The famous 118 year old martial artist Lu Zijian (呂紫劍) passed away on the 21st October. He was variously known as the “Knight of the Yangtze (長江大俠)”, “Swordsman of the North East”, “Three Time Knight”, and a fighter against Japanese imperialism and authored a number of books on internal arts and such as 《中國武當內家拳法》、《八卦養生法》. In 2009 he was said to be officially the oldest person in the world.
According to the his biography Lu was born in October 1893 in Yichang (宜昌市) in Hubei province to a family famous for martial arts:
1900 At age seven, Lu “follows his mother” and starts training in martial arts. At 12 years old he begins to study under the famous Wudang master 李國操. He also studied under 江英. During his teenage years Lu also became a close associate of Huo Yuanjia (霍元甲), the famous Chinese martial arts fighter who founded the Jing Wu Association and was featured in the Jet Li movie "Fearless". According to his own recollections, he along with Huo Yuan Jia, Du Xin Wu 杜心武 helped drive the foreign steamboats from the Yangtze.
He also reputedly spent some time studying medicine at the 湖北國醫學堂.
At 18, Lu arrives in Beijing and takes as his master a former bodyguard of the empress dowager Cixi (慈禧太后) named Ding Shirong (丁世荣). Lu starts studying the martial art form Xingyiquan (形意拳)
1912: Lu moves to E Mei Mountain (峨眉山) in Sichuan province to train in baguazhang (八卦掌) under the famous master 神掌李長葉. During these eight years he studied the swimming body linked palm baguazhang “游身八卦連環掌”.
1920: Lu takes part in martial arts competition in Nanjing and wins first prize at 27.
1924: “Patriotic industrialist” Lu Zuofu (卢作孚) asks Lu to help him take back shipping rights on the Yangtze from imperial powers. Lu proceeds to fight and win a duel with a famous Japanese samurai 三井秀夫. Henceforth Lu is known as the “Knight of the Yangtze”. This story is somewhat embellished by his own recollections, where he states that he defeated 3 Japanese fighters.
1945: Lu is appointed as martial arts instructor in Chongqing during the war by KMT generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. A bodyguard of US General Marshall called Tom Newham challenges any Chinese to a fight. Lu takes up the offer to fight the 1.9 meter American and beats him using baguazhang. He fought the Japanese multiple times and lost his wife to one of their assasination attempts.
During the cultural revolution he was beaten badly and was sent to Xinjiang for 10 years.
1979: Lu Zijian is elected a member of the Chongqing Municipal People’s Political Consultative Conference. Lu starts to participate in martial arts competitions and many accolades followed.
2002: Lu obtains the highest rank in the Chinese martial arts association.
However many people doubt whether he really is what he says.
The Chinese Wikipedia entry on Lu points to an entry in a collection of documents entitled Yichang City Literature and History Materials (宜昌市文史资料) from 1986 stating that Lu was in his seventies at the time, meaning that he was actually born sometime after 1907.
In fact, this same collection of archival material on the city of Yichang (where Lu was from) has information that contradicts virtually every aspect of Lu’s resume for the first third of his life. For example, another entry from 1992 records that Lu stayed on in Yichang until the 1930s, when he was forced to flee to Sichuan because he beat up a bodyguard at a brothel. Lu then went on to establish a clinic in Chongqing in 1938. He thus never became a close associate of the legendary Huo Yuanjia (who died in 1910), and never fought General Marshall’s bodyguard.
Regardless in his later years he did contribute greatly to promotion of martial arts and Qigong in the PRC. My Sifu, along with the wealthy industrialist Ian Fok, had dinner with him in 2001.
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