Heart of Tainan: Teacher Hong Guo Rong
I fell in love with Chinese martial arts when I was a child.
I grew up watching Hong Kong martial-arts films and reading stories about legendary fighters, but there was one major problem: where I lived, there was almost nowhere to learn Chinese martial arts.
Much later I found Wing Chun and began a journey that would eventually take me much farther than I could have imagined.
Two arts had particularly fascinated me since I was young: White Crane and White Eyebrow. Neither was available to me at the time.
Many years later, after moving to Taiwan, that old interest in White Crane returned.
I had no idea that one of the teachers I had been looking for was quietly teaching only a short distance from my home in Tainan.
Looking for White Crane in Taiwan
When I first arrived in Taiwan, most of my attention was devoted to Wing Chun.
Later I moved from Taipei to Tainan and began looking for a White Crane teacher.
It wasn't as easy as might be expected.
Taiwan has preserved many traditional Chinese martial arts, but that doesn't mean every teacher advertises publicly or operates a commercial school. Some traditional groups are small, local and almost invisible unless you know the right people.
I contacted practitioners and visited different schools, but nothing felt quite right.
For more than a year I practiced Baji Quan. It was an excellent experience and I particularly liked the people with whom I trained. Eventually my working hours changed and I could no longer continue.
Then, almost accidentally, I found the name of a White Crane teacher.
His name was Hong Guo Rong.
And he lived surprisingly close to me.
The Hardware Store
My wife called Teacher Hong and asked whether I could visit.
He agreed.
One Saturday we drove approximately twenty minutes and stopped in front of a hardware store.
That immediately felt strangely familiar. My father had owned a hardware store, and the place reminded me of home.
Behind the counter was a man with a big smile.
That was Hong Guo Rong.
He took us upstairs to the fourth floor, where his training hall was located.
We talked for a while. I noticed that his students were adults, many relatively close to my own age. Eventually I asked whether he would accept me as a student.
He agreed.
My White Crane training began.
A Small Traditional School
It didn't take long for me to realize that I had found the right place.
There were only a few students, and the atmosphere was relaxed and friendly. Everyone clearly loved practicing White Crane, and the relationships within the group felt much closer to a small community than a commercial martial-arts school.
Teacher Hong himself was unlike many martial-arts teachers I had encountered.
He was quiet, modest and uninterested in attracting attention.
Someone meeting him behind the counter of his hardware store would have little reason to suspect the depth of his martial experience.
But touching hands with him told a different story.
I already had considerable experience in Wing Chun when I met him. Although I was a beginner in White Crane, I was not a beginner in Chinese martial arts.
When we touched hands, the difference in skill was immediately obvious to me.
I had found someone from whom I could learn a great deal.
Details With a Purpose
Teacher Hong was extremely demanding about details.
But there was an important difference between his approach and simply insisting that movements be copied perfectly.
He explained why the details mattered.
A particular position was not correct merely because tradition said that was how the movement should look. The position had a function.
Small adjustments affected structure, power generation, balance, movement or application.
Gradually I began to see the training as the construction of a machine.
Individual movements initially seemed like separate pieces. Through repetition and explanation, those pieces began fitting together into a coherent method of movement.
Teacher Hong built that method from the foundation upward.
Basics were not something to rush through before reaching the “advanced” material.
The basics were the machinery that made the advanced material possible.
This became one of the most important lessons I received from him.
Zong He White Crane
Teacher Hong practiced and taught Zong He Quan (縱鶴拳), commonly translated as Vibrating or Raising Crane, one of the traditions within Fujian White Crane.
According to what Teacher Hong told me about his martial background, he began practicing Taijiquan when he was young and trained with his teacher for approximately ten years.
Around the age of thirty, he began studying Zong He Quan.
By the time I became his student, he already had decades of martial-arts experience.
His school also preserved its lineage records and maintained an ancestor altar, reflecting the way the tradition and memory of previous generations continued within the group.
These were not museum exhibits.
They belonged to a living martial community.
“You Want to Learn, So I Will Teach You”
At one point I asked Teacher Hong why he had accepted me.
His answer was remarkably simple:
“You want to learn, so I will teach you.”
That answer stayed with me.
It did not mean that he would teach absolutely anyone without consideration. Teacher Hong cared greatly about the character of the people he accepted into his group.
But nationality was not the important question.
The willingness to learn was.
This is worth remembering whenever we encounter sweeping stories about Chinese masters refusing to teach foreigners.
Chinese martial-arts history is considerably more complicated than that.
My own experience in Taiwan has often been quite different.
Why So Few Students?
Over the years Teacher Hong had accepted only a relatively small number of students.
I once asked him why.
His explanation was that most people simply did not have the patience required for this kind of training.
People wanted to learn interesting techniques quickly. Very few wanted to spend hours repeating fundamental movements until those movements became natural.
That philosophy could be seen in his teaching.
There were no shortcuts.
Skill was constructed through understanding, repetition and correction.
Real gongfu takes time.
A School Almost Nobody Knew Existed
At the time I originally wrote about Teacher Hong, his school had essentially no internet presence.
There was no serious advertising campaign and no attempt to attract large numbers of students.
Even in Tainan, very few people seemed to know that the school existed.
Teacher Hong appeared perfectly content with that situation.
He preferred teaching a small number of people who genuinely wanted to learn.
In fact, it took considerable persuasion from me and one of my classmates before he agreed to let me write publicly about him.
That reluctance tells something about the man better than any martial-arts title could.
A Hidden Treasure in Tainan
When people imagine searching for traditional kung fu in Taiwan, they may imagine famous masters, large schools and impressive temples.
My experience was different.
I found one of my most important teachers behind the counter of a hardware store.
Upstairs was a small training hall.
There were no crowds.
There was no advertising.
There were no promises of secret techniques or claims of invincibility.
There was simply a teacher, a handful of students and an old martial tradition being practiced carefully week after week.
After spending years searching for White Crane, I had eventually found it almost around the corner from my home.
Zong He White Crane is a rare art, but what made this school important to me was not simply the rarity of the style.
It was the quality of the teaching and the character of the person teaching it.
Sometimes important martial traditions survive not because someone successfully promotes them to the world, but because a small number of people quietly continue practicing them.
Teacher Hong Guo Rong was one of the people who taught me what that kind of preservation looks like.
The source :
Zlatic, Vladimir. Personal training, observations and conversations with Teacher Hong Guo Rong and members of his Zong He White Crane school in Tainan, Taiwan.
Hong Guo Rong. Personal communications with the author concerning his martial-arts training, teaching, lineage and Zong He White Crane.
Photographs and lineage materials. Photographed by Vladimir Zlatic at Teacher Hong Guo Rong's school in Tainan, Taiwan.