Zhao Honggang of the Tongbei Fist

Zhao Honggang was born in 1989 in a poor mountain village in Gansu. His family was impoverished, and at sixteen he left for Beijing with nothing but a dream, taking odd jobs at construction sites, restaurants, and barbershops and enduring the hardships of life. His struggles at the bottom forged an unyielding will in him, and he refused to be bound by fate.

While making a life in Beijing, he met a parkour team by chance and began training his body. Later, he took up boxing and devoted himself to mastering it. With extraordinary perseverance and insight, he opened his own martial arts school in 2018, pioneering a fusion of parkour’s agility and boxing’s power. But the pandemic forced the school to close, plunging him to the lowest point in his life.

In 2020, he traveled to Tibet with a friend. Over forty days of pilgrimage around sacred mountains and visits to lakes and rivers, the prayer flags beneath the snowy peaks cleansed his spirit and brought him peace once more. After returning to Beijing, he met Master Chen, a practitioner of Tongbei boxing. Deeply moved by the martial art’s essence of “guiding qi with intent and moving the body with qi,” he became Chen’s disciple.

For three years, he trained without rest, progressing from smashing boards with his hands to mastering explosive shaking power, and from copying the forms to grasping their spirit. He later honed his skills in the UFC Slap Fighting Championship, winning all six of his bouts and perfectly fusing traditional martial arts with modern combat. At last, he understood the truth of “entering the Dao through martial arts.” Through the transmission of martial arts, he opened a path to unity between heaven and man, proving with his mortal body that the martial way could reach the heavens and becoming a legend in his own right