Yizong · The Moral Dragon · Bath, UK
Ollie Smith
Senior student of Luo Dexiu. Certified to teach Xingyiquan, Baguazhang, and Taijiquan — the Yizong syllabus, in Bath.
Instructor
Ollie Smith was born in 1975. He teaches in Bath: Gao-style Baguazhang, Hebei Xingyiquan, and Chen Panling Taijiquan, from the Taiwan Yizong line of his teacher, Luo Dexiu.
He is a senior student of Luo Laoshi. He has been Luo’s student for twenty-six years, eight of them full-time in Taipei. Luo certified him to teach Xingyiquan, Baguazhang, and Taijiquan, and gave the school its name, Long De Guan (龍德館) (The Moral Dragon).
Before the internal arts
Ollie started kung fu as a child. The early training was Wutan kung fu, and Western boxing. Neither of those is what he teaches now. They are how he arrived at the internal arts.
The longer account — from that start, through Xingyi in Kent, to the seminar where he met Luo — is in his kung fu story.
Twenty-six years with Luo Dexiu
Ollie met Luo Dexiu at a seminar in Kent in the summer of 2000. Two weeks later he was in Taipei. For eight years he trained Luo’s class at Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Park, most days of the week. From 2006 Luo set him to teach new students there.
In 2008 he left Taiwan for Japan for two years, and taught outdoors in front of the Heian Shrine park in Kyoto. In 2010 he returned to Taiwan for five weeks of training with Luo, then relocated to Bath to start regular classes. He returns to Taiwan every year, and also catches Luo at seminars in Europe and over the phone.
Monday evenings in Bath are Gao-style Baguazhang. Xingyiquan is available by booking. He is not teaching the main Taiji syllabus.
Why he teaches
What he wants is to pass a traditional art on. It still feels, to him, as if Yizong found him, rather than the other way round. Call it fate if you like.
Luo’s own path was a fighter’s path. Ollie came for the skill, and for what the training does to a person over years. He still likes fighting. Beating people is not the point of the school.