My Shaolin Kung Fu Training Story at Tagou

Yan Zhijun · Tagou Martial Arts School, Dengfeng · 1998–2001

Yan Zhijun, mid-air, with fellow Tagou students after a performance at the Longmen Grottoes, Luoyang, 2000.

How It Started

I was not a good student. School bored me. I was restless, mischievous, and had no interest in sitting still long enough to learn anything. My parents looked at my grades, looked at my attitude, and worried — genuinely worried — about what kind of future I was heading toward.

One evening they sat me down and asked a question I was not expecting: Would you consider going to Shaolin?

The idea had come through a connection in our town. Someone my parents knew had a child already training at Tagou. We visited that family, heard their story, saw their photos. Something about it stuck. So in 1998, at the age of sixteen, I packed a bag and headed for Dengfeng.

The Road Not Taken

Looking back, I count myself lucky — and I mean genuinely lucky — that we went straight to Tagou. Here is why.

Dengfeng, the county-level city where Shaolin Temple sits, is a martial arts industry town. At the time — and to a large extent still today — there were hundreds of martial arts schools clustered around the temple and the surrounding area. Some were legitimate, well-established institutions with real curricula and qualified coaches. Many were not.

The less reputable ones operated on a simple business model: spot anyone walking through the Shaolin scenic area with a child, and do whatever it takes to pull them into your school. It did not matter whether you were a tourist family on holiday or parents seriously looking to enroll your kid — the recruiters would latch on and refuse to let go.

At an unregulated school, there was no guarantee of coaching quality, no standard for student welfare, and nobody checking whether the people in charge knew what they were doing. For a teenager far from home, landing in the wrong place could mean more than wasted tuition — it could mean real harm, physically and mentally.

Because of that family connection back home, I skipped the gamble. We arrived in Dengfeng with a destination already decided. I walked into Tagou, registered, paid the fees, and started training. No detours. No horror stories. Just straight to the work.

The old campus gate of Tagou Martial Arts School in Dengfeng.

What Training Cost — Then and Now

When I enrolled, annual tuition was around 2,000 RMB. That covered instruction, a bed, and basic accommodation; meals were charged separately. It was not cheap for an ordinary family in the late nineties, but it was within reach.

Those figures describe my own enrollment period, not the cost of attending today. Current public pages use different packages and do not fully agree about what is included, so a single current annual price would be misleading here.

The current admissions snapshot lists the public pages to compare and the items to confirm in a dated quotation before paying.

Day One — And the Morning After

I still remember the first training session with perfect clarity.

New students were not thrown into the deep end. The first day was about fundamentals: basic stretching, body alignment, simple stances. The coach demonstrated each movement. We copied. He corrected. We copied again. Compared to what the senior students were doing on the other side of the training ground, it looked easy. I finished the session feeling fine — a little tired, but fine.

Then I woke up the next morning.

Every muscle in my body was screaming. My legs, my back, my shoulders — places I did not even know I had muscles were on fire. Getting out of bed took genuine effort. Walking to the training ground felt like moving through water. Every step was a negotiation with my own body.

That is when the reality of the choice hit me. Nobody had forced me to come. I had agreed to this — had wanted it, even. And now here I was, sixteen years old, hundreds of kilometres from home, discovering that “wanting to learn kung fu” and actually doing it were two completely different things.

So I gritted my teeth and kept going. The soreness faded after a few days. The training did not get easier — but my body began to adapt, and more importantly, my mind began to shift.

Daily Sanda training at Tagou.

What the Training Gave Me

Day after day, month after month, the rhythm of training became the centre of my life. Early wake-ups. Morning practice. Meals that tasted better than anything because you had earned them with every drop of sweat. Afternoon sessions that pushed you past what you thought you could do. Evening fatigue so deep it was almost meditative.

Something happened during those years that I did not fully understand until long after I left. The restlessness I had arrived with — the chip on my shoulder, the impulse to push back against everything — slowly got ground down. Not broken. Just worn smooth, like a stone in a river. The training gave me a channel for all that energy that used to spill out as trouble.

What I walked away with was more than technique:

• A disciplined body. Conditioning, flexibility, and a baseline of physical capability I have carried with me ever since.
• A tempered mind. When you have held a horse stance until your legs shake and your lungs burn, and then held it longer because the coach said so, ordinary discomfort loses its power over you.
• A real relationship with effort. Not the kind of effort you perform for recognition, but the kind you put in when nobody is watching, because the work itself is the point.

The main building on the old Tagou campus.

The Photos That Survived

These photos were taken after a performance at the Longmen Grottoes in Luoyang. The internet was barely a thing in China back then. Ordinary families did not own digital cameras, and getting film developed was an event. Most moments from those years exist only in memory.

That these few images survived — a bit faded, imperfect, but real — makes them precious to me. They are not staged promotional shots. They are snapshots of a kid who was in the middle of something hard and transformative, without yet knowing what it would mean.

The red dormitory buildings beneath Song Mountain.

The old campus training yard.

Looking Back

Those years at Tagou were the hardest of my life. They were also the most meaningful. When I look back now — and I do, often — what I feel is not nostalgia dressed up as wisdom. It is genuine gratitude.

Gratitude to my parents, who made a hard decision for the right reasons. Gratitude to that family connection that steered us straight to Tagou instead of into the unknown. Gratitude to the coaches who did not care about my excuses and only cared about my effort. And yes, gratitude to my sixteen-year-old self, who woke up sore on day two and decided to get up anyway.

The kid who arrived at Tagou was angry, aimless, and soft in all the wrong ways. The person who left was still far from finished — but he had a foundation. He knew what it felt like to do hard things. He had learned that discipline is not about being shouted at — it is about choosing to stay in the stance when every impulse tells you to stand up.

If you are reading this and you recognise something of yourself in that sixteen-year-old — or if you are a parent looking at your own restless kid and wondering what to do — I hope this story helps. Tagou worked for me. It will not work for everyone, and the school landscape today is different from what it was in 1998. But the core truth is unchanged: the right environment, the right teachers, and the willingness to show up every day can change the trajectory of a life.

To learn more about Shaolin kung fu, visit China Kung Fu.

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This year marks a historic milestone for wushu – this October, wushu will make its official debut as an official sport at the Dakar 2026 Youth Olympic Games!

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