Saturday 18 July 2015

Project Week trip to the Fawang Temple


The Songshan region of Henan province is famous as the home of the Shaolin style of martial arts. For CIS Hangzhou's 'Project Week' in May this year, twelve of our students and three members of staff visited Da Fawang Si, one of the few Buddhist temples there that still runs a traditional kung fu school for its young trainee monks. It is also the only temple school which admits outsiders to study.

This trip was originally conceived and planned by Pierre Biret, our French teacher and also a keen martial artist; however, when he had to return to France at the start of the year, I inherited responsibility for organising it. Unfortunately, a serious foot injury prevented me from accompanying the trip; after seeing all the video shot of the experience, I am even more sorry to have missed out on it!

The participating students were Ingrid Tsang, Lauren Justice, Katherine Ye, Natalie Chak, Flora Xiao, Samantha Koo, Frances Amos, Andy Ji, Fenton Garvie, Timothy Chan, Yew San Cheah, and Vinay Hirani; the accompanying members of staff were Mark Tang, Eric Vallone, and Kuang Wen.



A short film of our group's shifu for the week demonstrating a sequence of fundamental practice movements can be seen here.




Filmed by Ingrid Tsang and Mr Tang; edited by Mr Murphy