This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
In 1966, a young Taiwanese martial artist named Hong Tao-Tze opened a school he called Tai Ji Men, a menpai built to carry forward what he had studied since childhood: qigong, martial arts, medicine, yin-yang philosophy and what practitioners call heart kungfu. The name reaches back to taiji, the Chinese concept of the Supreme Ultimate from which yin and yang unfold, but Tai Ji Men is not a generic taijiquan class. It organizes itself the way many Chinese esoteric lineages have organized for centuries, around the shifu-dizi relationship: a master, or shifu, transmits a body of practice to disciples, or dizi, who in turn owe the relationship a kind of respect that is expressed materially as well as spiritually. That relationship would later sit at the center of a legal battle Tai Ji Men fought for eleven years, but inside the school itself it is simply how the teaching moves from one generation to the next. Hong Tao-Tze drew his own teaching from esoteric Daoism, folding physical training in qigong and martial arts together with a program of moral cultivation aimed, in the school's own language, at conscience: an ethical alertness the school treats as inseparable from physical health. In 1982, at what its own accounts describe as the height of a separate business career, Hong Tao-Tze retired from that career to devote himself fully to teaching. The school grew from its original Taiwan base into thirteen academies across the island and additional branches abroad, including academies established in the United States beginning in 2000. Its disciples describe a further layer to the practice beyond the academy floor: self-funded travel, organized under a Bell of World Peace and Love initiative and, since 2000, the Federation of World Peace and Love (FOWPAL), an international NGO Hong Tao-Tze also leads. Representatives of Tai Ji Men say they have carried this program to more than one hundred countries, staging cultural performances and conscience-themed events as a form of people-to-people diplomacy; the school points to the United Nations' 2019 adoption of April 5 as an International Day of Conscience as one product of that advocacy. However striking these numbers, they come from Tai Ji Men's own account rather than an independent registry, a caveat this atlas records rather than either accepting or dismissing. What is not in dispute is that a private school built around a master-disciple relationship, teaching qigong and martial arts as a path to what it calls conscience, is exactly the kind of body a modern state can misread, and in Taiwan's case did: the tradition of gifts a dizi gives a shifu, ordinary inside the master-disciple relationship, became in 1996 the basis for a fraud and tax evasion prosecution that ten years of Taiwanese courts would ultimately reject.