With Senior Master Chin Min Lian
The Fan masterclass was held Saturday August 8 at the Ashburton Primary School; it’s a terrific venue for those reading this who have not had a chance to go there yet. The hall we use is a large, multipurpose space, floored with a firm, smooth carpet that allows your shoes to slide relatively easily, but is also somewhat resilient so that knees, ankles, and heels are not jarred too much by any higher-impact exercises.
There were around 30 or so people in attendance. As always, this was not just an opportunity to learn and refine a routine, but also a chance to spend time catching up with colleagues we hadn’t seen for a while. Sharing stories, experiences, and learnings with fellow Tai Chi practitioners is always part of the enjoyment for me. Senior Master Chin Min was his usually welcoming self, greeting everyone in the room at some point before the class proper began.
The warm up was a good mix of simple stretches and isolation exercises combined with some Qigong sequences; the inclusion of the Ba Duan Jin routine was particularly helpful for me personally, with the WTQA Festival competition coming up a few weeks after this session (we managed to score Gold there, by the way).
Then we got into the 36 Fan routine.
SM Chin Min broke the full routine into four sections, which were focussed on in turn. Most of the attendees were Instructors, so a lot of us were familiar with at least some of the moves, which helped a lot as the concentration on specific small variations was occasionally intense. Each section was gone through in detail, with the sequence worked through from the beginning over and over again and then linked to the earlier sequences as our learning of the moves progressed. This helped to both refine the moves as we went, and also to cement the order and interplay of feet, legs, body, and arms into a (mostly) seamless progression before moving to the next segment. I personally found the detailed attention to foot placement and arm-and-hand movement particularly helpful. A couple of very necessary breaks helped to relieve our leg muscles.
SM Chin Min shifted between working on the elevated stage and moving to floor-level with us throughout the masterclass and displayed his usual energy, jumping from the stage to the floor and back again more easily than I would be able to! While the stage demonstrations gave us all a good overview of the form, the floor-work was great as it gave us opportunities to see the moves close up and match the changes of balance and arm-and-hand position more accurately.
The final stage was, of course, the consolidation of all the sequences we had worked through into the full final form, which from my perspective was surprisingly short time-wise! I honestly felt like it should have lasted at least twice as long, but then that is a testament to the amount of detailed instruction we had received from the Senior Master. We all did brilliantly of course!!
All in all, a physically demanding, but fun and satisfying afternoon!
Chris White, Trainee Instructor
Camberwell & Doncaster
Updated: 23 September 2026
