Taijiquan's documented history begins with Chen Wangting in Chenjiagou, Henan, in the seventeenth century, and for roughly two centuries afterward the art was largely confined to instruction within the Chen family. That changed when Yang Luchan, traditionally said to have gained access to Chen instruction through determination and eventual acceptance by the family, learned the art under Chen Changxing in the nineteenth century and began teaching it publicly in Beijing, where his softer, more accessible teaching to Manchu nobility and the Chinese elite laid the groundwork for the widely known Yang style his descendants later systematized.
A separate and much older legendary account credits the semi-mythical Daoist immortal Zhang Sanfeng, placed variously from the twelfth to the fifteenth century depending on the telling, with originating tai chi's soft, yielding principle after observing a fight between a snake and a crane. Chinese martial arts historians treat this account as a legend that became attached to taijiquan to root it in Daoist religious authority rather than as a documented historical transmission, distinguishing it clearly from the Chen village lineage that the surviving textual and genealogical record actually supports. Twentieth century political history further reshaped tai chi's transmission: the People's Republic promoted standardized, simplified forms for mass public health from the 1950s onward, a state-sponsored version now far more widely practised worldwide than the longer traditional family forms, which continue to be taught within Chen, Yang and other lineage schools alongside the standardized versions.